The Sunday Funnies

Well, it's been a long week, what with mid terms, having to fix a broken opener arm on my automatic door opener on my van, and dealing with an EBD (Emotional Behavioral Disorder) kid. I think I'll kick back today, but here is the first of what will be a recurring Sunday series of real life incidents which I've found humorous. Perhaps you will too. In the summer of ’85, I snagged a set of orders for two weeks ACDUTRA (Active Duty for Training) at a Marine Reserve Firex (artillery live fire exercise) at Fort Carson, Colorado. Travel regs had just been changed to allow Naval Reservists to travel unlimited miles by POV (privately owned vehicle), with the proviso that the member would only be reimbursed for an amount not to exceed the cost of round-trip air fare. I took a full month off; packed up my deuce gear (782 gear – pack, shelter half, sleeping bag, etc,) into my new Honda Civic AWD – on demand wagon, and made a vacation out of it – one week on either side of the ACDUTRA. At the far northwest corner of my trek was the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah – a “must see’ for an “evolutionist” agnostic such as I. The focal point of the multi-thousand acre “monument” is the famous site where paleontologists have left the last small portion of a hugely productive dig for public viewing. In a roughly 20-foot-high by 75-foot-long cliff face, dozens of fossilized dinosaur bones have been left in situ. Technicians have carefully chiseled away the breccia surrounding each fossil so that the specimens are displayed in bas-relief. The entire cliff face is enclosed in a building which looks rather like a huge hothouse. To view the cliff face, I had climbed up to the mezzanine observation level, about half way up the height of the cliff face and back about 10 feet from it. Immediately to my right, as I stood at the railing, there was a display of some of the hand tools used to carefully chip away the breccia surrounding the fossils. These ran from dental instruments to a wedge which merits closer description. Imagine a steel wedge about 80% of the size of your typical wood splitting wedge. They had run the thick end of the wedge into a band saw at two points – each in from the opposite sides about one-quarter of the total width of the thick end. The idea was that once you drove that wedge in, you could then drive smaller steel wedges into the slits on the larger wedge in order to split the breccia apart. Now, there came a point where I had been standing there for about twenty minutes. I was lost in thought and feeling a sense of awed reverence of the sort that cathedrals evoke for theists. I was right in the middle of a thought that went something like “How could people possibly buy that ‘no more than 6,000 years old’ Creationist crap in the face of such ubiquitous and overwhelming evidence to the contrary?” when a woman walked up, family in tow, pointed to the aforementioned hardened steel wedge, and exclaimed loudly, “Oh, look, Honey, here’s what they killed ‘em with!”