Lost Transmissions: Furniture
Created | Updated Mar 4, 2012
Entry: Furniture.
Because "Happy Nerd" gave me very strange ideas to play with after a couple (probably) of pints of "Don’t Panic" at the Manchester Meet.
In the beginning, somewhere amongst all the endless nothing, something twisted, snapped, went "ping" and soon afterwards became a universe.
There are of course many theories surrounding this event – with some of the more far-fetched examples providing lucrative careers for retired physicists who can now spend their lives arguing vehemently on the documentary channels.
In order to keep the ratings up, even the most preposterous and downright unhinged theories get an airing and are treated seriously for several minutes until the retired physicists step in to frame and shoot the whole idea to pieces.
That hasn’t stopped some of the ideas gaining traction amongst conspiracy theorists whose justification for perpetuating these daft thoughts is their slogan of "It’s a truth THEY don’t want you to know".
Fortunately, the weak signals emanating from their basement transmitters aren't powerful enough for this drivel to reach anybody. That is what public service broadcasting is for.
The one idea that refuses to go away, despite repeated violent de-bunkings by the major religions, is F-Space.
F-Space was first postulated by a happy soul named Jano who had struggled to find a matching pair of shoes in the bottom of her wardrobe and failed. She complained loudly and at length that it should be impossible to lose anything in six square feet of wardrobe floor-space.
Apparently complaining about it wasn't enough, so she did the math.
She, like all readers of this book, knew full well that trees are the modulating force that binds the filament pathways of space-time together (See our entry on "Traffic Wardens" for conclusive proof of this). Consequently, the very idea of making furniture out of wood must alter the very fabric of existence.
Jano, being a practical sort, then decided to test her hypothesis. Taking a gravity wave displacement detector, two perfect mirrors and the biggest screwdriver she could find she locked herself in her garage and conducted a series of fiendish experiments on a self-assembly blanket box that yielded some surprising results.
In order to truly observe the effects of furniture construction that result in F-Space it is vitally important to consider the following:
Try not to buy cheap items made of compressed glue, hair, concrete and unrecyclable soft drinks bottles.
Don’t be tempted by the veneer even if it does say "Hyper-Walnut Effect".
Anything else except solid wood won't work.
Never use nails or screws if at all possible.
Jano experimented with the box, stacking the components on the floor, putting them together in the wrong order, replacing chipboard with real wood and tinkering with various thicknesses of veneer (eventually discovering Planck Veneer, the thinnest substance in the universe that single-handedly revitalised the flagging "wood effect wardrobe" industry).
She then went one step further and published her results. Her paper "The Universe – Is it just storage for lost matter?" was witheringly reviewed and scoffed at in the few academic circles that could be bothered, but that didn’t stop the Zeranim, a race of cargo cult galactic nomads, from using it as the basis for their major religion.
The Zeranim, long used to searching the universe for useful flotsam, ordained several of their best scavengers and entrusted them with the sacred task of scouring all of space and time for something they referred to only as "The Exit".
When asked what this mysterious object might look like these serious beings would explain in slow, measured tones that if the universe was merely storage for some higher entity, then the portal into that domain would appear to be the back of a pair of wardrobe doors.
However, the laughter soon faded away to be replaced with disbelieving curiosity when the Zeranim announced that they had found it. A mighty spaceship, covered in the mystic symbols of the F-Space Cult, was soon dispatched to the coordinates and beamed back images of two huge doors floating in space. Tantalizingly they were slightly ajar.
An airlock opened and a lone priest floated out towards the Exit, approaching with extreme care and propelled along by nervous little puffs from his methane jets.
He floated closer until he was within several meters of the object and lifted his visor to see what was on the other side.
His final words and the haunting image of a giant hand slamming the Exit shut from the other side are the stuff of legend.
"My God! It’s full of shoes!"
Entry ends.
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