The last unexplored frontier, along with space, is the junk drawer. There may be six or seven here, but, it could be eight by now, the way these untrustworthy things self-replicate.
Some drawers have better tales to relay. Two showed up that were worth a recounting: one involved lost jewelry worth millions; the other, priceless fossils collected by Darwin. Some junk drawer.
Hereabouts, for some reason, it's all electrical tape, in dribs and drabs, spits and starts of it, on short-length, beat-up, battered old rolls. Pens that don't work -- clicker or ink. Some paperclips, a few pushpins, some thumbtacks, oddball and interesting bottlecaps, a couple of flaking "emergency-use-only" wine bottle corks. A couple of pennies, some rubber bands -- elastics, if you please, if you're from, or on, the East Coast.
Homeless keys that once probably worked locks now gone or whatever, couple of Allen wrenches, old and used envelopes with oblique notes on the back, and, surprise!
Here's a rusty screwdriver with an unusual tip -- what the heck is that? Oh, right. The hexalobular deal, the Torx, the one we all like to call The Phantom Star Drive whenever it turns up again. It floats all over, turns up when it wants. Looks like it was last used in 19-and-18, but it will never be pitched -- just in case.
What we'd all give for a real Star Drive in the junk drawer, wouldn't you say?
Those jewels, by the way, were worth 9-point-3 million dollars, a lot of money to some people. They disappeared, thought stolen, in 2006, from the wife of the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands. The BBC reported Dawn Arnall realized her jewels were missing some months after staying at a Dutch hotel.
A case could be made that many people would noticed this right away, missing nine million -- and then some -- in jewelry, all of a sudden, poof!
Turns out the jewelry had been found, kept in safekeeping by the hotel, apparently without the owner being aware of any of that. But, it gets better: After a while of going unclaimed, they went to a hotel employee who, thinking them gaudy costume jewelry, socked them away in a drawer, one probably filled up with all sorts of junk.
The jewels got lost, then turned up again, then, they finally got hauled to a jeweler to see if they might be worth anything. Surprise! Nine million, three-hundred-thousand, give or take a little pocket change.
The jewels were handed over to police and returned to the rightful owner, who had been previously paid on an insurance claim for the loss. Must have been some discussion, that claim: "No, I tell you, there's no telling where they are -- last we saw, they were in the junk drawer!"
No word as yet on how any of that will shake out, or if any finder's-keeper's reward will be paid. Every time you look in a junk drawer, you take your life in your hands, or, you could find rainbows. Tie a rope around your waist, to be safe, put down some breadcrumbs, to find your way back.
And, those poor, old, super-valuable fossils of Darwin's? They were found clattering around in the UK, inside the headquarters of the British Geological Survey, says the BBC. Once again, old cabinet junk drawers are the culprits here, too.
The treasure trove of fossils had been lost -- this part sounds familiar and about right -- in some drawer for 165 years. Surprise! These kinds of things happen when junk drawers are involved. Coincidentally, the search, here, is still on for a penlight, lost in some drawer or other, and for about just as long, too.
Some of the Survey's objects collected had been from 1834, during Darwin's famous Voyage of the Beagle. Some of the items hadn't been fully catalogued, then there was a trip to the Himalayas, then the collection got moved and shunted around...
Understandable, this sort of thing happens, it's all part of the plan, with these J-D's.
The executive director of the Survey says, "This is quite a remarkable discovery. It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections." Well, sure.
Just now found, here, down at the bottom of one of the drawers -- had to go look, in case there might be some errant and lost jewels -- found a few chewed-up Number Two pencils: one has no lead the whole length of it, just an empty tube where it might normally go, while the other one has only a bit of its upper end left, but no eraser left inside it.
Commentary enough on the state of things as they are found here, in these junk drawers.
Junk drawers are closed universes and should not be trusted, even if they do -- paradoxes aplenty! -- keep mimicking the real McCoy, the larger universe beyond:
They keep expanding outward, ever outward, taking over whatever space they desire.
