Starbucks Writing Hell

Saturday, August 29, 2009 – 8:01 AM

This morning, I arrive at Starbucks to write, and Unnamed Man is sitting in my writing chair. I can't tell you how disappointing this is. He's reading the newspaper, so I figure, hey, I'll wait him out. I've been here almost a whole hour, and nothing. On and on he turns the pages. I think he's reading through the whole thing a second time. ...I hate him. 

Ok, so I don't hate him. I just disapprove of the direction his life has taken over the last 63 minutes. Maybe I should say something. Make a stand. Maybe I should snatch his newspaper and run. I can't do that. The newspaper is an endangered species, and my fellow writers are scraping for their inkly lives. In the same logical thread, it's like he's saving the whales. Does that mean I'm gutting their blubber to make perfume? I don't want that on my tombstone. I should just stay in my seat, let the man read his precious newspaper. 

WHY??? Why can't I just walk up to a man and reason, you know, like grown men. I could just say, "Excuse me, sir, but I have a Mac, and I need to write, and this chair… you see what I'm saying?" Somewhere in there... Really, I just want him to stop inconveniencing my life. Is that so bad? Maybe I can convince him that his seat selection is crap, and he'll find a greater threshold of happiness elsewhere in the store, or maybe China, or the Isle of Man. I hear cruises are great places to catch up on your reading - you know, the whole tranquility thing. One thing I know, if he doesn't get up soon, I might just place his ship in the Gulf of Aden. Maybe his Somali pirate captors will give him a cell that faces the morning light, and then he can read whatever he wants, and he won't unknowingly bother me any more, and I think, ultimately, we'll both be happier that way.  

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Grad School...

Friday, August 28, 2009 – 2:02 PM

Just a quick note to get the blogging habit reformed...


I just wanted to say how happy and settled I feel in my decision to return to school. I have no idea what my life will look like 1-2 years from now. Right now, however, I am in fellowship with 61 bright, dedicated individuals, and I am very excited about this class, what we can do together, and what we can do for TCU.

That's all for now.

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O Magnum Mysterium

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 – 8:34 AM

wow..

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One Down...

Thursday, January 15, 2009 – 10:07 PM

Hey friends,

I must go through this at least once a year, but I'm sorry for not writing more often. I have the mother of all excuses, and her name is Cara, and she's not a mother... that I know of...

I submitted my first graduate school application today. What a nerve-wracking process. The application asked for four essays, and I'm sitting here amazed at the emotional toll it took to write them. It's not like I wake up each day thinking, 'you know, I feel like being judged today.'

Anyway, nothing flashy with this post. I just wanted to let you know what I'm up to, and celebrate that I actually finished an ambitious writing project. There's a first for everything.

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Trains and Asses and Space Shuttles, oh my!

Thursday, October 02, 2008 – 11:09 AM

This is to funny
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The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5inches

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. ( Not to forget the Irish and Asian laborers , who probably did the work; I think the English were the designers...BB )

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. 

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