Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Yeeeeeeeeeeehaw!

I had a fantastically surreal conversation with one of my colleagues recently.

Just to properly paint the picture here, he is a well educated engineer, currently living with his nuclear family in Shanghai. However, he hails from a village far, far away from Shanghai - both in geography and urbanity - and he often makes me smile with his (at least for me) unique stories and perspectives.

So, my colleague was visiting out Taiwan office from his China office on a business trip, just before Chinese New Year. The team took him out for a nice dinner on one of those nights, and we had an interesting evening of conversation covering topics ranging from travel during Chinese New Year (you've heard the stories) to political party associations (turns out he's a card carrying member of the party) to the US election, etc.

Somehow, and I think this might have been over the third or fourth glass of plum wine, the conversation took a distinctly surreal left turn.

My colleague made the assertion that people that have, at some point in their lives, ridden a dog like a horse will find that it will rain on their wedding day.

That's right - riding a dog will make it rain when you get married.

Dog riding = rain on wedding day

It sounded (and continued to sound) like crazy talk, but then when we went around the table to try and disprove this theory, we soon discovered a direct 1-to-1 correlation. Those of us (that's right - I said "us" - I was 8 years old, so back off) that had ridden a dog at some point in our lives did have rain on our wedding days, and those that had not found the air dry when they uttered their I Do's.

I have since asked several people the two questions that just don't seem to go together, and have continued to come up against the fact that the correlation has remained defiantly present and unimpeachable. It's not even that the people that I have asked have exclusively stayed off the backs of dogs - you would really be surprised how many people have tried it when they were young.

So, in an effort to gather more data in a scientific manner, I have decided to put this survey to you (my audience of 2) to see if you can help me shed any further light on this topic...

RESOLVED: Riding dogs is tantamount to doing a rain dance.

Please use the voting feature on the side-bar to help me to either prove or disprove this theory. Feel free to encourage any other folks you might know to also fill out this survey, and feel free to leave any comments or anecdotes that might help us figure this crazy situation out.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

If You Can't Laugh At Yourself...

I always appreciate it when people have a good sense of humor. This video was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it really cracked me up.