• The “three-story” Christmas tree in the north suburbs of Chicago (three slices of Christmas tree: one in a first-floor window, another in the second, and the top on the roof).
  • How hard it is to open Chanukah gelt without getting chocolate under your fingernails.
  • A hallmark of a shyster: they say “Think about it!” when they mean “Don’t think about it!” Trust what seems true; don’t dig to see what’s more probably true.
    • Just one example, with COVID: it seems like common sense to think that if you can smell things through your mask, then it won’t stop a virus. But dig just a little further and you find that masks are about stopping droplets, which are bigger than the particles that cause smells.
    • It’s worth remembering that “common sense” is necessarily based on observation or things we’ve learned from other people. It’s not in-born. So it makes sense that we’d have to tune it up every once in a while, amend it when new information comes into play.
    • It strikes me that the “crisis of facts” in America isn’t always caused by people willingly sticking their heads in the sand. Sometimes we really are thinking, we’re just thinking based on missing or inaccurate information. And that’s when more info or better info can help.
    • Those who continue to rely on so-called common sense, even when new or better info conflicts with it, can probably only be moved by shifting the whole Overton window — making the bandwagon so big they don’t have to think to get on it.