Shoe Event Horizons and other inane thoughts

I haven’t felt like posting anything lately. I’ve thought of stuff to write, but nothing that seems really that worthwhile.

SO…I’ll mention one of my favorite passages in Science Fiction literature.

“The Shoe Event Horizon” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, by Douglas Adams.

As you of course already know, an event horizon is the (theoretical) point at which time and light get sucked into a black hole- therefore, the point at which ‘events’ no longer happen.

A ‘shoe’ event horizon is the (theoretical) point at which a society can no longer support the number of shoes that are manufactured and collapses into ruin and myth. It happens something like this:

Factories produce shoes more cheaply, so more people buy more shoes. So more shoes have to be made, more cheaply, so that more people buy more shoes, thereby necessitating the creation of more factories and more shoe stores, until the only thing that the society manufactures or sells is shoes, and civilization crumbles.

As far as we could tell, Puerto Rico is approaching its shoe event horizon, as it seemed that about half the stores we saw sold shoes.