I am a super sleuth.
from cnn.com article “Full swimming pool stolen”:
Daisy Valdivia is annoyed that someone stole her backyard pool — and baffled at how they did it without leaving behind a splash, drip or trace of the 1,000 gallons of water it contained. Valdivia awoke to find her family’s hip-high, inflatable, 10-foot diameter swimming pool gone from her back yard Wednesday. Valdivia told The Record of Bergen County the theft must have occurred between 1 a.m., when her husband went to bed, and 5 a.m., when she awoke. She’s amazed someone could steal the pool that quickly and just wanted to know “what the heck they did with the water,” she said.
This is, clearly, the greatest crime of all time. I will now solve it in 11 steps.
THE FACTS:
1. The missing swimming pool was 10 ft in diameter and contained 1000 gallons of water at the time it was stolen.
2. This water was not dumped at the site, hence they moved both the pool AND the water.
3. all within a 4 hour period.
4. 1000 gallons= 8330 lbs*
5. The average man can deadlift (a term I have never in all my days on this earth used until this moment) a maximum of between 185 - 235 lbs**.
6. If a team of the strongest men*** decided they needed their very own 1000 gallon swimming pool, it would take, at-the-very-least, 36 of them to lift it, with all the water inside. (8330/235 = 35.45)
7. Forklifts and towtrucks and cranes and robots other such machines that have the lift-capacity to carry 8330 lbs are very noisy and would have left track marks in the yard.
8. Where do you find groups of 36 super-strong men, without swimming pools? What do we know about these men?
A. they are very very quiet.
B. they like to swim.
C. they couldn’t afford to purchase their own swimming pool.
9. Equivalent swimming pools on the Interwebs cost around $80.
10. $80 divided 36 ways = $2.22/each, thus each individual member of the 36 super-strong, yet highly-budgeted, thieves had less than $2.21 to their names.
11. How is this possible? How can you survive with only $2.21? How do you buy food? Pay for your home?
THE ONLY LOGICAL CONCLUSION BASED ON THESE INARGUABLE FACTS:
Clearly, the 36 thieves own and operate (hence their strength) a communal farm that provides the food necessary to survive, and the surplus food covers the property cost alone.. not enough to give them more than $2.21 each to spend on the non-essentials, like, say, a swimming pool.
But, why, you wonder, wouldn’t they dump out the water too? Because water isn’t free when you own land.. Their farm is obviously nowhere near a lake or ocean or river or pond. No water in the pool = no swimming and we all know how important swimming is to these men.
I will send my findings to the police so they can start searching land-locked commune-farms for 36 chlorine-smelling, pruny-fingered farmers.
*Gallons into Pounds: Multiply the specific gravity of the liquid by 8.33* (weight in pounds of 1 gallon of water); then multiply this result by the number of gallons, to obtain the weight in pounds: source.
**According to here.
***I can assume that it is a group of men because according to Science ™, women prefer to swim in the ocean, or any body of water influenced by tides/the moon.
Nancy Drew and the Case of the AWESOME. You really need your own detective show with a comically mismatched partner.
Truly, your intellect knows no boundary. I think you personally need to stop them, because this is obviously a plot of James Bond villainesque proportions.
There are several flaws in your plan. Namely, on the physical structures of the pool and the water itself. Firstly, the water. Water sloshes. Even if you were 36 strong ballet or Qi Gong men, the water would probably splash as you attempted to maneuver the pool away to the farm. Especially when picking up the pool. Secondly, you presume that the bottom of the pool is flat and solid. I bet the bottom of that pool was all platic and floppy. Floppy bottomed pools would bulge in the middle when the 36 men try to pick it up. It would be difficult to have some of the 36 men hold the edges while the rest moved to the middle and squatted or laid on their backs or some other un-ergonomic position to lift the bulge. I think that the bottom of the pool would stretch in some weird ways, esp if the men managed to get the pool up into the air. Would some of the men have to walk under the pool to support the said bulge? Perhaps some of these men were short statured? At any rate, I have an alternate proposal: A bunch of people who happened to be on antipsychotic drugs wander into this person’s back yard. The antipsychotics make these people thirsty. One in the party begins drinking, and then another, and then another. There is, in fact, a parade of thirsty individuals on antipsychotics. They are all in a cult and out for a leisurely walk. These fine people are in a cult that stresses silence, so the neighbors don’t really hear them coming. Now, we all know that chlorine has a synergestic effect on some classes of antipsychotic medications. What this means is that a whole shitload of brain chemicals get put out that impair reasoning and make you really happy. Also, chlorine’s threshold of toxicity gets lowered. The happy individuals drink more and more water because they are happy and their judgement is impaired and they can’t tell when their bladders are full. Eventually, though they one by one quietly wander off and die of chlorine poisoning. More quiet cult members come along and drink more and more chlorine. At the end of the line of this procession is the quiet cultmaster and a few stragglers. The cultmaster is thirsty but alas the water is gone. The cultmaster and stragglers notice the bodies in the front yard and they panic, but quietly so. The cultmaster calls some discreetly disguised and rather quiet mondo cultcabs. They wrap the first batch of dead cultfolk in the pool, like a tarp. The rest just get thrown in the other cultmobiles.
This, I tell you, is how it all went down.
Comment #4. This was the first thing I ever read on your blog and I thought it was fantastic. But after meeting you it kind of lost it’s lustre and now I think it’s really just kind of crappy. [juuuust kidding]
And THANKS for the wallet. And all of it’s extra tape. It is really on of the coolest presents *ever*!
McLovin.
tiffany: I spent an extra $0.004 dollars on your wallet… because you are so special!
I used it yeserday. Best.Usable.Art.Ever.
That would be *yesterday*, not yeserday. Although I may have been saying ‘yes’ all day.
[...] amateur CSI-viewer talents, super-sleuth-skills and Science ™ in tow, I felt it necessary to zoom in closer, only to discover that, no, it is [...]