WASHINGTON -- Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner? - Adam Goldman, AP
I really appreciate you fellows letting me work on this, The whole time I was being waterboarded, you know what I kept thinking about. Vacuum cleaners. That's right. You know why vacuum cleaners suck? Because they don't. Ha-ha-ha. I know I'll have to stand trial for all the damage I did to those buildings and wrecking those two airplanes, not to mention the people, but I want to repay in some small way for all the damage I have done. I'm ready to declare jihad against dust bunnies. Are you with me?
So I'm going to need some parts. First of all, I need K-Type Vacuum bags. I believe these are available at any WallMart, and about three feet of three-inch flexible rubber hosing.
Also, I'll need a global positioning system and some gyroscopes. This is going to be a state of the art, fully automatic vacuum. Like a Roomba, only this one will really suck! Ha-ha. Oh, I already used that joke. And I'll need dorsal fins, these are very important for steering and stability. The whole body, by the way, in case I didn't mention, needs to be made of titanium alloy. Except for the "nose cone" itself, which needs to be a durable nonmetallic material that can act like a window for radar or heat-seeking devices inside the vacuum. Do you think you can get your hands on something like that for me?
Also the beater bar. Nylon bristles, high-gauge plastic. And extensions for getting the drapes and those little cobwebs out of the ceiling corners. Also, have you ever noticed how hard it is to vacuum into corners. Well, if you'd ever vacuumed, you would have. You can almost get right up into the corner, but not quite. It drives me almost as crazy as being kept awake a thousand hours in a row. Just kidding. No hard feelings. Anyway, I have a solution for the getting-into-corners thing. I won't tell. It's a surprise.
First of all, though, I'll need some conventional chemical explosives. I know what you're thinking, "So what? All vacuum cleaners have conventional chemical explosives," right? But here's the secret part, and I can't tell you how it works, because it's a secret. Fissible plutonium. Enriched uranium if that's all you can get, but the plutonium would work best. Plutonium-239.
Okay, to recap, here's what I need to start work on my vacuum cleaner: K-Type Vacuum Bags, GPS and guidance system, titanium alloy, radome, dorsal fins, flexible hose, chemical explosives, plutonium-239.
Oh, and a phillips screwdriver.
