Creative Endeavors, The Home of BoxcarOkie.com

Man Of The Year! What was Hanna Montana’s Daddy (Billy Raye Cyrus) thinking? Leaving a kid with a room of photographers and allowing her to make her own decisions on important issues. Seems like Dad kind of dropped the ball for his child if you ask me. Perhaps he is trying to drum up some new business for his sagging career. Isn’t it sad, when adults live vicariously thru their own children, and in this case, the word exploitation always seems to come to mind.

Not so long ago, the question of the day was why are kids killing themselves and/or their parents? Why are they inflicting so much pain on each other? And as usual, the experts, the soothsayers, have offered up nothing but theories of psychological nonsense. (How’s That Working For You?) Meetings were hastily arranged, and then just as quickly, disassembled and passed off into obscurity.

The battle is as always … In the Home. It appears in this case, there was “no one home.”

The father/daughter shot or pose, was a little provocative for me, and I assure you, I am not a prude. It all seems just a little bit perverted or sick in the end. When questioned about all this, Cyrus explained all this off by saying, “Annie is hard to say no to.” And that was that.

What a cop out. Reasoning, tested by doubt, is argumentation. We do it, hear it, and judge it every day of our respective lives. We do it in our own minds, and we do with others. What we do NOT do is leave it up to children. Someone dropped the ball on this one that is for sure.

Whatever happened to Seventeen Magazine, why Vanity Fair? Hanna Montana is going to grow up, all of us, eventually grow up. What is the rush? Fifteen is a magical time in life, something this teenager will sadly miss one of these days.

So here we sit again …Victims of our own foolishness. It is no small wonder that the rest of the planet watches us and then judges us totally out of our gourd. Our acceptance of violence and evil has sealed our fate and our society. Things that we found personally offensive 30 years ago are now common place — No Big Deal — shrugged off.

Unfortunately the walking wounded, the brain dead, are our children, it is enough to break your Achey-Brakey-Heart.

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Today I am sitting here and I am contemplating the providence of a U.S. Senator providing the income for someone to purchase 21 railroad cabooses with tax payer money and consquently, build a caboose motel in Pennsylvania, I just don’t understand it.

Then I think about the elections, “I don’t personally approve of a woman who goes to a bar and drinks Tequila Shooters,” but on the other hand, “he only bowled a, what was it, a 37?”
Man, I am going to really get ugly in November …..

I used to be a lover, a fighter, and a dirty old boxcar rider …. Worked for a major U.S. Railroad and I am here to tell you, a railroad caboose is the LAST PLACE IN THE WORLD you would want to sleep in, yet alone spend the night. Unless of course, you are currently in the employ of a major U.S. Railroad.

I don’t know a whole lot about modern day U.S. Railroads, but I know this …. “You get three railroaders together, and you have an EXPERT on any subject in the world!” My somewhat dubious credentials on this subject having been duly established, I will continue.

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.

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.

Isn’t this fun? (Stay with me now)

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.

Bureaucracies live forever!

So the next time you are handed a Specification/Procedure/Process and wonder “What horse’s ass came up with it?” … You may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.)

Now, the twist to the story. (Assuming you have stuck with it this far)

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 SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB’s would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s 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 SRB’s 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’ asses.

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? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything and …CURRENTLY … Horses Asses are controlling everything else too!

Tomorrow we will discuss Pasty-White-Faced Hereford cow’s and just how it is that they feel about being blamed for greenhouse gas emissions and of course, “being rounded up by cowboys and herded around like Jet-America passengers.”

Don’t miss it …

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