So what is a dust bunny?

Dust bunnies

01 January 2019

Dust bunnies are what you get when you leave hydrogen and helium alone for 13.8 billion years then don’t clean under the bed.

Dust

bunnies are the inevitable result of the Big Bang.

I’m sure you know the story well; vacuum energy cooks up gluon soup, gluon soup cools into particles, particles clump into atoms, atoms beget molecules, molecules become materials, materials shed threads and now look at mess in here, get out the vacuum.

Entropy – the universe’s tendency towards shabbiness

Dust bunnies are the visible manifestation of an increasingly untidy universe.

Dust bunnies are made of your clothes wearing out, your towels getting thin and your bedsheets chafing until threadbare.

The resulting dust bunnies will inevitably find themselves settling into the low air speed zones where the turbulence is ebbing. So most human/dust bunny interactions are limited to these frenzied bouts of ‘tidying up’ and futile dust bunny re-distribution.

Even as you move about doing your domestic cleaning chores fluff, broken fibres and tangled threads cascade from you. So when you think you’re tidying up you’re really just adding new bunny stuff and encouraging the diaspora of already established dust bunny tribes.

The Pekar Project; Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant. The ancient Greeks also argued that it is never possible to fully tidy up – mess, they posited, can never be made or unmade, just moved about. The Slaves Paradox. Source: The Journal of Questionable Greek Philosophical Studies.

Particle collisions — According to Thread theory dust bunnies exert an attractive force that causes them entangle with more threads of their own kind. Domestic particle physicists studying dust bunnyogenesis at CERN are searching for this force-carrying particle, the bunnyon. Source: The Journal of Untrustworthy Physics.

The warp and weft of a dust bunny determines its destiny. The multi-threaded dust bunnies accumulating behind computer and TV screens are prone to absorbing information and are dense with data.

The kitchen’s a lively place so the tribe of kitchen dust bunnies are more worldly and diverse.

The Biddies under the bed are bits of this, bits of that and dreadful materialists.

The Fuzzballs are newly-entangled agglomerations of laundry drier fluff, lightweight in every sense of the word. Entangled fuzzballs get everywhere so they’re in a super position to know what’s going on around the house.

When dust bunnies go bad

Mutant dust bunnies blowing in from US nuclear test sites in the 50’s. The Annals of Dubious Environmental Investigations (archived).

Dust bunnies up the nose

Our body has to survive an extraordinary amount of insults and challenges but dust bunnies aren’t one of them. Dust bunny material is generally too heavy to float airborne for any great length of time.

So although on a hot sock day you might find a damp, primitive cousin of the dust bunny nestling snugly between your toes, not a lot of dust bunnies make it up your nose.

Hazmat suit — How to avoid dust bunny inhalation on your walk to work

Biological challenges are fended off by our immune system but what stops the other chunky bits like pollen, skin cells, hairs and other fuzzball-like fluff?

That’s why your hairy nostrils evolved; to trap dust and those sundry other particles you vacuum up your schnoz. Snot is a dust catcher too. Your nose and throat are lined with glands that produce one to two quarts of mucus every day so you swallow about a tablespoon of airborne dirt.

That’s disgusting. Why should I care?

Because when Aunt Vera comes to visit a fuzzball meets a mucusy end.

The Vera was a snorer.

In with the fresh air, out with old. The prodigious vibrations of The Vera’s respiratory structures shook a gawking, too-curious fuzzball from the reading light above The Vera’s head. The fuzzball fell towards The Vera’s open mouth until, to its immense relief and ensuing delight, another rattling exhalation launched the fortunate fuzzball upwards again and kept it momentarily suspended in mid-air. Another downward rush on the inhalation, almost to the point of no return from a soggy, salivary ending, only to be re-launched again upwards; this time, however, it would go toppling off the topmost reaches of the snore, almost delirious with glee, landing back on the top of the light.

‘Again. Again.’

Another emboldened fuzzball leapt from the lampshade. It floated into the main current of the snore, then it too was lofted upwards. Down, then up; down, then up. Another joined in, and another until there was a small flock of fuzzballs snore-riding in the moonlight.

The fun stopped when the boundless and thoughtless enthusiasm of one particularly translucent and lightweight fuzzball caused it to badly mis-time its launch. It fell straight into The Vera’s mouth on the inhalation, making her ack and gag as she tried, half asleep, to dislodge the sodden fuzzball from the back of her throat. Finally, to the horror of the watching fuzzballs, she swallowed hard, rolled on to her side and went back to sleep.

References

Some further reading for #friendsofthedustbunny

The Secret Life of Dust
The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes is wonderful explanation and exploration of dust in all its’ manifestations from house mite poop to intergalactic clouds.

The Real Dirt
Penny Ward Moser serves up The Real Dirt on dust bunnies

And something for #foesofthedustbunny

Sweeping problem, cartoon
Smith Mag

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