Story Notes: A Trip North (FNFE) · 2:56am Jun 29th, 2018
FNFE: A Trip North
Source YouTube Link; fair warning: turn down your volume
I'll start this a little bit differently than I usually do, by assigning blame.
Or not.
Because I don't know what came first.
Someone—I think it might have been Snakeskin Ducttape—mentioned a pony coal mine having carved supports. I also knew about pit ponies (and sent a text to myself on January 12 to that effect). Likewise, the idea of mining something not so valuable by human standards and tossing away that which we would consider valuable has been kicking around in my mind for a while; it appeared in Drive, for example.
There were a few other bits of headcanon and random 'what ifs' that also made their appearance because this was the right place for them. Things like the pegasus pony refilling the water tower with a string of rain clouds, for example.
And there was one callback where I broke one of my cardinal rules (more about that in an upcoming blog post).
That's really about it for the genesis of the story; now let's get on to the facts!
First and most important, Pit Ponies are a thing that existed. There's a long human history when it comes to coal and coal mining. I don't know when it first started (and odds are that no historian does, either)—somebody discovered shiny, oily rocks and figured out that they burned nicely or made black streaks on things or who knows what. Probably lying on the ground; there were places in England where the Romans just picked them up off the beach.
As demand increased, people figured out ways to meet that demand, and it started by mining back those cliff faces that were being eroded by the ocean and eventually turned into mining like we know today.
In the interem, when coal was in high demand and practical internal combustion engines hadn't been invented yet, someone figured out that pulling loaded mine carts sucks and ponies like pulling carts (for some value of 'like'), and the pit pony was born.
While they weren't bred for this, the Shetland Pony was the best pit pony, and thousands of them went to England to serve in the mines. [Shetlands, as I've mentioned before, are stronger on a pound-by-pound basis than Clydesdales.]
Source (YouTube); volume warning again
Many of them spent much of their life underground.
When we think of things like pony-pulled mining wagons, our minds probably go back to Victorian times, but it turns out that the last pony mine in the US closed in 1971, and while I don't have the full details, I have to imagine that the ponies in that mine were descendants of the Shetlands that had been imported from England.
In England, the tradition continued for a bit longer . . . until 1999. And I know that some of you Millenials are thinking that that was ancient history, but I was graduating college when Robbie was retired from Pant y Gasseg.
Also, while this is jumping the gun a bit, in England there were 'foal labor' laws; ponies had to be four years old and work-ready before they could be pit ponies.
It won't surprise you to know that the five ponies all have mining-related names.
Longwall: “Longwall mining is a form of underground coal mining where a long wall of coal is mined in a single slice.”
Overburden: “Rock or soil overlying a mineral deposit.”
Assay: “The testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality.”
Gytta: “A mud formed from the partial decay of peat.” [Coal is essentially very, very old peat.]
Lignite: “A soft brownish coal . . . intermediate between bituminous coal and peat.”
Now let's move back a bit.
Back before there were trains as we know them, there were wagonways. Someone figured out that steel wheels rolled really well on steel rails, and since the steam engine hadn't been invented yet, equines got to be the pulling power. One of the earliest railroads/roller coasters in the US was in fact one of these, the Mauch Chunk and Summit Railroad in Pennsylvania. When they had coal business, they ran loads of coal down the mountain. When they didn't, they let people pay to ride in the mine carts.
If you skipped the Wikipedia link above, here's a YouTube link of Tom Scott and friends explaining it:
There is a running joke among railfans that a proper railroad name needs to include the words 'Central,' 'Pacific,' and an ampersand, thus making the “Chicago, Central, & Pacific” the most railroady name of all time. Especially since at the height of their route miles, they made it all the way to Nebraska, which is a far cry from the Pacific.
