I Am Treasure Hunting!

After losing all of my treasure to the evil egg king, REX OVUM MUNDI I have had to go out to find some more. Treasure is so important to me. Not because I love wealth and the vast power it offers me. No, not at all. I love TREASURE because it makes me happy. That's all. I love big piles of gems and money and paintings and cars and ships and airplanes and coins and stamps and cattle and land and spaceships and pens and fancy cups and glasses and golden forks and knives and vast estates and giant undersea cities and all the rest just because it makes me smile and giggle to myself. Yes, I do actually also love it that I can buy and do anything in the world I want - that is nice too - but I just like the way all of the treasure looks in great big piles.

To get new treasure I have decided to do it alphabetically this time. Starting with Amber - that interesting mineral that is filled with DNA for creating dinosaurs and other monsters from the past. Too many people get all hung up on the money kind of treasure and forget about the scientific wealth that is all around them. I am not some greedy money-grubbing jerk! No! I am a man of science and refinement and so there are things in this universe that are more precious than money and one of those things is ancient DNA.

Some AMBER from my new TREASURE TROVE before I smashed it to get the fly DNA to put into a WORM!

Not only can it be used to recreate dinosaurs and stuff but you can also mix it with today's DNA to create cool new kinds of life that people might find very fun and interesting! I am such a master and working with DNA that this kind of thing is very easy for me. I just get out some of my amber, break it open with a rock or hammer and take out the DNA. Then I put that DNA into a cell and put that cell into whatever I want to change into a new kind of creature. Then, as the animal (or person!) grows the new DNA changes them by giving them the power of the animal whose DNA I used.

For example, the other day I found some amber with a fly in it. I put the fly DNA into a worm and the next thing I knew I had a flying worm! How cool is that?! What might you want a flying worm for? I can think of a few reasons:

• To use as bait to catch flying fish
• To make it easier for birds to eat without having to land on the ground
• To transport worms more easily over long distances
• To make it possible for worms to get off the ground so they don't drown when it rains
• To make my dream of a "worms on demand" bait delivery service a reality
• To create a new and scary plague (they will be much scarier than locusts!)

Too many rich people forget about what is important in life. The love their treasures (and who wouldn't) but they forget how important it is to think about things from a "360" degree perspective. Not me! I think - first, get some amber, next, get the DNA out of the amber, next, put the DNA into a cell, next, create something new and better. Finally, the world becomes a better place. That is why I love my treasure and why and I working so hard to get it back! Starting today with Amber and working my way all the way to zirconium. I will be too busy doing big things with all of my new treasures to write everything about all of them but I will be writing about some of the most stupendous aspects of my new treasure hunt! You will not want to miss it!

Committed to rebuilding my treasure hoard again, I am . . .

ANDY LAM! 

The Positive Power of SCIENCE!

The birth of LAMLANDIA!

I am so happy today! LamLandia, the country of my fervent dreams, has become a reality! Through careful long-term planning I have secured a nation for myself; but not some conceptual nation of the mind! No, not by a long shot! LamLandia is a physical place in the world and I am its leader! Granted, it’s not the biggest nation in the world, and - in fact - it may be one of the smaller ones but it is mine, all mine!

So where is this nation you ask? Right now it is slowly pulling away from one of Antarctica’s ice shelves and will soon be zooming - with me along with it - around the Roaring 40s! LamLandia will be a stable and self-sufficient nation of the Southern Hemisphere, where it isn’t boiling hot like it is in the Northern Hemisphere! It will have an endless supply of ice for keeping drinks cool and refreshing and it will a great number of penguins to keep the inhabitants of LamLandia entertained and in a good mood!

There will also be plenty of blubber and blubber-related treats to keep everyone on LamLandia “fat and happy,” as they say!

So exactly, did I accomplish this feat? It was all very simple. A few years ago I invented a technique for traveling backward and forward through time by circling the North Pole in either a clockwise of counterclockwise direction. For every time I go around the North Pole counterclockwise I travel back in time by one day. My plan, which has worked flawlessly, was to travel back to the mid-19th century to encourage the development of a carbon-heavy industrial economy, one that was sure to increase certain chemicals in the earth’s atmosphere.

