THE BIG KABONG
by John Henry Carrozza
Since the beginning of time, man has wondered where he came
from, why he was here, and where he could get his rayon cleaned without
fear of shrinkage. While some of these questions have been answered to
mankind's satisfaction, every day new developments are changing the way
man views the universe and leading to even more questions and early
morning talk shows. Before Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, people
had to nail things down so they would not fly off into space. And before
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, nobody was related. Now we have the
revelation by a team of Norwegian scientists (although, technically, the
point guard was born in Sweden) that the very core of all existence can be
traced to the "Big Bang." This theory, which suggests that our universe was
brought into existence by an explosion of matter out of antimatter, is widely
accepted as a plausible explanation by experts in numerous time zones,
although many argue that it still doesn't explain bureaucrats. There remain,
however, several points of fact concerning this prime instant of time that
still meet with a good deal of derision.
Many argue over what there was before the Big Bang. There are
those who say that there was only black nothingness, and a sub-school of
those who believe that there was mostly black nothingness and the
remainder banana pudding. This later group partially stakes its claim on a
comment made by Einstein concerning the era before time began, which he
described as "a kind of squishy place."
Another point of debate is over when this event occurred. A group
of scientists in Lisbon say there is solid evidence that the Big Bang took
place on a Tuesday, at around 3:00 P.M. Their opposition comes mainly
from a school headed by Morris Stiedelberg, a German physicist/chef, who
insists that the event transpired on the morning of February 23rd, 1862.
The Lisbon team has adamantly defended its position, ridiculing Stiedelberg
openly and calling his theory "ludicrously idiotic." In one column in the
May 1987 edition of the World Physicists Journal, the Lisbonites asked
Stiedelberg: " … what about the Renaissance? All of those paintings were
painted in the 1500s. And what about Rome? And Egypt? All of recorded
history disproves your sophomoric theory." When asked for a rebuttal on a
timely "Meet the Press," Stiedelberg replied, "Oh, they're just jealous."
Unfortunately, the negative publicity surrounding the theory turned many
faithful away from the school, and Stiedelberg soon lost most of his
support, although his fervor towards his theory never faltered. "What do
they know?" He criticized his traitors. "Most of them weren't even born
then!" Yet while Stiedelberg faded out of fashion, the Lisbonites met up
with still more friction from several other schools, notably the Thursday
Group of Oslo, and so the debate rages on.
In addition to the timing of the primal event, its location has become
yet another hot topic among scholars the world over. Dr. Elton Franks of
Harvard’s School of Elemental Psychology developed a theory which
placed the exact location where the Big Bang occurred at a point not in
space, but within the collective mind of every being who ever existed or
ever will exist in the universe. “It’s merely a matter of perception,” he
recently stated at a dinner at the home of his bowling partner, Doug. “If
nobody believed that the universe existed, then it wouldn’t really exist at
all,” he claimed. When Doug replied to his friend’s statements by saying
that he had no idea what he was talking about, Franks canned the theory in
favor of his newest model, which places the occurrence in a glass of rye
whiskey at a small tavern in Boston, Massachusetts. The most promising
news on this front, however, came in 1994 when Devon Wyman, an
amateur deep space photographer, accidentally captured an image on film
which he claimed showed the location of the Big Bang, which was clearly
marked by a signpost identifying it as such. Unfortunately, the photographs
and negatives were destroyed during a freak fire in Wyman’s pants, and
later attempts to locate the spot via telescope have turned up only a signpost
reading, “Coming Soon: The Mall of the Universe.”
Even the name of the genesis is being questioned by some scientists.
While the event has long been billed the "Big Bang," Dr. Pembrick Schist, a
professor of molecular acoustics at Berkeley, says his studies of the
phenomenon indicate that the initial explosion would have generated a
sound more closely resembling a "Kabong!" then a "Bang!" The only real
opposition to this stance has come from a man in South Bentonridge, New
Jersey, who claims that the sound was identical to that of two squirrels
singing "I'll Be Home for Christmas." The theory was widely ignored until
the man claimed to have an actual recording of the event from the time it
occurred; although this was later disreputed when, upon careful listening,
there could be heard a barely audible snickering and an occasional passing
car. Meanwhile, as early as 1949, Einstein concluded at a talk in Bonn that
it was "a kind of squishy sound."
