The Ash-Sucking Umbrella Device That Will Save Earth

This person I know recently informed me it wanted to move as far away from Wyoming as it could within the next 10-20 years. The reason? The supervolcano that rests beneath Yellowstone Park.

If that thing blows, the ash blocks out the sun and we all die. Supposedly.

Of course, paranoia causes irrational fears.

We’ll be just fine, I said, because it’s an easy problem to prevent. Behold, the Ash-Sucking Umbrella Device:

From the diagram, you can see that the contraption is composed in a tapering pine-tree shape, with big ash-sucking umbrella things on the bottom to catch the initial blast. As you go up, there are smaller vacuums to catch what the bottom ones missed.

The option of another design also arose, which was basically the same shape, only upside down: with the large suckers on top, and smallest on bottom, in order to fit in with the above design like a jigsaw puzzle. However, my mathematics informed me something like that would be far too top heavy, and much more difficult to construct.

Further calculations only bolstered the fact that the big-on-bottom-littler-on-top schematic, utilized in large volume around the caldera of the potential extinction event, would catch enough ash to save the human race.

To cover the middle, we simply send up drones, which I have not yet sketched up, that look like manatee-sized Dustbusters.

Once all the ash has been contained, we then look to our final device, a reverse volcano:

This serves one purpose, which is to simply dispose of all that ash by shooting it back down where it came from.

Now we can all sit back and actually look forward to when Yellowstone erupts*.

*One side note, even if this somehow doesn’t work, I will have already become rich for inventing all of these devices, so I will end up as some post-apocalyptic prince-tycoon, and be able to live wherever the ‘privileged’ people end up.

Conspiracy Theory: Are Hormel And Hanes In Cahoots?

Have Hanes and the Hormel Foods Corporation been secretly in cahoots with one another? It looks as though the seemingly disparate industries have no plausible reason to cross paths. Well, looks like I prematurely shot my wad and based the whole premise of this article on some brash assumptions that had no basis in actual fact. Sorry to have wasted your time.

Oh wait, there is one point I forgot to make. Let’s take a quick look at both companies.

Hanes: An apparel company well-known for their socks, T-shirts, and undergarments.

Hormel: Producer of SPAM, Dinty Moore, and a variety of other foods, most notably Hormel Chili. I have an extremely hot tip from a trusted culinary insider that the meat used in this chili is just “good enough” to not be made into dog food. Interesting. Low-grade meat is notorious for its blindingly quick layover in the human digestive system. More notorious yet is its even hastier, comically-explosive-bat-out-of-hades escape from that digestive system.

Do you see the link? Why else would the nutritionally bankrupt products of Hormel be kept on shelves, unless they were serving a higher, more sinister purpose than simply gratifying the quivering gullets of the drunk, the poor, and the drunk poor? Picture the stereotypical consumer of a can of Hormel Chili — it’s a grizzled man in a beater and tighty-whities, shoveling that slop into his mouth like an immigrant coal stoker in the boiler room of an early 1900’s cruise ship.

I posit that Hormel is a multi-tiered puppet enterprise of Hanes, who is using the constant onslaught of almost-dog food blemished shirts and soiled underpants to create sales in an impoverished demographic that would under any other conditions hang on to their clothes if they weren’t covered in revolting meat stains and fecal matter.

Before you go out and buy that next pack of private delicates or can of lubricated swill, remember: you are a mere pawn in a high stakes game benefitting an over-paid fat cat who wants you to sit on your couch and sh*t your pants.

Investigation in process: is the upholstery industry a fringe benefactor of the Hormel/Hanes conglomerate?

Striking Similarities Between Schrodinger’s Cat, Dave Dahl’s Old House, And The Sexuality Of Hermaphrodites

Case Study #1: There exists in the world of quantum mechanics a thought experiment (composed by Erwin Schrödinger) that goes something like this:

A (hypothetical) cat is caged up in a steel box for an hour. Within the box, safe from any tampering from the cat, is a Geiger counter with a small amount of radioactive substance. There is an equal chance that one of the radioactive atoms may or may not decay over the course of the hour. If decay does occur, it sets off a series of events that explodes a flask of acid, killing the cat. If none of the radioactive atoms decay, the cat lives.

