That cloud looks like a bunny. And that cloud looks like a…corporate logo. And that cloud looks like…an unspeakable organ.

by JGordon on Jun. 12th, 2008
in The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate and Scientific Enterprise

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It's...a powedered donut with a bite missing: No! It's a dust bunny biting another dust bunny.
Courtesy kiwehowin.I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve always been very good at picking images out of clouds. Before anyone else can see anything but a boring ol’ cloud, I’m all, “Hey, look, it’s a bunny’s tail,” or “that one looks like a huge damn cotton ball,” or “that one looks like smoke,” or “can you see the snowdrift in that cloud?”

If the world is a party, I am the life of the party (I don’t get invited to a lot of “actual parties,” so this is good).

It’s frustrating then that some modern day Da Vinci, am Einstein for the 21st century, a veritable living Stephen Hawking, has invented a custom cloud-making machine, a device that can make clouds that look like anything you want.

If anyone in the world can look at a cloud, and immediately say, “Hey! It’s obviously a balled up gym sock,” where does that leave me and my God-given talents? It leaves me in the gutter. Or dead. I’m like a latter day John Henry. JHenry, perishing beneath the horrible, diaphanous advance of technology.

Slow down there, JHenry, and explain.

Former magician Francisco Guerra, not content to play God the old fashioned way, making clouds with smoke stacks and cooling towers, has created a machine to create custom shaped clouds out of soap and helium. The clouds are limited only by your corporation’s imagination, ranging “from Mickey Mouse to the Olympic rings.” No doubt this pervert will come up with something even more obscene than either of those images, I’m sure.

My only solace here is that the custom clouds, or “Flogos,” still sound a little crappy—although Guerra is working on machines to produce them on a large scale, Flogos are only about 3 feet in size, they generally hover at around 500 feet, and can drift up to 30 miles before they evaporate. I feel like a 3-foot-tall Mickey Mouse, 50 stories above your head, and drifting into the next county would have somewhat less than an impressive impact. Then again, the Flogo machine can produce a cloud every 15 seconds, or so, so I guess you could make a small army of Mickey Mice.

So the world moves on, leaving JGordon behind. If you need him, look for his body in the mountains, with his hammer in his hand.

Or look for him in a cubicle, holding a pencil and a photograph of himself.

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