The Breadandbutterfly – a 100 word story
The Breadandbutterfly is a rare species indeed. It only comes out at certain times a day, the shy little creature. The lighting has to be just right and the air has to be at just about the right temperature. The Breadandbutterfly would only eat the very rare Goldenmonkey Fruit and it would only eat it if it’s just about ripe enough. If you are on the hunt for The Breadandbutterfly, you’ll have to observe all of those conditions precisely, wear the right camouflage, carry the right scented perfume, but most of all, you’ll have to go through the looking glass.
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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 28, The Right Scented Perfume
It appears we have five senses, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, all there to help us experience the world around us. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at senses. 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 senses. Sight is the most obvious window to the world around us. We generally see in colors and shapes. Our brain get those as images through the windows of our two eyes. Our brain doesn’t handle those images as a whole though. Instead, it breaks those images apart, storing different parts in different places, then reassembling them for us, interpreting them as a whole. In that way, the image we finally get is not the real image of the world around us but merely our own interpretation of that image.
Sound is the result of the movement of air. Air moves in waves, not unlike the waves of the ocean. Those waves have singular shapes and speeds. The speed of the movement of air is also known as frequency. Faster moving air has a higher frequency and sounds higher pitched, while slower moving air would have a lower frequency and pitch. The shape of the wave would shape the timbre of a sound. A soundwave with a completely random shape would create white noise while a smoother shaped soundwave would create a smoother, more coherent sound. A triangular soundwave would create a sharper sound timbre. A combination of those waves and shapes create all the sounds we hear in our world. The sounds we intake through our ears are merely the interpretation of our brain for the movement of air around us. I think I’m going to listen to air move around me for a while. I’ll be right back.
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Sky Frog – a 100 word story
A frog dropped from the sky. Not a rain of frogs. Just a single frog. Not something to make conspiracy theories about. It did surprise the frog though. It didn’t expect to drop out of the sky. It was just sitting on a cloud, then it was plummeting towards the earth at top speed. It tried to comprehend what was happening, but it was only a frog. The end was inevitable. Frogs are very soft while the ground tends to be quite hard. As the elephant watched in horror from the cloud, it couldn’t help thinking “I could be next.”
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Welcome back. While sight and sound are about experiencing the world around you from a distance, touch is about proximity, it’s about being close, about being intimate with the world around you. Touch is the feeling of something touching your very own coating, your skin. The feeling of touch is caused by something moving the atoms on your skin, so touch is actually a sense of movement, the movement of your very own body, caused by some external, and sometimes even internal force. Touch is the sense that casts down the barrier between you and the world around you which is why it is considered the most intimate of senses.
Smell and taste are connected, almost dependent on each other. While touch is about connecting with the world around you, smell and taste are about taking the world in. Smell is there to sample the world around you from a safe distance, inhaling aromas and letting your brain decode them as smells, while taste is there to appreciate the part of the world that goes into your body in order to sustain it, and it is not complete without a sense of smell to complement it.
Your five senses are there to help you appreciate the world around you. Some people would tell you of a sixth sense, a mystical sense that goes beyond the five senses, beyond the world we know. They misunderstand the role our senses have. Our senses are there to help us understand the world around us, not to invent new worlds. That is the role of imagination, and that is where the sixth sense resides. This concludes episode 28 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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