like you mentioned in thiscolumn!
Please?
I’ll be your best friend!
That’s a story I want to hear.
Unca Cecil, tell us a story!
Wait a sec, lemme build a campfire!
Here, use these old Jack Chick Tracts, the Official Kindling of the SDMB.
<< and possessed fish are telling us to repent in Hebrew on the front page of the New York Times.~~~sig by Kyla >>
I aint gonna repent on the front page of the New York Times, neither in English nor in Hebrew… and I doubt that they have a Hebrew font anyway.
Oh, DEX—ter!!!
No, Bosda. Sigh. My comment was a joke about the misplaced modifier, namely the phrase “in Hebrew on the front page of the New York Times.” See, the way the sentence is currently structured, that phrase modifies the verb “repent” rather than the noun “fish”… So, the fish is telling us that we should all go and repent in Hebrew on the front page of the NYT.
Crawling along a leaf, I saw a beetle. Misplaced descriptive pages.
:dubious:
An’ ze Frenchman, he say to me, “Throw my horse over the fence some hay.”
Is anyone reminded of the Scotsman’s pig? “Yes, it’s a heroic and remarkable pig, but why does he have a leg missing?” “Man, ye don’t eat a creature like that all at once!”
Can we get back to topic on this? We want to hear about how Cecil nearly wrecked a building with a crane!
I plead again, please illuminate us with a song of yesteryear, one involving Perfect Masters, cranes, and buildings…
Yes Cecil, the children are gathered 'round and would ever so dearly love to hear a story from their beloved Uncle Cecil.
OK, here’s the deal. This takes a little setting up, so be patient.
When I was 18 or so I had a summer job at a railroad yard as a machinist helper at the diesel house. The diesel house was a big building where locomotives were serviced. Football field sized, maybe 30-40 feet high, made of brick.
The diesel house was equipped with an overhead crane. This consisted of a winch suspended from a truss that ran the width of the building. The truss was on wheels than ran on tracks running the length of the building. You could move the winch to and fro on the truss, and the truss back and forth on the tracks, and thus move the crane to any point in the building. With me so far?
Periodically I had to use the crane to move parts around the diesel house. Cylinder heads for the diesels, wheel sets, stuff like that. Things that weighed hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds. So the crane mechanism was pretty massive. To operate the crane I used pushbuttons on a control box at the end of a long cable hanging down from the truss.
One day I was supposed to move the crane down to the far end of the diesel house to get a part. I had the idea that there were brakes and limit switches on the crane that would automatically stop it before the truss reached the end of the rails and ran into the end of the building. There were. They didn’t work. I kept that button mashed down the whole time; the truss kept right on rolling.
There was a thunderous crash. The building shook. All work stopped. In retrospect I’m lucky - we were all lucky - that the crane didn’t take out the end of the building, which conceivably might have caused the roof to cave in.
The diesel house superintendent ran over. His name, believe it or not, was Belcher. He was well named. I was petrified. He looked me in the eye and roared:
“Son, did you ever do that before?”
“No, sir.”
“You ever going to do that again?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” With that he turned on his heel and walked away. Nothing more was ever said about the incident. I have kept my word. To this day I have never crashed another crane into the end of a building, and I don’t care what you ply me with in the way of money, liquor, and easy women, I never will. But I’ll say this:
It was kinda fun to have done it once.
Now, that’s a good story. Nice to see Cecil come visit the Teeming Millions. Bravo!
That was a nice story.
I agree, but I can also see how it would be hard to work that into a column. 
This pales in comparison, but at Villanova U., our main observatory was a normal-shaped rectangular room, but the whole roof could slide over to the side. The 15 inch telescope was long enough, though, that it had to be stowed horizontally while the roof was closed. When we were being introduced to the equipment, the department head asked us “Do any of you know what they call an astronomy major who runs the roof into the 'scope?”
“No.”
“A liberal arts major.”
I never did run the roof into the 'scope, but in retrospect, I see what Cecil means. It woulda been kinda fun to do it once.
Ha ha! Tars Tarkas has to be Cecil’s best friend now. He promised.
sucker!
:eek: [Blue M&M]He IS real![Blue M&M] faint THUD!