classification of inanimate objects

People always accuse me of mis-naming things.

But some things are confusing! I understand that I am supposed to see objects like this:

Also, that's what everyone else calls it.

But instead, I see objects like this:

Objects have many different characteristics. I find this confusing. Thanks to the SAT, I also often mis-name them.

When I was a middle schooler, it was decided that all the 8th graders should try their hands at the SAT. And so it was that I read a reading comprehension passage about Carl Linnaeus, and became fascinated with the accurate classification of objects.

This is actually a part of a larger chart, simplified here:

I usually use "popsicle" as the order name for "cold things on a stick," although it typically is also associated with the more traditional frozen-juice popsicle. My technical name for an ice cream bar is "popsicle ice cream" whereas the technical name for a traditional popsicle is "popsicle popsicle." I usually shorten this, unless specificity is needed, to just be "popsicle."

Classifying stuff this way makes me feel better, but it doesn't really help when people accuse me of mis-naming things.

Oh well.

loud noises

I have recently realized that I don't like noise. This is possibly because, when you add sound to anything that does not require sound, it immediately becomes more annoying.

Clearly, unnecessary sound is very grating. Unnecessary volume doesn't help things, either.

Once you notice that loud noises are annoying, you start into a downward spiral of anger and bad moods. You attempt to reduce the amount of noise around you, but that only makes annoying noises seem louder when you go outside.

There are not very many good solutions to this problem. Ignoring it is hard. Moving to a more quiet place is expensive and inconvenient.

You could try to blot out the sound using ear coverings, but that is a little conspicuous. Here are some suggestions for protecting your hearing, incognito.

No matter what you do, you will be existing in a happy bubble of noise reduction. You can once again be happy in the presence of noisy objects.

Of course, reducing your hearing can be dangerous. It can expose you to obvious dangers, such as not being able to hear a car coming when you cross the street. Plus, there are other dangers. If you are employing all three methods at once, you will certainly be living in a bubble of silence. You may think no one is talking about you, but that's only because you can't hear them.

Ignorance is bliss, people!

injuries

Injuries happen. If you are me, injuries will occur regardless of whether I am doing anything dangerous or not.

For this reason, I feel like it is important to play a sport. Because, I don't like explaining how I get injured, but I also don't like to lie directly.

If I play a sport, I can just make statements about my life, and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes, though, playing sports is difficult. In this case, I think it is important to acquire a potentially dangerous job or hobby that actually contains no danger at all.

That way, injuries created for no reason at all suddenly have meaning. Hooray!

post-its

Post-it notes are fun. I guess they are supposed to be used for reminders, but I use post-its for almost everything except for reminders.

Usually, I do post-it origami. It works particularly well if you manage to expose the sticky side on one end.

You can also play dress-up with post-its. Here are some examples.

The best thing, though, is to combine these alternative post-it usages in order to become:

The post-it pirate is fearsome. The post-it pirate does not care if you have many post-its or only one. The post-it pirate will take your post-its for herself!

I like the post-it pirate. I imagine that she is a frightening yet righteous marauder that punishes office post-it hoarders by stealing their post-its and redistributing them to needy office workers. Indeed, the post-it pirate is the Robin Hood of our modern life.

Sadly, the post-it pirate is mere fiction. However, sometimes when I see a particularly bad post-it hoarder in my office, and a certain temptation arises...

duck boat

Whoever made the duck boat had a great idea.

As a tourist on a duck boat, I would like to imagine myself riding an actual duck.

Duck boats are great. But perhaps not appropriately named. Because a duck boat, if it is really like a duck, should also fly.

This means that a real duck boat should be more than a combination boat/car. It should be a boat/car/plane!

When compared to the REAL duck boat (pictured above), current duck boats just seem inadequate. In fact, I would like it if we re-named the current duck boats to something that more accurately describes its function. Here are some suggestions.

Therefore, please join me in suggesting to duck boat companies that they rename their franchise Turtle Boat, or Swimmer Guy Boat.

Although despite any name changes, I don't think they could rival the boat concept I like to call "best boat ever":

Accents

Throughout high school and college, my friends kept telling me that British accents were "hot." According to them, a person's attractiveness can be increased two-fold by the presence of a British, Australian, or French accent.

Warning: Anecdotal evidence.

Since I don't find accents attractive, the only way I can attempt to dissect their mystery is by making venn diagrams based off of my friends' arguments on "which accent is the sexiest accent."

When my friends brought up the attractiveness of foreign accents with others, it appeared that they, too, were greatly swayed by the presence of particularly a British accent. I was beginning to think the opinion was something contagious, like a bad cough.

I had to see if everyone else in the English-speaking world really thought this. Since I don't have a linguistics laboratory at my disposal, I decided to use the internet.

These were the top five results of a Google search analysis I conducted for common regional dialects of English.

(For those of you who are confused by this graph, I will elaborate. I searched the terms on the X axis in Google using the terms indicated in the title of the graph. I charted the # of websites that appeared on the Y axis. In other words, the bigger the bar, the more websites created containing that search term.)

I wondered about foreign language accents as well, so I did an analysis for those.

The languages on the X-axis are the primary foreign and immigrant languages spoken in the USA.

If you go by the popular opinion on Google, accents really do increase attractiveness. Particularly British, or French if you prefer a foreign language accent.

I wanted to use this information to my advantage, because lately I haven't been able to get a chai tea when I want one. And my most attractive friends seem to be able to get awesome and generally free stuff all the time.

I developed a theory that if I altered my normal speaking voice, a chai tea would magically materialize. Here is the way my logic worked:

  A) Accents increase attractiveness.
  B) Attractive people get free/extra stuff.
  C) Chai tea falls into the category of "stuff"
  CONCLUSION: Using an accent will lead to chai tea.

Soon after thinking this through, though, I realized there were some holes in my plan. In real life, using an accent would probably not cause chai tea to materialize from thin air.

Thinking that perhaps the volume of one's voice was equally important in soliciting hot beverages, I checked Google to see how people liked to be spoken to.

Unsurprisingly, the best volume is a normal "talking" volume. But these results are probably skewed by websites about the 2007 movie "Talk to Me," since I don't know how to negatively filter Google search results. The most commonly found term after that is "yell at me."

This does not help me either.

So I guess my logic is faulty. Accents may increase your attractiveness, but not enough to magically cause chai tea to materialize from thin air. I later expanded my theory to include other commodities, such as food or clothing items rather than chai tea exclusively, but this didn't seem to work either. Changing my speaking voice has gotten me free stuff at times, but only when people were going to give it to me anyway, even without the accent. Oh well. I guess I can just pretend my logic is sound.