{"id":1238,"date":"2011-07-21T20:01:05","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T20:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/?p=1238"},"modified":"2011-07-21T22:21:34","modified_gmt":"2011-07-21T22:21:34","slug":"on-the-sauce-reflections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2011\/07\/21\/on-the-sauce-reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"On the sauce: reflections."},"content":{"rendered":"

Mr E Man’s quest to find the best ribs in Vancouver<\/a> is over: he’s admitted that he’s unlikely to find anywhere that makes them better than Ouisi’s<\/a> does, and so that’s where we found ourselves when a craving hit him on Saturday night.<\/p>\n

These ribs really are good (yes, I tithed my usual amount, after donating a similarly sized amount of my yummy chicken). And naturally, a little of the sauce found its way onto Mr E Man’s face. Wishing to discreetly draw his attention to this fact, I touched my own face on one side of my mouth…<\/p>\n

…and he promptly wiped the wrong side of his face with the napkin.<\/p>\n

This always happens to us. The reason is that when Mr E Man’s telling me that I have something on my face, his instinct is to touch his face in a mirror image of mine. So if I have sauce on the left hand side of my face, he’ll touch the right<\/em> hand side of his own, which is on my left as I’m facing him. But I do it the other way around: if Mr E Man has sauce on the left hand side of his face, my instinct is to touch the left<\/em> hand side of my own face, which is on his right as he’s looking at me and therefore not directly opposite where the sauce actually is. I sometimes manage to remember that we do it differently, and so I do it his way, in a mirror image; however, this usually happens at the same time that he remembers that we do it differently, and he still<\/em> goes to wipe the wrong side of his face. This double-bluff situation is what confounded us last week.<\/p>\n

Naturally, Mr E Man thinks I’m a freak, and he may well be correct. But I did, of course, have to try and defend myself by explaining why I do things the way I do. What I came up with is that my training in the life sciences involved looking at lots of diagrams like this one:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

where the appendix is on the left hand side of the drawing, but the right hand side of your actual body. Other possible explanations include gender- and country-specific practices.<\/p>\n

So, O Wise Readers… am I a freak, or does anyone else do the “you have a little something on your face” thing my way? Do you think the difference has anything to do with gender, age, nationality, or scientific training?<\/p>\n

I hereby agree to abide by my readers’ decision, and to allow Mr E Man to call me a freak if warranted by the results of this informal survey.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mr E Man’s quest to find the best ribs in Vancouver is over: he’s admitted that he’s unlikely to find anywhere that makes them better than Ouisi’s does, and so that’s where we found ourselves when a craving hit him … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,86,51,21,19,3,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-first-world-problems","category-food-glorious-food","category-freakishness","category-personal","category-science","category-silliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}