Chinook
by George Hosier II  - June 30, 2008

Saving Gas

For our wedding Anniversary this year I got my wife something really expensive. It was a necklace. At the end of a simple cotton cord was suspended a small glass vial in which was sealed nearly ½ cc of actual gasoline! She’s not going to wear it in public, of course. That would just be an open invitation for some lowlife to try to pilfer it. I’m not terribly concerned about it being stolen, because I had it insured with Lloyd’s of London, but I don’t want my wife to be injured in the mugging process.

I also served her an expensive meal of fried rice and Vienna sausages that I had cooked on our wood stove. We ate it by candlelight. We haven’t splurged like that for a long time. You should have seen the glow in her eye when I told her the candles were to create a romantic ambience. It was only a little white lie. Unfortunately the mood was broken when she suggested we snuggle up on the couch afterwards and watch a chick flick. It was then that I had to admit that in order to afford the gasoline necklace I hadn’t been able to pay the light bill. We played a game of tick tack toe instead.

I never dreamed I’d see the day when a trip to town would cost more than my mortgage payment. Speaking of mortgage payments, I’ve been reading in the news about the “new slums”. Huge chunks of middle class suburban housing developments all around the country are falling victim to foreclosure. That quintessential American dream—the tidy house with a two-car garage in a cul-de-sac is being abandoned like a flea-infested mattress.

Graffiti is appearing on vinyl siding. Abandoned drug paraphernalia is littering weed-choked lawns. Empty houses are being gutted of copper wire and pipe. In developments with yuppie names like Pine Acres and Hillshire Estate, gunshots ring out in the wee hours of the morning, sending bullets ripping through the bedroom walls of the few soccer moms still desperately clinging to their American Dream home.

It’s a sad commentary on our economy when a person has to choose between his housing and transportation needs. We’re going to have to start coming up with a creative way to reduce one or both expenses. Some people are combining the two, by selling their houses and moving into a motor home, or sleeping in their SUV in special lots set up especially for homeless people who own a vehicle.

Me? I’m focusing on trying to find creative ways to save gas money by squeezing every percentage point of fuel efficiency out of every drop of gasoline I buy.

Currently I am in the Beta test phase of a set of tires that look like ordinary tires on the outside, but are prominently ridged on the inside. What appears to be a hubcap is actually a ventilated door, which can be opened in order to place a rodent inside the tire. The theory is that any time the critter uses the inside of the tire like an exercise wheel he will be reducing the amount of energy needed from the engine to produce rotational torque.

The concept is sound in theory. Early experiments, however, soon demonstrated some flaws. I started with hamsters, since they are the creatures we most commonly associate with exercise wheels. The first problem I encountered was that the ventilation holes in the hubcap which were designed to prevent the hamster from suffocating inside of the tire, also allowed the tire’s air pressure to escape. As the pressure inside the tire stabilized with the atmospheric pressure outside, the tire sidewalls tended to deform. The resultant deflation of the tire would effectively disrupt the structural integrity of the hamster component. In layman’s terms, I ended up with hamster pancakes inside of a set of flat tires.

To solve that problem, I designed a set of rigid hollow tires with a tubular titanium alloy core. The prototypes were rather expensive, but I successfully eliminated the deflation issue without compromising the tire’s internal ventilation capability. However, the glitches were far from over.

Upon my next test, I discovered that hamsters can’t exercise fast enough to keep up with a tire’s normal highway speed. As the vehicle accelerated past a hamster’s average sprinting velocity, (which I calculated to be approximately 3.8 rpm) they would quickly succumb to fatigue. As soon as they stopped running, the momentum would summersault them into its vortex and ricochet them around inside the revolving tire like a Twinkie in a Laundromat dryer. Upon termination of the test, I opened the hubcap to discover an evenly distributed fine hamster paste coating the inside of the tire. This proved to use up my hamster resources far too quickly to achieve the cost savings that I had hoped.

I now was faced with a dilemma. Should I try to breed a line of super hamsterdroids capable of running for long distances at the requisite rotational speed necessary to linearly propel a vehicle at 70 mph, or should I try a different breed of animal altogether? Since my laboratory was not set up for genetic engineering, I opted for the latter. I just had to come up with a very fast animal.

By a brilliant stroke of luck, that very day I happened to receive an e-mail from a certain “Dr. Isiko Yerima with the Office of the Co-ordinator, Nigerian National Wildlife Preserve”. He was pleased to send his greetings to me, and he offered an urgent business proposal. He wrote, “I know this letter will definitely come to you as a surprise package, I actually came about when i was browsing through the internet and searching for a reliable, trustworthyand confidential partner who can transact this business with us pertaining to the utmost prudence and discretion.”

Naturally, I felt quite honored by his trust. He politely explained how he and his former associate, Jordan Caruthers had founded a charitable trust dedicated to rehabilitating wounded and orphaned wildlife who had been the victims of brutal poachers in Gashaka-Gumti National Park. Tragically, the Trust had to dissolve, after Jordan had been attacked and severely hacked by machetes while trying to fend off poachers who had trapped a baby penguin with the intention of dehydrating and selling its eyeballs on the black market for an aphrodisiac.

Although all of his personal resources had been drained paying for Mr. Caruther’s hospital bills until he expired from his injuries, Dr. Yerima had been able to find homes for all of his “precocious wildlives” with the exception of a pair of adolescent cheetah cubs that the local authorities had marked for euthanasia. He had bottle fed them from cubs and could not bear to see them slaughtered. Would I kindly accept his offer to take charge of the orphans for their safety until arrangements could be finalized for their admittance to the San Diego Zoo?

For the trouble of providing a safe house for his babies he would remit to my personal bank account 70% of the $18 million remaining in escrow for the feed and upkeep of the animals. If I was interested and could assist in the transaction, would I kindly fax him complete information on the bank account where I wanted the funds wired, along with copies of my birth certificate, social security card and all my credit cards front and back? “Please,” he concluded, “I want you to reply very quickly before Tuesday; else I will be force to find another alternative. As soon I receive the requested documentation, I will ship the cheetahs by FedEx the next day. May God bless your family and you most lugubriously.”

That sounded like a good deal. Cheetahs are the fastest animals on earth. I would be able to use them for fuel saving experiments until it came time to send them to San Diego. If one of my tests proved too much for them, I could claim that they hadn’t survived the FedEx trip. Meanwhile I would have all that money to expand my research laboratory and invest in more cheetahs and titanium alloys and whatnot. I felt a little guilty for taking advantage of a nice Nigerian guy like this, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if he did find out I had scammed him, what could he do about it?

It’s been three weeks since I faxed him my documentation. I guess it takes FedEx longer to ship from Nigeria than Dr. Yerima estimated. He’s probably not used to sending cheetahs to Alaska. I’m not discouraged. I have been putting the time to good use while I wait. Clearly the cheetahs won’t fit into my hamster sized tires, so I had to make a special set of tires for them. Then I had to install a lift kit on my mini van so the tires would fit. Even if the experiment doesn’t pan out, I’m going to have one awesome looking Monster Truck!

It’s a real nuisance doing all this work without power tools, but I don’t think I’ll be paying the light bill until I get my hands on those escrow funds. For the last three weeks, the bank keeps calling and telling me that my account is overdrawn. Even my credit cards somehow got maxed out. The only explanation I can think of is that my wife must have screwed up the checkbook ledger again. That woman has no money sense! Maybe I should pawn her necklace.
 

Index of Chinook Articles