Monday, Feb 8 2010

4:15 AM

You know what’s gross? Anything if you have enough of it.

If you will, let me introduce Cigarettes scalar theory of grossness.

An example:

This is a regular hamburger from a fast food joint. The odds are simply overwhelming that if you are on the internet you have eaten this kind of food before. It’s not super delicious looking unless you’re hungry. But as long as you don’t think to hard about it then it should go down fine.

This is a seven stack burger. Same basic ingredients just a couple more of them. Now there are super meat eating people out there and this still might have some appeal. Maybe you work construction or something and can afford 4000 calories a day? But to most people this is no longer something they want to eat, regardless of whether you think about it very long, and especially if you start to pick it apart and really look at the thing up close.

Behold! A 100 stack burger! Again, the same basic constituents. Only by vastly increasing the scale we can now sense the grossness particles with the naked eye. That is to say what was once only a buttery sheen is now clearly a trench full of grease the likes of which could hold off an advancing army. From this experiment we can demonstrate that the gross wave emissions from the ingredients must be acting in a sympathetically harmonic manner which increases the disgustingness of the product in an exponential fashion. At least to a point.

I haven’t tested this with all substances but having worked in the catering industry I’ve vetted the idea with nearly every conceivable type of food. Chicken salad for example becomes gross at any level over two pounds, but a standard soup would require that no less than 5 square feet in view, less if it’s sloshing. During certain states even non organic matter can produce this effect. For example there’s just something off putting about seven or eight wet garbage bags. My projection however is that as long as the amounts involved in reaching the grossness jumping off point don’t exceed human comprehension then the theory will hold.

-Cigarettes