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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Weirdness

I don't know if it's just me or if other writers have weird brains, but I can find myself asking the strangest questions for no particular reason other than curiosity. For example, since I've moved to Atlanta, I've noticed some things. Like there are a lot more rubber pieces from semi-truck tires all over the road down here than in Minnesota.

This is enough to get me to ponder the reasons. Is it because there are more trucks going through Atlanta than Minneapolis? Is it the difference in temperature? I don't think so because I was seeing this when it was 60 and 70 degrees and Minneapolis stays at that temperature or higher, too. Is it something in the roads in Georgia? Do the trucks passing through here have less maintenance work done on them than the trucks that go through Minneapolis?

Then there are all the cars I constantly see on the sides of the freeways here. In Minneapolis, it was maybe a few a week, but certainly not a few every single day. Which led me to run through a completely different set of questions.

Also, why do southern states have counties on the license plates while northern states do not? Why do northern states have front and back plates while many southern states have only the back plate? I can't conceive of any advantage to the one plate with county on it system, but certainly there must be, right?

I have no answers to any of these things, but my brain does this to me all the time. The smallest thing can send me spinning into a tornado of questions. At times, I try Googling some of these things because it would be nice to have answers and be able to put them out of my mind for good, but these aren't the kind of questions on which search engines can find relevant information.

The sad thing is that questions like this often pop into my head when I'm writing a scene, too, and again, the search engines fail me. I've tried emailing people who might have the answers, but with mixed results. This means my brain will spin back to the questions again and again.

Why do trucks lose more rubber in Georgia than Minneapolis???