Before I embarked on my plan, I gathered the greatest scientists in history and brought them to my compound. This I did by traveling back to their days by traveling around the North Pole counterclockwise, going to their houses, explaining I was ANDY LAM! and that I was from the future and needed their help. Of course because they were all scientists they were curious and came along with me. Once they were by my side, we went back to the North Pole and zoomed around clockwise until we were back in the current time and I could take them to my compound where they were given something nice to eat and were lodged in a very comfortable science-themed bunkhouse.

Who were these scientists? Oh, only the greatest minds (me included!) ever collected! There was Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Imhotep, Marie Curie, Galileo, Zhang Heng, Euclid, Homi Bhabha, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Momoun Beheiry, Copernicus, Thomas Edison, Heo Jun, Nikola Tesla, Michael Faraday, Heungseon Daewongun, Alexander Graham Nynex, Muhammad Abduh, Niels Bohr, Su Song, Gregor Mendel, Archimedes, Cai Xitao, Max Planck, Jang Yeong-sii, Johannes Kepler, CV Raman, Leonardo da Vinci, Coching Chu, Antoine Lavoisier, Carl Linnaeus, George Washington Carver, Dmitri Mendeleev, Edwin Hubble, Yi Mu, Robert Boyle, Rachel Carson, Ye Duzheng, Robert Hooke, Visvesvaraya, Blaise Pascal, Enrico Fermi, Alessandro Volta, John Dalton, Paul Dirac, Tertullian, Ibrahim Njoya, John Ogbu and me!

As you can imagine, having this many scientists in a room can be a challenge but as soon as I spoke they realized my natural superiority and followed my careful logic and direction! I explained that my goal was to create a new nation - but not a nation of the mind but one of physical fact - and that calving off a chunk of ice from one of the Antarctic ice shelves was the best idea. They all agreed with me. Next we got a bunch of paper and pencils and maps and stuff and began looking at the map of Antarctica. I think it was Euclid who spotted what he thought would be the perfect spot and the rest of the team waited to hear whether I agree. I poured over the papers and data and finally agreed.

Everyone was elated and set to work calculating the best way to have a giant iceberg break off. It was Michael Faraday, I think, who suggested that a small rise in global temperature would probably be enough to weaken some of the natural fissures in the ice to the point that they would break clean through, freeing LamLandia from Antarctica’s grip!

Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver went off into a corner to decide how much the temperature would need to rise and they came back with a number (I can’t share it because I promised not to reveal many of the key details of the science behind my brilliant plan.)

Armed with that number, another working group started working to determine the best way to achieve that temperature rise over time. There were two groups - one that advocated a sudden local warming and another that recommended a slower and more global increase. This became the source of a bitter debate but I, in my wisdom, told them to please be quiet because I needed to think. The rapid local warming may have made sense but it would draw too much attention to itself. I mean how could we explain a localized spike in temperature in one small part of an ice shelf? I couldn’t think of a way to do that so we shelved that plan.

The Gradualists eventually carried the day, thanks to my support, and all of the brains set to work on ways to raise the temperature over time. Because we didn’t want to mess up the flow of history it was decided that we would have to use available technologies to achieve our goal. Yes, I could have travelled to the future to bring back a laser or something but that could through the earth out of balance! Much better to encourage the use of fossil fuels over a long stretch of time and achieve our temperature that way.

This required the teams to go back to their own times and develop ideas and technologies that would lead to the mass exploitation of the earth’s reserves of coal and oil in a relatively compressed timeframe. I knew, from history, that oil would be discovered at Oil Creek in Pennsylvania, for example, and if we could get some big name investors behind it it would take off like wildfire! Coal, too, which had a much longer history, would need to be used A LOT MORE to achieve my end and so we decided that an industrial revolution powered, eventually, by coal, would increase the amount of chemicals and stuff being pumped into the atmosphere.

