Oddities we take for granted

[Sy Borg]

There is much that is odd about reality that we often don't think about. I'd be interested in others' observations here.

I have more, but here's one oddity for starters. I have not long come home from a funeral and, me being me, I was struck by the way we adorn coffins and rooms with flowers - plant genitalia.

We have images of plant nether regions depicted in artwork, on our clothes, curtains, wallpaper and even sometimes small line prints on toilet paper (which actually makes sense, aside from extra ink that the oceans don't need). On Valentine's Day marketers encourage us to "say it with [plant genitalia]", which also makes sense, if disturbing when you think of how we'd reactions if we replaced plant genitalia with those of humans or other animals. It seems rather less romantic to have one's partner give you an arranged bunch of different species' phalluses and labia ...

Your move :)

[Renee]

Greta: Scent.

In North America scent has been bred out of plant genitalia. But scent used to be all over the place a very strong attractant for bees, and sweet smelling for humans.

In funerals the sweet smell of lots of flowers -- esp. white lilies -- were hoped to overpower the scent of the corpse.

At weddings, on Friday night dinners, on birthdays, etc., the plant genitalia was supposed to raise the general ambience to a better, more festive level.

These days we have sprays, people wear undetectable scents, we don't have b.o. because we bathe and shower all the time, we wash our clothes and dirty socks more often, so there is no need to overpower the scents. But the cultural tradition jumped tracks, and we still like flowers, because they are colourful, beautiful, add a bit of nature to our sterile, sterilized inner environments of homes and halls and offices.

That's A. B. is that women enjoy flowers. I am not a woman, so I can't identify with that. I figure plant genitalia is a waste of time -- you can't even eat it. My girlfriend, however, gets ecstatic, (in a quiet, unassuming way) every time I bring her flowers.

This I can't explain.

Your turn again. (I believe you're a woman.)

My only theory, with very limited evidential support, is that plants have pheromones that act on women, but not on men, and the pheromone production has not been genetically engineered out of plants like other scents. Because humans can smell (some) scents, such as of flowers, but pheromones we can't smell, even though they act on us.

My guess is that flowers selectively affect women via pheromone production, but don't affect men.

[Cuthbert]

I suppose we can find anything odd if we think about it enough. Like saying the same word over and over until it sounds weird and foreign. When I was a kid I thought a weird thing was roads full of cars travelling in opposite directions, each side so eager to get away from the place the other side was so keen to get to.

[Renee]

I suppose we can find anything odd if we think about it enough.

I totally agree.

A wise man or woman once said (quote source unknown) "A conclusion is a spot in your train of thought where you got tired of thinking."

You can always ask to each answer, "why", and the answerer will eventually give up in frustration. Because there is only so much we, as humans, can answer; beyond that, from the perspective of what IS beyond that, our answers are trivial and odd. Because we don't have a connection of knowledge to the "other side" where the "why"-s are answered.

[Sy Borg]

Yes Renee, I'm a woman and I personally would prefer that plant genitalia stay attached to the original owners, who no doubt can make better use of them than me.

I am interested in the things we tend to overlook and take for granted and I thought others might be too since I would have thought curiosity to be the crux of philosophy.

For instance, we can wax lyrical for many pages about beauty but we largely consist of nauseating and malodorous blobs of goo and slime. Shave one millimetre of dermis from a person and you have an archetypal "zombie monster" - just a millimetre of a lipid layer that stands between great beauty and horror.

I also find it interesting how we seem to completely disappear at night and return almost intact in the morning (due to the conditioning of neuron switching and responses). Knowing the mechanism doesn't make the concept any less bizarre, nor the fact that we crave this temporary disappearance but greatly fear permanent absence.

-- Updated 24 Nov 2016, 20:49 to add the following --

When I was a kid I thought a weird thing was roads full of cars travelling in opposite directions, each side so eager to get away from the place the other side was so keen to get to.

It's been said that major roads are akin to a bloodstream, with messages being passed in either direction. The fact drives [sic] home just how situational and circumstantial our ideas of what is desirable may be. Each destination is only desirable in context, not in itself.

