It’s raining so hard, the electricity department can’t keep pace and
the electricity keeps shutting off arbitrarily and weird things start to happen.
For instance I’ve noticed my neighbours’ cat has a fluorescent tail.
It’s weird
really because when there’s no electricity (which happens most of the time here
even during a light shower) this glow-in-the-dark-tail seem to float eerily through the bushes followed by a
trail of fireflies much like a midget bishop’s sceptre leading a candlelight
procession of the faithful.
Don’t you just hate it when there’s no electricity? I mean
I’m having a hot shower, I drop the soap and voila! The lights go out. Or I’m
watching Mallika Sherawat about to disrobe and step into a bubble bath and the
TV just shuts down.
I mean what is it with the electricity department and
bathing?? And where does all that electricity go after they turn off the tap?
Modern humans tend to take our hot baths, electric lights,
fans, televisions, etc. for granted, but thousands of years ago, long before
any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric
fish, but had no electric appliances. This was just as well because there was
no place to plug them in. Also the fish wouldn't keep still and kept flopping
about.
Then along came Benjamin Franklin who proved, by flying a
kite in a thunderstorm, that lightning was powered by the same force as the
fish. This also damaged Franklin’s brain and he started speaking only in
incomprehensible proverbs, such as, “Fish and visitors stink in three days.”
Finally he was given a job running the post office.
So the question to ponder is: What in the world is
electricity and how does it really work?
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important lesson
about electricity: On a cool dry day, rub your hands vigorously on a cat’s fur
then reach over with the other hand a touch a girl’s metal piercing.
Did you notice how she twitched violently and then slapped
your face really hard? This teaches one
that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt
others unless we need to learn an important lesson about self-preservation.
It also illustrates how an electrical circuit works. When you rubbed the cats fur, you picked up
batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that cats
manufacturer in their fur so that they will repel dirt. These electrons travel
through the conductive cells in your skin and collect under your fingernails, where they
form a spark that leaps to the girl’s metal piercing, then travel down to her
palm and back onto your face, thus completing the circuit.
AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you rubbed the cat’s fur for a
really long time without touching anything, you would build up so many
electrons that your fingernail would explode!
But there's nothing to worry about unless you have a really patient cat.
After Franklin came a guy called Galvani (an Italian) who attached two different kinds
of metal to a dead frog’s unattached leg, and it twitched! I know of another Italian, a lady who can seemingly make a dead political party appear as though it's running a country.
Galvani's experiments led to enormous discoveries in human biology. Today
skilled surgeons can take a number of human body parts, embed pieces of metal
into its muscles, and voila! Wolverine
and Iron Man!
Then came Sir Thomas Edison... of course he was knighted for
the simple fact that he concocted a simple electrical circuit :- the electricity department, which sends electricity through a wire to our homes, then immediately
gets it back through another wire, then sends it right back to us again. Now,
since very few of us have the time to examine our electricity, the electricity department can sell us the same batch of electricity over and over again and never
get caught.
In fact I checked, the last time any new electricity was
generated in India was in 1963 when the Bhakra-Nangal dams were completed.
So today we give thanks to Galvani’s frog and Edison and
Franklin for our electricity which allows us to take instant hot baths and watch bleeped-out audio and endless anti-smoking messages on our mindless television programmes.
Gotta go now, have to try out this new electric toenail-cutter,… uh oh! There go the lights. Sob!!
