Babylon and the Duck of Butter

I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.

Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.

A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made. 

I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens. 

Which brings me to my wife. 

@inbabylontheywept you were not kidding this stuff is the platonic ideal of cheddar cheese

I can't begin to describe how perfect this is. I've had plenty of cheddars that tasted as sharp, or as smooth, or were as perfectly textured - but I genuinely thought it was impossible to do everything right at once. This punches you right in the face, then coats your whole mouth, then lovingly caresses your taste buds all the way down. Holy shit. Absolutely unbelievable what's been accomplished here. I'm gonna test how it melts once I get some tortilla chips back in the house and if it works for that too I don't care how expensive it is, this is all I'll ever buy.

i don't know how to make this into a story, but one of my worst attributes is that i make so much sense to myself that i can totally forget that what im doing looks strange to other people. and i just remembered this incident in sixth grade where i learned that churning milk yields butter and i was fascianted by that because i had always wondered from whence butter. so i took my cafeteria milk box and i shook it vigorously all lunch and all recess (where it was over 100, because of course it was) and i was even shaking it in class, when my teacher, who was a saint for many reasons, came over and said:

hey.

babs.

what are you doing.

and i looked at this poor, patient, wonderful man like he was the dumbest motherfucker that id ever met. and i said

shaking milk

because that is what i was doing, and the butter thing was implied because why else would anyone shake milk.

he took this in his stride. instead of doubling down, or repeating himself, he said ah, as if i had actually explained myself to him, and then he walked away because he was willing to tolerate disrespect so long as it was amusing.

people like that are why i survived to adulthood.

anyway, he really did get the last laugh because after shaking that milk for four hours, i finally opened the tiny carton when i got home, and instead of there being delicious butter there was insanely rotten froth and it smelled and looked so bad i threw up a little. so. you got me there mr. c. you got me there.

So. Uh.

Did anyone ever tell you about whipping cream?

…does it involve shaking small cartons of milk continuously for several hours?

i don't know how to make this into a story, but one of my worst attributes is that i make so much sense to myself that i can totally forget that what im doing looks strange to other people. and i just remembered this incident in sixth grade where i learned that churning milk yields butter and i was fascianted by that because i had always wondered from whence butter. so i took my cafeteria milk box and i shook it vigorously all lunch and all recess (where it was over 100, because of course it was) and i was even shaking it in class, when my teacher, who was a saint for many reasons, came over and said:

hey.

babs.

what are you doing.

and i looked at this poor, patient, wonderful man like he was the dumbest motherfucker that id ever met. and i said

shaking milk

because that is what i was doing, and the butter thing was implied because why else would anyone shake milk.

he took this in his stride. instead of doubling down, or repeating himself, he said ah, as if i had actually explained myself to him, and then he walked away because he was willing to tolerate disrespect so long as it was amusing.

people like that are why i survived to adulthood.

anyway, he really did get the last laugh because after shaking that milk for four hours, i finally opened the tiny carton when i got home, and instead of there being delicious butter there was insanely rotten froth and it smelled and looked so bad i threw up a little. so. you got me there mr. c. you got me there.

i make so much sense to myself that i can totally forget that what im doing looks strange to other people

Memories of Grandpa Hank

I'm eating a bag of mormon gorp that tastes like gasoline while watching the rain run down the mountain. The taste doesn't even bother me anymore - all homemade gorp tastes like this. It's just a natural consequence of everyone keeping their prepper shit in their garages. 

My dad's out in the clearing, wandering around with his GPS. He's got some pieces of wire out on top of it to try and make the effective antennae bigger, but it just makes it look like he's dowsing. Another mormon tradition. I ask him if he's close to find water yet, and he looks up at me, little rivers flowing off him, and says yeah - he can feel it. 

my wife asked me what the english call football, and my brain short circuited so hard i said "footbollocks."

ive been outsmarted a few times in my life, but i have never been out stupided.

a disagreement between readers 🤔

Should note that I've never actually used it tho lol. Like, I don't think I even have one post rn.

