Centerfield

O.K., Mr. Bean, this time it will come out of your salary.

Basil!

If a 99.99% (P=.9999 unharmed) safe shelf means that 0.01% of the number of times someone walks by, the vases on the shelf will get smashed (P=0.0001), you'll have about a 50/50 shot at them being smashed if about 7000 people are projected to walk by. You start getting really close to a 1 probability at less than 100,000 people.

Eggggscellent Smithers. Give that man a (Pabst) blue ribbon. This is an object lesson for everyone who engages in activities such as skydiving or motorcycle riding and take consolation from the low probability of an accident for ONE jump.

Of course, I think the probability that such messages sink in rises with every videotape scene of a skydiving disaster. And before anyone calls me Prudent Priscilla, let me add that I am DYING to get another bike.

Here's a good one. If you have 23 people in a room, there's a better than 50% chance that at least two of them have the same birthday. I know it's not quite the same thing, but I can't resist bringing it up when presented with the most minimal excuse to do so.

And speaking of Pabst Blue Ribbon, I was at a Reverend Horton Heat concert at the House of Blues in an Atlantic City ca$ino last month. Upon arriving I ordered a couple drinks for the wife and me at the bar. The total was somewhere around $20. I immediately inquired about lower priced alternatives. As it turns out, there as a promo for PBR going on at a little table against the back wall. $3 a pop and free cheezy t-shirts to boot. I'm not sure how many PBRs I ended up drinking, but if there's some small probability of finding a mouse in a can of PBR, I may have been flirting with significantly probable rodent consumption by the end of the night.

My wife and I were in the The Museum of
the Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy when another visitor brought a stone panel crashing to the floor. The panel was mounted perpendicular to the wall on a metal hinge so that it could be viewed on both sides. Apparently the visiter was "adjusting" the panel when it slipped out of its bracket and crashed to the floor.

Guards rushed in from all directions. Luckily, the floor seemed more damaged than the panel and, as they say, no one was hurt.

The Chinese vase museum had a very well trained PR person, whose first comment was gratitude that the patron whose shoelace destroyed the irreplaceable vases was uninjured.

I woulda been very tempted to strangle him with the shoelace.

What I like is their proposal to glue all the pieces back together, no matter how tiny they are. Now there's optimism.

A good antiquarian staff can do exactly that, so well it's tough to tell it was broken in the first place. But it could take 'em a year or more.

Now if only the king had had a good staff of antiquarians instead of just all of his horses and all of his men...

You haven't lived in glorious slow-mo until you've seen a restorer pat themselves on the back for spending a week or more restoring two square inches of something. And then bragging about their "rapid" progress!

Now if only the king had had a good staff of antiquarians instead of just all of his horses and all of his men...

LOL! I thought that was Humpty Dumpty, Pat. My bad. ;-)

Tully,

Believe me, I've followed the progress on the Sistine Chapel, not just the infestisimal, flake-by-flake chipping away of the old paint, but the mind numbing arguments about what color, shade and tint Michaelanglo "originally" used. It's possibly the only thing on earth that could make a bond hearing look exciting.

Please, don't mention bond hearings....

LOL!

Glad you enjoyed the Humpty Dumpty reference, Jean. It was definitely better than my earlier Fawlty Towers reference. Thanks to Tully for providing the straight line set-up for it.

Now all this talk of bond hearings has me bushed... I'm going to bed.

Oh, I laughed at that, Pat, but by the time I got back to replying, the moment had passed.

What do you mean, you're going to bed? And miss the thrilling Democratic response????!!! ;-)

No, I saw the Democratic response... that's why I had to go to bed!

I never ever ever watch speeches I don't have to. Anyone's. Ever. The transcript will be up later, I can read an hour's worth in a few minutes, and life is TOO SHORT, ya know?

lol, Pat. Actually, that's a good idea, Tully. (In fact, it's the same way I used to keep up with the soaps.) Is there a speeches.com?