Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for December 11, 2024

No lie, I haven’t lost a sock since Jerry Seinfeld dramatized how they escape.

You can use a selfie stick to retrieve it from behind the washing machine.

I have been putting my socks together with safety pins for years. You can’t lose just one of them this way, and it totally saves time in finding the two that match.

The guru won’t get rich, but it’s a job for life!

The feast of polyester is ritually observed by dust mites.

Socks often slip into The Soxth Dimension. Read “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Socks* *(But were afraid to ask)”

This socks.

Socks are the larval form of wire coat hangers. That’s why when you lose socks you also inexplicably find extra coat hangers in your closet. It’s an even greater mystery if you never use the wire kind or send clothes to the dry cleaner.

Okay, this is the scientific reason socks go missing in the drier. Socks soak up more sweat by percentage than any other article of clothing (they are small, we wear them for long periods of time, and are almost always covered by shoes that prevent evaporation). Sweat has small amounts of ammonia in them. What happens is the ammonia trapped in the socks mixes with the methane found in underwear (it should only take you a moment to gleam how that occurs) in the washer. When these chemicals are at the correct concentration and are then heated in the dried, the unfortunate sock combusts and leaves this mortal coil.

Yawn.

Ask him if he has a gray Barefoot Dreams with the snowflake on the left side. One turned up missing yesterday evening when the maid was folding The Count’s laundry.

One time I lost a sock doing laundry. Mystified I set the sock aside, only to lose another the next week! Curious I went on a scouting mission only to find them both behind the laundry basket I put my dirty clothes in. Out of boredom I had invented a new game recently where I flung my foot in such a way that the loosened sock was tossed into, or apparently near, the basket.

The only other sock I lost I found under the fitted sheet when I stripped my bed. Slept on it for 2 weeks and never even felt it. Guess I was never meant to be a princess ;)

One of my minor superpowers: I never lose socks in the laundry. I mentioned this to my wife shortly we got married and we were sorting out a laundry basket of her orphan socks. It took a year or two for her to believe.

In one of the Hitchiker’s books, Douglas Adams has a bit about where all the lost ballpoint pens go to. Turns out that they slip through some sort of wormhole, and go to a planet where they can live happily in a ballpointoid sort of way.

The socks intentionally escape. They’re fine with being dirty, and are trying to escape from the oppression of being spun around again and again in washer/dryer for no reason that they understand.

Did you ever see a crumpled up sock in a gutter somewhere? That’s a sock that didn’t make it.

There is an alternative universe where socks appear in the dryer.

The mystery is how, though

Somebody else has already said FORTY-TWO, right? Sorry, I’m in a hurry and didn’t look.

…and keys! Where’s my d**n keys?

Is there another guy with missing pens?

this didn’t even need a speech balloon!

It is one of the greater mysteries but not THE GREATEST MYSTERY.

Comments are really funny, that’s for sure…

If true, however, the hints and jokes show that people don’t pay attention to how their laundry comes out of the dryer. Next time notice that all the smaller items are at the front, and if you do not pay attention to what falls out, it will get kicked under the dryer. I remember one caretaker joking about how all the socks that he had to “flush out” with his broom stick at the end of the day…So next time, before you reach into that dryer to pull out that bunched up ball, just take a minute and fish out all the small items that are at the front and close to the wall of that drum…

Okay—-now,why do the colors run?

All white gym socks, here. There’s always a match.

I have no missing socks only one that needs to be thrown in the trash.

Back when there was a baby in the household, the washer refused to drain one day, so we pulled it out and checked: the hose was jammed with baby socks and the like that had flown out the gap between the drum and the outer wall of the washer till they jammed the thing. It had never occurred to me that things could simply wash out along with the water.

The drier converts them into Tupperware lids and teleports them into your cupboard.

Socks, ballpoint pens and threads are the 3 most often lost……what was l saying…?

They get lost inside the dryer. Take the front panel off. Every item of clothing that has gone missing will be in there.

“Sock it…to me?!”—Richard Nixon, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

My hypothesis, which I call the Law of Sock Conservation, is that there are a fixed number of socks in the Universe, and whenever I find only one sock of a pair in my dryer it’s either because its mate has teleported into YOUR dryer or one of yours has teleported into MINE. Supporting this hypothesis is the companion Phenomenon of Sock-Valence Magnetism, which states that socks are attracted only to dryers that already contain other socks of the same size.

I’m seeking funding to investigate these hypotheses more rigorously.

Buy identical socks. Problem solved.