A lot of railroad names back in the day just combined the names of towns where they went, and then maybe added something aspirational to the end (like the word Pacific). And sometimes they kept adding things, such as the Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Pacific (more commonly known as The Milwaukee RR) [and they did get to the Pacific in 1909, so their name wasn't a lie], the Atichson, Topeka, and Santa Fe RR (the Santa Fe), and of course the New York, Chicago, and St. Louis Railroad, which everyone (including me) calls the Nickel Plate Road.*
Back in Ye Olde Times, they also sometimes included other things that they did, and of course it's very pony to have two not quite the same things in a name. You know, like Quills & Sofas [& Pacific].
Hence The Manehattan, Paisley & Greenock Northern Steam Railway & Mumbles and Pit Wagonway.
I should mention that there was an English railroad named the Swansea and Mumbles.
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*Also worth mention, the East Tennessee and West North Carolina, a railroad infamous for including nearly every compass direction in their name.
I once rode on the Chemins De Fer De Province from Dijon to Nice and then back again.* The new rail car that we rode was built in the 30s, and the route itself I can only assume was a goat-herding path left over from Roman times that nobody was using. It was narrow gauge (goats aren't very wide) and the railcar itself looked rather silly inside a huge trainshed. Seating was first come first serve, and it filled up on the way south. Leaving Nice, it was standing room only, but as it made stops, the car emptied out and few passengers got on.
The rail crossings were manually-activated gates.
While in some ways it was a let-down from the TGV, the trip was certainly more memorable, and if I had the chance, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
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*Google helpfully translates their name as "The train pine nuts."
I think it's fairly well established in both canon and in my own works that gems in Equestria typically aren't worth much.
It's also worth considering that markets are complicated, but in the simplest form operate on supply and demand. If ponies from Pit Town are commonly coming to Greenock with buckets of gems to trade for food, before too long the Greenock market is flooded with gems—everypony who wants some has them—and their value drops. Much like lemon drops.*
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*This a reference to a thing that doesn't exist yet, so I'm actually guessing at how Estee will interpret the economics.
Small towns really do close down at night. Back when I first got my current job, fuel costs were high and my commute was long, and it made sense to sleep in my van a couple nights a week. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything to do after 8pm . . . the whole town shut down. Only the bar at the bowling alley was still open, and I think they closed at 10 on weeknights. That was never a problem in Lansing; heck, if I needed a master cylinder for a S-10 at midnight, there was a 24-hour Autozone that could sell it to me.
Similarly, small town businesses don't always post their hours. Everyone who lives there knows when the place is open, and for everyone else, it either is or isn't.
Back in Ye Olden Times, child labor was very much a thing. Children were really useful for lots of jobs, in fact, because they were small and could fit places adults couldn't. Of course, such a system was rife with abuse, and of course I'm not in any advocating it. At the same time, especially before universal education was a thing, there was something to be said about learning a skilled trade at a young age. [It's also worth brief mention that a lot of times back then, the options were some sort of modern factory job or working on a farm, and from what little I know of working on a farm, it isn't fun.]
I don't see the ponies going to the extremes (for lack of a better word) as we humans have (and do); however, there's a very fine line between child labor and an apprenticeship.
I never really discussed brakes in my blog series about wagons. IRL, they were operated by the wagon driver as needed. Ponies, naturally, don't need a wagon driver to tell them where to go, and as such would have the brakes be operated by the pony pulling the wagon wherever possible.
Dump wagons did exist long before hydraulic cylinders were invented. Some of them (and early dump trucks) were designed in such a way that tripping a release cause the bed to tilt due to the load, and once it had slid out, the bed dropped back down and re-latched; this is without a doubt the arrangement the ponies would use.
I don't know where the idea of right-side running originated from, or why England (and a few other places) do it the other way. Gytta's wrong about it being easier for a pony to turn that way; ponies can turn either direction just as easily, wagon or not. I haven't found any literature suggesting that equines are typically one-side dominant (like humans tend to be right-hand dominant [AS FAR AS I KNOW, BUT I HAVEN'T DONE A LOT OF RESEARCH]), although some sources suggest that particular horses are either right- or left-side dominant when it comes to novel things.