All of the scientists agreed that this was the smartest thing to do and happily returned to the past to set the wheels in motion! I have been tracking the slow rise in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures for some time now and measuring the cracks in the ice to see when my new nation would be born. It has been a slow process and there have been times when I thought maybe these scientists weren’t so smart after all! But lo and behold! The science of climate change really did work as planned! By pumping massive amounts of CO2, Methane, Chlorofluorocarbons and other neat stuff into the atmosphere for the past 150 years or so the temperature of the world was driven up very gradually so no one noticed and got suspicious and now I, ANDY LAM!, have LamLandia! An ice nation all my own to sail around the Great Southern Ocean in search of fun and adventure!

It really goes to show that if you put your mind to something, no matter how complicated it may seem, you can achieve BIG things! And it you have the GREATEST minds in history in your corner nothing is impossible and nothing can go wrong!

The proud owner of the world’s newest land, I am . . .

ANDY LAM!!!

Cloudward Bound!

A photo of me in the sky like a cloud!

Like most great men, I - ANDY LAM! - often find my inspiration in nature. I do not mean in the way that a 19th century romantic poet may have done (although I am famed both for my romantic nature AND for my wonderful poetry skills) but rather in the way that scientists may find their inspiration in the nature that lays before them. Also like many great men, I have been bitten by the bug of flight but have become BORED with the various approaches available to me: Airplanes? Boring! Kites? Boring! Jetpacks? Boring! Hot air balloons? Boring! Dirigibles? Boring! Helicopters? Boring! Gyrocopters? Boring! Gliders? Boring! Those weird pedal-powered things? Boring! Rockets? NOT boring but also not good for short distances! A bunch of helium balloons? Boring! A flock of birds tied to a basket? Boring!

You see, most of the ways of flying really are boring. But would happen if someone super-smart like me looked at this problem with fresh eyes? Well, that is just what I have done and I have come up with a way to fly that is not boring. First, I thought about boats. The are very heavy and yet they do not sink. I have looked for some reason for this to be the case but after pouring through literally a million books and papers I find no logical explanation for this seemingly impossible fact. Somehow, something that SHOULD sink to the bottom of the sea is able to bob around like an apple in a pail of water. What, I wondered, would happen if you put something in the air that should fall up into the sky and it didn’t fall but floated and bobbed around like an apple in a pail of water? That was the question I set myself to solve.

In looking up in the air I see that there are many things that are heavy that fly around: airplanes, kites, jetpacks, hot air balloons, dirigibles, helicopters, gyrocopters, gliders, those weird pedal-powered things, rockets, helium balloons and birds call came to my mind but they are all boring. I wanted something that wasn’t boring and then it hit me - there are already giant NATURAL things that are in the sky. Do you know what I am talking about? Let me give you some clues: they are white. They are giant. They are fluffy. Yes, if you guessed clouds you would have guessed right! Clouds became my inspiration!

I set out to study clouds. This meant going into the sky. I had to use a boring thing (in this case a flock of birds tied to a basket) to get up to see the clouds up close and personal. The birds flew and flew, I had a whip to make them go but didn’t need to use it, they knew just what I was trying to do and they zoomed me up up up up up up up into the sky to the clouds. There was a really good one that we flew to and I looked at it very closely. I could see that it was truly gigantic, that is was white and it was fluffy. We went into the cloud. It was wet inside and grey. I made a lot of notes in my notebook and told the birds to bring me back to the ground.

When we landed I knew what I needed to do. Step one: Make myself truly gigantic. This was not hard. I simply asked my engineers to make a machine that would make me gigantic. They worked on it for a while and came up with a brilliant idea. They made a machine that had a beam or a ray and when they fired the beam or ray at me I started to grow. I grew and grew and grew and grew and grew until I was the size of a mountain I think. Even though I was big, I was still my normal self and they said my mass to volume ratio or something was perfect for being a cloud. It was true! I could float very easily! I was gigantic and that made me happy.

