First Date Small Talk

I am not a fan of small talk. It is awkward and extremely boring. So, I have compiled a list of conversation starters for next time I go on a first date or for an awkward company car drive, or to use as vacation time killers or for random people on the street to start random-people-on-the-street conversations. These are questions you can ask me to peak my interest. These are not applicable to everyone. Make sure you actually can discuss the topic, however; otherwise, you will lose the game. Which I just lost. Also, most of these questions can be followed by the question "why?".

1. Who is your favourite Doctor Who character?

2. What is your favourite type of precipitation?

3. If you could go to any fictional planet, which one would you visit?

4. What do you think of outer space?

5. What do you think of the recent political changes affecting NASA?

6. What is your least favourite type of small talk?

7. What is your favourite word?

8. What word do you think best describes tornadoes? Spring? Space? Battlestar Galactica? Etc.?

9. Where is Carmen Sandiego?

10. Tell me about your family.

11. What do you think of rock walls?

12. Who is Rutherford the Unicorn-Sheep?

13. What methods do you think we as a society should enact to get to space?

14. Let's discuss asteriods.

15. Which is your favourite real planet?

16. What is your favourite non-profit organization? Why?

17. If you could pick three mythical creatures to be your roommates, which ones would you pick?

18. What is your favourite piece of theatrical lighting equipment?

19. Which do you like better: a Source4 Parcan or a PAR 64?

20. What was your favourite class in college?

21. Which King Arthur was your favourite: the one from The Sword in the Stone, Merlin, Cretien de Trois, or Gerald Morris' books (The Squire's Tales)?

22. If you could learn any language, which one would you pick?

23. What is your favourite memory of beekeeping?

24. Where's Waldo?

25. How do you plan to get to space?

26. Tell me about your cat.

27.  Which do you think is more important: society going to space or animal rights?

On the same note, a first date/car ride/vacation conversation/random-people-on-the-street conversation can be just as boring if the topic is unpleasant or awkward.

This is a list of things you should not ask me about:

1. Politicians.

2. Terrorism.

3. Rick Perry.

4. Hormones.

5. Sharia Law.

6. The number 4.

7. Country music.

Who wants to bet that next time Dave comes over his first comment will be, "So Ariele, I read this really fascinating article today, in which Rick Perry and a bunch of other politicians were discussing the interrelated nature of terrorism and Sharia law while listening to country music and complaining about their wives hormonal mood swings. Also, four. Four. Four, four..."

Nah. Dave would never use the phrase "in which". But he might just start chanting "four, four, four four..."

Backpack Across the Universe

The other day, I was thinking about Scotland. It's full of castles and sheep. I wish I could take Rutherford there--maybe then he could find himself a girlfriend.

While in Scotland, Leslie and I rode on trains. I was inordinately excited about this, because I had never been on a train before (except for that time in third grade which I don't remember) and because trains are a rather weird form of transportation. Basically, somebody takes a bunch of boxes, hooks them together, and drags them across the countryside on really, really long metal rods. And people sit in them and eat and read and play bridge. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I saw castles and sheep and a few beehives.

I fully believe that humans will go to space, one day, and build colonies and eat weird tasting potatoes grown in an artificial environment or eat weird tasting potatoes that aren't actually potatoes because they are native to Caprica, not Earth. All the common theories of space travel tend to lean towards space ships: big ones, small ones, ones with sails and nuclear engines and jump drives that allow them to skip over massive chunks of space or fly faster than the speed of light (a very useful trick, considering the size of the universe).

But what I want is a space train--a number of boxes run together in a chain and dragged from here to there by a massive engine harnessing the power of a star.

It makes sense: each car would explode away from Earth separately, and they would then be assembled while in orbit. Once assembled, the engine would leave orbit dragging a number of boxes and people behind it. Then, if one car exploded while taking off, only a few people would die, but the whole train wouldn't be ruined. If it were a big enough train, entire colonies could start out, ready and willing to colonize New Scotland and New China and New New England.

And when they look out the window of this train--the space train--instead of sheep and castles and beehives, they would see stars and spaceships and gravity whales, and on their way to New Scotland, they could make a stop at New New York and visit the black statue of liberty that sings when the wind whistles through her teeth, or visit the Big Apple which is actually the original, red spaceship that brought everyone to this planet.

New Scotland would be a planet of rolling hills and sparkling crags, with boiling water in Equatorial Ocean, and massive spheres of ice in the North, home to a particularly ornery species of furry dinosaurs. They would keep their royal crown, scepter, and stone in a sacred box hidden in a secret spot on the highest mountain in the world, and Great Britain would not rule over her any more. Then children would learn how their ancestors escaped from the rule of the Queen of England by traversing a billion miles across the universe and settling here, on the beautiful blue-green planet of New Scotland.

So if we could maybe hurry our technological advancement up a bit, then maybe someday, instead of backpacking across Scotland, I could backpack across the universe.

And for your entertainment, I have included this video about the Scottish boy in the Scottish McDonalds. 

Administrative Note: posting schedule will be changing, but I don't yet know to what. Thanks.

Rutherford the Unicorn-Sheep Goes on a Date

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