I was thumbing (figuratively) through the deluge of emails I receive from my crazy uncles tonight and happened to read one of them that almost literally caused me to suck a whole Pringles chip down into my lungs. I’ve pasted it below verbatim for your enjoyment, but let me give you a little context.
My dad and his brothers are wonderful men, really, but every one of them is absolutely convinced that he alone has all the answers to life and the universe neatly categorized within the archives of his mind. But not only do they have all the answers, they are led compulsively to share – sometimes rather vehemently – that wonderful morass of knowledge with the others…
I love them all, and who wouldn’t really? They’re a very interesting and diverse bunch of self described intellectuals all indoctrinating each other with their brilliance. It provides my wife and I with hours of entertainment on days when we should be doing something else but just don’t want to. After months now of somehow falling onto their mailing list I’ve come to know each one of my uncles in a new light, each with their own particular sarcastic and passionate character. It is like watching my own sons interact when they think we’re not watching… they know each other’s emotional triggers and poke those buttons with gleeful abandon.
Anyway, on to the reason for this post… my wonderfully cynical uncle Dale’s view of perpetual motion:
It is an well known fact that a buttered piece of bread will always land on
the buttered side, and likewise a cat will always land on it’s feet.
There is a new theory that if one was to take a buttered piece of bread and
tape it to the back of a cat, (buttered side up) and toss them into the air that
they would not come down but simply hover in an spinning circle as each one
fights to land first, going round and round forever in midair, or until the cat
dies.
Likewise, if one were to glue a piece of bread to the feet of a cat, butter
facing inward then the two would exert enough force upon each other to morph
into a black hole, and finally an “big bang” ending all life as we know
it.
Scientists tried to see if the first theory, of the spinning cat/bread
would result in an ever increasing speed surpassing the speed of light and
perhaps time travel. They got the three ingredients necessary, a cat,
a piece of buttered bread and some tape or glue, but realized after obtaining
the last ingredient that the cat had disappeared, probably back in time on it’s
own.
Science….. where you can prove anything if you really want.
-DMD