Backpack Across the Universe

The other day, I was thinking about Scotland. It's full of castles and sheep. I wish I could take Rutherford there--maybe then he could find himself a girlfriend.

While in Scotland, Leslie and I rode on trains. I was inordinately excited about this, because I had never been on a train before (except for that time in third grade which I don't remember) and because trains are a rather weird form of transportation. Basically, somebody takes a bunch of boxes, hooks them together, and drags them across the countryside on really, really long metal rods. And people sit in them and eat and read and play bridge. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I saw castles and sheep and a few beehives.

I fully believe that humans will go to space, one day, and build colonies and eat weird tasting potatoes grown in an artificial environment or eat weird tasting potatoes that aren't actually potatoes because they are native to Caprica, not Earth. All the common theories of space travel tend to lean towards space ships: big ones, small ones, ones with sails and nuclear engines and jump drives that allow them to skip over massive chunks of space or fly faster than the speed of light (a very useful trick, considering the size of the universe).

But what I want is a space train--a number of boxes run together in a chain and dragged from here to there by a massive engine harnessing the power of a star.

It makes sense: each car would explode away from Earth separately, and they would then be assembled while in orbit. Once assembled, the engine would leave orbit dragging a number of boxes and people behind it. Then, if one car exploded while taking off, only a few people would die, but the whole train wouldn't be ruined. If it were a big enough train, entire colonies could start out, ready and willing to colonize New Scotland and New China and New New England.

And when they look out the window of this train--the space train--instead of sheep and castles and beehives, they would see stars and spaceships and gravity whales, and on their way to New Scotland, they could make a stop at New New York and visit the black statue of liberty that sings when the wind whistles through her teeth, or visit the Big Apple which is actually the original, red spaceship that brought everyone to this planet.

New Scotland would be a planet of rolling hills and sparkling crags, with boiling water in Equatorial Ocean, and massive spheres of ice in the North, home to a particularly ornery species of furry dinosaurs. They would keep their royal crown, scepter, and stone in a sacred box hidden in a secret spot on the highest mountain in the world, and Great Britain would not rule over her any more. Then children would learn how their ancestors escaped from the rule of the Queen of England by traversing a billion miles across the universe and settling here, on the beautiful blue-green planet of New Scotland.

So if we could maybe hurry our technological advancement up a bit, then maybe someday, instead of backpacking across Scotland, I could backpack across the universe.

And for your entertainment, I have included this video about the Scottish boy in the Scottish McDonalds. 

Administrative Note: posting schedule will be changing, but I don't yet know to what. Thanks.

How to Wing the Superbowl

A few days ago I experienced a crisis of massive proportions. We are talking crisis on the level of the sun going nova, or an asteroid killing all the dinosaurs. Imagine every volcano on Earth exploding simultaneously or the tectonic plates suddenly deciding to go swimming in molten lava: that kind of serious. The 'a basilisk ate Obama and the Queen' kind of serious.

First you should know that I don't cook. My mother would rush to inject here that she made sure my brothers and I knew how to cook before we left the house, as well as how to do our laundry, and how to sew. This is true. For me, not cooking is a personal choice. This choice stems mostly from my hatred of doing dishes.

Yesterday I decided to boil an egg. Not a difficult task, you say, but let me remind you: I don't cook. My goal was to boil three eggs. The first egg- no problem. The second egg- fine. But the third egg, as I began to slide it into the water, slipped out of my fingers and cracked on the bottom of the pot. HORROR! Egg began to emerge from its encasement! White slimy stuff sneaking out into the water, like a Trojan horse wheeling its way sneakily into Troy. The water started to bubble and foam until it had reached the edges of the pot and threatened to leap out and consume the world.

So I did what I always do during momentous crises--I called my mom. She said it was fine. She told me to turn down the heat. She also said I could eat it, even though it looked like a deformed alien trying to pre-escape its egg, or like Earth leaking gravity through the hole in the ozone layer (I didn't eat it, actually--it creeped me out too much).

There is another reason to be concerned about eggs. I'm sure you've seen a double-yolk or a spot of blood inside an egg. But have you ever seen an egg without a yolk? I hope not. These eggs are laid by roosters. If they hatch, a terrible creature comes out: a two-legged dragon with wings and the head of a rooster--a cockatrice. There are only two ways it can die: by hearing the crow of a rooster, or by seeing itself in a mirror. If it looks at you, you turn to stone.

The trick to prevention is to throw the cockatrice egg over your house so it smashes on the other side without touching the roof. As the best chicken catcher in my family, I'm sure I could manage to take down a cockatrice--so if you see one, feel free to call me. 

But if you believe that avoidance is the best method, move to Toronto. Otherwise you're bound to be tormented by giant rooster-dragons staring you into stone and gobbling up all your children.

On the other hand, a cockatrice could be quite useful, if utilized carefully. If you're very clever, you could wrangle that rooster-dragon and use it as a weapon against the Giants (if you live in New England)  or the Patriots (if you live elsewhere), so that your team would win; and if you were really smart, you would have done it last week, so the game would have been a shutout. Or, if you were really, really smart, you would have brought the rooster-dragon onto the football field during the game, so instead of tossing around a small not-round kicking toy, the players would have been engaged in an epic battle against the Cockatrice: it would have been the football game of the century.


Here is the moral of the story: pay close attention to your eggs, and you could be the decider of the next Superbowl.