[LuckyR]

The reason flowers (or plant genitalia if you prefer...) are used for adornment is because plants need help from others to copulate, thus their genitalia is specifically designed to be appealing to other species by shape, color and scent as mentioned above. Plant genitalia is not designed for other plants but for animals... like people, as it turns out. Thus using flowers for human adornment is perfectly reasonable while using animal genitalia for the same purpose (since they are designed to attract the same species, not others species) is illogical.

[Renee]

Plant genitalia is not designed for other plants but for animals... like people, as it turns out.

Animals that like plant genitalia are insects. No monkey, horse, frisbee or bald eagle takes a bunch home to their wives on Friday nights.

Ergo, Humans are Insects.

don't let Darwin hear about this.

[TSBU]

You are talking about a funeral and the thing you find odd are the flowers.
I find that odd.

Calling plants "genitals" is a well known "feminist" (I mean, the stupid part of feminism, the one that real feminists hate) form of saying stupid things (like... the Eiffel tower is a falic symbol). We've been using flowers a long time, because they are pretty (I like flowers, a lot, and I'm a man) and they smell nice. Hell, It's like saying that we are puting genitals fragance in parfums and that's odd... but it just smells nice! (Yeah, we use that).

Anyway, you are talking about a funeral. In my country, a funeral isn't cheap, maybe 2000$ (and that's a cheap one, burning the body), lot of people that nearly don't know each other get together in a strange building (In my country, mostly a christian church), where a man says a tale, collect some money, and do strange things (in that christian church, they spread water in the cage that contains the body), everybody has speciall clothes for that, and they kiss each other (well, I think that's more in my country) and say lies like "If you need me...". They put the body underground. Depending in how much you pay, they put it in different places, and for a different period of time, after some years, they take the body from underground, and they use the same hole for other body.

Find things "strange" or "odd" only means that they don't fit with the rest of things you know, they estimulate your curiosity, you "can't understand them". But, "odd" is something you assign to what you know, when you know different things, you find odd different things, there is not an "oddymetter". Sometimes I feel odd that something isn't odd for me.

[Burning ghost]

Life, life, life and life

[Sy Borg]

Plant genitalia is not designed for other plants but for animals... like people, as it turns out.

Animals that like plant genitalia are insects. No monkey, horse, frisbee or bald eagle takes a bunch home to their wives on Friday nights.

Ergo, Humans are Insects.

don't let Darwin hear about this.

Nice. Like colony forming insects, naked mole rats and humans are the only eusocial species - the only species where different groups of colony members perform different roles.

This is why discussion about what humans being are like are so fraught - we are not like any one thing but we are like many things, depending on the person or group.

The reason flowers (or plant genitalia if you prefer...) are used for adornment is because plants need help from others to copulate, thus their genitalia is specifically designed to be appealing to other species by shape, color and scent as mentioned above. Plant genitalia is not designed for other plants but for animals... like people, as it turns out. Thus using flowers for human adornment is perfectly reasonable while using animal genitalia for the same purpose (since they are designed to attract the same species, not others species) is illogical.

Yes, now that's a funny thing in itself - the plant attracts with it's beautiful genitals whereas humans attract others with their beautiful "everything else" and only bring out "the uglies" when they get down to business :)

You are talking about a funeral and the thing you find odd are the flowers.
I find that odd.

This is one way that autistic spectrum can manifest :lol: I am not a communal type. Many people bond in their grief. I prefer private grief with a friendly Palliacci-esce happy face for the world.

Calling plants "genitals" is a well known "feminist" (I mean, the stupid part of feminism, the one that real feminists hate) form of saying stupid things (like... the Eiffel tower is a falic symbol).

Nope.

I enjoy thought experiments and my favourite (because it's inexhaustible) is imagining I am something else - an ant, a cup, the Earth - or a plant who'd had some of its genitals removed for the pleasure of post-apes. It's just another perspective - and one that reminds us of how strange reality is.

... "odd" is something you assign to what you know, when you know different things, you find odd different things, there is not an "oddymetter". Sometimes I feel odd that something isn't odd for me.

Life, life, life and life

These two posts work well together - where nothing is odd, or everything is.

With age and flirtations with philosophy in recent years I find almost everything strange. To look out into the sky and think that the line of sight extends more or less forever. The scale of the "machine" bends my mind. Even our "tiny" planet is of enormous scale and complexity we are still grappling with. Half of the Earth's heat comes from nuclear fission performed in its core so, in a sense, we are as sustained by the "star" that is effectively the planet's core as the Sun.

