There is a peculiarity that runs through the human race. We tend to think of ourselves as advanced, scientific, thoughtful beings, but when something out of the ordinary springs up, we have a myriad of excuses to cover our backs with: "The wife must have moved it." "God is punishing me for cheering for Notre Dame." "I guess I've been drinking to much basin, tub, and tile cleaner." "Damn kids.." Etc., etc.... Many are the events that we simply accept without question. For example: anyone who has had even the most basic training in physics knows that if you apply a force to an object, your change that objects velocity/motion/position. If you kick a sleeping cat, it flies in a parabolic course across the room until it comes in contact with something massive enough to absorb its inertia, right? If the cat hits a lamp, then inertia is transferred, and the lamp falls off the end table, and the cat hits the floor at a run, and ultimately strikes back by having a load of kittens on your pillow. (Trust me on that one.) If you trip and fall to the ground, your transfer inertia to the planet itself, and moves the earth infinitessimally. (Here's a thought - what would happen if we got everyone on one side of the earth, then got everyone to jump straight up at the same time?) Why then, in spite of all this, does a shower curtain float in to cling to your leg, even when faced with all the water power a showerhead can muster? This has happened to EVERYONE who has ever showered, but no one seems to care. At best, some people figure that SOMEBODY knows, and it all makes perfect sense, but no one has time to go look it up. Here we are, in the midst of the Scientific Revolution, remaining stubbornly apathetic about this shower curtain defying both gravity and the laws of motion to cling to our bare, soapy legs. Ben Franklin would have been furious. Before you get your hopes up, I must admit that I don't know what the shower curtain is up to, either. All the answers I come up with point to the presence of a non-human intelligence, and I don't want to think too much more about it. I feel vulnerable enough in the shower without worrying that a shower curtain- shaped invader is looking for a skin sample. No, there are other mysteries I want to ponder on. To wit, the erratic behavior of clothes hangers and of socks, and the possible relationships between the two. You see? All of you know already what I'm talking about, and you feel guilty for not wondering about it sooner. For shame. Where do all the extra hangers come from? Have you ever put two bare clothes hangers in the closet, and returned later to find just two bare coat hangers? Only if you've left the closet light on. Something about darkness causes hangers to replicate themselves at an alarming rate. Is it the absence of light itself? Reversed photosynthesis? God help us if we ever drop a coat hanger deep in a cave, if this is the case. The near- complete blackness possible underground would cause the hanger to pop off a copy of itself at whatever rate an asexual coat hanger could pop, and they soon break the cave apart and, in a worst-case scenario, eventually outweigh the earth. If we assume that the rate of reproduction increases as the amount of light decreases, it is interesting to imagine what would happen if a hanger were to find itself in a black hole. The gravity of the black hole would be crushing the hanger into nothingness, but the hanger would be reproducing exponentially at an infinite rate of speed. One coat hanger could battle a black hole to a standstill. For the moment, let us discard the above theory (if there is anyone who has not done so already). There is evidence against it: families have been away from their homes for months or years, and returned to not find there house reduced to a jungle-gym for hangers. Also, hangers never seem to get out of the closet on their own. Furthermore, this replicating of coat hangers has been most often documented when there is more than one hanger to start with, suggesting a mating is taking place. Perhaps the darkness is required to maintain hanger modesty, just as human beings prefer to "do it" with the lights out. Our limited human senses have been unable so far to distinguish male and female hangers, but maybe we all look the same to them, too. Perhaps coat hangers are hermaphroditic, and not built to be able to copulate with itself. This seems logical enough, especially when you consider that hangers which have clothes draped on them don't exhibit signs of replicating. It is possible that we humans, by using these hangers as we feel they are meant to be used, are forcing them to practice "safe sex". This theory only works if we assume that hangers are born already fully grown - or at least full-sized. There have been no reports of baby coat hangers mysteriously appearing. If we assume that the above theory is close to correct, we are given some insight into hanger morals. Have you noticed that hangers seem to be always tangled together, even when there were just two of them four feet apart the night before? You have just walked in on a hanger orgy. The