Closing Pandora's Box

Me: Do animals feel pain?

Little Miss Sunshine (LMS): Yeah I guess so. You can see it when you cut off their arms or something. What about plants?

Me:  Hmm. Well they don’t really have a nervous system as such. So I don’t really see where the pain would register. And transpiration doesn’t count as tears.

LMS: Hehe. Lactation?

Me: What the hell? I just imagined a plant with boobs. Every 6 months they pop out boobs and just squirt milk everywhere.

LMS: I always get confused. What’s that word for crying? Lac..

Me: Lacrimation? It’s derived from the Latin word ‘lacrime’ meaning to cry, I think.

*****

Last weekend my mum went to Pakistan. Me, my dad and my younger brother went to drop her off at the airport. Just as we were leaving to come back home, the following conversation ensued between my brother and I:

Him: Who are all these ladies in the red skirts and hats?

Me: They’re the air hostesses, you know the ladies on the planes who bring you food and whatnot.

Him: I bet they get to fly a lot and see lots of places. Do they get free tickets?

Me: I guess so. It’s part of their job. But I’m not too sure.

Him:  When they have gone abroad with a flight, do they like get to see the place? Or are they kept under curfew and can’t leave the airport?

Me: That would really suck if they couldn’t leave the airport.

Him: You know what. If they get good pay, then I too wanna be an air woman

… (after a I started laughing) air man.

I know this is a post about happiness and smiles, but when I typed ‘air hostess’ into Google, some of the stuff that came up would’ve made some guys a bit too happy. So to save on the kleenex, I decided to use this picture. 8-). She is pretty.

*****

You may remember the post I wrote about happiness. If not you can read it by clicking here. There’s not much else I want to say but would like to share a photo with you. This was spotted by the ever so lovely Aam in labs last year while we were looking at blood slides down the microscope. The smile on her face was bigger than the one you see below, so I took a photo of it for her. It shows a smiley faced neutrophil (correct me if I’m wrong, I sucked at spotting things down microscopes).

Smiles can be found anywhere if you just look hard enough – (can I quote myself?)

The phone had been ringing for a long time. Where was everyone? They’ve all gone out you twillop said a voice inside my head. We have a phone in the sitting room, dining room and two of the bedrooms. It so happened I was in one of the rooms where there was no phone. I pressed pause on my laptop, took out the earphone from my right ear and got up to run and answer it. Oh that’s another thing about me, I only wear one earphone so that if someone is calling me, the phone rings or someone knocks at the door I can attend to them or it. One of the worst ever feelings is needing to use the loo but you don’t have the key to get into your house. And when you knock, the person inside takes what seems like forever to open because they can’t hear you. I only ever use both when going to bed, or sleeping on the bus. Anyway back to the ringing phone. I ran downstairs to the sitting room, out of breath and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

After a few seconds an automated recording started playing, “Are you suffering from death? If you would like…”

I put the phone down after it finally registered what the recording had said.

*****

There’s been a lot of snow here in the UK. This story was in the news recently and the sheer stupidity of it made me smile. The woman didn’t even realise she was wasting valuable police time. (Click on the picture below to read the full story).

Even though the world is advancing rapidly in all sorts of ways, whether it be healthcare, learning more about the universe, creating smaller yet faster machines etc. etc, there’s still a lot of stupidity and ignorance. People still do and say things which make you open your mouth so wide flies are tempted to go inside and have babies. What’s the most stupidest thing you’ve heard or seen?