The Ball Bearing Incident

“You like sticking stuff up your arse don’t you?” asked someone recently. I can’t remember if it was family or friends who asked that. Sounds like Sarah (my sister), she’s very competitive and likes to playfully embarrass me when she can. Due to some very complicated stuff she was the ‘acting’ eldest of the siblings until we met, she 14, me 15, and she thought she was the matriarch of the family. She was unaware that there was a hidden ‘silver back’ amongst the siblings (Me! And I do mean that quite literally now, I have hair on my back and it is silver, only it doesn’t look quite as eloquent on me as it does a Gorilla). This makes her very competitive and I love her very much.

Any road, I got asked this because whoever was asking knew about my little story, a story of which I could only disclose when I was 28, 17 years after the incident. I nearly became a genius and then blew it all by having a little accident.

When I was 11 I used to have a round magnet that had a groove in it. Someone had dumped a hifi speaker in the woods where we played and I, knowing that these things contained magnets, had smashed the speaker to bits using rocks to extract it. When I took the magnet home I tested its strength against anything that reacted with magnetism, Iron Filings, the TV, the Cat (didn’t work!) but most impressively, a ball bearing about 20mm in diameter. When I positioned the ball bearing at one end of the magnet it quickly darted across the groove to the other side, no electricity or gravity involved. (See diagram below).


The Magnet and Ball Bearing

 I had had a conversation with my dad several nights prior to ‘the incident’ about perpetual motion. He had told me that no one had come up with a solution to it so far and I was determined to. In fact, several weeks earlier I had solved the Rubiks Snake in a dream, got up out of bed, went downstairs and did it. Maybe the solution to perpetual motion would be gifted to me in a dream like the Rubiks Snake was?

In bed one night I was playing with the magnet and ball bearing thinking about perpetual motion and my mind wandered over to public transport. Maybe, on a much larger scale of course, my magnet/ball bearing could be made into a very efficient form of public transport? The ball would obviously have to be hollow to fit people inside. And then to prevent people from being thrown about all over the place as the ball traversed the magnet you would need 2 hollow balls, one smaller than the other and inside the larger ball, and then separated by a special liquid. The inner ball would need a counter weight to stop it from moving. (See diagram below).

Cross Section of the Large Ball

I sleep naked, always have done and always will. I was laying on my front when I was thinking about this and at the time, unconsciously I add, I was rolling the ball bearing along the crack of my arse. At some point in the proceedings I applied a little pressure to the ball bearing and it shot up my anus. My arsehole was like a very hungry fish and trust me, once grabbed by your anus you can’t retrieve such a thing.

I’ve always been relatively good with physics, but biology doesn’t interest me, in fact I’ll go one step beyond that, I don’t like it. I don’t even like some of the names they give to organs. So slightly panicked by this, thinking that the ball bearing would travel up to my heart and get lodged there, I ran down stairs crying and stated to my unsympathetic stepmother, “I’ve got a ball bearing stuck up my bum!”. The room filled with laughter.

I remember taking the following day off school. I watched Blue Hawaii starring Elvis (a slight hero of mine at the time, God knows what he must have thought of me!) and I remember eating some noodles that tasted like crap. I then poo-ed into a tub and checked that the ball bearing had exited my system, it had.

Needless to say the transport system didn’t get built and I gave up on perpetual motion.