Something different

Today's post is quite different, with a couple of twists.
But first, responses to comments:

To Diana -
I like me home, too.

To Barbara-Kay -
Do you really groan at my jokes?

To Knitsalot 3:
If I didn't keep my sense of humor, I'd be a basket case.


I've been sent the following more than once. I checked it out on Snopes, and they said:

But don't go away. They have some interesting perspective on this, and I've extracted a bit down at the end.

DOES THE STATEMENT, "WE'VE ALWAYS DONE IT THAT WAY" RING ANY BELLS?

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 built 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.

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 army 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!

Then Snopes goes on to say:
“This is one of those items that -- although wrong in many of its details -- isn’t exactly false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as ‘True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons’.”

Then Snopes goes to considerable length to detail those “ trivial and unremarkable reasons”. And they end up with the following: “... this tale about railroad gauges succeeds because of the imagery of its play on words: space shuttle technology was designed not by a horses’ ass (figuratively, some overpaid government know-it-all) but because of a horses’ ass (literally, the width of that particular portion of the equine anatomy).”