1st place in Derby #92: Steampunk, with 1691 votes!

To hear R. Kelly tell it, all that’s required for flight is “belief.” Fiddle-faddle and crumble-cake! What a viscous wad of phlegm-flagm! To break gravity’s bonds, one must spend long hours toiling at research and development! One must calculate thrust and drag! One must scour the market-places for exotic chemical components! One must conquer chemistry, master metallurgy, and develop a facility with physics!

If simple “belief” were all that were required—belief that one could “touch the sky”—why, every cubic foot of domestic airspace would be jammed with delusional, drunken hoboes! Every Wally Wing-nut and Gerhard Schnobble would be flitting about like so many titmice!

No, it takes much more than simply believing. It takes discipline! Expertise! Diligence!

Also, it takes special pants, which are resistant to high temperatures on the outside, and resistant to… shall we say… “the physiological response to dangerous experimental flight” on the inside.

Wear this shirt: to keep your jet-pack shoulder-straps from chafing bare skin.

Don’t wear this shirt: during your arrest on COPS. For one thing, we don’t need that kind of publicity. For another thing, the dress code for arrestees on COPS is no shirt.

This shirt tells the world: “I think about it every night and day.”

We call this color: Black To The Drawing Board

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