Today’s science topic is: The Universe

The universe has fascinated mankind for many, many years, dating back to the very earliest episodes of “Star Trek” when the brave crew of the starship Enterprise set out, wearing pajamas, to explore the boundless voids of space, which turned out to be as densely populated as Queens, New York. Virtually every planet they found was inhabited, usually by evil beings with cheap costumes and Russian accents, so finally the brave crew of the Enterprise returned to Earth to gain weight and make movies.

To really understand the mysteries of the universe, you should look at it first-hand. The best time to do this is at night, when the universe is clearly visible from lawns. As you gaze at it, many age-old questions will probably run through your mind, the main one being: Are you wearing shoes? The reason I ask is, recently I was standing barefoot on my lawn, and I got attacked on the right big toe by a fire ant. This is an extremely ungracious style of insect that was accidentally imported into the southern United States from somewhere else, probably hell. I once saw a TV documentary wherein a group of fire ants ate a cow. When a fire ant attacks your toe, he is actually hoping you’ll fight back, so the other fire ants can jump you, after which the documentary makers will beat you senseless with their camera tripods. They all work together.

But we are getting off the track. When we gaze upward at the boundless star-studded reaches of space, we should be thinking about more than ants in our lawn: We should also be thinking about snakes.

FEDERAL PORNOGRAPHY WARNING: The Attorney General Has Determined That the Following Paragraph Contains Explicit Sexual Words, Which Could Cause Insanity and Death.

I used to think snakes were bad, until I got this document from an alert reader named Rob Strait, who is a member of the Chicago Herpetological Society (“herpetologist” is Greek for “alert reader”). This document is a sales brochure from an outfit in Taiwan that I am not making up called “Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House” (Cable address: “SNAKE”). Do not be misled by the name. The folks at the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House do not think that you would be so stupid as to purchase a poisonous snake. They think you might be so stupid as to purchase snake penis pills.

To quote the brochure: “Made of 5 species of the penises, livers, and galls of the snakes processed by modern scientific ways. The pills possess the efficacy to strengthen the kidney in order to increase the ability of reproductive function and keep the energy as well as the physical healthy, is a kind of good nutriment.”

Sold me! My only question would be: “What?” I mean, until I got this document, I was unaware that snakes had penises. Where do they keep them? In special little cases? Then how do they carry them? These are some of the mysteries that make it so fascinating to think about today’s Science Topic, which is: The Universe. (Really! Go back and check!)

The big mystery, of course, is: Where did the universe come from? Although this question baffled mankind for thousands of years, we now know, thanks to reading science books to our son, that the universe was actually formed 4.5 billion years ago this coming Saturday when an infinitesimally small object, smaller than an atom, smaller even than the “individual” butter servings they give you in restaurants, suddenly exploded, perhaps because of faulty wiring, in a cataclysmic event that caused the parts of the universe to go shooting out in all directions and expand at an incredibly rapid rate, an expansion that continues to this day, especially in the case of Raymond Burr. According to this hypothesis, after a couple of million years, various weensy particles began clumping together to form stars, planets, saxophones, etc., which is why we refer to this as the “Big Band” theory.

The Big Band theory is now widely accepted in the scientific community, although it still has a few technical bugs in it, such as that anybody who took it seriously would have to have the IQ of soup. There is no way you could fit everything in the universe into a little dot. I base this statement on my garage, which contains approximately one-half of the things in the universe, because my wife refuses to throw them out, scrunched together at the absolute maximum possible density, so that if you try to yank any one thing out, all the other things, attracted by gravity, fall on your head. From this we can calculate that the universe was roughly twice the size of my garage when it (the universe) exploded.

We certainly hope this has cleared up any lingering questions you may have had regarding the universe. We are looking forward to bringing you equally thoughtful discussions of other interesting Science Topics. We are also looking forward to receiving our order from the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House.

I propose that we pass a federal law stating that the government will no longer pay for any scientific research if taxpayers cannot clearly see the results with their naked eyes. I don’t know about you, but I’M getting tired of reading newspaper articles like this:

“LOS ANGELES—A team of physicists at UCLA announced yesterday that they have made a major scientific breakthrough with the discovery of an important new subatomic particle. This was the team’s eighth major particle this month, giving them a three-particle lead over MIT.

‘These particles are very difficult to detect, even with the aid of enormous federal grants,’ said Head Physicist Dr. Ernest Viewfinder. ‘But we definitely saw an important new one. At least I saw it, and Dr. Hubbleman here thinks he did, too.’ Dr. Viewfinder said he could not show this particle to newsmen because it was ‘resting.’”

I’m starting to wonder whether the physicists are pulling some kind of elaborate scam here. I’m starting to wonder if they don’t sit around their $23 million atomic accelerators all day, drinking frozen daiquiris, and shrieking “There goes one now!” and then laughing themselves sick. Maybe it’s time we laypersons asked some hard questions about this idea that all matter consists of tiny invisible particles whizzing around. I’m willing to believe that uranium does, because physicists have demonstrated that they can use it to vaporize cities. But I’d like to see them do this with some kind of matter that the layperson is more familiar with, such as cheese. I have examined cheese very closely, and as far as I can tell it consists of cheese. I have obtained similar results with celery.

Then you have your biologists, always getting into Newsweek by claiming they’ve isolated an important new virus. By way of “proof,” they show you this blurred photograph that looks like, yes, it could be an important new virus, but it also could be an extreme close-up of Peru or Anthony Quinn. The biologists always promise that just as soon as they get a few million more dollars they’re going to give us a cure for the common cold, but we veteran laypersons tend to hang on to our nasal spray, because we know that all they’re really going to give us is more photographs of Anthony Quinn.

Another invisible thing biologists love to talk about is DNA, which is of course the Key to Unlocking the Secret of Life Itself. Biologists have learned that the public, particularly the journalist public, will take anything they do seriously, as long as they claim it has something to do with DNA. Not long ago biologists managed to get two rats on national TV news by claiming they had the same DNA molecules inside them, or something like that. Of course you didn’t see any DNA molecules; you saw these rats, being broadcast to the nation as if they were the joint Chiefs of Staff.