the house i grew up in was a little bit of a fixer upper. for the first 19 years, my dad just sort of slowly fixed it, but pretty early on in college, he came into a large amount of cash and decided to just do the whole thing at once. so he rented a different house for like, 2 months that was just a block down from us, and then got a bunch of contractors to fix original house ASAP. it was kind of crazy, but it compressed many years of work into like, three months.

the sitting in a new house for three months was actually pretty fun. and i shouldnt really complain at all (staying at home while in college is a sweet deal)

but.

but. my parents are fairly hard of hearing, and their bedroom in the old house was in the furthest possible annex from everyone else. wheras in the rental it was just in the middle of the house. so without going into details, i was extremely aware that my parents were having sex like, eight times a day. my dad had just retired and i guess they were celebrating, which is great i guess, having parents that really like each other is way better than the alternative, but also, it did make me envy their deafness. i kept headphones on for so long that year i got literal ear calluses.

at the same time, the house my buddy from the shoe incident grew up in flooded. turbo flooded. they burst like, two pipes at once and the damage was so severe they had to redo all the flooring and all the drywall. his family actually had homeowners insurance, which is either incredible or suspicious for a family that used the drained pool in their backyard to store rusty scrap metal. so insurance was handling the work, but in the meantime, they were crammed into a very small hotel room space. we did the math on it then, it averaged about 80 square feet a person.

so one day i got home, and i was chilling, and then six rolled around, and apparently six o'clock was sex o'clock because my parents decided to flex their cardio. i grabbed my headphones and prayed that god would do for me what he did for beethoven, but that failed to work, and then seven rolled around and my parents were still at it, which again, very impressive, but was pushing me to swap out judas for mozart in those prayers. there's a definitive point where you stop praying to be deaf and instead pray that god could take you to a nice field and pop you like a gore-balloon.

i was about five minutes away from that point when my friend called me and basically said i have been stuck in a 500 square foot space with 6 people and i didn't have many marbles to start but what few i had are gone. please. if we are friends, if we were ever friends, take me out of here just for a moment.

and i was still pretty mad at him, but i had pity on the poor guy. also helped that i was desperate to leave the house. so i drove the chickenshitmobile to the hotel and i picked him up, and then we did our normal hangout activity, which was go to food city and buy produce. his normal house was, on a good day, nasty, and his backyard was, as i stated before, mostly used to store mosquito larvae and rusty metal, so what we'd always done before was just walk to the grocery store a half block away and leer at vegetables.

so we did that and it was like old times again. they had some radishes that were expired, so i could buy like, literally an entire grocery bag of them for about $5. so i did. i really like radishes. he got a coconut because he liked fruit and beating things with hammers.

which probably would've been great except we didn't have a hammer, so instead we spent about 30 minutes stomping itike it owed us money. when it finally cracked we cheered like we just got the winning touchball at the superdome and then he ate some of the flesh, and i ate some of the radishes, and we admired the black, starless sky of the city before i took him back to his hotel room.

and then we got pulled over.

i forgot to turn my lights on because the street all around the food city was ludicrously well lit. so it went from being pretty bright, to pretty bright and flashy, then i pulled into a parking lot and a cop came to ask us for IDs which is where everything went to shit:

i’d forgotten my license at home. 

the cop was was actually kind of chill about it - he said he could get by with just an address. except i did not know my address. i hadn't memorized the new one yet. so i told the cop, my house is getting remodeled, i don't know my address right now. and then he went to my friend, and my friend said the exact same thing. house getting remodeled, staying somewhere else, no address, sowwwwwwy.

now the cop genuinely didn't know what to do. he went back to his car, and i was stressed that i was about to get into HUGE trouble so i started eating the radishes and my buddy started eating more of his coconut, and we actually managed to eat like a quarter of both before the cop came back. we ate enough produce that he could smell something weird in the air, and he asked what the smell was, and i said radishes, and my buddy said coconut, and the cop said which, and then we produced a large bag of droopy radishes and an absolutely brutalized coconut, and the cop was just like

so my buddy tried explaining how he was sharing a 500 square foot apartment with 6 people and wanted a fruit he could fight with power tools, and i tried explaining how i'd actually tried buying my parents like, board games and puzzles and stuff but nothing worked - the only thing my parents seemed to like doing right now was each other, and we both went on long enough and pathetically enough that the cop eventually went:

ok. stop.

