Just when you think you know the answers, I change the questions.

 

 

 

When starting this blog, I wanted to include a regular piece where I answered question, so when coming up with a title I took a page out of the playbook of one of the greatest talkers in wrestling history, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.  If all goes according to plan, "Just when you think you know the answers, I changed the questions" will hopefully include some of the same hostility and aggression that Piper regularly displayed on Piper's Pit.   

 

 

 

Today's edition was specifically inspired by Chuck Klosterman's HYPERtheticals: 50 questions for insane conversation.  I found the questions to be more fun than insane and for those interested in checking them out, you can buy it here.  Here are two questions from Klosterman and my responses.     

 

 

1.Forever 75

 

You celebrate your 75th birthday in good health. As far as you can tell, you are a spry, relatively normal 75-year-old. And this condition does not seem to change over time: When you celebrate your 80th birthday, you look and feel exactly as you did on your 75th. When you hit 90, you still look and feel 75. On your 100th birthday, you realize that most of your friends are now dead or dying -- but physically, you are the same independent person you were 25 years ago. You hit age 110 with the same results. Every year, you are celebrating a new birthday without physically evolving beyond the age of 75. Doctors have no explanation for this inexplicable stasis.

How old would you have to be before you would start to seriously believe that you are immortal?

 

Let's start off with this.  I'm currently 33.  I'll be 75 in the year 2056.  That's pretty crazy to think about right there.  It feels weird even thinking about the year 2056.  So with some more simple math I'd be 110 in the year 2091.  Even crazier.    

The oldest recorded living person to this point lived to be 122.  Living to 122 would put me in the year 2103.  Life in the 22nd century.  Now let's consider something else, advances in technology and medicine.  That record of 122 is highly likely to be blown past well before I get there. 

Now, I’m sure if I end up being as vigorous and energetic at 90 as I was at 75 I would begin to mock death.  I'd have to crack some jokes about being a tenth of the way to Yoda's age when he died and knowing I was certainly heading for a life of 900 years or about how I figured I'd live forever but assumed it would be a life with my brain incased in the spider droid vessel of a B'omarr monk.  Joking aside, how old would I have to be to start seriously thinking I'm immortal?

125.  While the thought would have crept into my consciousness by the time I was 90, there would always have been doubt.  I have to think 50 years without showing any signs of aging would have me convinced I will live forever regardless of the advances made to halt the effects of aging. 

While I always thought I'd live forever, I figured it would be as a B'omarr monk.

 

 

2. Front Page News

 

Defying all expectation, a group of Scottish marine biologists capture a live Loch Ness Monster. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a bear hunter in the Pacific Northwest shoots a Sasquatch in the thigh, thereby allowing zoologists to take the furry monster into captivity. These events happen on the same afternoon. That evening, the president announces he may have thyroid cancer and will undergo a biopsy later that week.

 

You are the front page editor of The New York Times: What do you play as the biggest story?

 

Sasquatch.  There is no debating this and the logic is simple. 

Let's deal with the president first.  According to the statistics I found while researching this dilemma male patients with thyroid cancer have a 74% survival rate in the first five years and we don't even know the president has thyroid cancer.  He's just going for a biopsy which is an everyday occurrence.  Sorry Mr. President, you're not cracking the top 2 stories on this day.  He's gone.

Now to the real debate, BIGFOOT vs. NESSIE. 

First off, salt water oceans make up 71 percent of the earth’s surface.  We as humans are barely able to search the depths of the seas.  Hundreds of thousands of species are waiting to be discovered within the confines of the Earth’s oceans as you read this.  To bring current events into the equation, we can't find a single plane that is in the ocean and this plane was sending out a transmission to help locate it.  While improbable, the idea that a live Loch Ness Monster exists is still much greater than that of Sasquatch.

Secondly, this is the New York Times not some UK newspaper.  Location has to be a consideration as well.  While the New York Times considers itself a global newspaper, it's main audience is still the people of the United States.  A discovery in the USA definitely trumps that of a UK one.

The good news for me as the front page editor of The New York Times is this, there is room for three headlines above the fold of the front page.  So while Sasquatch will get top billing on the top right corner, all three stories will be there to see.