Thursday, February 18, 2010

Razor Blades, Q-tips, and the Meaning of Happiness

When you are dreaming your brain just keeps jumping around from thing to thing and when you wake up in the morning sometimes you say to yourself "What a weird dream!". But my theory is that this is just how brains work and we might as well get used to it. In fact sometimes it is funny the stuff brains come up with. Sometimes when I look at stuff in SL I think about dreams.

OK now for a story. Once there was an Army base in the United States where soldiers trained. This was quite a while ago and it was at a time when people were at war. They had a place where the soldiers could shave, but in those days the razor blades were flat blades and they could cut you very easily. They were safety razors but you still had to be careful because they were not that "safe". So the Army base put a slot in the wall where the soldiers threw their old razor blades away. No one ever knew where the razor blades went, they just went into a slot never to be seen again. This was because people did not want to get cut on old razor blades.

Then one day people came to tear down the old building. When they opened the wall a load of old razor blades from 50 years came falling out. So all the razor blades did NOT just disappear after all.

Once there was an old house that somebody moved into. The person decided to open an old closed up fireplace. Suddenly a zillion Q-tips fell out. The people who lived there before had cleaned out their ears for many years and had just thrown the Q-tips into the closed fireplace. But then again Q-tips is a brand name. Just like Kleenex and Band-Aids. But people use those brand names as though they are generic names. Isn't that odd?

OK now the history of Q-tips and how it relates to the razor blades. The Q-tip was invented by a Sargent in the Army named Marcus Hearit. He was a cannon shooter. A cannon shooter is a person who puts a cannon ball into a cannon ball and fires. They used to be very important in warfare 200 years ago. He got the idea for the Q-tip from the thing you stick into the cannon to push the ball down. He said "Man that sure looks like a good idea for something to use to clean your ears, so I think I will invent it". And the rest is history.

Then the great grandson of Marcus Hearit was in the Army and stationed at a place where the razor blades were thrown into the wall. That is how the two stories relate.

And now for the public service portion of this post. It is important to place a public service message into all artwork including a mindless rambling post because art must have a purpose. The message is to not stick a Q-tip directly into your ear because you may hurt your eardrum. You should not look directly into the sun during a solar eclipse either, but one time I saw a solar eclipse and I looked up but just real real real quickly.

Well I am not sure how this relates to happiness (title of post) but I wanted to be sure to let people know that just because a person tells off-the-wall stories, and perhaps they may be a bit eccentric at times, they are very happy people who see a lot of good in the world.

OK now for how these stories relate to SL. As we live in a virtual world we leave razor blades and Q-tips behind the walls. Will someone find them someday?

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