Roads on this fine last day of the year are so stupid-easy to navigate that it’s hardly worth the pixels I’m wasting to state so. Weather is dry and clear, and not terribly cold. The wind is not here (yet… but I hear maybe later?!?), and while rocks ARE plentiful, they’re only plentiful up on the hillsides and such, but NOT on the road. Notable, though: Traf. Fic. Is. LIGHT!!!! There are hardly any others out there… no students, and a LOT of people are not scheduled to clock in at their 9-2-5’s today, so there are but a few vehicles on the roads this morning (well… in comparison to MOST weekdays). Enjoy it today… it’s a pretty safe bet that on Wednesday, the cursing and brake lights and exhaust-sniffing and left-lane-squatters and texters and gridlock and red-light-runners and congestion and tailgaters and rolling roadblocks and SigAlerts and all the usual stuff will return with vigor.
This is the end… old lang sin, whatever that means. Time for balls to drop, and for resolutions to to be made. My resolution is still 1024 x 768, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that my ol’ cathode ray tube can’t still put on a pretty good show. 2018 is done… but wasn’t that the year we were supposed to get flying cars and hoverboards? And, no, those wheeled devices on Amazon that are CALLED “hoverboards” are no more hoverboard than they are spontaneously igniting boat anchor. And where’s my jetpack?
A few years ago, my young kiddos demanded an answer from me: they wanted to know when the future was going to get here. I tried to explain how it all works, but they weren’t buying it: they’d seen the stuff we were going to get in the future, and now they just wanted the date at which the future was going to arrive. I think that this was the first day that they realized that Dad doesn’t know EVERYTHING. Unfortunately for me, this began a trend of thinking, which eventually swung WILDLY into the new conclusion, to the point where, it turns out, Dad doesn’t know ANYTHING. Stupid future. Totally undermined my ability to trick children into thinking I was smart and stuff.
Well, okay… we do have some future stuff going on, right here in the present (although, really, as I write this, the events mentioned are still “in the future,” so, there’s that… correction: there WILL BE that, I mean…). On January 1, an interplanetary space probe (See? How can you really blame aliens…? Clearly, Earthlings are really into the probe thing, too.) that was launched in January of 2006, will go whizzing past this one particular object within the Kuiper (rhymes with hyper, piper, viper, and blasteroid) Belt, sort of a planet-like glob of stuff adorably named “2014 MU69.” (Okay, astronomers are apparently not entirely void of human warmth, as they HAVE given it a couple of nicknames: sometimes, lil’ precious is just called, “MU69,” while at other times (like, maybe when it’s in trouble?) it’s called, “Ultima Thule,” which somehow reminds me of Uma Thurman. Whatever… don’t mind me. I didn’t name it). Ol’ MU69 is just now being explored after the MAIN mission of exploring dwarf-planet Pluto (See? THAT one got a cartoon name! Sure, they eventually kicked it out of the planet club, but it still got to keep its Disney name) has already been completed. The probe weighs about 950 pounds if you count its cargo… (and, man, sorry to keep going back to THIS, but “950-pound PROBE” just scares the bejeezum out of me, and reminds that I NEVER want to travel country roads at night in my old truck with the electrical issues when I’ve been drinking a lot of Mad Dog 20/20 on the way back to my trailer, and, man, do I ever not want to ever go to prison). This thing is coasting through space at a leisurely 32,000 MPH. That’s almost nine miles per second. Like, here to Las Vegas in well under 20 seconds (unless SOMEBODY has to stop to pee in Baker). Crestline to San Bernardino in WAAAAAAY under a second, as the crow flies (which is presumably the only way this particular crow flies, as it’s doubtful that the curves of Highway 18 would be navigable at this speed, which also happens to be nearly double the speed at which I drive it).
Now, it’s also been recently announced that Russia has a “hypersonic missile.” This thing does 6,138 MPH, which works out to not even two miles per second. Talk about a slug, huh? Okay, to be totally fair, some sources are reporting that the Russian rocket moves at, “20 times the speed of sound….” Sound is generally considered to be about 767 MPH (about 1,100 feet per second, or five seconds per mile… this is why when comparing lightning flashes to thunder claps, each five seconds indicates about a mile in distance from the strike). So, if the 20 times the speed of sound thing is correct, then Putin’s pokey projectile is doing 15,340 MPH… that’s way faster than the 6,138 MPH (claimed by, admittedly more reliable sources), but even if that is a true number, it’s still less than half the speed of that Pluto probe.
I’m no physicist… since my lab coat is not white, but is black instead, I’m known as a “flasher.” Anyhow, if that 950-pound object (picture a grand piano) were to collide at speed with say, an upright piano? Geez… keys and pedals and ebony and ivory and chopped-off-pianists and wires and sheet music (from the little bench thing) and splinters freakin’ everywhere. When they crescendo each other, they’d be Chopin each other to bits from moving quite allegretto, at those supertonic speeds. It would be enough to put a damper on a Billy Joel concert held at the Metronome… even Bach in the day when he was slugging back diatonics at a quick tempo.
