Found this pic while sifting through some old emails. What a classic.
PS. Vandalism is naughty and against the law. But stuff this good should be celebrated!
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Archive for the 'Humour' Category
The bride came down the aisle and when she reached the altar, the groom was standing there with his golf bag and clubs at his side.
She said: “What are your golf clubs doing here”?
He looked her right in the eye and said, “This isn’t going to take all day, is it?”
If you’ve ever been frustrated by inflexible bureaucracy or archaic methods which seem to have no relevance to the present day, or you’ve met people who answer a problem with “We’ve always done it that way”, you may be wondering what drives them. Read on and you might just understand…
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Now the twist to the story…
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
…and you thought being a HORSE’S ASS wasn’t important!
Today is the first day of summer, and I have a cold. What a bugger.
A special hello should go out to Liz, because it’s her birthday today. Happy Birthday Liz!
And because it’s summer, why not talk about the drought. Below is a clipping from the newspaper that looks at the drought in an interesting way. You’d expect a comment like that from a Queenslander, but not from a Victorian.
Website of the week: http://www.stuffonmycat.com/
I don’t think either of our cats would stand for this kind of behavior. They wouldn’t like it much at all.
Friendship among women:
A woman doesn’t come home one night. The next day she tells her husband she slept over at a friends house.
The man calls his wife’s 10 best friends. None of them know about it.
Friendship among men:
A man doesn’t come home one night. The next day he tells his wife he slept over at a friends house.
The woman calls her husband’s 10 best friends. 8 of them say he did sleep over and 2 claim he’s still there.
My printer doesn’t work and my mouse is stuck!
This is mainly based on how you were in High School…what crowd you ran with etc., and is quite accurate:
This is clever.
