Blog of Josh Hall

Taking the thoughts of this old post (talks about keeping buried bodies from decomposing naturally and feeding new growth) a little bit further, I was thinking about the space that bodies and graveyards are consuming.  Certainly with huge population growths, cemeteries have to be filling up, and you don’t build up, you build out.  So, if there is a constant growth of cemeteries, wouldn’t they be the most prominent acreage holder eventually?  Is there a growth in land dedicated to the dead documented anywhere?  Will there be a day when Arlington Cemetery can no longer hold bodies?  What happens then?

If talking about the dead is too morbid, a different but similar question is metals being used in construction.  With the size of our buildings increasing to crazy limits like we’re seeing in Shanghai and Dubai, where is all this metal coming from?  We just keep on creating new stuff, and certainly recycling has helped in recovering metals and such from other items, but i’d be willing to bet our consumption and use of metals far outweighs our cultivated supply.  So, are we digging big holes in the earth, or shearing away layers and creating big spikes in the form of sky scrapers and airplanes?

I’m in a dressing room today, and someone comes into the area next to mine and begins talking to himself.  I think he’s crazy.  This of course is not the first person I’ve ever heard talk to themselves out loud though.  So I wonder why people do it?  Is it simply that they never learned to think to themselves?  Is it that they just don’t care about what other people hear or think of them as a result of what they’ve heard?  I started to draw a connection to spacial reasoning.  Maybe they have an inability to process thinking and conversation in their own minds, so they have to speak the words, then hear them, then they can process them.  It creates that millisecond delay, but it’s enough for your brain to catch up.

Then I thought about insane people, and how they stereo-typically talk to themselves.  Maybe that’s loneliness or a disconnect from human interaction, but it could be a subconscious work around to their brain’s own inability to process information.  Then I thought about people with multiple voices in their heads.  They must have huge spacial reasoning to be able to keep that information straight.

A list of 100 things from BBC from news articles last year that exposed interesting facts.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2009/01/100_things_we_didnt_know_last.shtml

Some highlights:

4. Etiquette dictates that at dinner parties, a man should always talk to the woman on his left during the first course, and right during the main course.
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21. Short men are more likely to be jealous.
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28. The Olympic torch is designed to withstand winds of up to 65km an hour and stay alight in rain up to 50mm an hour.
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40. You can lessen jet lag by not eating.
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41. Women are banned by law from Mount Athos in Greece, home to 20 monasteries.
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66. Misheard song lyrics are known as mondegreens.
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so I set up TallHalls.com to keep updates as Kallie and I plan our wedding.  That domain name is too great to let slip away, so it will probably be around for a while.  subscribe to the feed there and check back often to see how we’re doing!

In recent sports news, Grapevine Faith played Gainesville State School in football, but the fans from Faith rooted for the other team.  The formed a line for the other team to run through at the beginning of the game, the made a sign for them to bust through, and cheered for them throughout the game.  Was this some kind of reverse logic to the Yale "We Suck" prank?  Nope.  This was a good deed, since Gainesville is a correctional institution, and even those players deserve to have some cheering.

Why does something so right, seem so upside down?