elpasospeak

This came in from ElPTaxGuardians:

We are reaching out to you, the other El Paso Bloggers (at least, the ones we could find email addresses for), with a proposal.  Early elections started today with the Primary on March 1st.  Let’s face it, election turn out in El Paso SUCKS! We thought it would be an interesting social experiment if all of us started to encourage our followers to vote.  Separately we address the things that we don’t like in El Paso, what if we all joined together (briefly) with one common purpose – to encourage the people of El Paso to get out and vote.  What if, for the next 2 weeks, we all posted blogs that talked about the candidates we liked, the candidates we don’t like, the races we’re interested in, always encouraging El Paso to vote?  

This came in from Michael Bray:

History Trivia, why railroad gauge is what it is and the impact of this choice.

And this is especially true about the government.

Fun to read and you’ll learn something you never knew. I’ll bet you never even thought about this.

The U.S. 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 designed the U.S. 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

.

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.

In other words, bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, “What horse’s rear came up with this?”, you might be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that 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 larger, 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 2,000 years ago by the width of a horse’s behind.

And you thought being a horse’s behind wasn’t important!

Now you know! Horses’ asses control almost everything!

See you at the polls!!

Michael Bray

EXIT West Realty

299 Shadow Mountain Dr.

El Paso, TX  79912

(915) 549-1770

mbray@elp.rr.com

From time to time we are fortunate to have members of the community write articles that we publish on the blog.

We would like to invite those of you who would like to contribute to do so.

We ask that you use good taste and be factual.  Not getting nasty or personal will be appreciated.

If you wish to contribute please send your work to brutusep@yahoo.com

It would be nice to be able to read about some of the good things that are happening in our community.

Thank you again for your continued readership and participation.

Brutus

Did an old dog learn a new trick?

I finally learned how to enable a “like” button on the comments.

Brutus

Are there areas where our national government currently exerts control  that should be returned to the states?

Brutus