We received an impressive number of entries for last week's Riddled Identify-the-Woodcut competition. As always, the judging panel was impressed by your creativity and faintly disturbed by the unhealthy qualities of your collective imagination.No, the woodcut was not a design for a new range of one-sided dumbbells for weightlifters who want to build up the muscles in one arm only (though we are totally stealing that concept and marketing it to teenage males who want to compensate for the asymmetric arm development resulting from too much time surfing pr0n on the interlattice).
Nor is it a page of preliminary sketches for a Giacometti sculpture.
It is in fact the original discovery of the concept of the geosynchronous space elevator or skyhook. Athanasius Kircher considered the engineering challenge at some length. He concluded that the available materials were strong enough to construct an elevator to geosynchronous orbit, but not the flags at the top displaying the sponsors' names and logos in six different languages, forcing him to shelve the plan. If only he had thought to patent it, he would now be wealthier than Bill Gates, and dead for 330 years.
One person did provide the correct answer, and the usual prize is on its way to anonymous reader "AK".
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Below: The one-sided dumbbell is invented when a weightlifting session goes horribly wrong.
9 comments:
Poor, poor Fantomah... not even her jungle skull powers could save her.
You know there was a time when these comps were harder.
avicis, a bad thing?
One person did provide the correct answer, and the usual prize is on its way to anonymous reader "AK".
That Ashton Kutcher is one lucky dog.
No, it's al-Kaddafi! The man is unstoppable.
What's the use of being tempted by the "Bloody Belgians" tag, if one is not going to succumb to temptation?
~
Don't want to wear it out (as DKW's mum would say).
Y'know, now that you mention it, why did every Belgian I ever met scare me? Cold eyes, chain smoking murderous eurothugs. We need to think carefully about the continued existence of Belgians.
Maybe we need to move them to north africa, where the harsh conditions and limited cuisine might cause them to be more tolerant of our existence.
The alternative is to simply cede the entire planet. And hey, I'm not philosophically opposed to that outcome...
I suppose that the AK person could have expected to get the prize in the mail, by now?
AK person? From Alaska?
And ahem.
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