Stuff Comes Running Out of Your Ears

The Off-Mission – a 100 word story

The clowns came over today. They were just on their way to Kentucky. The big boss knows who to send on an off-mission, I mean, no one would suspect a clown. They always get their target and those poor bastards just don’t know what hit them. Was it the little plastic hammer? Maybe it was the pennywhistle? Those are so deadly. One note played the right way and all the gray stuff comes running out of your ears screaming. Not this time though. This time it was that little electric hand buzzer. Gets them every time. Those clowns are good.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 11, Stuff Comes Running Out of Your Ears

Repetition creates patterns, and patterns can help us organize our world, making some chaotic sense of it. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at patterns. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about patterns. We need to keep our world organized in order to make some sense of it. Patterns can sometimes come to our aid here. They can give us the security that comes with knowing that one thing comes after another. Let’s consider a simple pattern as an example, the pattern of day and night. That pattern has two opposite components that fluctuate with each other, coming one after the other. The repeatable pattern of “day, night, day, night,” is recognized by us and we know it to be a relatively unchanging pattern. Night always comes after day and vice versa. We expect that. In a way, this simple pattern lets us predict the future and that is what pattern recognition often does.

Patterns in nature are pretty common though not often as precise and sometimes quite chaotic. You can find it in the wandering of birds or in the sleep habits of polar bears. You can find patterns in the movement of clouds and the changing of seasons. The fact that patterns let us predict the future can help us find out where those birds are most likely to wander off to next year and they can help us create weather forecasts. If we make pattern recognition into a science, we can even predict the future of the human race. That is how the notion of the technological singularity, which I’m probably going to explore in a future episode, came to be, by exploring the exponential growth patterns of technological trends. I’m trending towards taking a break right now. I’ll be right back.

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Army – a 100 word story

The army of clowns slipped and fell, slipped and fell. Child laughter could be heard from houses with barricaded windows. Apparently, someone buttered up the road. Dogs started barking nearby. Doors opened and the dogs started coming out, seeking out the clowns. Bites and screams followed. “You should have stayed in the circus” shouted someone, “You make a lousy army”. Some people started opening their windows and throwing flaming rocks at them. The clowns started running away in the opposite direction, trying to avoid bursting into flames and running out of town. That’s how the army of clowns was defeated.

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Welcome back. We can recognize patterns in the most unlikely of places. We can find patterns in the movement of mountains and be surprised by the fact that mountains actually move. We can also find patterns in the movement of people and be surprised by the fact that people actually move. Patterns in the movement of people are called behavior patterns and they are the basis of a brunch of psychology called social sciences.

People don’t move the same way as birds. They don’t fly, well, mostly they don’t. Studying thair movement and thair behavior patterns can bring much insight into what those crazy humans are up to. Looking at those patterns you might find many similarities between both individual humans and groups of humans, but then you might notice that every individual human is a little bit different. Groups of people also have behavior patterns that are similar but not exactly the same. That follows the rules of chaos geometry, were looking at the whole you zoom in on the smaller parts of the whole and see that they are similar but not the same. When a pattern is chaotic it can’t be predicted precisely but only in an approximate manner. That way we can predict that the next episode of this podcast would have two 100 word stories and a single topic cut into two parts, but we can’t predict what those would be exactly. This concludes episode 11 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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A Fish Like Fashion

The Tenant – a 100 word story

The landlord opened his mouth and closed it in a fish like fashion. A sound came out of his lips, not unlike the merger of a washing machine and a tardis. Finally, he came back to his senses and said “The sign outside this apartment strictly states ‘no pets allowed.’” I smiled and simply said, “this is not a pet.” “Oh yeh?” he retorted, now growing a little agitated “then what is it?” “Why – it’s an elephant” I stated. “And what do you need an elephant for?” he asked, angry and exasperated. “That’s easy,” I said, “to hide the giraffe.”

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 10, A Fish Like Fashion

Science tells us that time is a fourth dimension. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at time. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about the scientific aspect of time called the speed of time. Time is actually perceived in different speeds. The speed in which you perceive time is influenced by your own speed in relation to your environment, as well as the mass of your environment, or rather the mass of the materials your environment is made of, including the mass of the planet you are currently standing on. You are standing on a planet I hope. Anyway, if you leave your planet, the speed of time relative to that of you and your planet start to change and your personal time, in fact, speed a little as opposed to the time of your planet. The reason that happens is that the further you get from your planet, the influence of you planet’s mass lessens. You yourself wouldn’t be able to perceive that change since your personal time would run at the same speed, but for anyone standing on the planet you would, in theory, appear a little slower though the discrepancy is so small it would probably be unnoticeable. This discrepancy in the speed of time can be measured and in fact, it has been measured using atomic clocks.