We all know that 'this is the way it's always been done' is a powerful force, though, and if mines are 'always' left-side running, ponies (or humans) would find ways to justify it, even if that wasn't actually the reason [consider the tired (and wrong) explanation why the common American rail gauge is 4' 8.5”.]
Wagons for passengers tend to have suspensions for the whole wagon (usually leaf springs); wagons for cargo tend to have at best suspension for the driver's seat (usually leaf springs). This has carried over into commercial trucks; one I used to drive had an air seat for the driver, and a padded board for any poor souls who had to ride shotgun.
Methane is one of the big dangers in underground mines. Besides it potentially being suffocating, it's also explosive, and if you're mining by candlelight (not as romantic as it sounds), the combination of open flames + explosive gas isn't a good one.
Methane itself isn't detectable by the human nose. It doesn't have a smell. When we smell farts, that's the hydrogen sulfide in them we're smelling. Likewise, commercially-available natural gas and propane has an odorant added (usually mercaptan).
Pony noses I'm less sure about. I couldn't find any sources that said for sure if they could smell it or if they couldn't, and I also couldn't find any about dogs, either.
Regardless, they are right about a slowly building concentration going unnoticed. Like people, ponies get accustomed to something that they're smelling all the time. We might realize when we open the door to a building and it smells like rotten eggs that there's a big problem, but if the gas leak is small and we're in it all the time, it can build up to explosive potential without us really noticing.
If you still don't believe me, look at your own nose.
Canaries were used to detect dangerous gasses back in the day (especially carbon monoxide). It wasn't really good for the canary—when the bird died, it was time to hightail it out of the mine.*
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*For those writers who put bird attributes on pegasi, there's story potential here.
Conifers really do absorb methane. Sources I found were a bit inconclusive at how effective at it they were, and I am unaware of anyone actually using them in a mine (there are all sorts of technical problems to solve before putting trees in a mine), but with good old-fashioned Earth Pony magicTM, it's probably doable.
Remember how we talked about the singletree as it applied to ride quality? Subscribe and never miss a blog.
The idea of cross supports being carved and painted most likely goes to Snakeskin Ducttape. I'm not 100% sure and don't feel like wading through many long PMs, but I can't remember who else I might have discussed the subject with.
One of the biggest technical issues of the entire story was how do you describe the house that the Dwarves owned?
Is it the seven dwarve's house?
Or the seven dwarves' house?
Or the seven dwarf's house?
Or the seven dwarfs' house?
Upon consultation, and the fact that Disney called them the Seven Dwarfs, the last option was chosen, but by all means if you're an expert in weird English rules (which basically means any rule I don't know [which is most of them]) feel free to weigh in.
Also worth mention, and not at all related to this particular story, the reason why in Grand_Moff_Pony's Princess Celestia Goes to Costco she is both “Lady of Her Majesty's Noble's Council” and “Extraordinary Princess of the Nobles' Council” is because of a similar debate I had with various pre-readers and editors about whether it was the Noble's Council or Nobles' Council.
Incidentally, Grand_Moff_Pony probably doesn't know why that particular detail is in his story. If he follows me, he'll find out in this blog post!
There's something almost magical about watching a team working as one. No matter what they're doing, when you have a well-oiled team of people (or ponies), there's always a magical rhythm going on. Each one knows what all the others are going to do, and once things get in motion, they just flow. Back before my idiot manager arrived, the shop worked like that, and I've also experienced that in many theatre productions.
Heck, in one practice where Rebecca hit me in the head with a quarterstaff by mistake (this is why you practice, kids), I was ducking when I realized that she was coming in too low, and she was pulling up and back because she knew it, too. I'd gotten lazy and she made a mistake and the two things conspired to turn into something that should never have happened, and we discussed it afterwards.
And lest you think that I'm perfect and she's not, we reversed the mistake in an actual show, and I got her in the head. Once again, we both realized that something had gone wrong, and she was ducking pulling away even as I was braking the staff and twisting up . . . that was captured on video, because of course it happened during a show.
[She was fine; both our actions combined caused the staff to only graze her hair.]
