HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE!

Which is going to give out first?

The guy’s hands?

The tree branch (which is dead anyway)?

The dog’s teeth?

The guy’s pants?

A LOUISIANA GHOST STORY

Just in time for Halloween

Louisiana Ghost Story

This happened about 6 months ago in Louisiana on Hwy 57, just outside of Dulac, a little town in the bayou country of Louisiana , and while it sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock tale, it's for real.
An Ohio businessman, Saul Rubins, abandoned his disabled vehicle on the side of the road, and attempted to hitchhike. The night was pitch dark in the middle of a thunderstorm. Time passed slowly and no cars went by. It was raining so hard he could hardly see his hand in front of his face.
Suddenly, through the sheets of rain, he saw a car moving slowly, approaching and appearing ghost-like in the rain. It slowly and silently crept toward him and stopped.
Desperately needing a ride, Saul jumped in the car and closed the door. Only then did he realize that there was no one behind the wheel and no sound of an engine to be heard over the rain.
Again the car crept silently forward and Saul was terrified, but too scared to think of jumping out and running. He saw that the car was approaching a sharp curve and, still too scared to jump out, he started to pray and beg for his life; he was sure the ghost car would go off the road and into the bayou and he would then drown!
But just before the curve, a shadowy hand appeared at the driver's window, reached in and turned the steering wheel, guiding the car safely around the bend.. Then, just as silently, the hand disappeared through the window and Saul was alone again.
Paralyzed with fear, Saul watched the hand reappear every time they reached a curve. Finally, scared nearly to death, Saul had all he could take, jumped out of the car, and ran to town.
Wet and in shock, he walked into Buster's Coffee Stop. Voice quavering, he ordered a cup of black chicory coffee and then told everybody about his supernatural experience.
The room became silent and everybody got goose bumps when they realized Saul was not just some talkative drunk but was telling the truth about what had happened to him.
About 30 minutes later two Cajuns, dripping wet, walked into Buster's and one says to the other, "Look, Boudreaux, ders dat idiot that jumped in our car when we wuz pushin' it in the rain!"

HORSE’S PATOOTIES AND HISTORY

Last week, my neighbor and co-author of http://www.thefrogandpenguinn.blogspot.com/, asked if anyone knew why the distance between the rails was whatever it was. He also said possums were not allowed to answer. Sigh. Maybe because this possum told him this bit of “information” some time ago, and he remembered it. Now whether it is right or wrong, or just a bit of truth or absolute fact doesn’t matter in the telling of a good story. What matters is if people REMEMBER it. Right?

The story I passed along to my neighbor was this one:

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!

Now there are more facts than this story mentions, and they can get very tedious, so I won’t bore you with them. But I will say this. The first time I heard any explanation about the ruts in old Roman roads was from an archeologist friend, somewhere in Italy, (or was it in Ephesus?) but she gave the credit to a team of oxen pulling carts for the wagon wheel distance – then the Roman chariot wheel spacing followed. Somehow the horse’s ass has a funnier ring than the ass of an ox. Actually, that sounds confusing, but I won’t go there, either.

Then another friend challenged me with the ‘narrow gauge’ tracks used in this country. That answer is simple, too. The smaller carts were used in mining and were pulled by a single animal, usually a mule. If you wade thru some of the histories of the early coal mines in PA, particularly the biography of Josiah White, you can learn a lot of amazing things – like the very first tracks carrying anthracite to the Lehigh River where it was then carried by barge to the southern cities- were made of wood! It took me a whole summer to wade thru that book, but it really had some fascinating information about the very early destruction of the land, as the Europeans “tamed” the wilderness in Pennsylvania, deforested miles and miles of forest, and began mining anthracite along the Lehigh and Susquehanna rivers. Interesting, but not as entertaining. The wooden rails had to be replaced constantly as the weight of the coal quickly shattered even the hardest wood.