In a message dated Thu, 6 Sep 2001 10:33:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Joe Foley <redmenaced@yahoo.com> writes:
> > There are very specific laws regarding the proper
> > display of the slow moving
> > vehicle triangle, that specify the speed range it
> > can be used in. It is
> > surprisingly slow.
> +++++++++++++
> Huh?
>
> I thought that was an Amish religious symbol!
>
> Joe
You're both wrong...it signifies an Italian tomato farmer on the wrong side of the road.
NOW, farm tractors ought to be equipped with flashing (green?) lights if anything should. I was once using mine to accompany my M37, which I had loaded up sideways on an old forage wagon chassis. The trip was a disaster. I was doing well, riding the 25 degree sidehill on the shoulder of Rt 70, doing about 5 mph, listening to Slim Whitman songs on the tractor's radio, holding a prize eggplant in one hand. A charter bus load of drunken Jamaican nuns came speeding by on their way to the casinos. Two things happened: The sudden wind and noise aroused a huge nest of them big black paper wasps that lived down in the bowels of the tractor's cowling, and I was the immediate target of thousands of enraged little jet propelled pissed off arthropods. The tattered cloth banner on the side of the bus was flapping in the wind, caught that little wire thingie on the Marvel Schebler carburetor, and opened the throttle wide with a huge belch of brown smoke, before you could say Holy Moses! I had to shift three times to keep
the engine from blowing to pieces! Every time I grabbed the gearshift, I got a hundred more bites! My hands looked like last year's keilbasa that got left in the swimming pool. The nuns heard the engine backfire, thought I had farted at them, and they all lined up at the windows and mooned me as they went by. As they opened all the windows of the bus, the thing virtually filled to the rafters with pissed off bees. As they retreated at high speed, I could hear them screaming like a pack of frantic dalmatians, which is exactly what they looked like with all them wasps all over them! I was laughing so hard that I didn't see the Four Mile traffic circle coming. For those of you who aren't familiar with NJ's traffic circles, these are periodic places provided by considerate planners, on busy highways, at which you can tighten your underpants, pull out your fording control, kiss your arse goodbye, and plunge headlong into hundreds of aimlessly speeding cars, fully half of them driven by blind Leisuretown residents
, all headed to different shore resorts at the speed of light. Talk about an E ticket ride! Well, they sure enough SAW ME COMING, as the tractor and the flatbed proceeded straight across the circle island, and only touched the ground twice. A small pond was approaching on the passenger side, so I stood up on the running boards and got ready to jump off. My shirt tails caught on an overhanging tree limb, my shirt suddenly disappeared like a Windows data file, and some faint hearted old lady going the other way ass-ended a gasoline tanker as she screamed out her window at me "Wow, them are some bad ass tattoos, sonny boy! She survived, but all she will say now as she lies in her rehab is "How's my driving?" 1-800-555-9595! SO there I was, standing on the running boards, barechested, at 50 miles per hour, a satanic smile on my face, on a three wheeled tractor pulling an M37 loaded sideways on an old forage wagon chassis, and as the pond passed into my peripheral vision, I bailed out. I lost my britches on the
gearshift as I jumped, I skidded three hundred feet on slimy mud, and came to a well-earned stop. All I could think of as my life flashed in front of me was that old joke about why cavemen pulled their women around by their hair...cause if they pulled them by the ankles, they'd fill up with mud. When I got done digging all that black mud out of my mouth with a stick, I walked over to the circle island where all the action was, only to overhear a woman telling what she saw as the scene played out. "Officer, this naked man with a bad case of hives came flashing by with the BIGGEST glow in the dark yield sign I've ever seen attached to his backside, with an army truck justa chasin him, and he jumped into that pond over there." She pointed obligingly to the mudhole I just climbed out of.
We all looked over at the same instant, only to see the bright afternoon sun reflecting off my SMV emblem.
Anyway, the tractor was fine after I adjusted the valves and pumped all the lily of the valley out of the tie rod end boots with my BIG greasegun. The M37 rode it out just as well, but I never knew if those nuns got to where they were going. I didn't even miss the eggplant until a week later when I began having these awful cramps.....
Folks, it takes more than an SMV emblem to get by in today's traffic!
best to all,
Jack
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 08 2001 - 10:58:57 PDT