And Then A Light….

The light is still a jolly long way away but at least it’s visible now. Tomorrow will be another day of sticking small beading and quadrant here and there, a trip to vote and a nice meal. Regards the meal, I’m undecided at this early planning stage; Texas burger at McDonalds or a double Whopper at Burger King. Man, I can taste ‘em already!

Who to vote for tomorrow? The gang belonging to Mr Cummerbund? Nah. That quango  bonfire sure didn’t keep me warm last winter. Or the winter before. Or the one before that. How about that Labour lads lot then? Sorry. Best I can sum him up is the quote I spotted somewhere yesterday;  “This man is marginally better than a vacancy.”

That leaves those other two gangs then. Young Clegg’s lot and that Mr Mirage. No contest for me. I just hope it isn’t really a mirage.

I was going to say that if the guy responsible for this debacle was standing for election somewhere in the UK, he’d be my man!! Then I thought, ‘Oh oh. He’s quite possibly going to be out of a job right quick so our Dave is probably eager to hire  him to ‘assist’ with his high speed dream train set planning.’ Never mind; what a beauty!!  See? There IS still fun to be had in the world. The amazing thing about this sad story is that UKIP haven’t, to date, been blamed.

Which, in turn, reminded me of this wot I’ve loaned from here;

“Say friend, did you know that the US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8 1/2 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.”
“I see, but why did the English build them like that?”
”Because the first railway lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.”
“Well, why did they use that gauge in England?”
”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 their wagons use that odd wheel spacing?”
”Because, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagon wheels 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 Roman roads have been used ever since.”
“And the ruts?”
”The original ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by the wheels of 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 question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. And the motto of the story is Specifications 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.”
“So, just what does this have to do with the exploration of space?”
”Well, there's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse's ass.”

Quote;  Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”