Combing the Desert

The movie Spaceballs is fantastic. Mel Brooks is a national treasure, and this iconic movie of his has given a name to our dog, Dink-Dink. She’s named after the way these folks walk, and the song they sing:

Brooks used a lot of different approaches to humor in the movie, but one style that really stands out is the use of props to help make jokes. In one scene, President Skroob wants Lord Helmet to find Princess Vespa, Lone Star, and Barf.

He orders them to comb the desert, so they do this:

Brooks is poking fun at language a bit here, and how metaphors mean something very different than their literal meaning, and how most people understand this intuitively. Lord Helmet, however, does not get the joke, so he has everyone drag giant combs through desert sand, trying to find any sign of the valuable Princess.

This scene mocks mindless compliance with orders, the non-thinking obeisance that led to horrifying conclusions during the second World War, where Brooks served as combat engineer. He saw a great deal of death and inhumanity, and that experience shaped his worldview. Here, he talks about what he saw during the Battle of the Bulge:

Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.

In the context of the Spaceballs joke, Brook is saying that it’s absurd to look for something tiny by zooming in close, when you need to zoom out instead and look around. If you want to find two humans and a mog (part man, part dog), you don’t need to sift and sort through grains of sand.

However, there are times when this method actually makes sense, and literal combing of desert sands has given us some incredible discoveries.

In 1922, inside the tomb of the Pharoah Tutankhamun (“King Tut” in popular culture), Howard Carter discovered a stunning breastplate with a scarab (sacred beetle carving) in the middle of it. This scarab had an eerie yellow-green stone-like object in the middle of it.

Roland Unger, CC 3.0

This stone was initially assumed to be a rare type of quartz, but in 1998 an Italian mineralogist named Vincenzo de Michele analyzed the “stone” and confirmed that it was actually something far more rare.

It’s very likely that a meteorite smashed into the Earth around 27 million years ago, somewhere near the modern border of Egypt and Libya. All that quartz—mainly what desert sand is made of—melted instantly, forming what we call today Libyan Desert Glass (LDG).

This powerful blast was hot enough to create almost pure silicon dioxide, but with important trace elements scattered throughout its substance. Iron, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and iridium all snuck in from outer space.

There’s only one place in the world this glass can be found in nature, so it was both impressive and eye-opening to discover that Tutankhamun was buried with a huge chunk of this insanely rare stuff. In order to find more of it, you would need to literally comb through desert sand, under incredibly harsh conditions.

Someone must have found this piece out there one day, who knows how long ago. Somehow, that piece of LDG ended up in the hands of the Egyptian elite, who rightly prized the material for its rareness. I can only imagine just how it must have made that journey.

I do know that it began with combing the desert, and that’s unusual. In addition to LDG, literally combing desert sand has been used to uncover inconceivably old fossils. In some cases, you need to be extremely careful and use tools like a brush.

Likewise, there are very old tools buried in the sand, and archaeologists will use similar very slow, very cautious techniques.

In summary, there is a time to comb, but these times are rare.

Combing the desert is a fun scene, but it’s far from my favorite one in the movie. Do you have a favorite Spaceballs scene? Are other Mel Brooks movies more your flavor?