The Tiny Black Hole of Screws

Greetings fellow Earthlings! I use our universal planetary salutation as a way to introduce the topic of dangerous “cosmic elementals,” as Riley Martin puts it. Within the last week we have been buzzed by near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14, had 200,000 square feet of glass in Chelyabinsk shattered by the shockwave from the exploding Chebarkul meteorite, and been galvanized by reports of fireballs over San Francisco, Florida, and Cuba. The one over S.F. might have been an incomplete Colin Kaepernick pass returning to earth.

It seems as if we are living in some kind of galactic shooting gallery. But I have observed another far more sinister form of cosmic elemental at work: The Tiny Black Hole of Screws.

Here’s how I discovered this anomaly.

I was replacing a tail light bulb on my wonderful SAAB Sport Combi on a beautiful Saturday afternoon several weeks ago. This is a simple task: remove two Torx fasteners, remove the plastic tail lamp housing, swap old bulb for new, replace the plastic tail lamp housing, retighten the Torx fasteners. Even a ham-handed interloper like myself should be able to do this. All went according to plan ( well, I did pulverize one of the bulbs...) until I dropped one of the Torx fasteners and just like that...it vanished.

Gone, disappeared, evanesced, evaporated, dematerialized...

I looked everywhere, inside the car, on the ground, in the grass.

It just...went...poof! I looked for a half an hour and found nothing. Needless to say, my search was punctuated by colorful muttered curses, and unanswered pleas to God for mercy. 

I went to the SAAB dealer in the hope that they would be able to sell me a replacement, and the guy at the parts counter was able to do so ($5.50!!!) all the while keeping a straight face. But I was still as amazed as I was annoyed. The Torx fastener had fallen all of six inches and just ceased to exist in the corner of our totality occupied by myself.

And why did SAAB insist on using Torx fasteners to begin with? SAAB’s slogan used to be “Built in Trollhatton by Trolls.” Are Trolls incapable of using a Phillips screwdriver? Every screw on the SAAB is a Torx fastener. Even the license plates are screwed on by Torx fasteners. No matter how elaborate your toolkit, you will be reduced to sobs of impotence unless you buy a set of drivers to fettle these devilish inventions.



I know it looks kind of like a Star of David but let’s not get distracted.

Last night I had another mysterious fastener disappearance.

I was setting up my camera on my tripod. I was trying to screw the tripod shoe onto the bottom of the camera. Once attached, this is what secures the camera to the tripod. I was fumbling away when again...I dropped the screw.

But this time was different!! I saw the flash!! It was the Tiny Black Hole of Screws!!

It was just a tiny flash as the screw was pulled across the event horizon and was being torn apart by the massive gravitational forces at work inside the  Tiny Black Hole of Screws. Once I worked out what had just happened, I instantly knew what had happened to my long lost Torx fastener. It too had been ripped from this part of space time by the Tiny Black Hole of Screws. It had traveled through the worm hole, and probably materialized on some alien world, perhaps OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, just discovered in orbit around red dwarf star OGLE-2005-BLG-390L, just 21,500 ± 3,300 light years from our solar system. 

What if the Tiny Black Hole of Screws was sucking up dropped fasteners from all over the Earth? Can you imagine the hail of screws just from India and China raining down on some metagalactic plane?

I then began to worry. I used to watch Star Trek “Deep Space Nine” and knew that a possibly murderous alien society might inhabit the part of the space time continuum at the other end of the worm hole and they might be pissed to a fare thee well about all these fasteners just showering down on their dimension. They might be able to use the Tiny Black Hole of Screws to invade our sector of the cosmos and get all up in our grille. They would probably be pretty small though.

Then-there was another tiny flash, and I saw my tripod screw lying on the carpet about six feet away. I had looked there before, with a flashlight, and there was no screw there five minutes earlier!! Thank Jupiter I found it though, because these tripod screws are as rare as snake bunions, and I would have been royally screwed without it: no screw, no camera on tripod, a difficult day ahead.

So I have learned that I have to take better care of my screws. There is no telling when the Tiny Black Hole of Screws will open and again suck a fastener off to some void. Riley Martin says that the Biavians have promised to protect us from large scale random planetary threats like asteroids, but we are otherwise on our own. 

Adrift in my own ocean of emptiness,

Tom