THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET (1/4)
The West
Our ranch was located several miles north of Divide,lost in the Pioneer Mountains.
The closest thing to traffic was when the Union Pacific Freight trains rumbled through the valley, at 5:44 am, 11:53 am, and 5:15 pm.
Divide was literally located on the continental divide.
To the east, the water spilled into the Atlantic.
To the west, it spilled into the Pacific.
One day my brother Layton and I,decided to christen this natural border.☻
Giddap, you little donkey!
Yee-haah!
Giddiup, horse!
Yaaah! Yahoo!
Layton, look over here.
Hello Big Sur!
Hello New Orleans!
Hello Big Sur!
And hello New Orleans!
Hello “Nawleans”!
But Layton's favourite pastime was shooting at anything that moved.
Big loop.
Elbow up.
Ready?
Now!
Go! Yaah!
Stop!
Upon my brothers request,father built us a seesaw.
Slow down!
Ride'em, cowboy.
My father loved Layton more than anything in the world.
Yeah, that's a ood deal. I would have liked to be a daredevil, too.
But I knew I'd never be up to it.
One year earlier Orffyreus had five marbles
travelling in tubes, creating an imbalance.
This rocking motion, however, caused the energy to dissipate.
Robert Flux built a mill based on the concept of perpetual rotation.
However the inherent friction of the machine
caused a significant loss of energy.
The Italian philosopher Marco Zimara
imagined a machine that could
recycle the wind.
But the force required
to compress the bellows
was greater than the energy
produced by the windmill.
And so, it didn't work.
No scientific challenge
remains greater,
most prestigious,
more mythical,
than that of finding the key to
perpetual motion.
Thank you.
And yet some affirm that
this quest is doomed to failure.
Such a machine defies the laws
of the universe.
The very basis of thermodynamics
assumes that
all mechanism will
eventually come to a stop.
Yes, you.
Given the current state of
Science and Technology,
isn't the quest for perpetual
motion better suited for
idealists and poets than
real scientists?
What if imagination started
and science ended?
Those who pushed the boundaries
of science, were they not all poets?
I'm certain that as we speak here today,
that somewhere in this country,
a budding Leonardo Da Vinci
is gearing up for the challenge.
Thank you very much.
Oh God…
Hello.
Sir, I am the Leonardo from Montana.
You are? What you are going to do?
I accept the challenge.
You do?
One afternoon in August,
the phone rang,
while my sister Gracie and I
were on the porch, shucking sweet corn
into large metal buckets.
What?
the buckets were riddled with
bite marks dating back to last spring
when our dog Tapioca got depressed
and started eating metal.
Hello.
Wow.
Gracie, can you hold this a second.
This is what I predicted.
The Manticora Herculeana
is a subspecies of the Cicindeler.
Who was it, that called?
Same time, it has a hair on
the tip of the mandible.
Doesn't seem to have a white spot
on the elytra.
Mom?
The phone, who was it?
Oh, a call for TS.
- A call for him? !
- M-hm. Yes Gracie.
- Who was it?
- Hm?
I don't know. Ah…
She's still in the line.
She's waiting.
You should probably go.
If you finish before I get back,
count the number of good ears
and the number of bad ones.
Why not count the kernels,
while we're at it? !
I had 3 options
to get to the phone.
The corridor-kitchen way,
the quickest
but also the most boring.
The upstairs-downstairs route,
but the shift in altitude
made me nauseous.
I opted for the third and
riskiest,
particularly when father was
working around the house.
The sitting room smelled like
whiskey stained leather.
and moldy photographs.
If you just closed your eyes,
you could feel the dust
falling onto the prairie
after a cowboy posse galloped through.
Layton used to think the sitting room,
was the greatest thing since
grilled cheese.
- Hello.
- Hello. Yes, um…
I would like to speak to T.S. Spivet,
this is Miss Jibsen,
Under Secretary of the Smithsonian.
Hold on.
Father!
Phone!
My father is all yours, Miss. Jibsen.
Hello, Mr. Spivet.
Yes, my dad is listening.
Could you hand him the phone please.
No, my father is mute, Mrs. Jibsen.
He can hear you but can only
respond in sign language.
I'll translate everything for you.
You are the T.S. Spivet
that has just invent the magnetic wheel?
One second. Father is saying…
Yes, I only sent you the blueprints,
because I didn't have the time to do it.
The quest for perpetual movement!
I mean, it's the Holy Grail
of inventors…
Tell me Mr.Spivet,
I take it you live in Montana?
Coppertop ranch.
Longitude: 112° 44' 19".
Latitude: 45° 44' 27".
These are the coordinates
to my bedroom.
Wow!
Clearly you have an eye for detail.
Which is a requisite for
any great inventor.
Father is asking:
so you are the head of the Smithsonian?
Well, technically,
I'm the Under Secretary, but,
many people would say I run the place.
Wow!
Yeah.
Look, Mr.Spivet, your invention
has won our prestigious Baird Award.
The Spencer Baird Award?
Indeed.
Our 150th anniversary gala
is in a week's time
and it would be perfect
oppurtunity for you to,
you know, make your
acceptance speech.
Of course, we would
provide you with a
sign language interpreter.
But… I'll be in class.
I go back to school on Monday.
Oh, you must teach at the
University of Montana.
A quick phone call to your
President, Jack Campbell,
and it'll be taken care of.
I mean,…
we are talking about
the Baird Award, after all.
Prairie of Truth
Mountain of Lies
Hello… Hello?
I was just thinking.
I can't come out to receive
the Baird award.
