Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Many people dream of discovering something. In the best case scenario, these new discoveries get named for the people who discovered them. Take the sciences, for instance. We’ve all heard of Einstein’s relativity, Newton’s laws of physics, Occam’s razor, Murphy’s law, Moore’s law, and Hotelling’s T squared. If you haven’t heard of Hotelling’s T squared, I don’t think I want to know you.

Likewise, many famous explorers got to name things after themselves. Pike got his Peak, Amerigo Vespucci got the entire New World, and Christopher Columbus got Columbus, Ohio, as well as this producer and his own Day.

Me? I’d like to have a vortex named after me. I’m not picky about whether it’s a swirling oceanic funnel or a churning mass of energy on the far rim of the galaxy. It just needs to be a vortex, preferably mysterious in origin and vaguely menacing, the kind of thing delicately avoided by Greek heroes or confronted by the captain of the Enterprise (if it’s Kirk, blow the thing out of the universe by reversing the polarity on the warp deflector array; if Picard, try to reason with it, then blow the thing out of the universe by reversing the polarity on the warp deflector array using Data). Wow, that was one heck of a run-on sentence. Quick! Feed it to the Dobres Vortex!

I want a vortex because they sound and look really good. The radial symmetry evokes the image of a flower — A Flower to Nowhere! The word itself, vortex, has the sharp Rs, Ts, and final X that are so popular among drug manufacturers. Plavix, Valtrex, Zocor, Xanax, Zoloft, these names were chosen because their sharp fricatives evoke a vague sense of power and efficacy. You can almost see a Darth Xanax featured heavily in a new movie. Not so much a Darth Ambien, but there are always exceptions.

Vortices figure into all of our greatest tales. What would the journey of the Odyssey be without the threat of Charybdis? Would Dorothy have had her adventures in Oz without the cyclone to take her there? Would Deep Space Nine be nearly as interesting without its wormhole? Would Donnie Darko make more sense in the last couple of scenes? And Sliders? Sliders wouldn’t even be a show. Don’t even get me started on Stargate, both the film and its TV incarnations.

And now, lacking a proper conclusion for this entry, I leave you with dialogue. From the future.

“Daddy, what’s that swirly thing up in the sky?”

“Oh that, son, that’s Dobres’s Vortex.”

“What’s it do, pa?” (the year 2135 is surprisingly like 1935)

“Do? Son, Dobres’s Vortex just is. And we don’t question the Vortex, now do we?”

“But, pa, where does it go?”

“I DONE SAID WE DON’T QUESTION THE VORTEX! Now help me gather up these old photos of Paris Hilton for kindling.”