On 7/8/2008 4:37 PM HeyBub spake thus:

Moan!

Did you hear the one about the Chinese woodworker (to be in consonance with
the mission of this group) who noticed some of his more expensive wood was
disappearing. Being a clever, though inscrutable, Chinaman he sprinkled fine
sawdust on the floor of his shop. The next morning, he discovered a child's
footprints in the sawdust!

Being even more inscrutable, he hid in a bin the next night. During the
darkness he heard scuffling around in his shop. The Chinaman jumped from his
hiding place and turned on the light.

Standing in the center of his workshop, gnawing on a board, was an
eight-foot tall Grizzly Bear with itty-bitty feet !

Nonplussed (which is similar to inscrutable), the woodworker called out:
"Now I've got you, boy-foot bear with Teak of Chan!"

groannnnnn ...

OK, now you've done it. I feel compelled to tell the tale of the
metallurgical engineer who was called in by Asarco, the big mining and
smelting company, to solve a problem in their copper smelting operation
in San Manuel, Arizona. Seems that no matter what material they used,
the big metal trays they used for one part of the process corroded and
leaked. They called them "sinks" since that's what they looked like, and
the corrosion was always signalled by the sink turning brown.

So they hired this new young guy, fresh out of metallurgy school back
East, to fix this vexing problem. He tried all kinds of alloys with no
luck. Stainless steel? lasted a week, then browned out. Tried this,
tried that.

Finally, in a fit of frustration, he made a prototype sink out of a
piece of sheet molybdenum that was in the corner of his lab. Poured the
copper concentrate in it, left it sit and forgot about it. He remembered
it about a week later and was amazed to see that the metal was still clean.

For his efforts, the company awarded him a plaque on the smelter floor.
It simply read:

The Unbrownable Moly Sink


(ba da BOOM!)


--
"Wikipedia ... it reminds me ... of dogs barking idiotically through
endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up
the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and
doodle. It is balder and dash."

- With apologies to H. L. Mencken