Next I needed to be white. I don’t mean caucasian but really really white. Guess what? That was super easy too! All I needed to do was get a bunch of White Out (which there is a lot of left over since people switched to writing on computers instead of typewriters!) which I got for a really good price. I stood in the field near my compound and stripped off all of my clothes. My team put ladders all around me so they could reach me since I was so gigantic and they started to paint me with the White Out. It took a very very long time since White Out only comes with a teeny tiny brush and there was a lot of me to cover. They were troopers though and eventually got the job done.

So now I was giant and white. There was only one thing left to do: I needed to be fluffy. Fluffy. Fluffy. What would make me fluffy? Why cotton balls of course! I sent a team of shoppers to the drug store and told them to buy all of the cotton balls they could find. And some glue. They ended up having to go to a lot of drug stores to get enough cotton balls to cover me and make me fluffy like a cloud. They did it though and soon they were back on the ladders gluing the cotton balls all over me! (Now I probably should have thought about this a little harder a little sooner because I could have saved time and money (but I have so much of that that it hardly matters) by thinking of a way to make myself white AND fluffy at the same time and I think the cotton balls could have done that. Live and learn I always say!)

Finally they were done. I was gigantic, white and fluffy - just like a cloud. It was time to test my theory! I jumped as high as I could and, just as I expected, I soared into the sky! I was floating as happily as a cloud, drifting high above the ground. Down on the earth I could see people and cities and trees and roads and buildings and cars and baseball diamonds and football fields and rivers and tennis courts and parking lots and shopping centers and rocks and schools and factories and farms and bridges and ships and trains and everything!! It was amazing!

I floated like this for a long time. I was having the time of my life up there in the sky! When I was bored I decided to come back down to the earth. That was easy too! I just turned over and pointed down and started to “swim” through the sky back to the earth. When I got there I started pulling the cotton balls off. Then I went to the ocean and sat in it to wash off the White Out. Then I asked my engineers to change the machine that made me gigantic so it could make me my normal size again. They twisted a bunch of knobs and flicked a bunch of switches and when the ray or beam hit me this time I shrank back to my normal size. Then I got dressed.

It was a pretty amazing adventure and a pretty amazing scientific achievement. I will probably be on the cover of a bunch of magazines and stuff since I was the person who had the amazing scientific adventure. Sometimes it’s hard to be a great scientist and explorer and adventurer and artist and everything else I am great at but when you get to do something like this - fly in the sky in a way that isn’t boring - it’s all worth it!

Back on the ground but with my head still in the clouds, I am . . .

ANDY LAM!

I’m Not A Cry Baby!

A CRY BABY: NOT ANDY LAM! (I AM NOT A CRY BABY!)

I am in a tizzy! The other day, when I was making my famous BEET TACOS I was cutting up some onions. Onions are a very strange vegetable. They grow under the ground, with green spear-ish leaves that poke out of the ground. For some reason, perhaps because they grow underground, they have a very special property: they make people cry. I think this is because we are supposed to feel guilty about pulling them out of the ground and cutting them. They are the only vegetable that makes people feel so guilty when they cut them that they start to cry. Maybe there are others? I don’t know. I only know that onions make people cry when they cut them.

So there I was, cutting some onions and crying, crying, crying! Just then, Bill-Beau walked by my kitchen window. Bill-Beau is mean. He hangs around the compound even though he knows he isn’t welcome here. When he saw me crying through the window he began to laugh and ran away laughing and saying, “Hey everyone, Andy Lam is a big CRY BABY!” His friends — Chuck, Pizza and Nostril — were right there and they started laughing and shouting and hooting too!

For the rest of the day I could tell people were talking about me, ANDY LAM, being a CRY BABY. Oh, they didn’t say anything to my face (who would dare do that!) but I could sense what they were thinking and what I could sense was, “There goes ANDY LAM, the CRY BABY.”