and we stopped.

and he said do you know why i pulled you over?

and i said, because of my headlights, and my friend (who is hispanic) and the cop both looked at me like like i was the dumbest person in the entire world. and then the cop said no. that's why i'm allowed to pull you over. i checked your car because this neighborhood has a terrible sex trafficking problem, and i pull over every car i can to make sure no one is buying or selling sex. and you two are obviously doing neither. now i could give you, like, four tickets right now, but that would do nothing to make this area safer, so just turn your lights on, go home, drive safe, and try to be less stupid in the future.

and i said okay but i was thinking, you know, damn, this is just how i live man, i don't have a hidden third gear i can shift into. people can't just get smarter because it would be convenient. it's always convenient to be smart. i am literally trying my best.

but i didn't say anything because i was, slowly, learning how to filter what i said. instead i nodded and the cop left then i dropped my buddy off, and the last thing he said was said he owed me for responding to his SOS. I said he owed me for a lot of things, and he agreed that was true. then i drove home with my lights on, 5 under the speed limit, and arrived to a peaceful quiet home. I could’ve wept with relief but instead I went to bed.

the relief was short lived. i was woken up at 6 am by my parents. i swore, and then i prayed, and when i did not explode, i swore again. then i got up to make breakfast before my first class.

This piece by @inbabylontheywept is extremely cool. Don't read it if you are claustrophobic or fear caves, BTW. This perfectly depicts several concepts, but specifically, what it's like to crawl through a cave.

My mother is a retired English teacher. I would love to share this story with her, but she would probably throw up, despite the excellent storytelling. She has had a remarkably similar experience.

My father loves caves.

He always has, since going through them as a boy scout and with his favorite uncle. When my brothers and I were kids, he would take us into a local cave that is actually a tunnel, though it gets very small in the middle. We didn't always go all the way through, but I've been through it. It requires crawling in your belly at one place.

My mom will not go all the way through that cave.

Babs, mom here. I vividly remember the urticating caterpillar tattoos and seeing Fred laugh (possibly for the first time ever) when he saw them. I would like to think you learned something from that but I also remember getting home from a run not very many years ago and telling you about seeing a mass migration of big green caterpillars that had giant spikes on their butts. Several of you kids wanted to check them out so we loaded up and went in search of them. When we found them, we marveled at the spikes and wondered if they were venomous and painful. Before I could take a picture to Google at home, you simply reached down and poked it with your finger. Despite the screaming of the other kid's you just turned to me with a grin on your college aged face and smugly announced " didn’t hurt, at least not yet." So as we say at our house, live and don't learn.

mother you will never know how hard it is to be burdened with a Destiny

I love your mother immediately. I hope she is doing well, and continues to be well into the future.

And I hope you find more caterpillars to lightly injure yourself on, if that is an action you find enjoyment in. Or if not, I hope you don’t find more caterpillars to lightly injure yourself on.

When I was like three, I was at the beach with my parents and picked up a fiddler crab. Predictably, it pinched me, I cried out in pain, and I dropped it. Not ten seconds later, I was picking up another. Guess what happened? This went on for a while, I don't remember how long. Eventually my parents must have moved me away from the crabs, or the crabs all went into their burrows.

We joke that I was doing science even at that age, because you can't test a hypothesis with only one data point, so of course I had to try it over and over again.

foolproof plan

I showed this to a family member that works at NASA. Honestly terrified.

Just to be An Explainer Guy, the mechanism for making a nuclear bomb explode is genuinely just putting the two halves together. The reaction through the material goes up by a factor of about 2.5 every "shake", which is about 10 nanoseconds. Depends on how wide the core is.

So the initial reaction is 200 MeV, or about 1/30th of a nJ, but then 10 nanoseconds later, it's 1/10, then 1/3, then 1, 3, 9, 27...

