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“You see, they get holes in them.” Albert Einstein, explaining why he never wore socks

If everyone stopped wearing socks and yet sockmakers maintained manufacture

One way to put them to use would be to sew bunches of them into throw-pillow-like gizmos that would follow fall-prone people around using Roomba technology, so that when the person fell it would zip under them, thereby preventing bruise and fracture.

We could also make everything from handguns to cannons that were designed based on T-Shirt-Cannon technology to harmlessly and via compressed air fire projectiles made out of socks that are soft and fluffy,

And then melt down or otherwise repurpose all ordnance capable of killing people, and when the gun nuts go ballistic so to speak say Hey, reread the Second Amendment, which gives you the right to bear arms but never breathes a word about what KIND of arms, have a free Sock-Shooter and stop being huffy.

With enough socks you can make a megacushion that would unsplat your landing even if you fell off a steeple,

You could make car-muffler cozies that shut off the car engine if the muffler noise exceeded 60 decibels, protecting pedestrian hearing and ticking off the loud-car people;

And I am no inventor but give funding to anyone willing to follow the mandate of using socks to make the world more benign

And soon all would turn warm and fuzzy and truly fine.

Afterword: Fans of the late, great Ogden Nash will recognize my attempt to adopt his style. His whimsical poetry truly made the world a more warm and fuzzy place. How I miss him!

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This page contemplates both footware socks and the sock-it-to-me socks. Of the former, there seems to be a guiding principle: An inverse proportion exists between sock desirability and sock durability. The pair that looks and feels fantastic is doomed within days: either they will get an inoperable wound, or one of them will be lost to the Laundry Sock-Eater. The ugly, scratchy, falling-down-your-leg pair of socks will last forever. (I finally threw away a pair that were older than this century, though they were still good for several more years at least.)

This is the first acrostic I’ve posted wherein the title is part of the acrostic. I had to try it to know for sure that I didn’t like it.

Here are the words:

STATIONS of the Darned Satrap

Ozone & the jowls of Opar
Oscillate away below par
Corded-sandaled, Ararat
Couldn’t mash the drama flat
Kewpie DAHLS adore a journal
Knotting naughtiness diurnal
SUMMING as an Ogre summeth:
Socks away: the AXMAN cometh

Provenance notes: Line 1 is a variant on “Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar;” Line 5 has a pun on Kewpie Dolls, originally created by Rose O’Neill as an illustration for the Ladies’ Home Journal, later incarnated in ceramic form, one of which is in the time capsule from the 1939 World’s Fair; Line 8 is a nod to Eugene O’Neill and his “The Iceman Cometh.” To my knowledge Rose and Eugene were not related.