What are...?

You know those pixelated things

that look like a scrambled checkerboard,

you point your smartphone camera

at them and it takes you to somewhere

and loads up a menu or a webpage?

It’s called QR code.

They are so ubiquitous that I wondered

there must be hundreds of millions

of them, so how many unique things

is it possible to code?

I went to Google and started to type

“What are…….”

Before I finished typing, beyond “What are”,

search results appeared.

Mostly Covid-related questions

but also in the top searches:

What are capers and What are hemorrhoids?

Interesting. Is there some kind

of global connection?

So I tried a new search, again

with just open-ended “what are…”

valence electrons, primary colors,

bonds, human rights and so on.

So naturally, being the curious person I am,

I tried some other non specific queries.

“Where is….” generates these results:

where is your heart located?

where is Wendy Williams?

where is euphoria set?

where is Yellowstone filmed?

and my favorite: where is the?

where is the?

OK, how about something grander,

something more essential and eternal.

Like “What if?

Resulting in:

What if it’s us, a novel

What if God was one of us, a song

And the best one is:

Serious scientific answers

to absurd hypothetical questions.

It’s a book. And a website!

Now we’re barking up my tree!

For example:

What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?

or Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?

What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched

at 90 percent of the speed of light?

Would a toaster still work in a freezer?

I can see that I’m not going to get much done today.