Topic #283:

If you found $1000 worth of superballs, and had a free afternoon, what creative use could you put them towards? Can you think of a clever way to use them or a prank you could pull on a friend or co-worker? Write about it.

You know, my first thought is just to take them all up to the roof of a skyscraper and dump them over into the city. Can you imagine watching three or four thousand balls bouncing around like mad? People would be finding them miles away for weeks! I wonder what the headlines would say? “Rain of balls causes havoc!”

I really can’t think of anything creative to do with them. I have a nagging feeling that I could do something neat by gluing many of them to something, but nothing suggests itself. I guess you could glue a bunch of them together into a giant ball, maybe even one with a space in the middle you could pad and stick a person in. Then roll them down a ramp and see how long it takes them to throw up? There are already better toys made to satisfy your “roll downhill in a ball” needs.

You could build launcher devices for them. Maybe something like a batting machine that will hold hundreds and launch them at set time intervals. Articulate that and you could make kinetic sculptures of bouncing balls. Add paint to the balls as they’re launched and now we have kinetic art that makes static art. I suppose you’d need to construct a sort of arena or something to launch them into. Making that space interesting could also be part of the art, since the balls are going to be bouncing off it.

In our launcher space, we could include gongs, bells, and other percussion instruments, which a robot ball launcher could play by bouncing balls off them. Forget the paint, make the balls solid colors and we have colorful balls bouncing all over, making music and doing interesting things. Now we add custom lighting that can highlight balls of certain colors at arbitrary times and we could probably even spell words or draw shapes with the balls in mid-air. That could be quite a show. I’m starting to really like this idea, if anyone does this I want a cut and some tickets!

I guess that’s all for now. Until later.