Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A Few Suggestions for Improvement

The Universe is crammed full of natural laws.  Electrons have to behave one way when they're being observed and another way when they're not.  Gravity is always busy.  You never see Magnetism loafing in the vacuum, playing pinochle with Weak Nuclear Forces while iron filings everywhere forget where to stand.

The Universe is an orderly place.  Writer Terry Pratchett summed it up beautifully, I think, when he described it as 'lots of rocks moving in big circles.'

Even so, I think there is plenty of room for a few additional natural laws.  Here are the ones I'd like to see implemented:

1) It should never EVER rain on people in wheelchairs.  Ever.  It's bad enough someone is in a wheelchair.  Raining on them is just rude.

2) People who text and drive should immediately be struck by powerful bolts of lightning.  Twice.

3) The smoking corpses left in the wake of Rule #2 above should be struck by lightning again, just to show everyone else that the Universe isn't screwing around this time.

4) When the lights go down in a theatre, the audience should, for the duration of the movie, lose the power of speech.  Seriously.  What motivates people to believe a roomful of strangers wants to hear their running commentary on a movie they neither made, starred in, nor even plan to watch?

5) We won't even discuss what happens to people who text during movies.  It's simply too gory and awful to contemplate.  Leopards are involved.  Leopards, and rabid bears.  Rabid bears with frickin' lasers.  And lightning.  Lots and lots of lightning.

That's it -- five simple natural laws.  None of them are nearly as complicated as quantum mechanics or even linear algebra.  They all revolve around lightning, and bears with lasers, all of which are more or less common items.  We're talking off-the-shelf components here, Universe.  Easy installation.  Low maintenance.  It's not like there's a big shortage of lightning, right?

But if I can only get one new law put into place, let's go with Number 1.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?


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