We are are barely past the 2021 elections and already congressional candidates are touring and making their pitches. I suppose it’s no secret that there is a higher level of anxiety and anger these days and that a certain political party is stoking those emotions. It’s getting scarey. I hope this guy doesn’t get elected.…
Bowing and Grumman have collaborated on designing and building the largest passenger plane ever imagined, carrying up to 1000 people. It will employ revolutionary reverse quantum vacuum engines that run entirely on theory. With this design the engines pull the plane forward without fuel and use conventional airfoil principles to provide lift.
The designs are secret and the companies are not releasing any information but a photo of the cockpit was recently leaked showing that operating this massive plane will require six pilots.
The technology was first developed back in the 1960s but the blueprints were inadvertently used by the inventor’s kids for making paper hats and kites. He did not know this and assumed they were lost or stolen. Despondent, he quit his job as an engineer and became a beet farmer.
Blueprint paper was very durable back then and one of the kites was discovered recently stuck in the top of a tulip tree. Production is underway.
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There was a time when he was rugged and strong and as a North Sea fishing boat captain. He’d gladly be attached to nets or lobster traps to mark their location and assure the catch. It was a worthy life and he knew his worth. But as the seas got warmer and industrial fishing became greedier, the fish and lobster became scarcer and scarcer and fishing became a zero sum enterprise. The corporations scoured the sea usurping everything. Fishing was no longer noble, just a way to maximize quarterly returns.
The fleets of small boats were driven from the ocean.
His fishing boat was rotting in the harbour when he was spotted by two very, avant garde designers who plucked him from the boat and took him back to the city to serve as a window decoration.
They were quite please with their “oh-so-hip” display, while our once noble buoy could only languish and dream that a new generation captain will someday come pluck him from the window and throw him back into the sea. …
He looks like a regular street musician, a busker. His horn is tarnished and looks well used. He expertly fingers the valves and puckers his cheek in earnest effort. But when I passed by I was baffled. It wasn’t the sound of a horn I heard, it was a piano. He was playing Bohemian Rhapsody, no small feat for a regular piano player, much less a trumpet player. Each note was crisp and melodic and could have been coming from a baby grand.
I stared. He smiled and opened the spit valve of his horn to flush it out.
I was about to ask what was going on when he simply started playing again. This time emulating the tones of guitars hitting the first few chords of Smoke on the Water. I threw a fiver in his case.
Sure, we all would expect snowman poop simply to be snowballs, but they have much more complex gastrointestinal systems than commonly known. When mammals eat lucious, leafy food and fruit it gets converted and changes quite a bit before being expelled. It’s the same with snowmen.
What is surprising is the transformation that takes place. Their intake does not just get converted into a simple waste product. It becomes something new. What it becomes, depends on the species of snowman. Here in the midlatitudes it takes on a vegetative nature. Pictured here is Snowmus squashim which produced highly valued white pumpkins used by Starbucks for their pumpkin lattes. …
She seemed so innocuous. Just another mom out shopping and stopping to get some photo prints made. The local Walmarts are not as crowded as the have been in the past, especially the non-food areas, so she took advantage of this to pursue her mission. What better way to hide nefarious actions that right out in the open? As I wandered by and I looked up at all the TVs they suddenly flashed to high resolution satellite images of our nuclear missile batteries. Apparently she realised this and quickly switched them back. But that gave me time to notify NORAD.
Within minutes she was surrounded by large men with sunglasses dressed in Walmart vests who led her away. It happened so quickly hardly anyone noticed.
After they left I saw a scrap of paper on the floor where she had been sitting and picked up.
It was a list, partially check off: bananas, toilet paper, Jello, pickled pig hooves, oranges, disable nuclear arsenal, sponges and paper towels. Shocking. I had no idea Walmart sold pig hooves.…
The back to nature movement is still strong, even in urban environments. People are realizing they can take even a small backyard and transform it into a wilderness. But sometimes, backyard wilderness may attract the unexpected. This small plot in Bethlehem is an example. The owners carefully cultivated an urban playground for their kids who enjoyed it immensely. But it attracted gnomes who tunnelled up from their subterranean complexes.
This race of gnomes is benevolent and kind and they love children. It wasn’t long before the kids began visiting the gnomes in their complexes and started adopting their lifestyle creating classic parent/child conflict. The kids left to join the gnomes, but they’ll be back. Gnomes aren’t crazy about teenagers. …
He isn’t the first person to be outfitted with a prosthesis to compensate for injury but he may be the most extensive. Sam is a long-time and dedicated worker and when he suffered a terrible accident, all he wanted to do was to get back to work.
But the damage was extensive and the current off-the shelf mechanical arms and legs weren’t practical. That didn’t deter Sam. He knew that the impossible is possible and reached out to the robotics experts at MIT with a revolutionary concept.
He found the right people and after ten years of design and construction, Sam is back to work keeping the sidewalks of Philadelphia clean and welcoming. The folks at MIT are currently working on a scaled up version for hockey rinks.…
This could be taken a few ways. Maybe it’s an article, an adjective, pointing out this is “the” road.
Maybe a comma is missing and it’s answering the question what should we be doing in our cars.
Maybe it descriptive. This is not an interesting road.
Or maybe it’s named after a local family.…
This should have made headlines worldwide but it could have caused undue consternation. While trying to crash subatomic particles into each other, the physicists at CERN inadvertently invented an actual time machine.
It isn’t quite as elegant as the H.G. Wells version with the big wheel and levers, though. (The coolest time machine ever!) It’s rather dull to look at but it works.
It also does something totally unexpected. It doesn’t allow one to go back into the future or forward into the past. Instead it creates time. A revolutionary concept. Imagine gaining more time to fix reality and what humanity could do with it.
This machine does not require extensive power or minus 263 degree temperatures like the one I made (I never used it. It kept blowing fuses). But there is a caveat. The days and years it creates are added to the “end” of the universe. …