You wouldn't clean your heart with a Swiffer!
Your belief ends where my rights begin
I was recently presented with the opportunity to go on an incredible journey which first required an important decision be made. I'm not sure how my name wound up on the list of candidates for this journey, but I do travel in certain circles where I could see someone floating me almost as a half joke and someone else not understanding the context, so maybe that's it. I've said too much already.
Anyway, the opportunity was to be the captain of a high-speed solar-powered blimp which could travel around the world in perpetuity. I'm assuming there was some physics and innovation involved in crafting this new engine, but we'll take that as a given and focus on the other details here. If I took the assignment as captain, I'd have to leave my family behind -- but this blimp ... it's very fast, and very comfortable. The decision is not obvious.
I was told that the financiers of the blimp project had insisted that we position the blimp at it's top speed moving around the earth in such a way that it was always either right at sunrise or right at sunset with respect to the earth and the sun and the atmosphere and so on. It's not clear to me whether the particular answer for each candidate for captain of the blimp was being evaluated on their decision about this question or not, but they did indeed ask how I felt about the sunrise vs sunset question during the interview process.
On the pro-sunrise side of things, I think you'd be in a great position to attract type-A personality business moguls. They like to wake up early and get their deals done before breakfast. I could just see them shooting off an "meet me on the blimp over Dubai, we'll have the deal done before before Tokyo" email, and their counter-party would just relish the opportunity.
On the pro-sunset side of things, you'd probably attract more party-goer types, who could now elect to travel to the blimp instead of Ibiza for a week or something and alternate between napping and getting their groove on and maybe you could have some bubble parties on that thing.
In either option, you'd probably want a "family wing" for people who were on the blimp as a vacation, because they might not want to do the same things as either the business people or the party people.
I wonder too about the mental health of the crew of the blimp. Have there been studies done about people kept in a perpetual state of sunrise or sunset? Do sun-risers become big go-getters? Do sun-setters become weirdly romantic? There's a ton of research to be done here. I guess living in extreme northern or extreme southern locations has similar properties, maybe we can ask around in Norway first before we build the blimp.
In the event this becomes an HBO series, I'd like to see an impassioned #TeamSunset vs #TeamSunrise twitter battle break out.
The straps are too tight
A podcast I listen to informs listeners each episode as to how to get in touch with the show's hosts, and they say something like "You can email us at mail at example dot com". While they are clearly announcing an email address like mail@example.com, I like to pretend that they are saying "male" and not "mail", and I always daydream about emailing them at female@example.com just to see what happens.
I haven't tried it yet.