John's Jewels

This may come as a surprise to those of you not living in Las Vegas, but there are more Catholic churches than casinos.

Not surprisingly, some worshipers at Sunday services will give casino chips rather than cash when the basket is passed.

Since they get chips from so many different casinos, the churches have devised a clever method to collect the offerings.

The churches send all their collected chips to a nearby Franciscan monastery for sorting and then the chips are taken to the various casinos or origin and cashed in.

This is done by the chip monks.

Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her in-laws and while there went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some groceries. Later, her husband noticed her sitting in her car in the driveway with the car running and the windows rolled up. Her were eyes closed with both hands behind the back of her head. He became concerned and walked over to the car. He noticed that Linda's eyes were now open and she looked very strange. He asked her if she was okay; Linda replied that she had been shot in the back of the head and had been holding her brains in for over an hour (at least it seemed that way to her, it actually had been 15 minutes, she blamed the inability to tell time on her head injury).

The husband called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head.

When they finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the back of her head. From the back seat a Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of dough hit her in the back of her head. When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She initially passed out, but quickly recovered.

Linda is blonde, a Democrat, and an Obama supporter; but that could all be a coincidence.

The defective biscuit canister was analyzed and it was determined to be Bush's fault.

A business man got on an elevator.

When he entered, there was a blonde already inside who greeted him with a bright, "T-G-I-F."

He smiled at her and replied, "S-H-I-T."

She looked puzzled and repeated, "T-G-I-F," more slowly.

He again answered, "S-H-I-T."

The blonde was trying to keep it friendly, so she smiled her biggest smile, and said as sweetly as possibly, "T-G-I-F."

The man smiled back to her and once again, "S-H-I-T."

The exasperated blonde finally decided to explain. 'T-G-I-F' means 'Thank God, It's Friday.' Get it, duuhhh?"

The man answered, "'S-H-I-T' means 'Sorry, Honey, It's Thursday'-- duuhhh.

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 designed 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 had 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. Lesson: Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' , you may 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, 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 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, 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 two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important?