[Renee]

TSBU, I like funerals. Quite.

I like funerals because everyone is nicely dressed, on their best behaviour, and pretending to be sad just at first, which mask they can't keep up, and eventually the unbridled joy of life comes out on the face of every mourner.

You see, funerals are a great way to remind yourself, that you survived this bloke as well. "Hehe, she's dead, I ain't", and that gives every funeral attendee a great joy. (Except for the newly widowed and orphaned.)

Eventually the crowd relaxes, back-room jokes are told, some people eulogize the dearly departed from the pulpit, but say snide remarks and funny strories about them when the crowd starts to mingle.

I especially like the fact that women all look beautiful and sexy at funerals. They wear something subdued and modest, which brings out the immodesty in their demeanor, or are all the immodest thoughts in me that I mix it up with the women's attitude.

I get to kiss the widow. Then the daughter, the mother, the cousins, the grandmother, then the girlfriends, the co-workers. I go around the room mouth-to-mouth kissing every good looking woman. It's like being dead in a Muslim seventh heaven. All the girls (18+, and in some states, 21+) and ladies are at the disposal of living out my sexual fantasies. Which is kissing them. I know it's lame. I lived a very sheltered life.

Men are subdued, friendlier than usual, and they are, for a change, not hitting me hard in the back, or boxing me on the shoulder, or kicking me from behind.

Oh, and he food! Superb!

Funerals are more fun than weddings. The food is better, easier to eat, (finger food, not fork-and-knife food which are, essentially, harder to handle than your fingers), the speeches are shorter, there is no dance to exemplify how much of an uncoordinated gimp I am void of any sense of rhythm, and nobody gets drunk. Or rowdy. I have yet to attend a funeral where there would be a drunken brawl among the attendees. At weddings there is loud music, the bride acting like a w h or e, (which I don't like), and the groom being so tired of it all. At the funeral, the young lady is more like a saint, and the man of the hour lies still and motionless the entire event, not getting bored at all.

In Canada, a better wedding these days costs $50-100,000. A funeral, while not cheap for the same socioeconomic level at $5-10,000, is still a bargain compared to a wedding.

A minor but important point: funerals are more equitably paced out, they can happen any time of the year, while weddings are cramped into May and June, mostly.

I live on welfare, medical welfare, which is called disability pension here in my country. Which means that I get burnt for free. If I manage to die before retirement age, that is. The FED will take care of my corpusculum. They'll burn me, unceremoniously, and scatter my ashes in an undisclosed part of the cemetery grounds. "Ashes to ashes, dust to donkeys, we know Major Tom's a junkie."

[LuckyR]

Plant genitalia is not designed for other plants but for animals... like people, as it turns out.

Animals that like plant genitalia are insects. No monkey, horse, frisbee or bald eagle takes a bunch home to their wives on Friday nights.

Ergo, Humans are Insects.

don't let Darwin hear about this.

True... back before civilization. I am certain you are familiar with hybrid tea roses, for example. Don't exist in nature without human intervention. The number of these plants is uncommonly high, thus it is an example of a Darwinian success story since their genes are so prevalent, yet the trait that makes them successful is appealing to the needs of Humans (not insects). Your view is at best archaic.

[Renee]

True... back before civilization. I am certain you are familiar with hybrid tea roses, for example. Don't exist in nature without human intervention. The number of these plants is uncommonly high, (what's a number of plants which don't exist in nature in pure form that can be considered common?) thus it is an example of a Darwinian success story since their genes are so prevalent, yet the trait that makes them successful is appealing to the needs of Humans (not insects). Your view is at best archaic.

You stumped me.

There is another dozer there. I'll start a topic on it.

[Felix]

Ergo, Humans are Insects.

Yes, I will be leaving my chrysalis soon, good thing, I've been feeling very claustrophobic. But soon I'll be able to fly free and live on flower nector - can't wait.

[Apex_Predator]

Kissing someone is pretty weird. Some people have said it has its roots in cannibalism. I don't know about that but why would we be willing to smash our areas that we use to consume together, including our tongues.