Norah and I are going to go to New Orleans for the Labor Day weekend. We will be there Friday (09-03-2010) and Saturday night and will be returning Sunday afternoon (09-05-2010). We are staying in the Holiday Inn Express just off canal. Anyone who wants to join us should hop on a train and come on down!

2b1ask1

-Dollar-

Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed 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 had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

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 (including England ) for their legions. Those 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. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.) 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 in 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, and 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? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything…. and CURRENT horses asses are controlling everything else.

I am sure you noticed that the site was down for awhile. I apologize for this. We had some trouble with malware when the site got hacked and the hosting company disabled all of my hosting until they could confirm that I was the owner of the site, and that I was going to take corrective action. I didn’t get around to correcting the issues right away because I am studying for the CPA exam, but alas, we are back up and running now. I have updated the site with the newest version of wordpress, cleared out anything that looked suspicious in the backend files, and changed all of my hosting passwords. Hopefully, that will fix the problems. Please let me know if you see anything suspicious on the site or if you get warning errors from your browser about the site which may be an indication that we have been hacked again.

All the best,

Dollar

Memphis has been ranked 51 out of 56 for the smartest cities in the world. According to the DailyBeast.

Daily Beast IQ Score for Memphis: 48

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Miss ya and hope to see y’all soon

Jenn & Dave