I was very flustered and frustrated and frankly felt like crying — but I wasn’t going to give in and prove these meanies right! I just ignored them all as best I could but I felt a doubt growing inside me: maybe I was a CRY BABY? Maybe I was someone who loved to cry? I didn’t think so but it was hard to ignore the fact that the onion had made me cry. Were there other things that could make me cry too? Might it happen that I might be maybe walking down the street and something else — maybe a falling leaf or a lawnmower or a flashing yellow light or two children playing with a red wagon or a dog barking at a butterfly — might make me start to cry?

That would be a disaster! I am ANDY LAM and I am the best at everything and I should be able to see these kinds of things without crying, shouldn’t I?

There was only one way to find out! Science!

I summoned my research team to my presence. “Team,” I screeched, “I need to prove to myself, to Bill-Beau and his nasty friends and to the world that I am not a CRY BABY! I need you to do some science that proves it and I need you to do it right away!”

All of my smartest scientists put their heads together. I could hear their voices as a quiet murmur. It was like the buzzing of bees or the chirps of crickets. “ANDY LAM,” they screamed, “we have come up with a test to find out if you are, or are not, a CRY BABY!” I clapped my hands and hopped up and down. I was so excited!

They told me to meet them in the LAM LAB in 15 minutes. I went to my rooms to prepare myself. What could the test be? Would I pass it? Would I get an A+ in the not being a CRY BABY test? I was so nervous!

After 15 minutes I went down the elevator to the lowest level of the LAM LAB. There was a table covered with a black cloth. The black cloth made me very nervous. What were they hiding from me? They all looked very serious. “ANDY,” they yelled, “We have made up a test to find out if you are, or are not, a CRY BABY!”

They pulled back the black cloth. There, on the table was a clipboard and a pen. “Take it, take it, take it,” the scientists chanted. I sat at the table and with a trembling hand reached for the pen and clipboard. I saw that the clipboard had a piece of paper on it and that the paper had some questions on it. I prepared to take the test!

Question 1: Do you cry a lot? Yes or No. I circled the word “No.”

Question 2: Do you cry sometimes? Yes or No. I circled the word “Yes”

Question 3: If you answered Yes to question 2 please describe. I wrote “I cry when I cut onions.”

Question 4: Was your answer to question 3, “I cry when I cut onions”? Yes or No. I circled “Yes”

That was the end of the test and I passed it to the scientists. They told me they needed some time to analyze my test results and that they would call me when the results were ready. I went to the waiting room while the scientists used a computer to analyze my test results. I was so nervous! What if the results came back and proved that I was a CRY BABY! That would be the worst thing ever!

The clock ticked in the waiting room while I waited. A minute went by. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Finally, after four long minutes had passed a loud bell went off and the door of the waiting room opened. One of the scientists was there and asked me to come back into the LAM LAB.

“Andy,” the scientists said, “we have the results of your CRY BABY test.” They sounded very serious and I almost started to cry! What if I did cry!? That would prove I was a CRY BABY. I wished they would hurry up! “We used a computer and we fed your answers into it and after four minutes it spit out the answer. According to our science and our computer we can say with 100 percent confidence that you are NOT A CRY BABY!”

I was as happy as Miss America! They handed my a large bouquet of flowers and a crown that said “NOT A CRY BABY!” right on it! I ran from the LAM LAB to find that big jerk Bill-Beau. I found him in one of the courtyards with his jerky friends. They were still laughing about me crying.

“Look, you big jerks,” I screamed and pointed to my crown, “the scientists discovered and proved that I am NOT A CRY BABY!” Bill-Beau scrunched up his face. I could tell he was mad but he was also smart enough to know you can’t argue with science. “Come on guys,” he said gruffly, “I guess I was wrong, ANDY LAM isn’t a CRY BABY, let’s go!”

The grumbling group of jerks left and I was happy. I still am happy! I am happy that it has been scientifically proven the I AM NOT A CRY BABY!

With a great deal of new confidence, and NO TEARS running down my cheeks, I am . . .

ANDY LAM!