There are a lot of things I wonder about that I have seen over the years. I suppose this is true of everyone, and we probably each have our own list. Here are some of mine. Maybe you have wondered about these things too.
1. If you ever watch old movies from the 30s, 40s and even the 50s, whenever drivers get out of their cars they almost always seem to exit out of the passenger’s side. They scooch across the front seat to get out. It just always seemed odd to me and kind of difficult.
This changed in movies of the 1960s when a lot of cars with bucket seats appeared and many had consoles in the middle. Sliding across to the right side by a driver in one of those vehicles could be at the least painful and in some cars almost impossible.
I did some research on this one and found that before some point in time (before 1920), you couldn’t get out of a car from the driver’s side because there was no left door in some models. Also in some places, particularly big cities, it was safer to slide across the seat because you were getting out on the sidewalk rather than into traffic.
I read that in some states you could fail a question on a driver’s test if you answered it that you could go out the left door. Finally there was also the fact that it was standard practice to do that in the movies because of the way they shot their scenes. Those are all answers, maybe with a little or a lot of truth to each of them. Bench seats hardly exist in cars anymore and only in certain models of trucks. If you wonder where bucket seats came from they originated in sporty cars of European design and then spread to the United States in the late 1950s. Interestingly, one of the original sporty American cars of the 1950s, the Thunderbird had bench seats in it until 1958, which is kind of weird because that is also when the car grew into something much bigger and moved from a being sports model to more of a sedan. Ford did goofy stuff like that.
2. I remember one time as a teenager a couple of buddies and I were working on the brakes on one of their cars, and when we were done there were a lot of springs and bolts left over. I was scared to ride in that car, but the kid that owned it never had one problem with the brakes even though he kept it for six years until he got married. How come you can take something apart to fix it and when you are done you have parts left over, yet the device or machine operates just like it had all its parts? This is a wonder I have had for a very long time.
I have not seen research on this one, but I have my theories. First of all, some things in machines are redundant and as with some people, will operate pretty well even if they are few parts short of a whole. However, more than once, a part was left over and the machine would not start or wouldn’t work right. Some machines will work without certain seals or washers or spacers. Unfortunately, they will not last as long.
3. How do people decide to name their children? And when they do chose a name why do they spell their names the way they do? As a reporter in the early 2000s doing stories for this paper, I duly noted that one of the worst things you could do (other than leave their child out of a story completely) is to spell a kid’s name wrong. It was sometimes tough understanding the creative way parents had come up with using vowels and consonants to form a moniker that was a complete spelling mystery unless they wrote it on a piece of paper for you. Just last week, I was reading something that said that the number of names and the way they are spelled had tripled in the last decade. These days C’s and K’s are interchangeable, people add or omit vowels or consonants (and they even include blank spaces), and there is a tendency to “double up” letters such as two ee’s or two ii’s. Some of the kids names are zany. I remember when Frank Zappa, a semi-rock star of the 1960s named his daughter Moon Unit, everyone thought he was crazy. I saw a story the other day about a family name Ayer (pronounced air). They named their son Billion. The story didn’t say anything about any other children, but I doubt they had another child named Million. What kind of a complex do you think that would have given a younger brother? Makes you wonder where it is all going.
So, there are three wonderings. I have a lot more, and I bet you do too. The point is that there are a lot of things in the world we don’t understand including why we keep electing morons to Congress.
But that is a subject deeper than anything I could write about here.
Things I wonder about, and a few I found out
Richard Shaw