Monday, November 19, 2007

Two Morons, One Egg, and the History Channel

Ok, the Monday night Titans/Broncos matchup isn't the most intriguing game on the NFL slate this weekend, so instead of watching the manufactured pre-game hype on ESPN, Rob and I spent the afternoon watching a couple of recorded episodes of Jeopardy (dammit, lunch-lady Doris won again!). Once that ended, it was on to the History Channel for a documentary about the Hoover Dam.

At some point, they had an engineer talking about the different types of dams, and they said that an Arch dam was the best option for Hoover Dam because the weight of the water pressed the structure into the canyon wall, thus making it even stronger (or something like that), and to illustrate his point, he said Just like you can't crush an egg in your hands when you squeeze it from the ends--it speaks to the strength of the arch...

We don't know what else he said after that point, because it struck us as a challenge that we couldn't crush an egg with our bare hands. The truth is, we'd never tried it before. So we bagged the documentary and headed over to the kitchen to prove the experts wrong. Rob even took pics and video:


Your humble correspondent holding Test Subject No. 1 (We figured that we'd crush a lot of test subjects, so we numbered them) Also, doesn't Rob have mad composition skillz with the camera?



I tried it first. The results were somewhat different than I imagined.





I really wish I would've had some safety goggles handy, just to make it look even more authentic, but we figured we looked dorky enough already.

The last sentence was "...because of the strength of the Arch", but I got cut off. Rob's camera only takes 15 seconds worth of video at a time, and my digital camera is sitting in my locker at work (I was trying to take some covert pics of the Naughty Santa's Helper outfits that the cocktail waitresses will start wearing on Thursday, just in case the door to the seamstress shop was open--they had one being altered on a life-sized mannequin, but I was denied in my quest...), so we were limited to the video we could take.

Anyhow, I was squeezing as hard as I could, and nothing happened. I even went to two hands there at the end and it didn't work, either. Rob somehow didn't really believe I was trying, or thought I was just a wuss, so he gave it a try. No video, but I got a pretty good picture of him trying to crush the egg. Or take a huge and difficult dump. I'm not quite sure which:




As it turns out, the engineer was right, or we are just a couple of big wimps when it comes to hand strength. We couldn't crush the egg from top-to-bottom, so in order to avoid being defeated by the embryonic chickens, we turned them sideways, thinking they'd be easier to crush that way.

Nope. These bad boys were laid by Super Chickens!

We got schooled. Apparently human hands are no match for an egg, unless those human hands have the edge of a mixing bowl nearby. Then it's Scramble City, baby! Oh yes, the eggs may have won the battle, but I shall win the war! I will exact my revenge tomorrow morning at breakfast time.

So the guy on the History Channel was right, and Rob and I are just a couple of huge dorks with weak fingers. Stay tuned for our next experiment--the Winter Solstice is coming up, so we're going to try and stand up all of the eggs on their ends, like Weebles. They damn well better cooperate this time, or the next day you'll see a picture of a 12-egg omelet.

Mikey

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