(An amusing story about the future)
It was a clear, cold day in Emeryville California the day a rusty old pickup truck with Kentucky plates pulled up and parked in the great, grey parking lot that surrounds Wham-O world headquarters. An itinerant inventor from Kentucky (who grew and chewed his own tobacco) got out of the truck and stretched away nearly 24 hours of non-stop driving.
Cletus Horatio Junk was his name. Nowadays it is hard to imagine a time when his name wasn't known worldwide - but that was soon to change. Indeed, today was going to be a big day for the old Kentucky farmer.
Old Clete stretched himself and enjoyed the warmth of the sun before grabbing an old milk crate and heading into the building. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps it was fate, but the old man somehow talked his way past secretaries and security guards and made it into the main meeting room.
Cletus Horatio Junk was his name. Nowadays it is hard to imagine a time when his name wasn't known worldwide - but that was soon to change. Indeed, today was going to be a big day for the old Kentucky farmer.
Old Clete stretched himself and enjoyed the warmth of the sun before grabbing an old milk crate and heading into the building. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps it was fate, but the old man somehow talked his way past secretaries and security guards and made it into the main meeting room.
Sixteen men and women were seated at the long oval table - the annual board meetings always included a good feed so attending the meeting was less of a chore than a pleasure. The President of Wham-O, Walter Pierpoint, was leading the meeting. As the door swung shut behind Cletus, Walter looked up from his presentation notes and glared over his reading glasses. "Who are you and what the Hell are you doing here?" he barked.
Well, Clete wasn't much of a public speaker and it must be admitted he flubbed his own carefully prepared presentation.
"I want y'all to see this game I've invented." He said, "And I've got a sample right here..."
A few months earlier Cletus had discovered a unique characteristic of tobacco smoke. Have you ever noticed how the smoke from a cigarette rises a lot faster than campfire smoke or smoke from a burning trash heap? Well old Clete noticed... and he rather quickly discovered that by capturing and concentrating that smoke something real interesting happened.
Tobacco smoke you see defies the laws of both gravity and physics, and it turns out that if you pump enough of it into a container it liquefies, and when you pressurize it sufficiently with a hydraulic pump you'll suddenly hear a loud 'Ping'. Well, turns out you've just created a quantum singularity. A perfectly stable, perfectly shiny little black hole no bigger than a bug's testicle. Amazing.
Well, Clete didn't know much about practical applications, but he had plenty of grandkids and he loved a good toy that would teach a lesson as well as be just plain fun. Soon he had packaged a few of his black holes into little metal cages, and after he instructed grandkids to clean their rooms he'd let them toss trash, junk and old broken toys into the little black holes to vanish without a trace.
Just as he was explaining this the CEO began to yell; "Security?" "Security!!" "Get this nutjob OUT of here!"
This unexpected turn of events disturbed Mr. Junk more than a little - and the box of sample black holes slipped out of his hands and bounced onto the table top. In the wink of an eye 1/3 of the boardroom table and four very surprised board members vanished in a quick "whoosh" of vacuum and a rather sickening little "Pop."
