Implosion

One of my favorites, and well recieved by the people who have read it so far. Enjoy at your leisure:

The trick, gentlemen, is to create an implosion so powerful that it can level a city block. This is because we would like to use it to safely level city blocks. The problem is that we can't do this with our conventional tech.

By analogy, consider: Meet heidi, who sings in the mountains, for reasons that nobody can quite fathom. Maybe the hills are alive with the sound of music or something. And her only source of water is from a lake three kilometers below the house on the cliff where she whiles away her life in fairy tale splendour. Well, she installs a pump at the top of the cliff and drops a giant hose into the lake, and switches it on. The lake cackles madly at her vain attempt to draw water with such an ill-conceived effort, and spawns a lake monster that rises from the depths to terrorize all humanity. Of course, Heidi is blissfully unaware of this, living fully 3000 meters above this lake.

She purchases a larger pump and turns on all eight mighty cylinders, and the hose is emptied of all but a trace amount of air. But yet no water reaches her. The lake shrieks in imperious, derisive laughter and sends floods to ruin the crops of the surrounding farmland. Trembling peasants begin to worship the lady of the lake with the same fervor that a Polynesian volcanic-island dweller might venerate the active volcano. The lake's self-awareness and power increases, it fills the sky with clouds, and greedily laps up the rainfall from all across the land. Heidi looks down and sees that the lake has expanded, and is delighted that her water supply is doing so well. She just can't get at it.

(For those among us who don't remember our phsyics, I'll remind you why this won't work. What propels the water upwards when one drinks out of a straw or uses a gas syphon is the pressure of the air pushing down on the REST of the water, propelling the low-pressure liquid above its normal equilibrium point. But even if the hose had a hard vacuum inside, the sea-level atmospheric pressure working on the lake would only push the water up about ten meters. She should have installed the first pump at the base of the hose to push at the water rather than pull it. Heidi doesn't know any of this. No physicist seeking to educate her could ever get past her incessant singing.)

Full of determination, sing-song vigour, and an irrepressable faith in the human spirit, Heidi buys the most powerful water pump that has ever yet been concieved by human minds, or assembled by human hands. It has the works; redundant fusion generators, a tractor beam, built-in security systems and auto-repair capacity, a powerful AI expert system, and a twelve-man crew compartment able to sustain the full crew complement for three months in the furthest reaches of space. She turns the pump on and a tremendous geyser of water spews from the pump, in defiance of conventional engineering wisdom and economics. As the precious water touches Heidi's lips, the lady of the lake finally has a taste of her spirit. The two merge into the Empress of the Lily, an insane egomaniac bent on the complete and utter subjugation of all the living peoples on all the worlds in the galaxy and beyond. Shrines and temples are built in her name, and a new darkness covers the land. Only a young farm-boy armed with the sword passed down through his family for generations stands between the Lily and her total ascendancy.

That, gentlemen, is the kind of implosion that the Acme Demolitions Department is trying to create.