Drove my Chevy to the BLEVE

A corruption of a line in the song American Pie, used in past tense reference to getting dangerously close to a Boiling Liquid Evaporating Vapor Explosion. Such explosions are often delayed for some time after the start of a fire heating a closed vessel containing liquid. The fire makes a telltale plume that draws spectators, who often bring their video cameras, and then the container bursts, producing the BLEVE.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the BLEVE...

I drove my Chevy to the BLEVE and melted my sunglasses.

Whaling Expedition

An enterprise operated under the guise of scientific research, or some other unassailable cause like “saving the earth”, which could not otherwise be justified. The term is applicable to a wide range of activities not limited to whaling that are typically subsidized and which obtain a product through obsolete, redundant, or ineffective methods.

Germany's energy policy has become a sort of whaling expedition. Who would have thought that saving the earth could be so expensive?

Garbage Horizon

A limit, where science has exhausted the interesting and useful things that can be done in a given field of study or technology. It is when further creative efforts begin producing mostly garbage, that the garbage horizon is reached. This reaching of the garbage horizon is the telltale sign that a field has matured, and that science is running out of useful new things to do in it. Like an event horizon, the garbage horizon is a boundary littered with spiraling trash, and from which no light escapes.

A patent search on engines reveals machines that have no clearly drawn means of extracting the heat and work, machines that are extraordinarily "busy" and probably don't work, and machines that have extraordinarily high contact pressures and would probably wear out very quickly when used, if they work at all. Most of this work is garbage. The rest is textbook stuff, the implementation of which is a matter of copy and paste, not the subject of new research. Hence, one concludes that the field of engines has reached a "Garbage Horizon".