Several Things, One of Them Sucky

What's Next - A Bouncer?

This little sign appeared on our 8-year-old son's door yesterday:

Now how am I going to unload all these dang Girl Scout cookies?

One More Thing to Worry About

So I was reading this book in my house the other day. (I don't think it's of consequence in which room I was reading, exactly. Suffice it to say I was sitting down.) Anyway...I was reading about black holes. Have you heard about these things? They're crazy!

Basically, a black hole can result when a huge star dies out and collapses upon itself, compressing into a single point with no radius and infinite density. (Lost yet? Join the club.) This single point is so dense that even light can't escape it. (That sound is my mind breaking.)


[Flashback to my high school senior physics class, in which we spent approximately 72 months studying waves. Nothing but waves. Each lab table had a pan like you'd use to dip a paint roller, and attached to the pan was a tiny model plane engine hooked to a windshield-wiper blade. Now, if conditions were just right, you'd turn on the tiny engine and the wiper blade would smack the surface of the water in the pan, making perfect, regular waves that you could measure. Conditions were, of course, never right. Instead, there would be at each table the equivalent of an airboat turned on its side in a dank bayou, spewing funky water on us and making my hair all fuzzy from the humidity. Only Unibrow Guy could make that dang contraption work. (Side note: Unibrow Guy went on to attend Cal Tech, but he also kept female hair samples in a Tupperware in his backpack, so that all kind of evens out in my book.) Anyway, it didn't really matter if we got our wave machines to work because all that was riding on it was college admission. But no pressure. Takeaway: my physics teacher had a highly suspect goatee. And that pretty much sums up my grasp of physics.]

Okay, so there's a boundary around this super-dense point called an event horizon. (Yes, I think there was a movie by that title!) Anything that crosses that boundary gets sucked into the super-dense point in the center and, well, hammered to crap.

Does anyone else find this troubling? I like dangers that I can understand and, if necessary, kick in the juevos then run away from.

So here's a real-life description of the black hole experience:

It says in this book that if you were to sashay across an event horizon, it would look to an outside observer like you were moving more and more slowly but never actually reaching the horizon. (Okay, now I can understand what they're saying, because that's exactly the effect when I am, say, heading to a mammogram appointment or PTA event-planning committee meeting.)

To the person actually crossing the horizon, however, nothing special occurs until you are (surprise!) crushed to death at the center point. (Once again, that certainly rings true with my experience at both of the above-mentioned appointments.)

As we all know, of course (guffaw), this whole idea flies in the face of the law of quantum mechanics, which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The black hole theory poses a dilemma for physicists that continues today and which has drawn comment from several quarters over the years:

"God does not play dice with the universe."
~ Albert Einstein (confirmed smarty-pants with wild-ass hair)

"God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."
~ Stephen Hawking (confirmed smarty-pants and physics superstar)

"It looks more like Pictionary to me, guys. What is that, an anteater? A yam? No, wait - a garden gnome!"
~ Anna Lefler (confirmed crackpot and wave-machine reject)

Moving On

I've got a new post up on LA Moms Blog, FYI. Full disclosure: this one is not intended to be funny (like the Jeff Foxworthy one was), but is more on the, hmmm, introspective side.

Also, one of my newest favorite places to visit out there in the blogosphere is Life at Willow Manor. Willow runs a truly classy joint and it's easy to see how she has acquired her robust following. Imagine my glee when she included my recent silly blog acronyms in one of her posts! Thanks, Willow!