#MakeMeThinkIn5Words

PotD
#MakeMeThinkIn5Words
January 16, 2016
charles i. letbetter = #MakeMeThinkIn5Words

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.—George S. Patton

charles i. letbetter - #MakeMeThinkgIn5Words

Ah, the weekend! You made it and, quite fortunately, you’re still alive! This has been a very emotional week with the deaths of so many prominent people and we’ve all expended an abundance of energy mourning, fussing, remembering, arguing, and various other activities that, in the end, contributed to little more than the grayness of our hair. If all of 2016 is going to be this stressful, we’d just as soon go back to the previous year, please.

After such a difficult week, we thought it was time to have a little Twitter fun again this week. This time, the hashtag we’re playing with is #MakeMeThinkIn5Words, which, interestingly enough, involves six words, not five. The whole premise is to ask mind-challenging questions using only five words. This is interesting because, while the game fits well within Twitter’s 140 character limit, it comes at a time when the executives running the social media app are questioning expanding the limit to 10,000 words. Whatever would we do with all that space? There are advantages in being forced to be succinct.

Nonetheless, five words are our limit. We’ve seen some good ones already, such as, “What if Darth Vader sneezes?” and “What’s another word for thesaurus?” Even our friends at NPR got in on the game with tweets such as this:

Obviously, we’re going to have to put our thinking caps on for this one! So, let’s see what we can do:

(Sorry, couldn’t resist getting that one in early)

 

An old platitude involves the line, “you can win the battle and lose the war.” Maybe winning isn’t always everything. That is a very difficult concept to grasp when we live in such an aggressive that champions winning at all costs. Still, if you’ll give it a moment’s thought, I’m sure you can come up with a scenario in which winning on one level results in losing on another. For example, breaking the record for running the mile, but dying as you cross the finish line. 

 

No one really wants to die, and medical science is doing a lot to prolong our lives. But if we never died, would that not remove the need to procreate? Would we have to make sex illegal in order to survive? I can imagine life getting quite uncomfortable if we begin living too long.

 

I do my most serious thinking and research sitting right here in front of this computer. The more thinking I do, the more sedentary I am. The more sedentary I am, the more likely I am to snack on junk food. Knowing that there is a cherry turnover in the kitchen right now isn’t helping. I tend to consume more coffee and scotch when I’m thinking as well, which leads me to the possible consideration that thinking, ultimately, could kill me.

 

Frequent visitors know how I feel about the benefits to posing nude.However, we’ve not written about it yet this year, and we’re getting a lot of new visitors. Maybe we should write about it again. I need a different hook, though, don’t you think? We will need to revisit this question soon.

 

You know the concept already: If a man says something and no woman is around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or, more commonly, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Whether there can be reality without perception has been an arguable point for centuries. One can take sides, but the truth of the matter is that anything that might answer the question would amount to perception in some form, therefore the question is unanswerable. Bloody frustrating.

 

Another philosophy question because I’ve not seen them asked and they’re so much fun. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) proposed that, “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” He based that statement on the concept that, prior to making the world, God must have considered every possible iteration, including one without hate and malice and other forms of evil, and decided that we were better off with them. A world void of evil, he thought, would rob man of free will. However, given that modern science no longer binds us to a mythological view of creation, does Leibniz’s concept still apply? Could the universe have done a better job of evolving?

 

Seriously, chocolate may honestly be the best food ever! Whether eating it by itself, or using it as a layer with other foods, it is difficult to imagine any situation that cannot be enhanced by chocolate. Even when it’s messy, it’s still good. What other food can come close to possibly comparing to the pleasure and satisfaction that chocolate brings? There are many great foods in the world, but none are going to beat chocolate.

I’m going to stop there because I think you fully understand how the game works now and should be able to carry on without my assistance. Be sure to follow me on Twitter (@charlesletbetter) and I’ll follow you back. Have a wonderful, thought-filled Saturday!

Continue Reading