Science Reveals the Heaviest Substance Known to Man

It’s the type of discovery that cries out for dramatization, so in this treatment I am shopping around Hollywood I have a huge crowd of people gathered in an auditorium, murmuring restlessly.

The towering stage curtains are closed, but in front of them there is a podium with a microphone, one of those blackboards that you can roll around from place to place and which can flip over in a swiveling fashion to use the back if you need to, and leaning against the blackboard one of those pointers that scientists use when they want to show you exactly where you attention should be now.

Audience members look at one another with wild surmise and it is clear that they have no idea why they have been gathered.

Among them are luminaries in the sciences, the media, academia, and certain high level government officials.

You can spot here and there, if you are the type of person that stays on top of who’s who in the big old world, doctors of philosophy, renowned researchers, and more than a few top-ranked military men.

Suddenly a hush falls over the crowd; they can see that the curtain is opening.

As it does, a distinguished sciency-looking fellow walks out. He wears a white coat like these guys do, even when cleaning out the gutters or laying down tile in the kitchen.

Whatever the news is that he has to share you can tell that it has upset his normal equilibrium. His eyes shine with an unnatural brightness and his hand shakes just a bit as he picks up the pointer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please! I have invited you all here today, the best and the brightest in your respective fields, to bring news from the front lines of research. For the longest time my team and I have been searching the world, nay, the universe, for the heaviest substance known to exist. Today I bring you great news: we have found it!”

It is as though an electric current has shot through the crowd. They are all craning their necks to see.

The sciency guy walks over to the blackboard and adding a bit of drama to the proceedings, flips it slowly. Coming into view bit by bit the picture on it is finally revealed to be a sofa.

Someone cries from the crowd: “You’re telling us that a sofa is the heaviest element in the universe?”

“Not just a sofa,” the guy replies, choosing his words carefully. “A sleeper sofa.”

And with that the crowd erupts, for the guy on stage has only pointed out what everyone in the world knew intuitively but lacked empirical proof of…..there is nothing, nada, nicht, zilch, zero, in the universe heavier than a sleeper sofa.

The cause of this is not hard to find.

These pieces of ‘furniture’ are lined with lead plating at both the beginning and the end of the assembly line.

Special tactical teams of military tanks, earth movers, those machines you use to yank stumps out of the depths of the earth in your back yard, and a fleet of oxen, each the size of Babe, Paul Bunyan’s pet ox, work in unison to pull them down the assembly line one by one, and even then it is a pretty close thing

Specially outfitted trucks – not mere eighteen-wheelers, but one thousand and eighteen-wheelers – take them to the furniture showrooms where they are carefully placed on iron- and titanium-braced flooring.

As to the matter of getting them from the showroom to the customer’s house for the last leg of the journey, secret anti-gravity devices have to be employed.

Someone shouts from the crowd – I’m back to this crowded auditorium thing again – “But I have heard that a black hole is the heaviest thing in the universe! One of those babies is so heavy that even light cannot escape!”

The guy at the front paces a moment, and takes his bottom lip between his fingers, a habit of his whenever he has to respond to an especially slow student in the classroom.

“I can see that you mean well, sir, but I am sorry to say that you have been misled. What would you say if I told you that your average sleeper sofa is so heavy that it incorporates black holes themselves into its being, and they are never seen again? Many a sleeper sofa has three, four, sometimes a dozen black holes contained in its mega-heavy interior. This has been proved! What does it take to finally convince you?”

Well, that really gets the crowd going, and now they are all foursquare behind the guy on stage.

It has been there right in front of their eyes all the time, particularly to anyone who has ever had to move one of these beasts, and now here comes along science to confirm their deepest instincts.

We have always suspected something, it seems. Most people, even the most unobservant, would have to say that light, gravity, and time itself start to act mighty peculiar around the vicinity of a sleeper sofa.

Many of us have found that you can’t look directly at a sleeper sofa for fear that it might damage the delicate corneas of our eyes, and there is always a blurring at the edges of these things as though they are tearing at the very fabric of time and space just by sitting there.

I propose here that it is this clash with the ordinary laws of gravity and mass that makes these creatures blur around the edges, but it may just be tears in the eyes of those who are asked to move one.

It is a topsy-turvy world these days and for all I know there are ruthless teams of master thieves that sneak into unsuspecting people’s houses and steal all their furniture, every stick of furniture. It’s quite possible.

If I were home at such a time and they found me, one of these master thief furniture thieving gangs, I suppose they would have to put me in a corner and warn me to keep my mouth shut, deeming me of little danger to them otherwise.

Well, this I would be happy to do. I even would accept with equanimity the sight of them carrying out every chair, TV, refrigerator, ottoman, sofa, dining table, grand piano, and the like.

Because I know what’s coming.

When two of them, then three, then all four, then a flat dozen that they have called in from the glory days of their youth when they were all incarcerated together at Penitentiary High, place themselves strategically around that damnable sleeper sofa and heave, I will have my ear cocked for the pleasing sound of cracking vertebrae, collapsing kneecaps, and rupturing organs.

When they heave again after achieving absolutely nothing the first time, I will have my eye out for compound fractures in the knee, elbow, hip, shoulder, and back areas.

The occasional eyeball may pop out with the effort, and now and again heads could separate entirely from this or that neck.

If at this point one of them looks over at me whose name is Mugsy or Slick or Lunkhead or The Original Armageddon or Bill, the latter of which somehow missed out when they were passing colorful nicknames around – and by the way by this I do not mean that one of these, as in Mugsy or Slick  or The Original Armageddon or Bill, is my name but rather the name of one of these criminals calling out to me – and this individual says in a somewhat plaintive voice, “hey, can we get a hand here? We almost had it,” then at that point I will say the line that I have been dying to say all afternoon, “you’re the big Furniture Thievery Gang, you move it.”

And you can be sure there will be some astringency in my tone.

There is a grass-roots movement afoot to get sleeper sofas onto The Periodic Table of the Elements, and I for one am all for it. I’ll put my name on any petition you put in front of me, and will attest before a judge and jury as to its superhuman weight, and will argue in front of a panel of the most esteemed scientists for its inclusion.

And if you ever need help moving one, just give me a call.

I’ve got The Jolly Green Giant, Godzilla, Superman, Hercules, Goliath, The Hulk, The Iron Giant, and King Kong on speed dial, all of them husky, even hefty fellows, and I’ll be happy to pass your number along. They may be able to help you.