A place where everybody knows your name

[Caesar dude]

To be fair to the Romans...they'd only been fighting for a thousand years and had probably never met a few drunken Scotsmen before..... 

[apnp]

...come-back HAPpy, come-back HAPpy...


Aye an' a bit of Mackeral settler rack and ruin
ran it doon by the haim, 'ma place
well I slapped me and I slapped it doon in the side
and I cried, cried, cried.

The fear a fallen down taken never back the raize and then Craig Marion,
get out wi' ye Claymore out mi pocket a' ran doon, doon the middin stain
picking the fiery horde that was fallen around ma feet.
Never he cried, never shall it ye get me alive
ye rotten hound of the burnie crew. Well I snatched fer the blade O my
Claymore cut and thrust and I fell doon before him round his feet.

Aye! A roar he cried frae the bottom of his heart that I would nay fall
but as dead, dead as 'a can be by his feet; de ya ken?

...and the wind cried Mary.
 

[Zen Dog]

The Romans!  What did they ever do for us?  Apart from............No hold on a minute.
When they cleared off, the bath houses closed, the theatres closed,the roads disappeared under the weeds, the postal service stopped and all the nice buildings fell down.Shoot through bunch of bastards.

[cckeiser]

The Romans!  What did they ever do for us?  Apart from............No hold on a minute.
When they cleared off, the bath houses closed, the theatres closed,the roads disappeared under the weeds, the postal service stopped and all the nice buildings fell down.Shoot through bunch of bastards.

What did the Romans Give US!...

(I think I received this in an email back before the turn of the century.)

Subject: The Impact of the Roman Empire on Space Shuttle Design


A useless fact (with a twist) about technology:

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 built 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 used for building
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! 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? The first long distance roads
in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their
legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman
war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. Since
the chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the
original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you
are handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear came up
with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman war
chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of
two war-horses.

And now, the twist to the story...

There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gaugesand horses' behinds. When we 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.
Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at Utah. The engineers who
designed the SRBs might 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 had to run through a
tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the
railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds.

So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a
Horse's [rear]!

Think about it!

Received from L. Rodney Ford via Doug Taylor.

[Zen Dog]

Innerestin.But the Romans didn't use 'war' chariots.Chariots were for racing, (in the circus) and ceremonial parades.
The 'Eagle' also fucks up the truth.The Britons didn't use them in combat either.They were just a transport system.
Also used for showing off pre combat.There was a lot more to conflict in those days.Like stags rutting.
Wagon wheel spacing was as it was just because of regulation.The civil service is not a modern concept.

[cckeiser]

Innerestin.But the Romans didn't use 'war' chariots.Chariots were for racing, (in the circus) and ceremonial parades.
The 'Eagle' also fucks up the truth.The Britons didn't use them in combat either.They were just a transport system.
Also used for showing off pre combat.There was a lot more to conflict in those days.Like stags rutting.
Wagon wheel spacing was as it was just because of regulation.The civil service is not a modern concept.

Yeah, someone corrected calling it a hoax on the MOTU forum with this link:
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

It did make a good story though.