If you are reading this entry, congratulations, you are among the more curious and proably the more clever of our race. Foam is probably the second oddest and most useful thing in the galaxy, but unlike the oddest and most useful thing in the galaxy, the babel fish, no one seems to care, or even in fact have noticed

Foam isn't exciting. It tends to sit where it's put, disolving away or hardening into exotic shapes, and therein lies its beauty. Less than a dozen people people in all history have ever been aroused to inspiration at the sight of foam, and eight of those cases involved large mugs of beer, which probably skews the statistic very much in favor of alcohol and the mood lighting in shabby bars

But the truth is that without foam in all its variations, the beer (or any alcohol for that matter), the mood lighing, the padded barstools, the styrene drinks cups and take-away cartons, the fire extinguisher for putting out grease fires in the kitchen wouldn't be possible. Washing would be less pleasant, shaving vastly more painful, and the creation of truely comfortable bean-bag chair a virtual impossibility.

It will only be in the coming eighty to one hundred years, as the larger ecological impacts of losing our ozone layer in a trade for polystyrene take-away cartons, packing peanuts, and bean-bag chair beans becomes apparent, that humanity will finally realize the wide-ranging impact of foam and its incidious usefullness on our society and its future course.

(Didn't see that one coming, did you, Mankind?)