Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Rube Goldberg: The Cartoon, The Man and The Machine


Can this be an illustration of the complex thought process required to write this post? The absolutely wonderful array of sexual positions that will be covered in Naylin Palin (VP porno film) or the completely ingenious ideas of a man that understood the curiosities of a society that once was curious?

You guessed it, smart readers. It is a cartoon from Rube Goldberg! Yeah, just liked you guessed it was a boy and found out it was an abortion.


Click through for more drivel and a completely awesome video.


Well, it's been a hectic few weeks in my real world so forgive me for my lack of candor. I have not had the energy to do the extensive amount of research that Mumbletomyneighbor posts so require. Nor, has their been anything so completely audacious that has grabbed my attention from emails sent from my vast network of interesting sources (read, two) that send me things that are interesting and unseemly enough for me to get off my lazy ass and scour the Internet for something worthy of your time and your viewing pleasure. I basically had no inspiration.

There were events in the real world that did take place that were newsworthy and these seem to take up so much of bloggers time that the creme (read, inane bullshit) did not float to the top of the linklists. We did lose a world economy, maybe decided an election (or did we?) and I did finally get a radiator. Also, I now have to feed a cat. This is probably the most problematic. But the other day, I saw something on Rube Goldberg. The most interesting man I have read about, as of late.

He was the guy that drew the cartoons of your childhood (early 1900s) that involved a mustachioed Monopoly Man looking gent wearing some crazy contraption that was invented by "Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts" that used a machine created from a disconnected set of chain reactions (usually 20) to perform a very simple task, like wiping your ass.

Due to his early rise in fame, nerds everywhere united and now have contests at universities everywhere whose foliage of choice is ivy and not marijuana (my previous institution's choice of popular foliage) and have names that are one word, simply followed by "University" as opposed to the descriptive nature of "St. Mary's School for Blind and Deaf Hispanic Tractor Mechanics" [ed note: failed out on a technicality after 2 hard years...]

The premise of the contest is simple. Create a machine that uses a very complicated process to do a very simple chore. Cook a burger, lick a stamp, make an ice cream cone, keep your job. This years winners are from Perdue University which can't seem to create a video that is as ingenious as they're design. They are engineers and not porno cameramen (don't have enough attention to detail...) so you can't really see what's going on in their contraption.

This made me scour the Internet for the best one I could find and unfortunately I found it first and wasted 30 minutes of my time looking for ones that were horribly titled, such as, "Best Rube Goldberg Machine" or "Betr Rube goldberg Makination." (i.e. complete shite, even the mythbusters one sucked) The incessant misspellings and increased dorkiness should have been my first indicator to stop searching and get back to drinking. But from now on, when I think genius, I now only think Tony Stark genius. Or I should say, Japanese Tony Stark genius.

So, here are the Japanese, doing what they do best, outsmarting the world. Wait til you see what their 100 step, 6:30 minute machine makes...



Winners of American 2008 Competition

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