I saw the Borat movie when it came out, but don’t remember that line and don’t recall ever hearing it as a meme. My first thought was the Henny Youngman line, which I’ve never actually heard.
“It’s hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee’s wheel-and-axles are really good.”
I’m not sure that inclined plane is usable.
[Six simple machines: lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge, pulley, screw]
Every rigid straight thing can be forced into inclined plane duty. 
Or, alternately, the ways in which their intuition is actually right, even though their previous teachers told them it was wrong. That’s probably even harder. When someone’s intuition is wrong, I can explain to them why it’s wrong, because the situation under consideration is different from what they’re used to. But it’s hard for them to accept that their prior teachers were wrong.
Depends on how quickly you want to get there. If it’s an inert cargo that you can afford to wait a decade for delivery, sure. If it’s live humans, then transit time matters.
One of the Schlock Mercenary comics featured a view through a sniper’s scope at one of the heroes, in such a habitat, and the calibrated crosshairs were curved and dynamically changing as the weapon’s orientation changed.
And I’ve got to quibble with the new strip. There are a lot more than six simple machines (and thankfully, the claim of only six is now mostly gone from the textbooks), and the classic six are only three of them. The wedge, inclined plane, and screw are all the same thing, and the lever and wheel are also the same. But the hydraulic ram, solenoid, side-pull ropes, tandem springs, and hammer, off the top of my head, are also all simple machines that are distinct from all of those.
Thanks for this. I was going to bitch about the original six, but you did a much better job than I would have. And you brought up the later ones.
Oh, yeah …
And a pulley is just a wheel. Or it’s just a lever. Or maybe it’s both, in which case it’s not a simple machine anymore.
A pulley, by itself, isn’t a simple machine. A block-and-tackle is, but you can make a functional block and tackle without anything wheel-like (just make it out of a low-friction material).
Where does the pulled bootstrap fit as a simple machine?
That depends on your culture: In German, you don’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but by your own pigtail. That is a reference to Baron von Münchhausen, not a simple machine.
When I heard that expression as a kid, I pictured very long bootstraps, running up over a rack of some sort, and then you’d pull down on the loose end (thereby gaining a mechanical advantage factor of 2).
In Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” it was by the seat of his pants.
‘“I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young.”’
Note that they correctly depict the bottle floating lower in the water than the surrounding ocean. And the becalmed sail.
Well, assuming that the glass or whatever it is he’s using is denser than water. Which it probably is if it’s actually glass, but 2 million liter bottles aren’t exactly standard, so who knows, it might be a plastic.
On powering a house with bananas:
Brian
So far, there hasn’t been a new xkcd for yesterday. Did the Dark Side win? It’s hard to overcome the Dark Side with just a banana.
“It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it ‘looks silly.’.”
Oh, not that old canard again.
(Sorry)
Yeah, see how “silly” that plane will look trying to fly without them.
In the very early days there really was a lot of barely-informed experimentation with different fin arrangements. Some of which came to become standards, some of which are actively avoided, and some of which proved harmless but also useless.
So not the same sort of oops as at Randall’s factory, but an awful lot of oops did happen at various factories (more like workshops) as all these guys tinkered their way into inventing aviation.