No Sex on the Ark!

When the Ark's door was closed, Noah called a meeting with all the animals. "Listen up!" Noah said with a demanding voice. "There will be NO SEX on this trip! All of you males take off your penis and hand it in to my sons. I will sit over there and write you a receipt. After we see land, you can get your penis back." After about a week Mr. Rabbit stormed into his wife's cage and was very excited. "Quick!" he said, "Get on my shoulders and look out the window to see if there is any land out there!"  Mrs.  Rabbit got onto his shoulders, looked out the window, and said, "Sorry, no land yet." "Darn it!", exclaimed Mr. Rabbit. This went on every day until Mrs. Rabbit got fed up with him. Mrs. Rabbit asked, "What is the matter with you? You know it will rain for forty days and nights. Only after the water has drained will we be able to see land. But why are you acting so excited every day?" "LOOK!", said Mr. Rabbit with a sly expression, as he held out a piece of paper... "I GOT THE HORSE'S RECEIPT!!"

Texan Buys Spread

A loud American, looking for properties to buy out in Australia is in the bar of the Railway Hotel. "Yeah, ma'am" he says to the barmaid, "Ah'm looking to buy me a ranch - stations, you call them, so they tell me. Ah come from Texas and ah'm looking for a big spread because where I come from in Texas, everythang is BIG. Why, do you know, mah ranch in Texas is so big, it takes a whole week to ride around it on a horse?"
"Yeah?" says a wizened station hand sitting at the bar. "If we had a horse like that we'd turn it into glue."

How Specs Live Forever

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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United State standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs 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 chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.