You guys are trying to kill me. I have some sort of chst cold, so I’d start laughing, then have a coughing fit and about pass out. The whole thing reminds me of that old “bad metaphors” joke list, with “hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup”.
I only started watching football about 4 years ago, but this saying never annoyed me before that (and it doesn’t now, of course). I figure that it’s mostly standard knowledge that a football field is 100 yards, and even if someone doesn’t know that, they should be able to picture a football field and figure out approximately how far away something is based on that.
I generally figure that it’s car for the next few states, and plane for anything much beyond that. For example, if someone told me, “It takes 8 hours to get from San Diego to El Paso”, I figure they’re talking about going by car. If they said, “It takes 2 hours to get from San Diego to Chicago”, they’re talking about going by plane. You can also figure it out by thinking for just a few seconds about how long they say a trip takes. Planes go roughly 1000 mph, cars go roughly 60-70 mph on highways, and the USA is about 3000 miles wide. These are pretty easy numbers to toss around in your head, and anyway, there aren’t too many ways you could go from Chicago to St. Louis that take 4-5 hours. Unless the pilot is drunk, that is.
Driving downtown tonight, I heard an NPR segment about extinct ancient creatures. The reporter says about one critter: It’s not the size of a modern rhino, but more the size of a Texas longhorn.
Everyone should be happy to know that their skin has the tensile strength of a watermelon, according to numerous refernces on the Discovery Channel. And since this comparison isn’t silly enough on its own, as a rule they are talking about puncture resistance and not tension.
About the size of a Yellow Lab, with a similar disposition* (towards you; he’d still charge your enemies…) *the horn would be the consistency of foam-rubber, and he’d poop Rhino Chow.
I read this years ago and can’t remember exactly where. I doubt it’s strictly accurate, but I like it.
“If the Great Lakes were the density of a neutron star, they would fit in your bathroom sink-which would immediately tear loose from the wall and fall unimpeded to the center of the earth.”
“An armored knight trying to pull his foot out of this mud would have felt as though he had a robber evading the cops attached to his ankle. When are these criminal gonna learn crime only gets you muddy and attached to a midevil knight?”