Rube Goldberg Rides Again

I came across this gif while blog-surfing and traced it back to Flickr:




I find it absolutely mesmerizing. Whoever designed this? How long has it been around? (Beth says that she’d seen it a while ago.) I’d call it a Rube Goldberg, except those contraptions supposedly perform recognizable tasks – and I’m damned if I can detect a purpose to this. What’s especially fascinating about this particular mechanism is that it wraps: left and right edges connect, as do top and bottom. And if you study it, you'll find there are a couple of closed loops. Just gazing at it, I feel like a kid who's been presented with a shiny new toy. It kinda makes me wish I still smoked pot....

Ah, those were the days, now a couple dozen years in the past. Firing up a jay and cueing up Firesign Theater, or turning on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, or opening a volume of Escher prints and getting lost. But there came a point when the stuff just got too strong – too conducive to paranoia, no more mellow highs – and several age-group peers have confirmed this. (Marcelle Clements also wrote about it in a perceptive essay entitled “The Dog Is Us,” but you’ll have to check the library or used-book market.) Judging from the few tokes I’ve been offered since then, I don’t know how they do it anymore.

Getting high was good for such activities and I’m sure would enhance the appreciation of this splendid gif. Maybe giving up the habit led to my abandonment of fun and games in general – which is not to suggest that I was baked as a kid when I got out the tinker toys or became preoccupied with a sliding-tile puzzle. Maybe it’s just that the nature of our toys has changed. Now my “toy” of choice is an mp3 player that invites me to obsessively manipulate its content. Or the very laptop on which I’m writing this post.

So compelling is this gif that I opted to make it my wallpaper on said laptop, replacing the image of the lunar surface that I’d selected from the palette that Lenovo provided. And I’ll tell you, it’s quite a contrast going from the Sea of Tranquility to this constant busy-ness. I’m not quite sure it’s there to stay, but it’s something to stare at. And at the very least, it should be good for a contact high.

Which may well be its intended task.