u/spagetyspagety1234

When I first listened to this song the immediate impression I got was that it was the linear story of an escaped prisoner waiting for his beloved to scoop him up and flee to Kansas together. I was surprised when I couldn't find that interpretation being talked about anywhere else. What do you think?

There's only one verse that directly suggests it ("struggled through barbed wire... outrun the hound dogs"), but I feel like once you've heard that the rest of the song falls very nicely into place around it.

First verse is the request: "meet me in the morning," giving the location where a road meets a highway (going with some other readings I've seen that he says "56", not "56th" as state highway 56 and wabasha was a real intersection). I think that's a pretty non-traditional meeting spot for a date, but a very reasonable place to pick up a fleeing convict.

In the second verse he actually arrives at the meeting place "right before the dawn". Anticipating her arrival he establishes how much he misses her.

Third verse is the actual morning and planned time to meet, but the rooster is crowing and his love is not there hence "treat me so unkind".

In the fourth verse I imagine him waiting through the day at the meeting place, stewing about all he went through just to get here and get abandoned. I also imagine the hail he's recounting being the same stuff as the snow that would thaw after they arrive in Kansas, since it would have fallen during the prior night as he escaped and still be on the ground.

Fifth verse, the sun sinks and she has still not arrived. But even with the sun setting on the day and on their relationship, he cannot help but think of her kiss.

How do you feel about this interpretation? Think I'm reaching?

I'm sure this is just common sense for everybody else but I've spent my whole live rinsing and squeezing out my sponges after cleaning with them to get all the soap out. It wastes a lot of soap when you're just cleaning a single dish, but for some reason the thought of leaving soap in the sponge for later was gross. Like the soap would get dirty from sitting too long.

But... soap is soap. It captures dirt and carries it away with water. Even if it did get a bit dirtier with time it's not gonna get anything else dirty, it's just gonna rinse it away. So I don't see any reason to squeeze it out anymore, just leave it in for the next time you wash a dish.

I found this old post with pretty much the same question, but the answers didn't really satisfy me. The answers I can understand (and there were admittedly some that I didn't really understand, so I'd appreciate if it's possible to explain this in layman's terms) are mostly talking about cosmological red shift, where energy in the light from very distant galaxies is lost over long periods of time as space expands.

However from everything I'm reading about that phenomenon it has nothing to do with doppler red shift, where a light emitted by an object moving away from you appears slightly lower energy when it arrives than when it departed.

If a 1.000eV photon is transmitted from one object and arrives with 0.999eV at another object moving away, where did that energy go? If the objects were moving towards each other and the light blue shifted, where did that energy come from?