corduroy

I was walking through the parking lot when I noticed a sock laying on the ground. That is not unusual, the laundry room is at the end of the lot. Later that day DW and I were at the store and there on the pavement was a sock, the same colour and size as the one I had seen earlier. It even seemed to be in the same position.

I realized it's true what homemakers, what we used to call housewives, have been saying for decades. Dryers are a space/time porthole! The seemingly ordinary appliance eats socks and sends them through another dimension, to who knows where, never to be seen again. At least not by their rightful owners. Makes sense, maybe. In the tumbling confusion and noise the universe "sees" the two identical socks and gets confused. It appears that one object is in two places at once, deifying the laws of physics and violating the natural order. Desperate to set things right the cosmos sends one of them somewhere else in time. Anywhere so long as it is not "now".

In the distant future, after years of intense research, the leading scientists of the day will finally build the worlds first time machine and send a man into the past. Or future. And the machine will bare an uncanny resemblance to a 1965 Whirlpool Deluxe Home Three Temperature Dryer, with end of cycle buzzer. Only bigger with more circuitry. And it will work much the same way. Just as your mother's dryer ate holes in the fabric of her fine linens, the Whirlpool Time Machine will eat holes in the very fabric of space and time.

Mankind will be able to experience history first hand and glimpse the future. There will be drawbacks though. It will only work for one member of a pair of identical twins and only if they enter the porthole together.

And it will be a very rough ride.

OWL

January 29, 2008