Pat Online ~ February 2012

Run for Your Lives!

 The universe is expanding!  The universe is expanding!  Run for your lives!  We’ve got to get out of here!

According to the latest scientific reports I’ve read, the universe is going to keep on expanding forever.  For a while, it was thought by some scientists that the universe would expand to a certain point, and then the gravitational pull from all the stuff around us would suck it back together and we’d get to start all over.  But apparently that isn’t the case.  What this means is that the universe is taking us on a one-way ride, and we ain’t never coming back.  Now that’s what I call a downer, man.  It makes me sick!

[Pat getting the newspaper on a snowy January morning. Photo by Bun, 2012]

While the universe is expanding, the universe is shrinking.  Several years ago, my wife, Bun, and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean in three hours and ten minutes, flying from New York to London.  If we had been flying in the opposite direction, we would have arrived in New York before we left London.  I don’t understand it either.

[Pat explaining the expansion of the universe to a concerned pussy cat. Photo by Bun, 2012]

We were flying on the Concord, which as you probably know flew at supersonic speeds.  Scarcely were we halfway across the Atlantic when Bun told me she had to go to the bathroom.   “Can’t you wait until London?” I said.  No, she couldn’t, so there was nothing to do but unfasten my seat belt and let her into the aisle.  She returned a few minutes later brimming with excitement, not a good sign in a person just returning from the bathroom.

“Guess what!” she exclaimed.  “There’s a little speedometer mounted above the door to the cockpit, and it said we’re traveling at Mach II.”

“Good heavens!” I said.  “Why it means you went to the bathroom at twice the speed of sound!”

“Yes!”

“Gee,” said the man seated across the aisle from us.  “I wouldn’t mind trying that myself.”

It’s amazing what people will do for a thrill.

When I was a little boy, it took practically all day for my father and me to travel to town and back by horse and wagon.  (Yes, smarty, there were cars back then but we didn’t happen to own one that worked.)  It’s a good thing we weren’t headed for London, because we wouldn’t be there yet.

“How much farther to town, Pop?”  I asked for the twentieth time.

“Shut up,” he explained.

It’s now possible to circle the globe in about the same length of time it took my father and me to drive a team of horses to town and back.  I myself have never circled the globe but on a recent trip to Detroit my luggage did, stopping off for some sightseeing in Hong Kong and then on to Thailand which apparently is where the elephants got hold of it.  That’s how much the world has shrunk in the last fifty years.

Oh! There’s that creaking sound again.  It’s either Bun up in the attic looking for something or the universe has started expanding.