I ask you: Isn’t it
enough that my eldest son, Richie, exploded purple chemicals onto my kitchen
ceiling when he was nine, nearly blew his hand off in high school, makes his
own black powder fire crackers and tried to install a jet engine in a Mustang? Now he wants my big screen TV so he can make
a Death Ray. Yes, you heard me: A DEATH
RAY. Did I mention this child is now 31
years old?
Last night he calls and asks if he can have our TV, should it
ever conk out and require more money to fix than it’s worth. Sure, I say, the ever agreeable, kind,
generous mother. Once again, I walk
right into it.
Good, he says, because he’s going to make a death ray and see
if it generates enough energy to power his home.
Some troublemaker with a Ph.D in physics (his poor mother)
has posted a youtube video of this ridiculous idea, where you extract a
gigantic magnifying glass from the TV screen, angle it so the sun hits it just
so, and then whammo! You annihilate
anything in its 2,000-degree path. Wood
ignites instantly, pennies melt like bits of wax, eggs fry, and hot dogs turn
into charcoal briquettes. You think I’m
kidding? Watch the video.
Clearly this gizmo would pose risk to life and limb for
anyone daring enough to reach into its path at the wrong moment. And, should it accidentally ignite a dry
patch of lawn, I can see whole neighborhoods going up in flames. Naturally the brainiac in the video puts it
in a WOODEN frame.
I tell Richie I never should have taken him to that science
supply store where they have a cat named Rhymes-With-Orange. And his also grown brother, Brandon, would be
right in league with this if he weren’t living in San Diego, a relatively safe
distance from Sacramento. Brandon once
created a mushroom cloud in our street, made all the windows rattle, and scared
a Lebanese airport shuttle driver out of his wits.
In the fifth grade, they pull you into their bedrooms to
show you an arc and some
numbers on their white board, and offer this as an explanation as to why they
shouldn’t have to clean their room anymore.
Then they graduate from high
school early, but come back for auto shop just to work on their Mustang, and cause
their high school to rewrite the school’s rule book about tardies. These are kids whose teachers write an
unsolvable equation on the board, and then get mad when the kids solve it. I could go on all day with this.
Did I mention giving their mothers gray hair? And then saying, “Too late” when you tell
them you’re going to die an early death?
And now Richie wants to create something Lex Luthor would use
to vanquish Superman. It’s solar-powered,
he says, environmentally safe. Yes,
unless your environment is the target of the death ray. To say, “You can have my TV over my dead
body” would be playing right into his hands, wouldn’t it?
He says he also wants to melt basalt rocks with it to separate
the minerals, research the earth’s mantle, blah, blah, blah, something
scientific, which I question in the first place as something that needs to be
done at all. But it could probably be
done in a laboratory while wearing goggles and gloves, and does not need to be
done in one’s back yard where it isn’t even legal to build a fire for s’mores,
much less a death ray.
The only thing I will admit is that, at least, it’s aptly
named. And that only a very tiny, small
part of me wishes I’d thought of it first.
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