little beasts have no scruples once the light goes out. Do you see the scope of what I'm trying to get at? We simply do *not* know what is going on. It doesn't just stop with coat hangers, either. If it did, then maybe we could just ignore it and continue our lives in blissful ignorance, but there is more. To wit: What happens to the other sock? You wear them at the same time, remove them at the same time, cast them into the same hamper, throw them in the wash together, and one of them disappears before you take them out of the dryer. As you may have feared, I have several theories explaining this, some of them tying in with the coat hanger mystery: 1) the socks are afraid of the wash, so when they are all in there together, they choose one of their number to act as a sacrifice to some god in exchange for deliverance from the wet and sudsy hell. The sacrifice is slowly unraveled during the course of the wash, and is pulled away in the spin cycle. Or maybe it's the dryer that they don't like, and we are removing what's left of the unfortunate sock when we clean the lint filter. This theory shows a primitive and fearful sock society. 2) one sock from each pair, at some point in time, retreats by whatever means into the pipes leading out of the washer. it hibernates deep in the bowels of the house until it receives some sort of signal, then it pupates into a coat hanger, and makes its way somehow into the closet. In effect, socks are the larval form of coat hangers. 3) (really a variant of #2) during the wash, the socks participate in a bizzare mating dance, after which the female sock devours the male sock. Following a rapid gestation period, the female gives birth to a baby coat hanger, which slowly and stealthily creeps to the closet. By the time it is in the closet, it has matured to a full-grown hanger, ready to sow its oats. These are but a few examples of what can happen when the human mind is employed to learn, to probe, to question as opposed to merely keeping the ears from touching. The coat hanger/sock mystery is just one of thousands of questions that need to be examined, along with: "Why does the soulful allure of rap music continue to elude me?" "What is the opposite of sideways?" "How can you tell if yogurt goes bad?" "How hungry was the person who discovered escargo?" "Was disco as bad as everyone remembers it to be?" Etc., etc.... I could go on, but it is time for my soap opera. Until next time.... Christian REBUTTAL: I would like to dispel some wild theories recently posted to this group, concerning the behaviour of shower curtains, coat hangers, and socks. I don't know where Christian has been all these years (in a dark cave, with coat hangers?), but modern science has fully elucidated these ``mysteries'', and the results are quite well known. In case there are others as ill-informed, I report the results here. Shower Curtains: It is true that shower curtains are an alien life form, but their relationship to humans is a mutually beneficial symbiosis. People are totally unaware, today, of the danger of showering without a curtain. Before the benign ``invasion'' of shower curtains, however, many lives were tragically lost. What happens is that as water passes through the shower head, it acquires a static electric charge. Over the course of a single shower, this charge can build up to dangerous levels, until it is released in a violent discharge between shower head and showerer. This discharge (actually a miniature lightning strike) can cause cardiac arrest, and death. The shower curtain, by making occasional contact with the showerer, harmlessly dissipates the accumulated charge. It has been recently determined that the curtain itself derives some sort of sexual pleasure from the contact. However, the precise role of this behaviour in the curtain reproductive cycle is still unknown. Coat Hangers: Christian's speculations about the possible relationship between coat hangers and socks are particularly amusing in light of the well known fact that the larval form of the coat hanger is the paper clip. It is a zoological curiosity that in this species both the larval and adult forms are sexually active. Socks: It is now well understood that the spin cycle of a washing machine can create quantum black holes, which connect via wormholes to black holes at other points in the universe. There was alarm and confusion in the scientific community when the SACHS study concluded that some wormholes might connect to *other* universes, where modern washday miracles have not been developed. This would imply a net outflow of socks from this universe, and a gradual unravelling of the fabric of space-time. There were suggestions that people might have to wear their socks until they rotted off, or wear no socks at all! More recent computer simulations show that the SACHS concerns were overstated, and support the conjecture that if socks are made distinguishable left from right, then parity conservation requires that they both remain in the same universe. This result is supported by experiments with sneakers, which are observed never to disappear from the wash.