The Universal Theory of Underwear

I have, through observation, developed a proposal of underwear. Ferlinghetti wrote a poem about it, title, not surprisingly, "Underwear." (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171600) I wrote a poem about underwear on a clothesline, somewhat inspired by Ferlinghetti, called "My Neighbour's Underwear," to which I can't give a link, because nobody thinks it's important enough to steal and put on-line. (sob)I won't inflict it upon my Gentle Readers here and now (the book it's in, Loser's Day is A$20, including postage, for Australians, and US$22 for our American cousins, £12 for those in the UK) except to say that it deals with underwear on a clothesline, which is part of the origin of my thesis.

You see, I have a method of hanging out clothes where the underwear goes on the smallest line, right in close to the spindle (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, look up "Hill's Hoist" on Wikipedia). I search through the washing basket to find all the underwear, because after I start hanging clothes on the other lines, it's inconvenient to go back to the little inside one; wet washing smacks you in the face.

I carefully search through the washing basket to find all the underwear, so that I can hang them up all at once, and then I hang up everything else, the jeans, the shirts, the kilts, the aprons, etc, beyond them. No matter how I search, there is always at least one piece of underwear that turns up later, forcing me back through the wet washing to hang it on the inside. 

I know I could hang it on the outside, but, hell; a method is a method, and consistency is all. And no, I am not OCD; I just have this little method of hanging up washing.

Which leads me to enunciate the Universal Theory of Underwear: there is always another pair of knickers.

It's not only in hanging up the washing that I have observed the proof of this; when taking washing out of the clothes' basket to put into the washing machine, there will always be a pair of knickers lying at the bottom to creep out and wave its elastic at you when the machine has gone into its first cycle and the door cannot be opened. When I throw out old clothes, something which my wife insists I should do more often, there will always be a piece of underwear hiding in an inaccessible corner that jumps back out after I have taken everything down to the charity clothing bin. Generally, it's a black pair with elastic that has turned into a sort of drippy goo.

This is not only observed in the; out in the wild, you can often see knickers that have escaped domestication and returned to the wild of pub car parks on Sunday morning, or blowing along the sands of the beach, unoccupied and carefree. You can sometimes see them lurking in bushes after a neighbour's late-night party. They erupt onto stages at rock concerts (or Tom Jones, which is not the same thing, boyo, and I have applied for funding to do a statistical analysis of this phenomenon when the Rolling Stones come back to Perth in 2015. I am sure that there are more knickers thrown than can possibly emerge from the mosh pit.

This brings up a corollary of the Universal Theory of Underwear; how far can knickers be thrown? I intend to conduct a series of experiments, first in the laboratory, then in the wild. Knickers of different fabric, weight, cut etc. will be hurled from a small catapult with varying degrees of force, and the distance to where they land carefully measured. The next stage of the experiment is to engage volunteers to throw the knickers, and then to progress to in-situ experimentation, where a number of these same volunteers, at varying distances from the stage, bombard Mick 'n Keef with knickers at the concert, their accuracy and range carefully measured by telemetry. 

And so science marches on! At the end of the universe, when the big crunch occurs, or the big stasis, or the heat death, there will be a pair of knickers peeping out from the ashes of a dead star, ready to begin the next big bang.

What does this have to do with whisky? The worst whisky I have ever tasted came from the island of Lombok, in Indonesia. I really can't remember the name, but I bought it out of curiosity, not really expecting a great deal from a whisky made on an island where Islam is the predominant religion. I was right to expect little of it. What I did not expect was just how little.

In Pompeii, one can see the laundry, where clothing was bleached using urine. Next to the door are the pots where people were invited to relieve themselves. By far the best urine for bleaching was camel urine, and it commanded quite a high price. Somehow those Lombok distillers had achieved a liquid which rivaled camel urine. It tasted like camel urine that had been strained through a crocodile's jockstrap, hence the connection with underwear. It was a wonder that it did not etch the bottle. It was so bad that I could not even try to drink more after the first sip, so I brought it home. I later used it to kill some weeds. It was far more effective than glycophosphate.

Next time I might talk about some good whisky.

Bye