The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler
1. With a poof of inky black smoke, the Devil appears before you and offers you long years of success and fortune, all in exchange for that little intangible he calls your soul. Do you prick your finger and sign on the dotted line?
I can sit around around all day and argue in favor of the existence of a person’s continuing spirit, but a capturable, containable human essense? Dunno.
I think if it were just some jack-ass saying “I’ll give you whatever you want for your soul”, I’d be more inclined to consider it, but I’d still say no, just because I don’t believe the agreement.
The problem here is that I don’t buy the idea of an actual Head Bad-Guy, rather than the simple irrefutable fact of Evil, born of man (with no one else to conveniently blame it on) — were I actually faced with someone of that Nature, we find ourselves in a “X proves Y” situation where presense of Devil = proof of the concept of a Soul.
In which case: No. Hell no, pun intended.
2. If you walked out of your house tomorrow morning and saw a bird with a broken wing huddled in some nearby bushes, what would you do?
In most cases, I’d end the thing’s suffering — I have no illusions at all of the thing’s life expectancy, were I to “take it in”. (You see, ‘take it in’ means “take it into the house” — we have two curious cats and two uber-curious dogs — that bird is dead meat.) I’m a farm kid, and I can’t count on both hands the number of animals I’ve had to perform a mercy killing on — it’s not bad or good, it just is.
If it were one of the Big birds — raptor, hawk, eagle, phoenix, or whatever, I’d call animal control and advise them to get their asses out and rescue the thing. I’d probably hang around and try to keep the thing calm (toss it a little meat or something), and keep neighborhood kids and dogs away from it.
3. What’s the best use you can think of for snow?
Skiing.
