Have you ever cut open a golf ball to see what was inside? Did you name all your Russian nesting dolls? Have you ever tried to recall all the ingredients in a seven-layer dip? Were you obliged to learn the parts of a cell or an eyeball in school? Of course you did. And they all happen to come back again when we get a good look at the layers of the earth below us, courtesy of Randall Munroe at xkcd.
As an aside, my father was both a geology professor and a golf coach. More than once, probably more than I know, he would cut open an old golf ball to demonstrate the earth's layers. The dimpled vinyl was the crust, the rubber band majority of the inside was the mantle, and the liquid-filled rubber ball at the center was the core. Until he got hold of some foreign-made golf balls that had all manner of garbage inside, then he gave up on that idea. (via Nag on the Lake)
LOL! Old golf balls now are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. I'm old enough I would have gone with the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop for the earths center.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was 10 my stepbrother Craig and I cut open a golf ball, using a steak knife. Tip: don't do that; that's the wrong tool for that job. It took a long time and we both were painfully, bloodily cut, though not badly enough to have to tell ma about it. Bandaids and tape and hide the hand at dinner.
ReplyDeleteThe child-lore was that at the center of a golf ball you'd find a special smaller ball full of a super-compressed liquid that you could use for things, like to power a toy jet, or just to pierce it and let it skitter around the porch. We were disappointed. There was a small black ball at the center, sure, but it was solid rubber and it didn't even bounce all that well. At the time (1968) you could get a pretty good little superball from a dime gumball machine and not risk bleeding all over the place.
That was around the same time that we ruined all the back windows of a nearby house under construction with our beebee guns. I got mine from a catalog by selling Christmas cards door-to-door throughout the land like a prodigal salesman from hell.
Marco, you got cut up and bloody plus didn't find what you expected, but you learned valuable lessons that day. Got a good story to boot. That's a win in my book.
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