Week 1: The Idiot Question Edition
Hey dad, I have a question for you.
Hello!
Welcome to the first week of Everything Is Amazing.
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So, last time I explained how this newsletter works. Now it’s time to actually begin.
Shall we?
My Idiot Question of The Week
What I’m spending the next five days inquiring about, in every way I can think of, is something strange about my late father, David Sowden.
My dad was a remarkable chap. I’m aware I’m biased in the way all admiring sons are, but - he was much loved, for many excellent reasons. Solid bloke, according to all who knew him.
From him, I got a love of writing, of science fiction (and anything involving Big, Strange Ideas), of humour as a tool of diplomacy and cheeky insightful inquiry - and also, less welcomely, of cheese.
My dad’s capacity for eating cheese was basically a superpower, the kind of thing Tony Stark would cautiously investigate. One time at a restaurant, the waiter left a huge cheeseboard at my dad's table, thinking that he would take a few slices from each variety like any normal person. When the waiter returned, all the cheese was gone - including a full wheel of something eye-wateringly expensive. My dad had inhaled the lot.
(He was also very tall. From this I concluded at an early age that excessive cheese consumption makes you taller. I like to think I wasn’t incorrect, I just chose the wrong axis.)
Sure, my dad wasn’t perfect. If you were a waiter in a restaurant that served cheese, for example, you were terrified of him. He also liked cooking kippers for breakfast - a deeply antisocial habit that should only be done on remote mountainsides, or even better, never at all. (According to my mum, the only time she seriously considered divorcing him was when he decided to fry kippers in our ground-floor kitchen at 3am. There’s a line, dad.)
And, like one of every twelve men in the world, my dad had the X chromosome genetic abnormality that manifests as deuteranopia, or red-green colour-blindness.
This only becomes truly remarkable when I mention what my dad did for a living.
Over a long and successful career from the end of the 1950s to the start of the 1980s, first in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), then Germany (where I was born), then Cyprus, then Scotland and England, my father worked in the British Royal Air Force as an aircraft technician.
It was frequently his job to roll up his sleeves and tinker in the mechanical guts of such RAF workhorses as the Westland Wessex, the Blackburn Beverley - for which I believe he worked on the technical manual - and the gorgeous-looking Sea King.
(Maybe it’s just me, but - what a beaut. Ah.)
The thing is, this was an era before computers entered aircraft engineering in a big way. This was the age of wires. Wires of all shapes and lengths…and colours. All the colours.
And my dad was colour-blind. He couldn’t see reds. He couldn’t see greens. He presumably couldn’t see the difference between them.
So here’s the question I’m asking the world this week:
“Why Didn’t My Dad Blow Everything Up?”
How did he do his job without his colour-blindness getting in the way, every time he went to work on an engine? And how did the RAF even let him do it in the first place? (As far as I understand, colour-blindness disqualifies you from the vast majority of jobs in the British Armed Forces. Was this always true?)
So how did you get away with that, dad? How did you still manage to do your job so well? What are all the things I’m missing here?
It’s clearly time to ring a few people up and try to get to the bottom of this.
On Researching Your Own Idiot Questions
Here is a useful guiding rule for the modern online-dependent world:
The easiest answers to find are always the least interesting.
Yes, you can spent 0.007 seconds typing something into a search engine. You can spent a further 11 seconds reading a very confident-sounding post on Quora that seems to answer your question perfectly. Then you can fill in the blanks on Wikipedia and hooray, you’re done! What’s on Netflix?
What you’ve actually done is miss everything fun and surprising along the way, learn nothing you’ll ever remember - and bypass the whole point of asking stupid questions.
A daft question is a gateway to better, more interesting & more useful questions. Always. The questions worth answering have to be unearthed by posing foolisher questions - in exactly the same way a shitty first draft is an unskippable part of writing something worthy of publication and public consumption. You can’t have the good stuff without wading through the relatively rubbish stuff first. There is no getting around it.
Except, with curiosity, there is. It’s called Google. Or Bing. Or Baidu. Or Yahoo.
We should be using this services to inflame our curiosity, not snuff it out. To find more and more sources to ask, instead of closing this mystery box on the basis of a single sentence. We should also (and this goes without saying) enjoy inquiring. Instantly getting your answer from the internet is oddly deflating, an existential shrug from the universe. “Meh. Is that it?”
No, that’s not it. So we should act accordingly - and have all the fun along the way. We should be prepare to abandon our Idiotic Question if something much more fascinating emerges enroute. We should feel the thrill of questions multiplying, until we feel like we now know less about this thing than when we started!
We should do it properly.
Yes, go to page 1 of Google Search. But please, never stop there.
So if I gave you a week to answer a weird but interesting question that’s been bugging you for far too long - what would it be?
Images: Wikimedia Commons; Patrick Fore; Brett Jordan; Steven Wright.
