The Matt Lisac Thing.

Ducks are an animal that have been around since the dinosaurs died.  Some people think that’s just a coincidence, but others believe ducks were the cause.  Ducks are really adept at scavenging food, especially food that dinosaurs used to eat.  Also, the duck’s size is to its advantage, as it is considerably more small than the most famous of dinosaurs, the Tyranosaurus Rex.  Tyranosauri Rexium (plural), or, T-Rexes, had really big mouths, with a lot more teeth than the duck.  Which made it harder to taste the difference between nuts and grubs, which are the main dietary staples for both.  T-Rexes are the awesomest of all dinosaurs, real OR fake.    To fully explain how a duck works, you would first need to understand flight, which will be covered in Episode 5.

The staple is a practical bit of magic that almost anyone can use.  The machine called “Stapler” acts as the staple enabler.  That’s how the stapler got its name: staple(enable)r.  The staple’r was invented in 1767 by a young Turk from Hungary named Alfred von Lastname.  He found that if you tied a string of solid lead  through the holes in several papers, you cured the headache of organizing papers, but also caused the headache of lead poisoning.  Hence the need for the stapler.  The staple uses friction and gravity to “hold” several “sheets” of paper together.  You cannot put a staple in the middle of a page because of Newton’s Seventh Law of Stationary.  Staples come in a variety of sizes, but mostly people just use “standard staple” size, because of a government mandate in the Reagan years.

Hurricanes are big wind circles that start in the ocean and end on land.  Wind is the enemy of the ocean, and so the ocean tries to push hurricanes toward hills and trees where the wind feels more comfortable.  Hurricane winds can reach up to 200km/h, which is not quite as fast as a child’s sneeze.  This is why you can’t catch a cold from a hurricane, so that’s good news.  Most people who say that hurricanes are dangerous live on the coast, and they’re just mad because the ocean  is usually pretty nice to them, bringing them bottles with letters in them, and wet logs, and Swedish piano players.

Tides in oceans and seas happen because of the moon.  When there is a full moon, the oceans come up, because the moon is at its biggest.  Then they slowly recede as the moon gets smaller.  (Gravity is relative to mass.)  The most dangerous time is during a lunar eclipse, which is when the earth sits on top of the moon, and the oceans go all crazy, causing tsunamis and tidal waves.  Tides make blue whales sea-sick, because blue whales are very sensitive to ups and downs.