h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Talk of engineering and pasta brought something to mind, however, and I am delighted to find my childhood memory verified by Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyUvNnmFtgI

I remember seeing this film clip in America in the early 1960s. My mom, dad, and I fell about laughing. My serious-minded younger sister became outraged: Where did spaghetti come from, she demanded, if not from trees?

My mother faltered. 'I have no idea,' she said. 'I don't know how they make it.' My dad, an engineer whose only cooking experience was in the US Army, shrugged.

We were ethnically disadvantaged - we didn't even know how to *cook* spaghetti, let alone make it. We got it from the school cafeteria, where it was used as a come-on for PTA fundraisers - always broken into shorter pieces and smothered in melted cheese, with ground beef and tomatoes.

I had to go ask an Italian-American friend for information.

Moral: Take an interest in your surroundings. There might be physics involved.

Thanks dmg

In fact this one started out with Scrof suggesting I should write about another spaghetti manifestation, only it turned out Tufty had already done it : A18740559

Your YouTube clip is a UK legend, mentioned here : A516791. Panorama was (and arguably still is) the most straight-backed and reliable current affairs program on British TV, and the presenter of this piece, Richard Dimbleby, was its most revered and trusted broadcaster. Although it went out on April Fools' Day, millions believed it, because the notion of the BBC deliberately making stuff up just didn't occur to anybody in those days. Plus the fact that spaghetti was exotic food in 1957.

Spaghetti snapping, along with slinky dropping and a few other bizarre table-top demonstrations of similar ideas make up my firm's annual offering to Science Week : http://www.the-ba.net/the-ba/Events/NSEW/, something else I reckon the UK can be proud of.

Indeed you all can, along with inspiring tongue-in-cheek April Fool's stories.