Your own speed also influences the time flow as perceived by you and your environment. If you go really fast and I mean really, really fast, your time would slow relative to the time outside of speeding you. From your perspective, you would appear to be going at a normal speed. For everyone else, you would appear to slow down considerably. Time is funny that way. Speaking of time, it’s time for a break. I’ll be right back.

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Mustache – a 100 word story

They say I’m a compulsive mustache painter. I was banned from most of the art establishments when I was much younger. I have a court junction, preventing me from getting within a three hundred mile radius of any art shop. When the long playing records started appearing, many of those famous musician faces got decorated before they caught me. That’s when I started doing actual faces. They say Salvador Dali never recovered from what I did to him, went completely and utterly insane, but it was after Stalin that I was finally put away. My inmates all have whiskers now.

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Welcome back. Orienting yourself inside the time continuum can be difficult. You can make this simpler by measuring time. We do that by breaking time into regular pieces. We call those pieces hours, minutes and seconds. Time itself is a flow and does not really break, so those pieces are an illusion, put there by us to make time more manageable. We use those measurements to predict and sometimes influence the time things happen.

Time seems to flow in a single direction from one minute to the next one, things happen one after the other, or at least that’s how we perceive them. The truth might be more complicated. Using particle accelerators, scientists found out that some particles can actually go backward in time. Those particles are much smaller than actual atoms, so this is something that happens on a very small scale. We apparently can’t go back in time ourselves, though if we would be able to find a way to make lots of those particles go back in time at the same time, who knows? For now, we would have to accept that we are trapped in time, flowing at a certain speed in one direction. This concludes episode 10 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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The Cat Had Other Ideas

The Birds – a 100 word story

At first, Hitchcock thought about using flies. He worked laboriously for months with a fly trainer before ruling that out. Then he thought about using cats. The cats had other ideas and putting them on telephone poles proved to be a near impossibility. Their inability to fly was also a problem, so he turned his mind to using bats. It worked well at first until daytime came and the bats decided it was time to go to sleep. He went for a long walk which ended with a bird staining his best vest with bird poop. The rest is history.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 9, The Cats Had Other Ideas

You know, some things are true and some are just, well, not true. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at what is true and what is false and how we can tell them apart. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about truth. In order to get our daily dose of truth, we must observe it and we get the most of it through our 5 senses. Our senses can be kind of tricksters though. They sometimes trick us into believing things are true when they are not. If you draw two circles and a curved line on a piece of paper for example, you would see a smiley face. There is no actual face there. There are only two circles and a curved line. Our senses are clearly deceiving us.

There are plenty of ways to trick our senses, especially our visual sense. What you see is not always what you get. For example, you can be tricked into believing two circles that are of the same size are actually of different sizes, by playing with their colors and the colors of their background. You can make straight lines appear curved by placing a grid of lines behind them, organized in a specific way. Knowing that, it is only natural to be skeptical about the truth as depicted by our senses. As a skeptic it would be harder to get to the bottom of what is true and what is not. You might become a scientist and use the scientific method to get to the truth. It’s the surest way to get there. I’ll be talking about the scientific method in another episode but right now, the truth is that I need a break. I’ll be right back.

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A Loss of Time – a 100 word story

I lost my watch today, which wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t the keeper of time. You see, my watch is the key for time running smoothly, regularly and in an orderly manner. Now that it’s lost, no one has the time, except for a few time sensitives. People are rushing around like crazy, faster, faster, not even realizing anything is wrong. Time is accelerating towards a time bang, an end of all times when everything would happen all at once, then time would stop altogether. This is why you have to help me. Have you seen my watch?

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Welcome back. The truth can be slippery and what you see might rely on where you are in relative relation to the truth. Let’s say for example that you are standing at the corner of a house. Let’s also say that this particular house have four walls. From where you stand you can see two of the walls and they are both painted light yellow. Would you say that the color of that house is light yellow? The whole house? Now, let’s say someone who has been standing at the exact opposite of the house comes your way and tells you the other two walls are in fact blue? How do you know if he is telling the truth? If he is telling the truth, how do you know someone hasn’t gone and painted the other two walls in red while he was away?

Truth can change while you look the other way. Truth is elusive. Truth is dynamic. What was true a minute ago might not be true anymore. Everything you know might be wrong. Some of it might be right though. You can never know for sure. That’s why you should always be a skeptic and double check the facts and remember, your truth might differ from someone else’s truth. So, what is the truth? Truth might be the best of all trolls, the finest of tricksters. In short, truth is a form of perspective. This concludes episode 9 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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