I am a little worried about what we’ll find in Rock Springs, but my more immediate fear is that the immigration officer at the border will reject us. If that happens, though, I have a plan: we’re going to slingshot across the border!
Doug and I were watching a show called Mythbusters on Discovery Channel last week. Each show, these wonderfully quirky scientists and engineers take an urban legend and try and prove or disprove it. The episode we happened across really fit our current situation: apparently one story in circulation is that people are being flung from Canada into the US using slingshots.
We thought this was absolutely hilarious. First of all, while the US offers many opportunities, who would give up universal health care in Canada to be shot across the border (where, I might add, you would need serious medical attention after being hurled 200 or so yards. And who wants to live in a country that still uses the imperial system with crazy measurements like yards?)?!
Anyway, the show’s experts dutifully constructed a slingshot of monstrous proportions and succeeded in launching a man-sized dummy a reasonable distance. It bears noting, however, that the dummy landed nowhere near the carefully placed mattress (hence the needed medical care). Also, I am sure with all the money being pumped into homeland security that its enforcers would surely notice if a group of people were constructing a slingshot so big it could be seen from space.
That there are enough people who believe in this slingshot idea that it made it on to Mythbusters is really frightening. Someone should tell these paranoid people that most Canadians are not willing to risk life and limb to go to the States. Maybe these folks should be focusing instead on building that big ol’ wall down along the Mexican border…
