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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?
© Peary Perry
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com |
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