Aarp

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?