Saturday Miscellany

A selection of topics today. To begin:

Those intrepid why-didn't-I-think-of-it purveyances of the modern commute,
articulated buses. Not to be confused with articulate buses, the likes of which I have yet to encounter. I often bring a journal onboard the bus with me, hoping that this time at last the act of doing so will render me more articulate. But no.

And in case you don't have enough to do (irrefutable evidence of which is the fact that you are reading my blog), then you might have found yourself wondering lately (1) how and (2) where I find all my neat graphics.

No? Oh. Well, I'll enlighten you anyway. (1) I take them lawlessly (stealing is such an ugly word), and (2) I constantly Google.

This time the big G disappointed, though. Lots of pics of articulated buses, but nary a one articulating.

Anyway.

While doing my spurious research, I was attracted to the nutty fragrance of half bakery, a communal blog of crackpot ideas that actually had something to say about this, but I didn't understand it.

Just like you might not understand this:

zorch

or this:

zorch

or even this:

zorch

What I'm speaking of is what someone else on another Web site has called a "Zilch" (emphasis theirs). This is something you should never try at home unless you are under 30 and still taking advantage of all plausible means of recreation that life has to offer.

I find it more than a little disturbing that the only other people in America who seem to know about this activity are the folks who frequent Fiberglass RV. They claim the name "zilch"--which I insist is "zorch"--comes from the sound of the phenomenon one creates by:

Taking a bunch of plastic bags (we used drycleaning bags back in the day) and tying them together to make a long strand with knots every foot or so. Then you thumbtack the resulting four- or five-foot strand to your ceiling (we were all happy renters in the days we did this).

Then you put a pan of water underneath this whole affair, and you light--yes, you light--the bottom of it (all of us smoked in those days too, so lighters were a-plenty).

You turn out the lights and wait. What happens next can hardly be described, but basically you watch drippy little psychedelic masses of burning plastic zip into the water-filled basin at an increasingly shocking rate, all the while making little zorching and zipping noises. As if that were not enough excitement, whenever the flame hits one of the knots you've made, the thing drops into the water and the room goes briefly dark until the residual heat relights the next segment, and so on and so forth until the fire reaches the top when, for a grand finale, the whole mess goes zooming down into the dark for a noisy, satisfying climax.

Neat, huh?

I think it's called "zorch" because after you turn on the lights, somebody among all you renters will inevitably say, "Zounds, man, your ceiling's totally scorched."

categories: amusement miscellany