…never mind, then…
maybe i’ll just be an assassin…
…naah, i’ll just pour another bowl of marshmallow mateys instead…
…they’re like generic lucky charms, they come in those bags…made by malt-o-meal…
know anybody who goes to college in northfield, minn? nothin’ but 2 colleges and a malt-o-meal plant. hannah’s got a facebook group: “my school smells better than yours”. the day i was visiting her they were making their low-rent golden grahams… mmm… whole town smelled like graham crackers… a dollop of half-n-half and they taste better than the name brand stuff. i should get some half-n-half. or swipe a couple of little creamer things from the gas station.
y’know, i should face it, i am never getting around to makin that thermite…
Very exothermic and fast. In the early sixties, one of the fraternities at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) used it to weld a streetcar to the tracks while it was stopped at a traffic light on Forbes Avenue.
Got a cite for that? The same rumor is told about MIT…
One of my fellow grad students in civil engineering at the U of I did his PhD thesis on using thermite to repair broken rails in situ - surround the cracked rail with a clay form, set a thermite charge on top and ignite. Molten iron pours down into the form and repairs the rail seamlessly. Let cool, break form off and you’re good to go. Bit of a simplification but that was the basic method.
I’ll admit that it sounds like an urban myth, but so far, I cannot prove or disprove it with a news cite (or even snopes).
However, it has been immortalized on a CMU Campus Center mural by Douglas Cooper. It is described in a PDF at the Heinz History Center which mentions the trolley incident. It says:
The mural is full of stories and history.
There’s that famous street car stopped at Forbes and Morewood. In the ‘60s, it seems, a fraternity brother distracted the driver by dropping a ton of pennies all over the streetcar floor as he paid his fare. The driver paused long enough for the pledges to move in with their tools and weld the streetcar to the tracks. Then they blew it, Cooper says. They were so pleased with the prank that they went back to their house (now Alumni House), laughing all the way but making it easy to track down the culprits.
(Alumni House does occupy the old Delta Upsion building)