What We Still Dont Know: Are We Real?

I’ve been questioning about this since I was very very little. When I was with myself talking to my favourite bunny toy, I would suddenly felt lost of “self,” I would ask myself why I existed, why my family existed, my friends, anyone else in this world existed, and then I’d ask my bunny why it existed but couldn’t have soul and life like me. And when I reached these unanswerable questions, the “self” of me became impalpable. And then I would start to tear silently. I wept for the fact that I’d die one day and the “me” would never exist again, but my bunny toy would never die and it’d continuously exist. Who would take care of my bunny toy after I died? I loved my bunny toy so much, and I wanted to bring it with me “after” I died, but how could it “get to me” when I didn’t exist anymore?

 

I love someone’s (madogmgd)  comment: If God is matter, then you might as well be an Atheist and dismiss the concept altogether. There’s no evidence to support God. Science is based on evidence. Therefore we cannot assume that God did it without proper evidence. If God is matter, then you might as well be an Atheist and dismiss the concept altogether.”

I always claim myself to be an Atheist because I question the existence of God. But this person (madogmgd) is so right. If I can’t confirm the existence of God, then why does God theory matter to me when I say I believe in Atheism? Maybe I should rename myself, “Science-ist” and “Scientism”.

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New philosophy

Human interactions will emerge endless arguments and complaints, and it happens every single day. Compromise doesn’t equal giving up. However, it is the manners to determine the winner and the loser. Don’t swear. Don’t curse. Don’t be harsh.

Negotiations and communications with respects can give  …

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Derren Brown – The Experiments: The Gameshow (Full)

 

Spoiler and critical review: The girl near the end of this documentary shouted, “Why are you still filming? You shouldn’t keep filming . . .” actually make herself even worse. In a way, she was not wrong to tell the cameraman to stop filming, but what people didn’t notice was she was trying to turn the guilt to the TV crew. This is human natural behaviour. When people realise they have done something wrong, they tend to make excuses or try to get someone involved so that they can shift the attention of their faults. In this way, they make themselves less guilty. If they really admit their own wrongnesses, they shall never say, “Because . . .” , “I apologise, but . . .” , “It’s not just only me, blah blah blah also . . .” , etc. If they acknowledge their own faults, they shall accept and apologise for what they have done and say they will improve themselves instead of getting someone involved.

 

Let’s think about it in this way, if Derren weren’t doing an experiment, the accident were real, how the audience and people who didn’t attend the live show would criticise Derren, the TV crew and the company? Would they pay “more” attention to blame that Derren and the crew shouldn’t have created this programme or the attendant audience who made the choices and controlled and affected the subject’s life? Would Derren and the TV crew become the hateful target or should the attendant audience if the accident were not faked?

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Here’s a question: why do pub quizzes turn me into a raging monster?

By MELISSA KITE

PUBLISHED: 22:47 GMT, 28 February 2013 | UPDATED: 22:47 GMT, 28 February 2013

 

Who said: ‘I think therefore I am’? Is The Great Wall of China visible from space? What sort of vegetable is a red thumb? And can you survive a pub quiz where you are constantly arguing with the quizmaster who, in your view, is always getting things wrong?

Every week, I turn up to my local pub quiz hoping for an entertaining night out, and every time it descends into a trivia-hurling scrum as the quizmaster and I lock horns.

The problem is we are both pedantic nerds, obsessed with pointless facts and figures, and in the genteel surrounds of a Surrey gastro-pub we slug it out to see who can pick the most holes in the other’s useless knowledge.

 

For the truth is that while we all go to pub quizzes, social club quizzes or school parents’ quizzes pretending we just want a couple of drinks and a laugh, really we’re dying to show off our knowledge, to feel we have proved ourselves intellectually.

We live in a world in which money talks very loudly, where expensive cars and big houses are a marker of social status, yet part of us all still craves this social cachet no millionaire can buy.

Perhaps it’s a subliminal hangover from those days at school when we — or some of us, at least — strained a hand into the air hoping to catch the teacher’s eye and answer a particularly obscure question.

What I do know is that when you take these things seriously, being told an answer you know to be correct is wrong is utterly infuriating.

 

Our pub quizmaster thinks he’s smart, of course. He has horn-rimmed spectacles and a smug grin which he can barely contain as he reads out his questions. I have no doubt he has spent many hours at his laptop researching obscure types of fruit and vegetables, unheard of capital cities and U.S. states that begin with M.

He was insufferably pleased with himself when we all thought The Great Wall of China was visible from space, when, in fact, it’s visible only from Earth’s orbit at a relatively modest height. He was overjoyed that no one knew Popeye’s nephews were called Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye and Poopeye.

He does enjoy his petty torments.

But just because he thinks he knows the answer — because he’s looked it up on the internet — doesn’t mean he’s going to escape my pedantry.

 

At Halloween, for example, we had a terrible row after he asked: ‘What animal would you turn into if you were suffering from lycanthropy?’

I wrote down ‘wolf’ and assured my team that we were on firm ground as I happened to be an avid reader of period horror stories.

But when it came to the marking, the pub quiz compere said the answer was ‘werewolf’ and that we couldn’t have a point for writing ‘wolf’.

‘Look here,’ I argued, ‘if you are suffering from the mythical disease of werewolfism, you don’t change into a werewolf. You are a werewolf. A werewolf is a man who changes into a wolf, ergo the answer is wolf. Not werewolf.’

There is always trouble, and usually it peaks at the Food And Drink round.

Take what happened when the quizmaster asked us to identify sauces for which he named the ingredients. ‘Basil, pine nuts, parmesan, olive oil.’

I wrote down ‘Pesto’, and my team mates nodded their approval.

 

‘Chick peas, tahini . . .’ I scribbled ‘Hummus’ and my team mates nodded again.

