#1048 – Dump

I still remember having those old fashioned metal garbage cans. Those things were such a pain to drag out to the curb. The lid would get rattled off halfway down the driveway and so you needed to make a second trip to retrieve it. Why the heck did it take so long for wheels to be a commonly built in?

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20 thoughts on “#1048 – Dump”

  1. PsychoDuck says:

    Shame on you, Biff! Well, knowing his luck, the cosmic garbage will one day reap its revenge.

    “ATTACK OF THE SPACE DETRITUS” – COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

    The Duck Has Spoken.

  2. linuxxorcist says:

    When china shot down one of it;s defunct satellites, it crated enough flying wreckage to destroy every man made object ever put in space, but there’s so much, well, space up there that everything misses everything else by thousands of miles, wired has a good article on the problem of space trash:
    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_space_junk/

  3. Mewthicus says:

    The answer you seek, Chris, is simply that it took effort to put wheels on a trashcan, and no one wants to take that kind of time out of their schedule. Like the woodsman with the dull ax that didn’t have the time to sharpen his ax, but would take the extra time needed to cut down a tree with a dull blade.
    Lazy humanity.

  4. baughbe says:

    In college I did a paper on the problem of space debris. Did you know that one of the shuttles landed with a hole in the wing bigger than a tennis ball due to collision with a tiny particle? Orbital speeds are very high. So unless you are going in the same direction, any debris around you is passing you by at speeds much higher than a bullet. Imagine taking a bowling ball to the top of the worlds highest building and tossing it off. Imagine the damage when it hits ground. In space at orbital speeds, a tiny ball bearing will do more damage than that bowling ball. So Biff, Shame on you. But then again, can you aim for (censored by the Homeland Security division of WalMart)?

  5. Wizard says:

    Don’t sweat it, PsychoDuck. All we have to do is shoot matching garbage back at it.

  6. DtLe says:

    “Why the heck did it take so long for wheels to be a commonly built in?” The same reason it took so long for people to make upside-down ketchup bottles.

  7. MaskedMan says:

    At least Biff is working on that global warming issue – The clouds o’ trash will eventual occlude significant amounds of solar radiation… Oh, wait – He’d have to be up there a LONG time for that to work. 🙁

  8. Ralf says:

    Well, the need for wheels wasn’t obviated until lazy kids decided they weren’t able to lift the trash can off the ground, like it was designed to be! ;D

    I still have those good, old fashioned aluminum monsters. As an adult, I find them very easy to lift, mostly because their capacity allows them to hold only a small volume of garbage (i.e. 2-3 bags). This, combined with their small profile, allows each to be easily lifted by its handles and carried to the curb, rather than dragged.

  9. bold says:

    Actually you’re supposed to roll them too, just sideways, the lid has a round knob for holding it down while it’s turning.

  10. Sisshi says:

    While they may have been heavy and annoying, they were fantastic for putting in fireworks and watching things go nuts. Well according to my dad who had them anyways.

  11. grapy says:

    i hate trash day too because you have to kick the wheel bar down and then push it down a sloped driveway plus i have do that twice every
    wens day i have to do it though i think the worst part of trash day is that we have to fill a trash bag and the post trash day grump i call my sister

  12. noname says:

    Space Week!

  13. Cari says:

    @ Ralf–Apparently you don’t mind the big clunky garbage can hitting you in the shins as you walk down to the curb. My wheeled trash can and I don’t miss that one bit.

  14. Anon says:

    Wow, lotta lazy people; every time I need to take the trash out, I have to load a bunch of barrels and bags into a truck and drive ten minutes to then offload and dump it all myself, and not one of my barrels has wheels on it. Enjoy your curbside pickup folks.

  15. soilent says:

    When the next big scale war is over, they will have dumped so much debris into the orbit that it will take generations until we can fly into space again.
    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome for clarification.

  16. Ralf says:

    @ Cari – It doesn’t strike me at all, I hold it steady as I walk. Also, nothing beats the classic, Oscar the Grouch feel of metal cans.

  17. linuxxorcist says:

    @soilent, there’s actually an interview with Kessler in the wired article i linked earlier, on his opinion on the Chinese ASAT missile test and the iridium satellite collision over Siberia

  18. Chris says:

    @Ralf – It was kind of hard to lift those cans as a kid when the handles were practically at shoulder height.

  19. Madrak says:

    this reminds me of a theory that a piece of space debris will hit a satellite or the ISS and destroy it (because debris is moving faster than bullet speed in space), causing more debris, which will destroy more space objects. This process will continue until Earth is entirely without functional satellites, surrounded instead by a deadly cloud of randomly orbiting space junk. The bottom line is that this cloud makes space inaccessible to us Earthlings for a very long time, because anything we send up will be shot full of holes by the flying debris, and proper “armor” would be too heavy to carry into space.

    Bad Biff – increasing the chance of catastrophe! 😛

  20. greenhouse says:

    We still have a couple metal garbage cans, the two of them are held in a rolling cart, so that was never a problem for us.

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