And You Wonder From Where I Get It...

I had to share this story. It seems as though Ferris State University, the great enabler of my college educational monies, just recently won the Rube Goldberg competition. For those of you who don't know (a group which included me just half an hour ago), Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist, who created and drew elaborate machines to perform very simple tasks. Still don't know what I'm talking about? Sure you do, if you've ever seen Tom and Jerry or the Roadrunner cartoons (not the bowling ball!). How about all those elaborate traps the gang on Scooby Doo created to catch the ghosts? More recently (relatively speaking), how about Doctor Emmit Brown's elaborate dog-feeding machines in the beginning of Back To The Future? Or how Wallace and Gromit usually start their days, complete with a slide that changes their clothes and drops them into the kitchen where breakfast is already made?

Regardless, there is an actual competition where Universities compete to create these kind of machines. The previous record was held by those engineering marvels at Purdue. Purdue's machine took an amazing record--215 different steps--to shred five sheets of paper. I, on the other hand, can name that tune in three notes.

If you thought a 215-step process was good, then prepare to be astounded by Ferris' orange juicing machine. This year's winning machine from Ferris State makes a glass of orange juice using a 345-step process!!! They added one hundred and thirty steps to the previous record in just one year! Incredibly inefficient! Congratulations, kids.

I'm sure if you asked my parents (or Ken's or Nate's or Jason's) they would say that this inefficient team was surely headed up by the school's Administration. Talk about inefficiency! (zing)