One of the aspects of this experiment, aptly named Schrödinger’s Cat, is used to show that, while in the box, we have to assume that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive, until the box is opened.

Case Study #2: A friend of mine recently moved into a townhouse complex where acclaimed meteorologist Dave Dahl is known to have lived in the early ’90’s. It is unknown to us some two decades later which unit he actually resided in; only that it was one out of the many homes in the neighborhood.

Screaming, drunken arguments take place over this topic, in the very townhouse that may or may not have been lived in by Dave Dahl: I’m sitting at the counter shouting “YOU HAVE NO F$%^ING PROOF THAT HE LIVED IN HERE,” while my friend tries to drown me out with “YOU HAVE NO F&*$ING PROOF THAT HE DIDN’T,” while the neighbor next door assures his wife, “Don’t worry honey, they’re just arguing about Dahl again.”

A hearty touché goes out to both sides of the argument on that one. Until Dave Dahl himself is contacted, we must assume that Dave Dahl both lived in and didn’t live in that house. (I still maintain that Double-D would refuse to live in a poorly-lit center unit, when a man of his income and prestige in the media could easily afford to secure an end unit with more windows and thus a clearer view of the sky, something that I think a meteorologist would want for his dwelling. Unbeknownst to the current residents, I have been collecting hair samples from every nook and cranny of the place, and holding them up to Google Images of Dave Dahl circa 1990-1994 to see if they match in hue, tone, and “splendor.” No matches yet.).

Case Study #3: The hermaphrodite, owners of not one, but two private sexual zones, are perhaps the most flummoxing of all. While having the properties of both males and females, we come to the inevitable question: if a hermaphrodite is attracted to a male (or female, for that matter), is it heterosexual or homosexual? Much like the cat in the box and Dave Dahl’s supposed house, the herm must be assumed to be simultaneously in two states: hetero and homosexuality. But we can always open the box and see if the cat died or not, and find someone with a Rolodex deep enough to contact Dave Dahl about his rental history. Herms are up in the air for life.

It’s one of those rare questions we’ll never be able to answer, like what would have happened in Back to the Future if Marty McFly actually had wiped out his own existence? How could he have traveled back in time to prevent himself from being born if he had never been born?

Hyper-Intelligent, Genital-less Race of Super-Humanoids Found Living In Cloud City Above Area 51

Scientists have discovered a step to the next level of human consciousness. A race of highly evolved, hyper-intelligent humans was found living atop a cloud city over Area 51. Their digestive systems are extremely streamlined — no liquid or solid waste is produced by their bodies, causing both their genitalia and rectal orifices to have been snuffed out by natural selection. When asked how they reproduce, what we formerly considered a “smart” anthropologist, who would be thought of as a water-headed infant by this new society’s standards, put down his Tootsie Pop and replied, “I don’t know, but it’s probably totally nast.”

The members of this all around better breed are so advanced that they transmit their language telepathically. Since we have no way of communicating with this newer, better version of the poor excuses we currently have for people, it may not be possible to find out or even hope to understand the technological advances they have made, but you can be damn sure those rat-bastards would have something up their sleeves, if they had use for clothing. They’re just up there on their stupid cloud, zipping around on their personal perpetual motion machines, while all us idiots are stuck down here, listening to what Stephen Hawking says, and he can’t even talk. We can only hope our out-dated bodies are so revolting to them that they have no interest in prodding, probing, and picking at every hole they can find.

This is sort of what they might look like.

A Guy With A Beard Sits Here And Talks About The Four Laws Of Thermodynamics

Ah yes, the four laws of thermodynamics. Can’t live without ’em. And if you can, that means you live in an alternate dimension, and I would like to shake your hand, if you even have one. But what exactly are the four laws of thermodynamics? How to they apply to your life? Allow me to explain in the following post. As a side note, I haven’t shaved since Halloween, and I’ve noticed that everything is better with a beard. So I used beard analogies to make everything easily understandable.

