The Jenga hypothesis, or how I learned to start worrying

This is the story of one man's baptism in the September 11 truth movement.
By Adri Mehra


For those of you inching further and further (read: younger) from my increasingly age-addled, 24-year-old cerebellum, I ask y'all to indulge my chronological license here.

Jenga is a popular Hasbro game from the 1980s.

It's a game of skill in which small hardwood blocks are stacked in a tower formation - 54 blocks arranged in 18 stories - and players remove one lower block at a time from the body of the building and place it on the top of the tower. The player who causes the tower to collapse loses the game.

The idea of the structural integrity of tall buildings is well represented.

Anyone who's ever played Jenga knows that if you take out a block or two, the building will not necessarily collapse right away.

That's the point, and the continual self-renewing challenge, of the game.

Sure, the tower might distort or shift its weight to compensate for the chunk you just took out of it - visible in the form of shaking, or teetering - much like the redistribution of forces of stress in the steel columns of skyscrapers.

But even if a Jenga tower does indeed fall, it will topple over and to the side - it will NOT neatly collapse straight down without resistance into its own placement, and in a beautifully symmetrical fashion, like a certain cluster of humanity's finest feats of structural engineering in Lower Manhattan were somehow wont to do on a crisp, clear morning nearly five and a half years ago.

Yes, when applied to the behavior of the World Trade Center towers after being struck by airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, this, my friends, is my newly minted Fisher Price My First Theory of 9-11 Skepticism. continued