How To Hide A Subaru

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 21, 2010

I know you scan the newspaper every day looking for some good news, news that will lift your spirits out of the doldrums that the constant caterwauling over health care reform and terrorism and financial bailouts and Lindsay Lohan leaves us all in.

I know that at least once a week you sigh as you put your newspaper down and look across the kitchen table at your spouse and say, wearily, "Must I be sentenced to forever reading daily news stories about filibusters and senatorial holds and pour taxes and Lindsay Lohan, like some common prisoner being punished for a crime I did not commit?"

I feel certain that there are evenings when you sit down in front of the television set to watch the nightly newscast, hoping for a few stories about the defeat of polio or landing a man on the moon or passage of women's suffrage, and instead get snippets of gloom in the form of stories about sex scandals on the golf course, sex scandals in the governor's mansion, sex scandals involving Academy Awards winners, and Lindsay Lohan.

I feel your pain. That's why I am here to let you in on some good news, some spectacular news, some news you can really open the bedroom window and shout to the world about without fear of retribution from the neighbors. According to my colleagues at the Associated Press, researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they have made progress in creation of the world's first working cloaking device.

The good Damen and Herren at KIT — as the school is known in the Sweet 64 Scientific Researcher Playoff brackets — were able to cloak "a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies," the AP reporter wrote. "Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said."

Yeeeaaah, baby! That's what I'm talking about! Gold cloaking in three, count 'em, three dimensions! I have been anxiously awaiting this next development since learning that scientists at the University of California at Berkley were working on a similar project back in 2008.

Back then, I wrote that creation of a cloaking device would give us residents of West Chester the ability to hide our hometown from pesky outsiders who want to visit and, well, frankly, vomit on, our friendly downtown during constant bar-hopping contests. I don't know whether it has hit your radar screen, but my neighbors and I have made frequent comment about the increasing influx on weekends of people from Delaware County for such activities, and we wonder aloud about the ability of immigration authorities to get a handle on anything if they can't stop such obvious violations of the nation's culture barriers.

But the news from Berkley left me encouraged, at the time, because I had always assumed that the soonest the cloaking technology was going to be available was sometime in the mid-23rd century, and then it was going to be used exclusively by the Romulans to hide their Battle Cruisers until they were ready to fire their Plasma Torpedoes at the Starship Enterprise.

According to last week's AP story, the cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold layer beneath. In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it. Which would lead one to believe that there is still some road to travel before we are able to install a device that will be able to hide a geo-political entity one mile square.

Nevertheless, we assume the team at KIT will not fall prey to the "always say die" mentality that apparently has kept their colleagues at NASA from putting the finishing touches on that human teleportation device I've assumed was well on its way to completion.

Besides, for immediate purposes we don't need the cloaking device to be functionally able to hide all of West Chester. Cloaking an object the size of a small Subaru station wagon would suffice, with enough portability to allow it to travel to various parking spaces along West Chester's Gay Street corridor. After all, I have begun to get the impression that the parking ticket payment department at District Court 15-1-01 in West Chester has pretty much gotten fed up to here with my appearances every month to clear up the latest in an on-going series of apparent misunderstandings.

Almost as fed up as I am with stories about Lindsay Lohan. But not quite.