*To begin, the first law of thermodynamics is actually the zeroth law. How there can be a zeroth law? That’s this whole other thing that goes into like philosophy and math and logic and other esoterica that this guy with a beard is going to have to research, and maybe someday explain.

Here it is, the zeroth (first) law of thermodynamics:

“If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are by law in thermal equilibrium with each other.”

Interesting.

Imagine that there’s a man with a beard – thick and commanding, like the picture that would be next to “beard” in the dictionary. The thought of a scarf has never crossed his mind. He goes to a circus, and is appalled to see that the devious carnies claim to have in their midst a “bearded woman.” He sees her in her cage, but all she’s got is that weak peach-fuzz all over her face that most (but not all) women just wax off. “THAT’S NO BEARD!!!,” the man with the real beard yells as he throws the gnarled remains of his Pronto Pup at her cage. Looks like those two beards will never achieve equilibrium with each other.

But wait. Let’s go to the dictionary.

Beard – noun \beerd\ – the collection of hair that grows on the chin, cheeks, and neck of human beings.

Two very different beards – one a high-water mark in the world of facial hair, one weak and controversial. Opposite ends of the spectrum. Yet, they are both hair growing on the chin, cheeks, and neck of a human. Therefore, the two systems (man beard and woman beard), are in flocculent equilibrium with a third system (the definition of a beard), thus by law equilibriumizing them with each other.

The first (really the second) law of thermodynamics:

“Energy can be transformed, that is, changed from one form to another. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.”

Interesting, again.

Go back a few months, and imagine again the man with the beard from the zeroth law parable. Only now it’s months earlier, and he doesn’t have a beard. He has only recently decided to stop shaving for a while. In the coming weeks, hair appears, from seemingly nowhere, on his face. Was this hair (hair = energy in this example) created from nothing? As a person with a beard knows, it seems as though your face just spews the stuff out from nowhere. Get ready to have your socks rocked off. The hair (energy) isn’t being magically created out of nothing. The bearded man’s face makes it out of other stuff that already exists in his body (proteins, I think), that came from other stuff, that came from other stuff, and on, and on, and on (who knows where the original “stuff” came from). And when he shaves it off, it will be transformed into something else, possibly a merkin.

The second law of thermodynamics:

“In time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical possibility eventually equalize in an isolated physical system.”

Very simplified, heat flows from hot to cold.

Back to the man with the beard. It is the present day again, and he has his full, glorious beard. He’s working the late shift at White Castle, and some hair falls out of his beard onto a delicious slider that is cooking on the grill. He sets that one aside, telling himself that he’ll pick the hair off in a moment. He later eats it, forgetting to pick the hair out. Afterwards he realizes that he didn’t even taste the hair. This is because the heat from the meat flowed into the hair, equalizing their temperatures. The numerous chemicals present in a White Castle hamburger were absorbed by the hair, giving it flavor, therefore equalizing in that area as well. This is why it is estimated that the average American ingests about three to seven pounds of hair per year from eating in public restaurants. Nobody even knows it’s there! Hell, half of an average White Castle burger alone is probably hair. All the employees there are just so hip to the laws of thermodynamics that they can get away with it.

The third (fourth) law of thermodynamics:

It is impossible to cool a system to absolute zero (for A-muhr’icans, that’s -459.67 °F, for Celsiites, -273.15 °C, and for whoever uses the Kelvin scale, 0 K).

Let’s say the man with the beard is locked in a freezer – the coldest freezer EVER conceived by man. Actually, I don’t really know how to explain this. The closer something gets to absolute zero, the less energy it has available to get colder, I think. Similar to trying to reach the speed of light, like E=mc². To go faster, the mass has to exponentially increase in proportion to the energy or something like that. Ergo, it can’t really happen.

*There’s a good chance most of this is wrong.