All About Holes

Holes are very useful. The universe began as a hole in nothing. People are built around holes too.

People take fuel into their upper holes and expel waste and exhaust out lower holes. This is done by gravity. Gravity is what permits people to live on a big ball of dirt in the universe and not fall off. The big ball is planet Earth, which also has some impressive holes in it. Pictured over this essay is a really big one, the Grand Canyon. The state of Arizona is located in it.

When people are little in this part of the world, they like to go outside and try to dig holes to China, just as British kids dig holes toward the Antipodes. My brother and I did that all the time. We would dig and dig and periodically stop to listen. My brother said if we could hear people speaking Chinese through the bottom of the hole, we were getting close. I used to wonder if Chinese kids were digging holes to America and if we could talk to them if our tunnels met. My brother thought language would present no insuperable problem; American is just Chinese upside down.

The Grand Canyon was dug by kids trying reach China. This caused problems when it lowered the Colorado River so many miles that water had to be pumped upward at great expense just so people could get a drink or flush a commode. When I was Lieutenant Governor of Arizona, I proposed legislation that would prohibit children from any further mass-excavations to China. The initiative never became law however, despite my best efforts as Lieutenant Governor, because Arizona has no such office.

Our discussion of holes going down really addresses only half the enigma. Attention must be given to other directions as well. Blog friend and excellent writer, Jon, at Lonestar Concerto, furnished a dramatic description of West Texas dust storms the other day and posted some awesome photos of them in progress over the high plains. My photo does not approach the fearsome umber cloud that awarded Lubbock, Texas the "Toughest Weather On Earth", but I have converted my stock picture of crumbling buttes into a conservative approximation.

It is a matter of historical consensus that the first flight of a heavier-than-air craft took place at Kitty Hawk in 1903 but this is inaccurate.  Texas Ranger Thos. Lubbock achieved this distinction 20 years earlier by going outside in a dust storm with nothing more than a shovel and began digging upwards. Being a vigorous man, aided by gravity causing the dirt to simply fall away from his shovel, he achieved an altitude of several thousands of feet before the wind subsided. Fortunately, he was also quite resourceful and invented the parachute on his way down. There are some historical exploits that quite frankly cannot be exaggerated but I am unencumbered by facts here and this is not one of them.