Curiosity on Mars?

Curiosity on Mars?
11 August 2012

So I thought that in honour of the Curiosity landing on Mars, it would be appropriate to investigate the whole “Men are from Mars” thing again.  If you recall I pondered about this in a previous post called “The Bermuda Triangle”.  Now I would not necessarily have gone back to this topic so soon, but there have been a few instances of man-telligence in my circle of friends lately.

Firstly, a friend who will not be named, is married to a very intelligent man, an engineer to be exact.  He works for a company involved with construction, mainly road construction to be exact.  And the advice that we have been given by her, is that we should not trust bridges anywhere.  If her husband cannot remember a simple task like taking his lunch box to work with him in the mornings, what are the chances, that he’d be able to build a bridge or road successfully?  There was a weeklong saga about trying to get him to remember to take his lunch with him to work.  He kept on taking his daughters’ pink lunch boxes - day after day.  Next my friend put his lunch box down for him where he would not forget it -  as his car keys were then placed on top of it and he still could not remember it.  She’d give it to him in his hand on his way out of the door in the mornings, and later find it lying on a counter in the garage.  One day she even put it in his briefcase for him, and told him about it, but still he did not join the dots – he forgot to open his briefcase and look for it, rather starving instead.   And will she ever forget the day he took the humongous big box that she keeps on her kitchen counter filled with dry provita’s and cracker breads (she keeps them there for storage so that they don’t go soggy or mushy).  In his haste, he grabbed this box of dry biscuits and then complained bitterly to her about his very dry lunch.  Now had he taken the lunch that she had lovingly packed of him, this would not have happened.  But let’s not judge too harshly, at least on that one occasion, he at least took something with him.  It has been suggested by her that perhaps he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Another friend, who shall also remain anonymous, had been visiting her Mom one holiday.  It’s quite a few hours’ drive away and her husband (also an engineer – there seems to be an emerging pattern here), is also not all that logical it would appear.  He’s not very good with packing up their gear and getting things going, so she takes it upon herself to pack everything up, put it in one central place and then he simply loads the car for her. When it came to packing the car this time, she instructed him that everything was ready on the spare bedroom bed and that he could simply go ahead and load the car.  She did remind that he should not forget to pack the kids’ blankets (the one’s they have had since birth and use all the time), as they were in for a long drive and it would be nice for the kids to be warm and snugly on their journey home.  When they eventually got home and started unpacking their car, it became evident that he took her instructions quite literal about the bedding.  He’d even stripped the bedding off his mom-in-law’s spare bed and packed that in as well.  She has suggested that perhaps the lift doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.

Yet another friend, who will remain unnamed, is also married to an intelligent man.  If memory serves he’s an accountant.  He went grocery shopping with his eldest son, quite proud of his achievements when he brought some crumbed chicken home that he’d bought at the store.  His wife duly thanked him and told him that she would cook the crumbed chicken for them later.  No, he says to her quite knowledgably, it doesn’t need to be cooked, as it is cooked already, because it’s crumbed.  She calmly explained to him that it might be crumbed on the outside, but that the inside was still raw.  He greatly disputed this and in any rate he said, their son had consumed a whole box of crumbed chicken on the drive home from the shop already.  We’re hoping he doesn’t succumb to Salmonella, but the jury is still out.  She reckons that he is perhaps not a full box of chocolates either.

So perhaps the whole “Men are from Mars” thing is just a pot of crock and not spot on at all.  Besides which, despite carefully scrutinizing all visual images collected thus far, Curiosity has picked up no sign of ESPN, beer or porn on Mars.  So clearly man does not come from there either.  Sorry, Mars!  You’re off the hook, we’ll simply have to find some other planet to blame.  I’m thinking Uranus…