Hai,
What is the strangest thing about living on Earth Prime?
Hai,
There are so many differences between the planet of humans and Ventrosia, it's hard to know where to begin!
Traffic lights. Apparently, they do not trust each other to share a road without one driver trying to kill another, so they have to regulate vehicle traffic with signals to tell them when they can go and when they must stop. It was very weird adjusting to that.
The smell of peanut butter. Most of the strange smells of this strange reality are mild and easily ignored. However, peanut butter makes me start shaking (even more than the air conditioning in many of their buildings, I mean) and making unpleasant snorking noises; I must spend half an hour in a quiet room listening to the songs of wild ruffloon to return to normal.
But the strangest thing? That would have to be the period of darkness human beings refer to as "night."
To be sure, there are periods of lesser light on Ventrosia, primarily when Ventralis B, the weaker of our two suns, replaces Ventraliana B in the sky. But here? The poor deprived humans live on a planet that circles a single sun; Earth rotates such that the sun is below the horizon for as much as half of their day!
To be sure, humans, clever little monkeys that they are, have created many methods of lightening the darkness. Light bulbs, for example, are a form of technological glowing mushroom that hang upside down from the ceiling. My favourite are glow sticks, a most whimsical source of light.
Still. I suspect that, somewhere in the psyches of humans, they know there is something strange about this arrangement, for their culture is full of references to the period of darkness. Unfortunately, I find such references to be less than illuminating.
"Tender is the night." This phrase is terribly confusing. Is the period of darkness soft, like a flagulum steak that has been beaten with a meat tenderizer? Or, is it more like the soft caress of affection that a mother might give to one of her hatchlings? Whenever I try to make the flagulum steak comparison to a human, they look at me blankly for a couple of seconds before turning the conversation to the previous night's hockey scores.
"The night has a thousand eyes." I have never actually seen an eye floating near me at any time during the period of darkness. Perhaps the night eyes are very good at hiding, ducking behind road signs or into shadows when somebody tries to look at them. Personally, I find the whole idea highly creepy, but when I have tried to discuss it with humans, they just shrug and turn the conversation to the previous night's hockey scores.
"The dead of night." This could be a reference to spirits of the deceased, although I've never understood how they could be seen in the darkness. Perhaps the deceased carry flashlights (portable devices that create artificial light - humans can be very clever at finding solutions to their afflictions!) with them, although I imagine this would tend to undermine the element of surprise which makes them so very scary to humans.
On the other hand, it could be a reference to deceased who continue to walk the Earth. Some humans refer to such creatures as "neo-cons," but most call them "zombies." Zombies exist to eat the brains of still living humans, possibly because they weren't all that smart when they were alive, possibly because they were starved of protein. It's just one more culinary oddity of humans. Whenever I attempt to engage a human in a serious discussion of the meaning of this phrase, they just shrug and turn the conversation to the previous night's baseball scores. It's a seasonal thing.
"Night moves." The idea that a period of darkness would have motion is simply beyond my comprehension. I have never brought it up with humans because anything they might say about sports scores in response would be wholly inadequate.
Night. What a strange concept!
Ask a Ventrosian Squiggle is the Alternate Reality News Service's blatant attempt to cater to the inhabitants of Earth Prime 4-4-9-0-0-4 dash phi in the hopes of developing a market in that universe. How are we doing? If you're a Squiggle struggling with a strange new concept or just a being who is permanently confused, drop us an email at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Remember: rach ibn fershlonger aik dibbi. Ferank dibbi dibbi squabbloon? Ark ark!