This may be the heaviest bulletin you have ever held!

Long ago, half a lifetime for me, I was in college at Kent State University studying to be a chemist. To get a degree in such a thing, I was required to also master the basics of other related studies, such as math, biology, and physics. Ah Physics. What a fun discipline; you get to theorize, predict, and experiment to prove the theory. One of the things we got to play with involved weights and measures.

We had a balance that was extremely sensitive. You just about drop an eyelash hair on there and it would tip to one side. Our teacher joked he would use it to weigh our test papers beforehand, individually, and then once again after we turned them in. The more pencil lead on the page, he told us, the more it would weigh. The more it weighed, the higher the grade. The bummer came in when he told us no doodles or scribbling was allowed, though - only pencil marks directly related to our class.

We all got together and thought about what we could do, and boy did we come up with some great ideas. My paper had my full names, "Randall Eric Crihfield". I put on there the date, the time (in various styles, such as Julian and Gregorian, military and standard). I included the classroom location, the University address, and longitude and latitude.

For each of the story. problems, I drew elaborate pictures. So if the problem said something about a train leaving a station at such and such time I made sure to draw a picture of the train, the station, the clock, etc. And at the end, I made sure to sign my name (my FULL name) as well as Q.E.D. statements for each problem (and made sure to include the "." characters in between.

Our teacher thought he was so funny, because even though we all did this the papers didn't get any heavier! He claimed that we were merely staining the paper, and that even if a paper was stained blue vs bleached white it would weigh the same. He said "Your words, no words, are really all that heavy." What!?!?!?!

I disagree with that. Some of the heaviest things in the world are words, and spoken or written they can crush us under their weight. So consider these well known and perhaps not so well known quotes:

"Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?"

"Let me die with the Philistines."

"Wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the LORD is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy?"

"Thou art the man."

"MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN."

"Hang him thereon."

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

"But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us." "Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice."

"I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Randy