#5 - The Guitar
Don't get me wrong - I love the guitar, and people who can actually play it (not just power chords) rock. But for all my love of them, I still don't understand how Gaetano Vinaccia ever came up with them. Let's look at a possible dialogue:
Gaetano: Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I got a tree, cut some wood out of it, made it evenly thin, and bent it into a really weird shape.
Gaetano's friend: What? Where did you even come up with that? Are you feeling OK?
Gaetano: I'm fine, just listen. Then, I could put a top on in, and cut a hole in the top.
Gaetano's friend: Still not sure what you're going at here? Are you sure that you're OK?
Gaetano: Yes, I'm sure! Then I could put a solid back on it. Maybe a really weird drum...
Gaetano's friend: The drums we have now work fine, why try to re-invent them? That would just be a really big pain in the neck, and it probably wouldn't even work very well.
Gaetano: Hmm, maybe you're right, but probably not. If I put a neck on it, and pulled 6 strings taut across the whole things, and then pluck them!
Gaetano's friend: *backs away slowly* You do that, I'm sure it would be awesome. Tell me when it's done.
I close my case. Maybe Gaetano was drunk or something, you never know.
#4 - Hollywood
Some movies are awesome - take Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and a hundred others, but every once in a while* some completely drunk screenwriter decides to exaggerate the abilities of something, most often computers. "I want you to hack into that guys brain and make him kill himself." "Hack into that gas line and make it explode." "Hack into that wall and destroy it." "hack into that chandelier and make it fall." Sentences like that make no sense at all. "Hack" is not a magical thing that can, and will, defy any and everything you thought you knew about life. "Hack" ruins too many movies. Then there was the big craze over kung-fu in the 70's, and you got people who:
A. Didn't know any kung-fu.
B. Didn't know if kung-fu was a kind a Chinese food.
C. Decided it was kind of like "hack", and claimed it did absolutely everything.
Combine these 3 things, and you get a film like, "Enter the Ninja", with one of the most awesome clips of all time:
No, that video was not altered in any way. Clips like that, (although freaking awesome) were time users, created for the sole purpose of using up screen time so the main character wouldn't have to pretend to do kung-fu for longer than absolutely necessary.
Of course, there are just plain bad films that make no sense, but I prefer to laugh at the completely at utterly ridiculous ones.
The directors of the bad films were probably drunk, too.
*About 1 in every 10
#3 - Japanese Anime Cartoons (and occasionally movies)
Do I really even have to explain this further? Let's take Pokémon for example - several children running around with technology far beyond our comprehension, capturing random animals (that conveniently live near these children) in these high-tech spheres, and fighting eachother with them. No joke, that's about the whole show. And, if it could possibly get worse, it does: Pokémon is probably on of the better* anime cartoons.
Next, let's look at the animation. When people cry, you don't actually see tears unless it's a close up shot. If it's not a close up shot, you get freaking waterfalls coming almost horrizontally out of their eyes, probably draining all of their bodily fluids in a matter of seconds. Their mouths are open, gaping, with the lips moving the slightest bit, again, and again, and again, and again, like an endlessly repeating .gif, but it's supposed to be a TV show (or a movie). I don't know about you, but I wouldn't watch a .gif for a half hour.
Crying, however, is not the only animation that ever happens. There is also walking, which is a lot like those neon signs you see outside of shops that "move", 3 images that flash in which you can almost what something is, and what it is supposed to be doing - something like this:
Instead of being a flag (I think that's what it is, anyway...) however, it's a bad walking animation. You get my point - not very great animation, very choppy. Combine these things - Bad animation, disturbing and nonsensical plots, and overall lameness, you get anime. Why would anybody ever want to do something like that? Beats me.
*I say better in need a different, currently nonexistent word.
#2 - Computers
I love computers - they have a part in almost everything I have ever done. You know those toys you used to play with when you were little? They were probably made in a machine, run by a computer. The house you live in? The blueprints were printed out after being drawn down, on a computer. Your friends? Computers. I am on the computer every day, doing one thing or another, and I kind of understand how they work. What I don't understand is how somebody came up with them. Let's look at a basic diagram of a computer:
Yeah. That's a computer. Did you think that was all going on inside that little box you're on? I know I didn't. If a caveman went up to his dad and said something like:
"If would be awesome if you could put a monitor and a computing system next to each other and link then with an 18 port cable, effectively creating a visual display of what the computing system was doing, and then develop GUI to tell the computer to do stuff?"
You know what his dad would do? He would probably be breifly confused as to what his son was saying, then smack his son for making him confused, then send him back outside to play with his sticks and rocks in the dirt. But when Charles Babbage decided to ramble on about a computer, people took him seriously - and they ended up creating a computer that worked on punch cards. Admittedly, it kinda sucked, but it was an improvement from nothing, and from that point, computers got better and better, and we were eventually able to send somebody to the moon with one. Slight disadvantage of computers getting better and better: The calculator you buy anywhere for 99¢ is more sophisticated then the computers that sent the first man to the moon.
Even if I went back in time with my current knowledge, I doubt I could understand Charles Babbage's machine, and computers will (for the most part) always remain a mystery to me...
#1 - Death
Sure, I know what death is. I know that it happens to everybody, but my main question is why? Let's look at this from the brains point of view:
Things are going pretty good - when you eat, your body takes the nutrients from the food, and gets rid of the stuff you don't need. The more nutrients you get, the more cells you can grow. The more cells you grow, the stronger you get. The stronger you get, the more you can do, the more you can do, the happier you are.
The brain understands this - your body grows, and grows, and grows more. But at some point, for some completely idiotic reason, your brain thinks: Let's stop growing as many cells, and start killing a lot more - it'll be fun!" Then, when you start getting less powerful, you brain is still thinking: "This is awesome!"
From that point forth, it continues to show an amazing amount of stupidity, refusing to grow more cells, until you snuff it. You'd think that smart people would live forever, because their brains weren't completely useless, and dumb people would be born, last a couple days, and then bite the dust, but it doesn't work that way - why? If your brain regulates cell growth, why not keep growing them? It just goes to show that no matter how smart you are, your brain is:
A. Out to get you.
or
B. An idiot.
And that is why I will never understand death. If you have anything you get one of those "What the heck?"™ moments, post it in the comments.
