Amanda the Great by Amanda El-Dweek for February 24, 2023

uh oh – are they going to blame China again for this one?

Does it get too cold for hot air balloons? Mostly they’re a winter thing here, but we don’t get cold cold.

And thus a ufo sighting tale is born.

It’s really nice of your brain to respond so well and so courteously to you!

That’s exactly right. Giving attention is the first step in learning anything. But second is perception—perceiving rightly what one encounters. They are different stages, though often occur simultaneously. (There are five more steps in the learning sequence, but enough undergrad lecture for today. Tons of research backs all this up.)

So I encountered this kind of in reverse. Years ago, I was attempting to teach English to some elderly Ukrainians who had just come to America. Their English was on par with my Ukrainian, so our weekly language sessions often involved a great deal of pantomime, sign language, and sketching things on scratch paper. I arrived for the lesson and found them intensely curious about something they had seen and they wanted me to explain what it was. They sketched what looked to me like a water tower, but eventually I realized it was a hot air balloon (they are a fairly common sight here.) They wanted to know what it was for, what was its purpose, and when I said people did it just for fun, they were stunned. дурнота! (Foolishness!) they told me. And that is one word of Ukrainian I have always retained.

In Japan, they paint pictures of mountains that are floating. China too maybe? Not sure about that.

You should go to Cawker City, Kansas and see the largest ball of sisal twine of its type.

(You won’t need fog to mistake it for something else!)

Navigation aid. Town names on water towers.

A sign of a good imagination. Eh?

Just what things was your brain finishing up? Concentrating on driving I hope.

I miss water towers.

Huh. My brain and I are hardly on speaking terms.

Things get whacky in western North Dakota.