I have too much work to finish.
Thanks anyway.
Have a good day.
What are you doing?
What do you think I'm doing?
You're going to mess up my dataset.
You were in there for, like,
15 hours. Who was that?
A journalist, from… New York.
Wants me to go there
for an interview about my work.
Inside Gracie's cortex
Just laugh in his face,
it's the only way to deal with this.
Clearly he is making it up.
And what if it were true?
You mean this total spaz
leaving Montana before us?
Would it be so bad to be
a celebrity sister?
This total dork, invited to New York? !
For an interview? !
You're full of crap!
I told her I can't come,
'cause classes start again on Monday,
but she was insistent.
What did I do to God
for Him to hate me?
It's like, “Here, Gracie, I found
you a family full of nutjobs,”
“And you are gonna live in
Nowheresville, Montana”
“and your brother, who is a
total spaz”
“is going to New York!”
I told you I'm not going,
I've got school!
News flash: crazy New Yorkers love
spazzers. It's kind of a new trend!
Too late.
Any chance she got
she'd wallow in the role of the
misunderstood actress.
She landed the lead in a retro
anti-establishment theater piece.
But that night,
I was busy working on a challenge
set by Discover magazine
“How to drop an egg from the top”
“of the Empire State Building
without breaking it.”
In order to finish my project
and get out of seeing Gracie's play,
I had to enlist Tapioca to the rescue.
One night, in her Bette Davis phase,
Gracie launched into a heated diatribe
about father's museum sitting room.
Is it even conceivable that that
cowboy museum or rather, mausoleum
could be turned into a
normal living room
where normal people could relax
and have normal conversations?
My father, Tecumseh Elijah Spivet,
was born 100 years too late.
He had the soul, stature,
and mindset of a cowboy.
For him talking was a necessary
chore, like shoeing a horse.
Cellphone reception was nowhere
to be found at Coppertop Ranch
and father refused to install
a telephone in Gracie's room.
And you heard her voice, right?
Her body…
Yeah, its no wonder in the history of Miss
America pagent Miss Montana's never won.
It's, like, the worst selection ever!
Every night in his sitting room
father took off his boots
and muttered some cryptic statement
after raising a glass of
whiskey up to his lips
precisely every 45 seconds.
You can't get horseshit
from a cricket.
Crickets and insects,
were my mother's specialty.
Dr. Claire had spent most
of her adult life
studying tiny creatures
with a magnifying glass,
and then classifying them
into species
and subspecies.
What if it doesn't exist?
What?
I mean, for a year now,
you stopped everything
to prove that Tigermonk
Cicindelas exist…
Stopped everything?
What do you mean, in a
maternal sense or a scientific one?
What is it that you want me
to start doing again…
that I stopped doing, hm?
I dunno.
Your research on the
Parasitic Scolyte Catepillar maybe?
Your findings could've saved
all the pine trees in Montana.
Every other scientific
attempt had failed.
Failed?
Form the ecologists
point of view, maybe.
But from the caterpillar's
point of view,
looks like a win-win situation.
Anyway I've never liked pine trees.
They're drippy and they're sticky.
Some things are just meant to die.
How my parents ever fell for
each other is a mystery.
They were like day and night.
The human head lice,
Pediculus Humanus Capitis
belong to the Anoplura family.
A-N-O-P-L-U-R-A.
TS, When you're drawing the legs,
make sure you observe not just
how many there are,
but the exact distance between them.
Yep. The exact distance between'em.
Beware of mediocrity,
it is the fungus of the mind.
We must constantly fight
against it
or it'll creep into everything we do.
Darn!
The louse got away.
Here. Made a lasso to catch him.
Wooh!
Thanks, Dad.
A fool, by definition
is one who turns what is beyond
his mental grasp,
into one big joke.
And then a few days later,
at the end of the hallway,
their hands brushed against
each other,
as if they were secretly
exchanging a few seeds.
What?
And then there was Layton,
my dizygotic twin.
That's when two sperm cells
fertilize two seperate eggs.
To each his own embryo.
To each his own lucky star.
Layton got the height
and I got the neurons.
- Mom…
- Yeah?
Have you ever gotten AIDS?
What? !
Angela Ashworth says AIDS are bad
and I probably have them.
Well, next time,
you just tell Angela Ashworth,
just because she feels insecure
about being a little girl,
in a society that puts an
inordinate amount of pressure
on a woman to live up to
some physical standard,
it doesn't mean that she
has to take out her
misplaced self loathing
on a nice little boy like you.
You may be an inherent part
of the problem,
but it certainly doesn't mean
you have AIDS.
I'm not sure I can remember all that.
Well then, just tell her, she's fat.
OK.
But Layton died last year
during an accident with a gun
in the old barn.
I don't know what went wrong.
I was there too,
measuring gun shots.
No one ever talked about it.
No one.
Chris, not bad.
Except, we're going to have to
go over this a little bit.
Daisy… B+.
Solid work.
Excellent illustrations
of the lake formation process.
TS.. C+.
Report shows undeniable qualities,
but as usual, is way off-subject.
What does the formation of lakes
in Montana have, anything, to do
with the east-west migratory
path of Canadian Geese?
Sir, I'm not sure if you read
the introduction, but I…
You think you're the smarter
than everyone else, don't you?
As for the diagram,
its very pretty,
but scientifically erroneous.
Really, Sir?
Bacause I sent it to the
Discover Magazine…
and they liked it,
and they published it.
Do not play games with me, TS.
You're out of your league.
And what about the magnetic wheel?
