You Ever Wonder...?

I've been pondering imponderables again, I have the free time for it. Here are a few.

What did ancient Egyptians use for a nasal decongestant? Did the subject even come up for them? I assume they got colds - they for sure got various plagues - but since they lived in the desert along the Nile I'm not sure they got stuffed up. Maybe King Tut just lived with sinus headache.
   For that matter, what did they do for toilet paper? They had papyrus, but that was for important stuff like government documents, not for wiping. I'm assuming.

If you could read someone's mind, would you really want to? I have trouble going into someone else's bathroom, can you imagine treading through the cesspool of someone else's thoughts? There's some dark, disturbing stuff rolling through my head, but I'm pretty sure it's tame compared to what you're thinking about. Mind reading would be a punishment, not a gift.

Why is being brutally honest when you're a little kid cute and precocious, and doing the same thing when you're really old is curmudgeonly and endearing, but being brutally honest at the ages in between is frowned upon? Why do kids and old people get a pass but I get a whispered admonition to 'be nice?' If I want to tell someone he's dressed like a colorblind clown I can't do it, but if some kid tells me I need to shave it's charming. If I open my mouth in a boring meeting and ask why we're there I get a talking-to from my boss, but if an old lady in line tells me to speed it up everybody chuckles. It ain't fair.

How can people not like dogs? I can certainly understand if someone doesn't like cats, if you die alone in the house with them they'll eat your eyeballs, no loyalty at all. I can also understand not liking birds, lizards, hamsters, what have you. But dogs are special. We grew up with dogs, literally, our evolution and theirs are tied together, they need us and we need them. So what kind of degenerate could not like dogs? Communists, that's who. Lousy fifth-columnists as Red as a baboon's ass. That's right, I said it: if you don't like dogs you're a devotee of a discredited socio-political economic philosophy. What are you gonna do about it?

I understand intellectually how airplanes fly, it's a very simple equation. But it still seems like magic to me. How can a 600,000 pound machine stay in the air? It seems like a violation of natural laws for anything that big to be off the ground, let alone carrying people across the globe. Like seeing an elephant swim, your eyes are telling you it's happening but your brain is screaming at you that it can't possibly be. So cut it out already, it makes me uncomfortable.