An idea for a blog post came to me today, and while doing some research on the topic, I stumbled across a subreddit page referred to as “No Stupid Questions“.
I’m not sure what that says about the topic I had been thinking about writing a post on, but that thought quickly vanished as I became fascinated with the types of questions people had posted to this reddit community.
Here’s a sample:
- Do conjoined twins have to buy separate movie tickets?
- Why do I keep looking for content that I know pisses me off?
- What are the long term health effects of castration without hrt? (I had to look up hrt – hormone replacement therapy)
- Where does the e in Serbia come from?
- How can I hang out on my pitched roof safely?
- Does sticking stuff up your butt make it easier to take a dump?
- Will flaring my nose often actually make my nose bigger?
- How come you can pair almost any letter with J to make a first name (AJ, BJ, CJ, DJ, MJ, PJ, etc.) but you hardly ever hear other letters used as names? (E.g. no one is named MT, KU, YR)
- If there are no stupid questions, why does the submit a post button say “Ask a stupid question”?
- Elderly neighbour not home when I think she should be. Should I be worried?
- Why does every news station have a meteorologist when weather forecasts are available everywhere and can be explained by a regular news reporter?
- How do meals work?
- Can dogs have autism?
- Why do colleges/universities have swimming pools/gyms/other fitness equipment and sort of like amenities?
- What happens to the crime rates in places with really long day and night cycles?
- Why don’t scrambled eggs taste like chicken?
It seems every few minutes another question pops in the reddit listing that I want to put on my list above, but I need to stop, or I could do this all night.
By the way, in case any of the questions above pique your curiosity, you can just click on them to go the reddit page to read how people have answered the question. And amazingly enough, I believe every question listed above has at least one response.
It seems like no questions are off limits, and I’m sure a good number of them are just posted to try and get a laugh (or at least I hope so – do people really want to know where the “e” in Serbia comes from, or not know how meals work?) But it also seems that people believe reddit must be a useful place to find answers to that question that has been really bugging you, and you don’t know where else to find the answer. I guess that’s one of the reasons reddit is often referred to as the front page of the internet.
Here’s how reddit describes this community:
Don’t be embarrassed of your curiosity, everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help. All questions are welcome such as to how to change oil, to how to tie shoes. All questions are welcome, except clear trolls, please don’t be that guy.
Anyway, as often happens, the serendipitous nature of the internet directly led to a new blog post for me.
And in case you were wondering what my stupid question was, here it is:
“If I eat five pounds of food, do I gain five pounds of weight? If that’s the case, what does it matter what the five pounds of food is?”
I might have to post it to reddit and see what the response is, maybe it will lead to another blog post that basically writes itself…
Borden's Blather 