Ponderings Collection 34

• Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?
• Since light travels faster than sound, isn't that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?
• How come abbreviated is such a long word?
• If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?
• Since Americans throw rice at weddings, do Asians throw hamburgers?
• Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together?
• Why do banks charge you a "non-sufficient funds fee" on money they already know you don't have?
• If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it?
• When two airplanes almost collide why do they call it a near miss? It sounds like a near hit to me!
• Do fish get cramps after eating?

7 Quickies!

1) On July 8, 1947, witnesses claim a spaceship with five aliens aboard crashed on a sheep-and-cattle ranch outside Roswell, NM, an incident they say has been covered up by the military. On March 31, 1948, exactly nine months after that day, Al Gore was born. That clears up a lot of things.
2) What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?
3) I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older, then it dawned on me -- they were cramming for their finals!
4) If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the OTHERS here for?
5) If a man says something in the woods and there are no women there, is he still wrong?
6) I thought about how mothers feed their babies with little tiny spoons and forks, so I wonder what Chinese mothers use. Toothpicks?
7) Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?

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.