If the core could just stay together for a full fucking second, the last reaction would give off 3^100,000,000 power more energy than the initial. That's like, (I think?) a 10^47,712,125 multiplier. I cannot emphasize how stupidly large that number is. That is a googolplex, times a googolplex, times a googolplex, times 10^50. I am too lazy to put that kind of number into physical terms, but it would not surprise me if it was trillions of times bigger than the big bang.

But real life has limitations. First, you know, to have a supercritical reaction go on for 1 second would take an absolutely ludicrous amount of uranium, but outside of that kind of bullshit, there's just. Like. It's trying to explode apart very quickly. And we can hold it together shockingly well for a bit, but it really wants to explode apart, and once it explodes apart the nuclear reaction stops. Those two halves must be touching for the magic to keep happening.

There are huge rewards for keeping the core together just a smidge longer. Every ten nanoseconds gives off triple the power of the previous ten, so they're quite motivated. But! Fuck! Is it hard to keep a nuclear explosion small! The "easy" method bombs used to use was to like, fire one half of the core at the other half. Like with a cannon. A cannon inside the bomb. But that just couldn't keep the reaction going long enough, so the better method was detonating a bunch of very precisely timed plastic explosives all around the core, so that the blast waves would squinch it together just a bit longer and that worked out pretty good. Multistage bombs use alternating nuclear blasts to squinch the next blast together, and that works out pretty good because damn near the only thing that can cancel out a nuclear blast for any amount of time is another nuclear blast, to say nothing of how fusion works with all of this.

It's nifty is what I'm saying. I think it's neat.

Wait I fucked up my exponent math. Googol times googol times googol times 10^50 is just 10^350

This is like. A googol, raised to the power of a googol to the googoleth power, raised to the 50th power. Like

((((10^100)^(10^100))^10^100)^50)

It’s a batshit number, is the point.

foolproof plan

I showed this to a family member that works at NASA. Honestly terrified.

Just to be An Explainer Guy, the mechanism for making a nuclear bomb explode is genuinely just putting the two halves together. The reaction through the material goes up by a factor of about 2.5 every "shake", which is about 10 nanoseconds. Depends on how wide the core is.

So the initial reaction is 200 MeV, or about 1/30th of a nJ, but then 10 nanoseconds later, it's 1/10, then 1/3, then 1, 3, 9, 27...

If the core could just stay together for a full fucking second, the last reaction would give off 3^100,000,000 power more energy than the initial. That's like, (I think?) a 10^47,712,125 multiplier. I cannot emphasize how stupidly large that number is. That is a googolplex, times a googolplex, times a googolplex, times 10^50. I am too lazy to put that kind of number into physical terms, but it would not surprise me if it was trillions of times bigger than the big bang.

But real life has limitations. First, you know, to have a supercritical reaction go on for 1 second would take an absolutely ludicrous amount of uranium, but outside of that kind of bullshit, there's just. Like. It's trying to explode apart very quickly. And we can hold it together shockingly well for a bit, but it really wants to explode apart, and once it explodes apart the nuclear reaction stops. Those two halves must be touching for the magic to keep happening.

There are huge rewards for keeping the core together just a smidge longer. Every ten nanoseconds gives off triple the power of the previous ten, so they're quite motivated. But! Fuck! Is it hard to keep a nuclear explosion small! The "easy" method bombs used to use was to like, fire one half of the core at the other half. Like with a cannon. A cannon inside the bomb. But that just couldn't keep the reaction going long enough, so the better method was detonating a bunch of very precisely timed plastic explosives all around the core, so that the blast waves would squinch it together just a bit longer and that worked out pretty good. Multistage bombs use alternating nuclear blasts to squinch the next blast together, and that works out pretty good because damn near the only thing that can cancel out a nuclear blast for any amount of time is another nuclear blast, to say nothing of how fusion works with all of this.

It's nifty is what I'm saying. I think it's neat.

I’m almost thirty and I am still getting roasted in new ways. Top notch work.

So let me get this straight: Is this accurate?

i mean yeah its pretty accurate but now i want to see oliver twist where the twist is that he can shoot fucking lasers. that sounds fantastic. m night shyamalan meets dickens