I
know the government is involved in some big dollars research
such as looking for life on Mars and other celestial objects
several thousand light years away. Not that it would do us any
good if we did find someone out there alive and well on Planet
Zork, since none of us can travel for thousands of years and
be in any shape to party hardy once we arrived. Think about
it, our intrepid space traveler arrives on some local planet
which takes seventy years to reach. Our youthful astronaut was
some twenty five when he left, now he’s ninety five or so and
can’t walk down the space ladder much less boogy with the
space foxes who have been assigned to make his visit
pleasurable. What kind of an image is that going to convey to
the inhabitants of the planet? Why, they’d be on the fastest
space ship possible to take over the entire human race
thinking all of us were feeble, toothless and bald. Not the
kind of image we want to advertise is it? NASA needs to think
about this before charging off into the universe.
Well, anyway for my money I think we’d be better putting all
of those mega computers and the brainpower of Steven Hawkings
to some more worldly and practical use.
Since
we’re not to going to achieve any form of long term space
travel in the near future, how about we do some research on
some everyday issues we all deal with? I mean, I’d like to
know why it is you can carefully, notice I said carefully,
wind up those long strings of Christmas tree lights and gently
place them in boxes which will lay undisturbed for another
eleven months and then what happens? Why, you open the box and
the entire string is tied in some giant rat’s nest of wiring
that usually takes a couple of weeks to untangle. Some of us,
type A personalities just throw the whole mess away and buy
new every year. This may be part of the plan concocted by the
light manufacturer. The string is designed to defeat us by
wrapping itself around itself and causing tons of mental
anguish.
Same
thing goes for water hoses. You can buy those neat hose reels,
but you know as well as I do they don’t work. No sooner do you
wind those things up than they get tangled into knots and you
have to unroll the entire line of hose even if all you want is
about fifteen feet. If you don’t use the hose reels, then you
carefully, I said carefully, roll up your hose after you get
finished. Then what happens? You go out the next day to water
and lo and behold the thing is tangled up just like the
Christmas tree lights. All in the space of about twenty-four
hours. You spend the next fifteen minutes trying to get the
kinks untangled in order for you to use the hose to water that
petunia your Aunt Milly gave you two summers ago, which you
hate. The flower, not Aunt Milly. Well, maybe her as well. I
don’t know about that.
Anything that you can wind or unwind, I don’t care if it’s
string, rope or pearls. It will become tangled once it is out
of your sight. You can count on it.
Another fact that I’d like to have explained is how come when
you drop your bread on the floor, it always lands jelly side
down? You can put butter on bread, peanut butter, jelly, jam
or preserves and drop it from your hand to the floor and you
can bet it will land smack face down every time. You’d think
every once in a while you’d get a break and it would be
salvageable wouldn’t you? But no, the immutable laws of nature
dictate that the peanut butter and jelly side will always hit
the floor, not the bread side. If it was the bread side, it
might be saved, and still able to be eaten, but you can’t do
that with the sticky side down. I’d like Steven Hawkings to
explain that one. Black holes are all well and good, but they
really don’t figure in too often in my daily life. I don’t
know as if I’ll ever see one in my lifetime. On the other
hand, bread, jelly and peanut butter are there every day.
It’s not too much to ask of our government, now is it?
