Here's one I've been wondering about: say you have a life insurance policy. It has the usual restriction that suicide renders the policy void. Rather than killing yourself in a traditional way, you decide to deliberately place yourself in a life threatening situation, like going to an area known for violent crime at night and picking fights or something. If you are successful, can the insurance company refuse to pay out on the grounds that this was a type of suicide?

Should we continue to fight for the right to have Civil Unions as a step on the path to right to marry or should we hold out for the right to marry? Is there a difference? Is the argument all semantics? Are Civil Unions enough? Are Civil Unions really "separate but equal."

Hm.

If cost/resources/job were no option, where on the planet Earth would you live, and why?

ehhh, strike "option" and insert "issue". i suck @ the internets.

Could an airplane takeoff from a conveyor belt, where the conveyor belt has property X, and the airplane has limitations Y₁, Y₂ & Y₃, on a day when the weather conditions were Z, if the pilot was temporarily insane during takeoff because of homophobic/sexist slurs heard on open mikes from other pattern traffic waiting for clearance? No legal jurisdiction is assumed, and the fuel grade and quality in the airplane is unknown.

Follow up: If the airplane were carrying blessings from the Pope, the Dali Lama, and Arthur Greespan, and based on a conveyor belt in the West Bank, would it climb faster or slower into a headwind over Jerusalem, if it did manage to takeoff?

If a young woman wrote letters to the same man every day of her life for five years, and he answered those letters sporadically for the first two, for what reason could he have stopped, assuming he had not moved? If that same young woman saw the same man occasionally during those last three years, and at no point in time did he seem unhappy to see her or ask her to stop writing, would you assume he had no balls or that he just didn't mind either way? What if these letters were never brought up during the course of any of their conversations?

If, after ten years, both were married but she still wrote to him sporadically and the two still saw one another in social situations, at what point would you have her committed be interested in hearing more?

ps. all content in my previous comment copyright brina 2007. ;-)

One chestnut I pull out at the pub when conversation lags (regionally specific, but you can tailor it towards your audience):

How far is the longest trip you could take on the TTC from start to finish, using as many transfers as needed? And what if you didn't use any transfers at all?*

So one guy will say "Oh, that's easy, from the airport, take the airport shuttle to Kipling station, take the Bloor line all the way to Yonge and then go up the Yonge line across to the end of the Sheppard line." And then someone will go "No no no no no no. There's this 79 bus that leaves Square one and goes all the way up to...etc etc" After that wears thin, you toss in the "no transfer" bit to see what changes. People love to talk about how to get places. In New Hampshire, it was like an obsession with my high school friends, as we were all recent drivers living in a place where the roads are literally old farm paths and make. no. bloody. sense.

Maybe I'm a nerd but I consider these types of conversations fascinating.

*Your transit system may vary, but on the TTC there are some subway stops where you can get on to the corresponding buses/streetcars without having obtained a transfer at the time you entered the subway, and there are some where if you don't have a transfer you have to buy a new fare. Really sucks to be a noob on the TTC.

If you went back in time and kidnapped your grandfather & took him further back in time and forced him to marry your great-great-great-grandmother. And then you took the resulting child and replaced said child with the grandfather at the point of the grandfathers birth. And then you painted all the fences in one town the same shade of green on the coldest night of the year. Then what number should I be thinking of when I ask someone to guess what number I am thinking of.

My mobile number, 6939578032. Because obviously you are just the kind of guy I'd like to date.

Why are there Zebras?

life changing experiences