The Ten Ton Snakes of Tlön

One of the less entertaining Savage adventures is the Ten Ton Snakes. Its a struggle over a quantity of material, believed to be a meteorite, that has enormous density. At hundreds of pounds a cubic centimeter its not neutronium, but definitely not from here on earth. Some prospectors found it in the jungles of Brazil, and were forced by the force of narrative inevitability to become crazed gangsters. Unlike a lot of these cases the peculiar property - the density -  of the material wasn't even exploited as a weapon.*

I wouldn't be bringing this up if I hadn't found something interesting. I was reading Jorge Luis Borges classic Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius when I noticed a reference to an object found in Brazil:
"...along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die...A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground...I remember that its weight was intolerable..."

In passing he remarks "These small, very heavy cones(made from a metal not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön."

Borges account hails from the 1940's, and I have tentatively placed the Ten Ton Snakes as being in 1945-1946 period. TTS  has a weak ending that seems to state that Savage et al. hung around the jungle for a few days until they were rescued, and that Renwick toyed with the ultradense material a little, but didn't seem much use in it.  It would have been a much more interesting story if the material was linked to an intrusion of the parasitical plane of existence Tlön,  and the time spent until their 'rescue' pushing it back.


While it seems odd in retrospect that Savage never fought metaphysical  threats (With the the exception of the Thing in the cave at Quoddy Bay), I always figured this was due to the fact that any adventure that didn't involve two-fisted action would not have been very interesting to the audience of the day. Its not clear how Tlön's grim plan of reality replacement could be interfered with, but certainly there would have been nothing that could have been punched or blown up. But if a metaphysical scalpel was needed to slice Tlön's  infection free from this world, I daresay there would have been few people better qualified to wield it than our favorite Action Scientist slash Surgeon.

I would certainly read ' Doc Savage vs Tlön '!

*Although if it was collapsium, then I imagine it would have some weird electronics properties. Would collapsing a atom's electron shell around its nucleus make it a perfect insulator? Or would it have a disastrous breakdown voltage where it un-collapsed at around the speed of light, vaporizing the material and a good chunk of the nearby landscape?

Soylent tastes like despair

Tried Soylent today, and discovered it tasted exactly what's wrong with this century: bland, chalky and mediocre.
Humanity has thousands of years of cooking expertise, guys, couldn't you get it to taste like something interesting?
Or is its wallpaper-paste impression part of the concept?

Even Bass imagined that the Nebish's algae-based foods would be flavored calories.

And on kind of a side note, why is the blank white bottle wrapped in a blank white plastic wrapper of a different plastic type, expressly to make recycling difficult? 

All in all, I expected something other than a bottle of un-sugared Boost  wrapped in a neo-Modernist idea of a joke. Come on guys! This is the 21st century! I am open to the idea of an engineered, nutritious foodstuff. So why make a cliche? Everyone expects engineers to make boring crap; I expected you to at least be able to improve on  Pablum!*
 
I never thought anyone would make something more boring to eat than cheap tofu, but I guess I have been proven wrong again. I won't say a bottle of bull semen would have been more entertaining to drink (unless I was watching someone else to drink it) but I am pretty sure that if I mashed up a handful of vitamin pills into some almond milk it would have been more memorable.

Flavors, guys. Mouth feel.
You know that there is these things called vegetables that have all sorts of amazing flavors and nutrients? While I get the impression the designers grew up on chicken nuggets and Cheerios*, I am sure they must have encountered something with a savory taste, even if its accidentally before they became legal adults that could choose what they put in their mouths.


* TL;DR , invented in 1931.
**Which are neither cheerful or cheer-inducing.

RIP

"Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way,
our universe, all the stars that have names are dead.
Vast is the night.

 How you have grown, dear Night, walking your empty halls, how tall!"

 --Robinson Jeffers, 'The Double Axe'