Hmmm … leaving kind of a big footprint there, aren’t you, Anti-Lincoln? Seems like you’ve been feeding on a pretty good pasture lately, am I right? No? Ah, okay.
Well, the gravity’s back. Isn’t that good new?. And now all of us weigh about twenty pounds more than before. Just a little side benefit of Mitch’s latest project. (YEAH, MITCH … THANKS A LOT. Turn that gravity thing down a little, willya?) Something tells me we will need to replace the floor joists in this crumbling old ruin of a hammer mill … except that I don’t know how to do that and I wouldn’t know a floor joist if it hit me upside of the head.
Mitch has got this whole gravity thing figured out. He describes swarms of little invisible magnet-like particles he calls “gravitons”. Apparently these little critters swarm around you by the thousands, holding you down as the world spins out of control. Without their persistent intercession, we would all fly off into space, the earth shaking us off as it rotates on its axis. Mitch thinks of them as the quantum mechanical equivalent of guardian angels … which is the reason why he hates them with a mad man’s passion. He went into a bit of a rage last night about gravitons, swiping at the invisible particles like he was shooing away mosquitoes. At one point, he appeared to have caught one between his thumb and forefinger, but his triumph was short-lived – the little specter slipped away, eliciting a yelp from the mad scientist as if he had touched a hot stove.
Okay, so …. that guy’s crazy. And, as Mr. Spock once observed, madness has no reason … but it can have a goal. That’s what Mitch’s anti-gravity machine was all about. The device attracts gravitons like a bug zapper, apparently, though it doesn’t zap them … it just keeps them busy so that they can’t hold the rest of us down. (You always thought it was THE MAN that was holding you down, but no, says Mitch, it’s the gravitons!) Anyhow, it kind of worked for about a week, then something went bust. That happens a lot with mad science tinkerers like Mitch. Hell, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dozens of glitches, but hell … he’s family.
So we’re back on the ground, for the nonce. We’ll see what the weekend brings. I’ve got my bike helmet on, just in case.
Right, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.
What was the results of my regression analysis? Well, it looks like I should have put more effort into eliminating relationships between variables. And I should have kept my focus on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. It’s all about co-dependency, you see? You don’t? Right. Neither do I. And apparently my rent-a-shrink is actually a statistician by trade. I don’t understand a word he says, mostly because he just talks so fast, but partly because his comments are so unbearably dull I just can’t keep my eyes open. And you’re not supposed to fall asleep on that stereotypical therapy couch, but I did. So maybe I’m on TV, now.