For reference’s sake, know that a bullet coming out of the end of my Ruger .357 (the end with the hole in it) is going about 1,000 feet per second. The grand piano/probe is going 47 times faster than that. So, the only way that a .357 bullet could match the supersonic Steinway would be if, sitting on that speeding .357 bullet, there was a little guy, with a little gun, firing another .357, and sitting on THAT speeding bullet, was another little guy… and so forth, 47 times over. I know… this sounds silly, and realistically, physicists hardly EVER actually perform this demonstration. It’s hard to find the little guys, especially in this politically correct age when physicists don’t even know what to actually call the little people when posting “help wanted” ads on Craigslist. Only when they’ve been drinking a lot of Mad Dog 20/20 will they post, only then having no fear about saying dwarf, or midget, or lilliputian minutian, or petite person, or pygmy, or whatever is or isn’t the politically-correct term du jour to reference those who are less tall than other more tall people are. I don’t even know what’s politically correct, but don’t get mad… and don’t you get short with me, young man.
By the way, I heard a list of different New Year’s Eve traditions the other day, from around the world. Most were crazy: Like, in Switzerland, they drop scoops of ice cream onto the floor…. In Danishland (Wait? Is that right? Note to self: edit later, make sure that the place where Danes come from is called this… is it maybe Daneland? Or Danishia? Danishakisztan? Don’t forget to research and edit before publishing this last post of the entire year!) whatever… they break dishes against the doors of “friends and neighbors.” In Siberia, they jump into frozen lakes while carrying tree trunks (“No! We didn’t mean THOSE kinds of swimming trunks! But at least they are not Speedos, so, thanks for that!”). In Puerto Rico, they pour buckets of water out of their windows… because, of course. So, obviously, those other countries ARE crazy, but one that was NOT mentioned was the perfectly reasonable tradition here in the United States of firing our guns into the air. Talk about a time-honored tradition! Okay, look… here’s the real deal on that. For one, please don’t. But, for two, if you’ve had a lot of Mad Dog 20/20 and you MUST shoot, do it into the dirt. Not rocks, not water, just dirt… point and shoot, nobody gets hurt. That’s actually a remarkably safe thing to do, because dirt eats bullets, and won’t spit them back out.
However… if you MUST go number three, because the thrill of firing INTO THE AIR holds some fascination that you are unable to overcome, then know this: if you fire STRAIGHT up into the air, when the bullet returns to earth, it’s speed is not going to be lethal. It could ding a car, or maybe put an eye out, but its tumbling (which begins around the time it reaches its apex) will prevent it from maintaining the spin that it needs to move with a real serious quickness. However, if you shoot at an angle, more than about 10 degrees away from straight up, the bullet then has the ability to continuously maintain the spin issued to it upon initial firing… and it CAN come back down at a speed that could kill people. So… if you MUST shoot into the air, please, ONLY do so straight up. Then you’ve got about 10 or 15 seconds to go cower under the awning so you don’t get that sting. On the other hand, you probably won’t feel it… Mad Dog 20/20!
Dang it… we keep going down rabbit holes here… “spinning” reminds me that we need to select the category of, “Automotive History,” Alex, “for $1,000, please.” See, in the 1960’s, a couple of really smart guys invented a two-wheeled car. It was fully enclosed—not a motorcycle—and was called the “Gyro-X.” It stood upright, balancing, even at a stop, through the use of a gyroscope which was installed in the car. Of course, one of the first questions skeptics had regarding this vehicle was, “If the engine stalls, won’t the car fall over?” Nope… as it turns out, this gyroscope (which has a spinning weight of about 230 pounds) spins so fast, and has so much weight behind it, that even after power is shut off, the gyroscope will keep spinning for TWO FREAKIN’ HOURS! Now, the car had other technical difficulties that were never overcome, and it never made it into production beyond prototypes… but… TWO FREAKIN’ HOURS!
Okay, so Mad Dog 20/20 has popped up in this column a number of times. Sorry, there’s no gag, no reason, no punch line… it just sort of happened. Perhaps it is I who am mad, but I can’t see that clearly. However, one more random comment: A few years ago, when I was a serviceman stationed in Germany, I was approached a number of times by German citizens who wanted to know if I would be willing to perform black market trading. The product they wanted to me to trade? Mad Dog 20/20, the cheapass wine whose bottle ya wrap in a paper bag, and drink while wearing those gloves that you inexplicably cut the fingers off of, as you stand around the burn barrel with the other unshaven flashers. The Germans couldn’t get it… but they knew that as a serviceman, I had access to it, at the on-post commissaries. It’s cheap, and here in the States, it’s NOT a coveted item. However, since it was forbidden fruit to the Germans, it commanded a premium. Now, I’m not going to say whether I ever did, or didn’t buy the rotgut for $2/bottle at the commissary and then illegally resell it to German Nationals at fantastically-inflated—like, exponentially higher—prices. But, for sure, this was proof to me that the forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. I’ll bet that if Mad Dog 20/20 were suddenly declared to be illegal contraband here, its desirability would go shooting through the roof… like a .357 slug fired at the worst trajectory angle possible of 40 degrees from vertical from 1.6 miles away (the distance a grand piano can travel in less than a quarter of a second).