One of the reasons I reduced my comments in the world of FizzBok is because it's better, I find, than revealing my ignorance to everyone I know.
Take a friend of mine who, at least until I removed - like I eventually seem to do with everyone - the appearance of their descriptions of their every waking moment from my "news feed", used to regularly inform me that they'd just been "spinning" at the gym. Now, given my immediate thoughts upon such things, my initial response, if I was the kind of person who needed to comment continually, would most likely to have been to say something like "I hope that you didn't get dizzy!" and they might have thought that I was trying to appear "clever" or "witty" when I would merely be revealing my own ignorance to the world in general and my (admittedly limited) "friends" list in particular.
You see, until I found out much later on, and through another, unconnected source, (i.e. something like a news report on the telly) that spinning was actually something to do with riding a static bicycle, I genuinely thought that "spinning" must be an exercise using an action not unlike the movements of a "Whirling Dervish" or a ballet dancer doing a pirouette, where you stood upon your toes and whizzed around and around whilst trying to keep your eyes on a particular spot on the horizon so that you didn't fall over.
That, I thought, sounded a very peculiar way to keep healthy, but, well… I suppose that it's a case of whatever floats your boat.
Mind you, the actual exercise of spinning, I'm reliably informed, is a pretty dull way of getting some exercise. I'm told that some of the devices include a TV monitor so that you can take your long ride to nowhere whilst watching an episode of your favourite television series or some "pop videos" (as I believe "da kids" refer to such things) which is probably better for you than my own preferred option of sitting on the couch and doing precisely the same thing.
That said, most forms of exercise look fairly tedious to me. God knows why anyone would want to run twenty-six miles or more surrounded by the sweaty mass of humanity when they could curl up with a good book and sip at a glass of something pleasant instead, but some people seem to enjoy doing so and, as long as they don't insist on making me join them in doing it, I'm perfectly happy to let them get on with it whilst I slowly rot and transform into a decaying, pulsing mass of blubber.
Ah well, probably best just to let them get on with it, not ask too many questions, and presume that eventually, as it indeed did, something will pop up and explain precisely what it is without me having to ask any questions and reveal another vast chasm in my knowledge about the goings-on of this modern world.
After all, for people of my generation, "spin" was one of the darker arts performed by politicians and marketing executives, or a skill developed by slow bowlers to bamboozle the opposition's batsmen, whilst to my mother's generation, it might have had something to do with knitting or weaving, and if I'd made some pithy comment along those lines, who knows what responses I may have got…?
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