Around a Campfire, "Smoke Follows a Fool"

Back when I was in my early twenties, a couple of summers after leaving the Air Force, I worked on a job cleaning up after a windstorm left hundreds of trees down in a local real estate development. Our focus was mainly cleaning up around the road network, so we frequently had brush fires on the roads. One guy on our small crew was named Dean and one day Dean and I noticed that whenever I came near the fire, the smoke would come my way. It didn't matter which side of the fire I was on, the smoke just came my way.

Dean, being the more intelligent one, pointed out to me that the reason that was happening was because, "Smoke follows a fool."

I don't know where Dean came across that tidbit of information, perhaps in Boy Scouts - like the notion of going on a "snipe hunt" which I actually did after dark one evening on a camping trip during my one year in the Boy Scouts - but the saying followed me around ever since. I've passed it along to quite a few other people not only to point out that I am a fool but also to show others that they are as well.

Low and behold it turns out that there might be less truth to that than meets the eye, although perhaps not knowing the real reason for the phenomenon and suffering the consequences may actually indicate that you actually are a fool. Anyway, here's the real reason:

Why Does Smoke Follow You Around a Fire?

Watching the graphics of this movie, I realized this might be a good way to display my unique theory of gravity, assuming the presence of a strong omnidirectional force field from which all matter is derived. But I'll leave that for another era I guess. Nobody on earth seems to care about my theory.