Friday, March 10, 2006

Chapter 8: The Whereabouts of Coffee

Some of our readerbase will inevitably be aware of the curious surroundings contributing to the epidemic of missing ballpoint pens in the universe. This is something that we do not need to delve into. Instead we choose to investigate the instances of missing coffee. Many times in my own life and (I suspect) in yours as well you will be finding yourself uttering the fateful words “Where did I put my coffee?” This isn’t merely the product of bad memory as you may expect. Coffee droplets in and of themselves do not posses any intelligence; however, when a sufficient amount of them join together they form a low level semblance of a collective mind not entirely unlike honeybees. The strangest phenomenon in this scenario is that this collective mind is not merely bent on self-preservation (though that often is a by-product of it’s actions) but rather on mischievousness. It’s primary directive is not to avoid being drunk (though that is a rather unpleasant experience from what I gather) but merely to cause you strife and minor mental anguish from continually escaping your gaze and ending up places that you have no idea you have been near recently. It appears that this collective mind retains its semblance of intelligence throughout the dwindling amount of liquid even back past the point where the cup reached critical thinking mass to begin with. How this residual intelligence continues to exist is currently a mystery to 7 out of 8 scientists galaxywide. Unfortunately the 8th ones are not currently in good standing with this publication due to their efforts to promote tea as an acceptable alternative to coffee without the semi-intelligent byproducts. Their misunderstanding of the uses of a good tea are so vastly inferior to the near-truth of assumed uses that the rest of their research is generally dismissed offhand.

The biggest hurdle in understanding the abilities of coffee collectives has been trying to discover the method of propulsion used to grant these forays into mischief. Great financial backing has been recently procured for this research, mostly bankrolled under miscellaneous expenses like toilet seats and hammers for the Senators and governmental -inter-office memo runners to use (rarely simultaneously). Recent breakthroughs in this field have uncovered at least part of the circumstances allowing locomotion to be achieved. It has been documented that a coffee collective of substantial mass emits a ULF (ultra low frequency) soundwave that can temporarily draw higher organisms into the local hive mind. Thus locomotion is achieved by the coffee owners own body but the drinkers memory is not informed of this because he is not operating under his own will at the time. This frequency is such that it only affects something that has previously ingested a portion of this same cup once the hive reaches it’s semi-conscious state. These same frequencies do not have any affect on those who are drinking the same liquid from another cup since that has formed a separate hive and therefore operates on a separate frequency. The strange part is that when a single container of coffee gets past a certain volume it begins to split into conflicting hive factions causing a disruption in the ULF waves and multiple local consciousnesses. This effectively negates any intelligence that may form within the coffee causing what is known unofficially as a “dumb pot effect”. This explains why you rarely see full pots or carafes of coffee turning up in the same types of strange locations that a simple cup will.

Experiments have been conducted with many other liquids to attempt to determine whether or not this is an isolated scenario with coffee alone or if other liquids can develop a similar hive collective. Milk and plum juice have proven to be exceptionally dense however most other liquids have shown some propensity toward intelligence though almost never enough to really develop the true semi-consciousness of coffee. IBC cream soda seems to have the closest likening to a conscious mind however it rarely stays around long enough to execute any mischief.

2 comments:

Ted M. Gossard said...

uhhh????

Radont said...

We have not been able to experiemnt as much as we'd like with various other substances to see if they posess any degree of intelligence. A TV remote seems likely to have at least some higher brain function. Stay tuned for further reports.