The Buckets by Greg Cravens for September 25, 2016

Eddie learned a very important lesson that day. Facts from dad must be filtered first by the BS-ometer.

Oh dear. I do hope this report won’t go on his permanent record.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Helmholtz resonance, or wind throb, is the phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity, such as when one blows across the top of an empty bottle. The name comes from a device created in the 1850s by Hermann von Helmholtz, the Helmholtz resonator, which he used to identify the various frequencies or musical pitches present in music and other complex sounds.

Don’t feel too bad Eddie

I’ve had teenagers and adults believing some pretty crazy stuff, just because it sounded logical or technical enough and I said it in a confidant and authoritative manner

Once when I was wiring an old coax cable network, where you have to put data plugs on the final T fitting. The secretary was watching me and asked me what the plug was for. I told her that if you didn’t put that in, the bits would dribble out on to the desk and that she should check it every so often to make sure it wasn’t leaking because it would make a mess. Every time I came she assured me it wasn’t leaking yet.

Greg, this was absolutely brilliant! I scared three cats from laughing so hard. Thank you!!

We had a story when we were kids. The pumping station at our reservoir was built in a big brick dome. Dad told us that a Bear lived inside it and came out to eat runaway kids. In 4th grade I wrote a report on it thinking it was real. We got a class trip to the Pumping station and We learned all about how it works and I learned that the story was over 50 years old. It started when a bear was trapped in the area, and kids were told the old bear died and we got a new one. My grandfather heard that story and told my dad who passed it along to us kids.

Well I met Professor Woobidy and have known him for years. He now lives outside a small town in Wisconsin since his retirement, where he and his wife Wanda knit colorful earmuffs.

The window acts as the opening in a whistle producing a subsonic tone, which you feel more than hear.

To be fair there is a large portion of the human population that still believe in Santa, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny and some mythical deity that controls their lives and will severely punish them if they don’t toe the line set by arbitrary groups of people with dissimilar agendas. .Believing one of dad’s stories is fairly minor by comparison.

My dad told me about ‘granite worms’, which eat holes in rock along highways. They were trained to do this so explosives could be put in the hole & the rock blasted for the road.

The first seed of parental disillusionment is sown…

I used to know a man who told his children that a “NO OUTLET” sign meant the houses on that street didn’t have electricity. He also told them Cheetos grew on trees because the bag said “Plants in 14 states”. I hope his now-grown kids can laugh about it and not hate him.

When we went to Freedomland (a sort of theme park) and the 1960’s NY World Fair they had attractions such as the cyclone and and earthquake. I was terrified of them – and as a result of the possibility of one.

Dad assured me that neither could happen here in the NYC area. He even pointed out that they would not be allowed to build such tall buildings in same if there could be an earthquake and that the land was more stable in this area than in California (full explanation) and the cyclones hit in the midwest due to the weather. (Dad was trained as an engineer – no,not trains.)

Not sure if he just said all that to reassure me or there have been changes, but I there have been both,more than once, in this area in recent years.

That sound is extremely nauseating.