Call Me Mali

So imagine Doof monologuing over Zoom, secure in the knowledge that Perry the Platypus can’t possibly thwart him over a video call, when Perry disappears from the frame. As he ponders where his nemesis could have gone, Perry plummets onto Doof’s balcony and socks him one in the jaw.

Doof: What?! Perry the Platypus?! What are you doing? You shouldn’t be out here! There’s a quarantine going on, in case you haven’t noticed!

Perry: *platypus noise*

They think that they’re thieves, agents of an elite criminal group led by Giovanni, stealing rare pokemon and advanced technology and such. And there might have been a time this actually was their jobs. In the first season or two, they frequently get angry phone calls about how they’ve fucked everything up, or get their expense account cut off because they have literally never turned a profit on their criminal enterprises and constantly procure and then lose/destroy expensive and elaborate devices.

But then the world came within a hair’s breadth of being destroyed, several times, and Jesse, James, and their weird cat rescued everybody. As terrible as they’ve always been at criminal endeavors of any kind, when the apocalypse approaches and they’re forced to step up, they’re really fucking good at saving the day.

And Giovanni is over here like… if the planet is destroyed, or time/space becomes unrecognizable, or civilization collapses, there’s no way for me to run a profitable criminal enterprise anymore. I need this planet, because it’s where I keep all my stuff. And I don’t pretend to understand the why of it, but these couple of bumbling nutcases that I should have fired years ago seem to be an important component of that? Somehow? So you gotta stop thinking about them in terms of acquisitions and start considering them… loss prevention. As in, even if you waste a million dollars a month on giant cat-faced robots and a vast array of fancy ball gowns and they never turn a profit, they are preventing all of your assets from going away at the same time because of something you can’t do anything about.

The Pitch Drop Experiment

The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar that is the world's thickest known fluid and was once used for waterproofing boats.

Thomas Parnell, UQ's first Professor of Physics, created the experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties.

At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a hammer. But, in fact, at room temperature the substance - which is 100 billion times more viscous than water - is actually fluid.

In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle for three years, and then in 1930 he cut the funnel's stem.

Since then, the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop to fall, and more than 40 years for another five to follow.

Now, 87 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops have fallen - the last drop fell in April 2014 and we expect the next one to fall sometime in the 2020s.

The experiment was set up as a demonstration and is not kept under special environmental conditions - it's kept in a display cabinet - so the rate of flow of the pitch varies with seasonal changes in temperature.

The late Professor John Mainstone became the experiment's second custodian in 1961. He looked after the experiment for 52 years but, like his predecessor Professor Parnell, he passed away before seeing a drop fall.

In the 86 years that the pitch has been dripping, various glitches have prevented anyone from seeing a drop fall.

- University of Queensland, Australia

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