‘Egg yolk, English mustard, white wine vinegar, oil, salt and pepper.’

I looked at my friend, Ingrid, and shrugged. Ingrid shrugged back. My boyfriend Will tried to look interested but failed.

‘I think he might mean Hollandaise,’ I whispered.

‘What about Béarnaise?’ whispered Ingrid.

‘Yes, unless . . . you don’t think he means mayonnaise?’

‘Mayonnaise doesn’t have mustard in it,’ said Ingrid incredulously. Even a woman who set fire to her kitchen while trying to boil an egg, and whose only attempt to make soup ended in the soup being on the ceiling, was outraged at the suggestion that mayonnaise had mustard in it.

‘I could put “mustard mayonnaise”, but you know what he’s like. He won’t allow it.’

When Food And Drink ended, I took the pub quiz compere aside.

‘I’m not happy with these sauces,’ I said, trying to avoid a bloodbath by being at least a bit diplomatic.

‘What’s the matter with them?’ he snapped.

‘There is no sauce consisting of egg yolk, white wine vinegar and mustard, unless you’re talking about Béarnaise, and then you’re missing some ingredients. If you’re trying to describe mayonnaise, that wouldn’t make mayonnaise, it would make mustard mayonnaise. But I assume the answer is simpler than that. So you must mean Béarnaise or Hollandaise with the butter missing.’

The pub quiz compere curled his lip. His right fist clenched on the bar next to his bowl of nibbles, as if he wanted to grab a cocktail olive stick and poke it in my eye.

He leaned forward and between gritted teeth, in a very husky Clint Eastwood voice, said: ‘The answer is mayonnaise.’

The pub quiz compere then started typing into the internet on an iPad.

Perhaps he thinks you can find the store of all accurate knowledge with one click on Google or Wikipedia.

Then he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and read out so loudly that the entire pub could hear: ‘Egg yolk, English mustard, white wine vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. Not my words, the words of the BBC website to describe the recipe for . . . MAYONNAISE!’

 

‘Oh hilarious!’ I shouted back, as my team-mates begged me to be quiet. ‘You actually think the BBC is an impartial source of information about mayonnaise? That isn’t a straightforward recipe for mayonnaise, it’s a la-di-dah, woolly liberal . . .’

But the entire pub was now shouting at me to shut up.

The spelling questions are also problematic. However distasteful it might be, the word ‘diarrhea’ sparked a minor riot. I wrote that spelling of it down confidently, but when we came to the marking, the quizmaster insisted there was an ‘o’ in it. When I challenged his ‘o’ as outdated, he yelled ‘Right!’ and started fiddling with his iPad again. He then declared that diarrhea, or should I say diarrhoea, was spelled with an ‘o’ on the NHS website.

‘That proves it,’ I cried, as the rest of the pub booed. ‘This is a Socialist pub quiz!’

I get so worked up about all this that I do wonder if I’m taking it all a bit too seriously.

One evening, I realised I was driving behind the quizmaster after we had all left the pub to go home.

Before I knew it, I was entertaining the idea of tailing him to his home so I could continue a discussion about the number of bones in a giraffe’s neck on his driveway.

 

I told myself to get a grip. Nothing is that important.

But there is something about pub trivia that brings out the worst in people.

When we swap papers and tot up the other teams’ scores, I howl at the answers I should have known, or that I had answered correctly at first then crossed out and changed.

The time I wrote down ‘True’ to a slug’s blood being green then panicked and, incorrectly, wrote ‘False’ was a low point.

A pub quiz can test friendships, too.

Like the time Ingrid told me to write down Sunset Boulevard in answer to the question: ‘From which movie is the quote: “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small”?’

While we were deliberating, the quizmaster asked the next question, we got stuck into arguing about that, and I forgot to go back and fill in Sunset Boulevard.

When the quizmaster eventually called out the answer, Ingrid shrieked ‘Hooray!’ and I had to tell her. ‘I’ve done a terrible thing,’ I said, bowing my head. ‘I daren’t tell you.’

‘You didn’t write it down did you?’

‘I’m sorry. I was just worried that . . . I thought Joan Crawford said . . .’

‘NO!’ she yelled. ‘How could you?’

To paraphrase former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, getting quiz answers right is not a matter of life and death — it’s much more important than that.

Also, call me paranoid, but I sometimes I feel I get no credit for providing really clever answers while my team-mates all slap each other on the back for knowing silly things.

For example, Ingrid knew that Hass was a type of avocado. Everyone, including my boyfriend, went berserk congratulating her.

Whereas when I came up with Descartes as the answer to: ‘Who said: “I think therefore I am”?’, no one complimented me at all.

‘Is it? said Will, nonchalantly. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Oh,’ said Ingrid, ‘well, if you’re sure.’

‘Yes, I am sure. I know my Cartesian philosophy,’ I said, haughtily. ‘You what?’ said Will. ‘Oh forget it.’
Then, when the quizmaster read out that Descartes was the answer, no one shouted out: ‘Yes! Well done, Melissa.’ I had to congratulate myself. ‘See,’ I said, pathetically, ‘I told you so.’

To make matters even worse, the quizmaster pronounced the philosopher ‘Dez Cartez’, which made him sound like a second-rate club singer.

‘Day Carrrrrr!’ I shouted out, rolling my guttural Rs as I corrected him.

‘Well, that’s the French pronunciation,’ he said, facetiously.

‘Is there any other way to pronounce a French name?’ I said, taunting him. We argued about it until the manager called last orders. I know, it’s so trivial.

(Oh, and a red thumb is a potato. But then you probably knew that . . . didn’t you?)

A version of this article appears in The Spectator.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286242/Heres-question-pub-quizzes-turn-raging-monster.html#ixzz2MIBsZYml
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