Back in the late 1900's a woman was throwing a dinner party for several close friends. She worked in the kitchen, calm and collected, when suddenly her hands slipped. The chocolate fudge she had been mixing had fallen into the unbaked bread pudding! She felt overcome by her mistake, but quickly received a shock at the dinner table: the chocolate-like bread was a sensation. Quickly after her "Tollhouse morsels" swept America into a dessert passion.

The seredipidous bite of the ordinary also has far more practical, if less appetizing, applications for industry. Dock workers daily sacrifice their well-being in climbing long riggings and perilous scaffoldings to maintain and board/unboard a ship. One day, an engineer who regularly visited the docks gave himself a curious problem to solve: could those workers actually climb up the side of the ship without rigging? If so, how? An observation of the plight of these workers was translated, months later, into foot and hand actuators that could stick and unstick from sheer and bumpy metal surfaces.

The real world aside, we cannot forget the contributions of normal, even rather boring, events and actions that have contributed to the progress of science itself. One of the more famous examples in Psychology concerns Pavlov and his discovery of conditioned behavior response. The medical doctor had decided he wanted nothing more than to study gastrointestinology. Specifically, he wished to focus on how food was appetizing in dogs by studying their salivating response. According to legend, one of Pavlov's students--a particularly clumsy one--accidentally knocked over a bell while the dog was being given meat powder. Pavlov later noticed that when the bell rung the dog began to salivate. He suddenly developed a keen interest in why this behavior had occured, leading him down a concourse of discovery he otherwise wouldn't have seen if not for simple procedures and simple mistakes.

But then you might ask: weren't these people already engaged in whatever pursuit they were interested in? They were just tipped off by normal occurences, stuff that wouldn't ever just impact something by itself. For such an argument, one need look no further than Andy Warhol. Arguably one of the fathers of post-modernism, Warhol enjoyed soup. These two seemingly unconnected passions met and fell in love when the man struck cerebrum dynamite. He painted a picture of a Campbell's soup can. This one rather bizarre act turned the art world on its head forever after. It was Warhol that sparked the debate of 'what IS art, anyway?', inspiring artists thereafter to showcase toilets, carrion and other works in museums. It was the ultimate triumph of the ordinary over the abstruse.

The commonplace is considered such because it is plain, normal, relatively unchanging. In these and many other examples, however, we see a strange glimmer of genius shine, its fangs barred and waiting for another person to take an interest in the mundane and give a second look."