Mental Sampler 15

It’s been a while since I’ve dumped out the contents of my brain like this but we need to talk about FORTUNE TELLING TEA CUPS.

I just found out about fortune telling tea cups, which are made for people like me (people, let’s say, unable to spot the acorn shape in soggy tea leaves) to read their fortune.  They are so pretty.

Image: Malcolm Lidbury via Creative Commons license

You can buy them, but I thought it would be so much more fun to make one as well as my own booklet for interpreting the tea leaves.  I could go to one of those paint-your-own pottery places and make up all my own symbols.  This feels like a brilliant plan.

Right?

OH!  Or I could make it like a Magic 8 Ball tea cup, with sections connoting common Magic 8 Ball answers like “yes” or “no” or “concentrate and ask again.”  In that last case, people would have to keep drinking tea until their leaves clumped on a definitive answer.

I see no flaw in this plan.

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I’ve been listening to Gimlet’s new podcast, The Habitat.  It’s about the experiment that NASA did to troubleshoot issues that could come up for astronauts going to Mars.

On a remote mountain in Hawaii, there’s a fake planet Mars. Six volunteers are secluded in an imitation Mars habitat where they will work as imitation astronauts for one very real year. The goal: to help NASA understand what life might be like on the red planet—and plan for the day when the dress rehearsals are over, and we blast off for real.

It is so interesting, especially because I would be a terrible candidate for this type of experience.  I’d be a terrible candidate to go to Mars AND I would be a terrible candidate to go to fake Mars.  So I’m fascinated to listen to other people living out this scenario.

Is anyone else listening?