I'll admit, the parts about the cleaning crews and the ventilation systems were added as afterthoughts. I knew some of it, and an alert reader reminded me as well, but the original story never included that.
As a last resort, clearing a mine with a tornado probably would work. Based on personal experience, tornadoes are a good way to remove a lot of weak trees and power lines and roofs that aren't fastened down all that well.
Lignite trots in her sleep. How cute is that?
I feel like I forgot to cover at least one thing in the notes, but I can't remember what.
Having pedaled alongside the TGV line near Nice, I can tell you it would've been very similar, both in term of scenery and speed -the landscape did not provide a huge number of possibilities afterall- it just would've been less fun and more, you know, modern.
(not that modern always equal boring)
I never quite figured why we run on a side of the road or another. There was at some point an urban legend that circulated saying that england used the left side 'cause it's how it was in medieval tourney, but that sound vaguely far-fetched.
If someone know, do tell.
I'd love to go to sleep less ignorant.
4891486
Tourism without guide?
Strange gait?
Train schedules? Or tickets?
I can't think of anything else worth mentioning you did not discuss here, but sometime you just like to expend on thing that looked usual/normal...
Funny story, one of my very first paying jobs was building custom hardware & software to go into coal mines (this was through a subdivision of the Bureau of Mines, so it actually got used). One of the interesting things is that there were hard limits on voltages for everything. Even the risk of the slightest possibility of a spark would keep the hardware above ground (and for very good reason).
(I have this record. One of my favorite Andrew Sisters songs... although, I'd be lying of I didn't love them all.)
Yeah, railroad company's tended to choose some really odd things for their names. There is one road in PA that goes by "The Northern Central Railway". A few others usually included in industry they were connected with, such as the "East Broad Top Railroad & Coal Company." Such interesting railroading lore...
The videos linked from the Wikipedia page about the last pony mine in the US were fairly interesting, but more about the very low-tech methods they were using and the miners. The pony is seen (and named as Bill) but occupies a small portion of the run time.
The Last Pony Mine
Part 2
Part 3
interim,
that
I wonder what ponies would think of salt mining? I imagine it would be just as important to them as it is to us, and salt would probably be much more scarce inland than on the ocean coasts.
I've read somewhere that horses, and a lot of animals, are side-dominant. And will start walking with, say, right foot first all the time, etc. idk how much supporting evidence there is.
You know in Chicago, at the Science & Industry (& Pacific) museum, they have a coal mine exhibit. They actually take a tour group in an elevator down a mineshaft and show you all the cool mine-related things. It was very in depth, you got to walk through mines and ride a miner's train, and all sorts of cool shit. God I loved that exhibit when I was little. One of the first things they talked about was CO and canaries and the Davy safety lamp. I think the last time I was there, probably a decade ago, they didn't demo the lamps. But they used to light an actual miner's safety lamp and put it in a box with a window, and fill the box with methane to show you how the flame changed. And then they'd light a damaged lamp with a hole in it and put it in the box with the methane. And it legit actually exploded (inside the box). I guess some lawyer or whatever decided that showing museum goers a real live explosion was not safe. Way to take the fun out of things.
You had your character speculate about paying his ticket by shoveling coal...
...it’s not actually as easy as all that. If he did talk his way onto the footplate (hoofplate?) he’d probably annoy the firepony and throttle mare.
Not an expert on weird English rules, but I think I know this one!
"Dwarves", "Dwarven", "Dwarvish" and similar are basically J.R.R. Tolkien deciding he didn't like the way the normal English word sounded for the race in his story (I don't think he had any objections to "dwarfs" for everyday usage, just for fantasy dwarves), and using his own spelling in his works. Because of his influence in the fantasy genre and because it's not a commonly used word outside the genre, his spelling of "dwarves" has become fairly ubiquitous.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs uses the normal non-Tolkien spelling, of course, so your choice was quite correct.
Now there's a story idea. Davenport the railroad (and writing implement and furniture) magnate...
I think I've seen pegasi being used as CO detectors bandied about before, but I'm not sure if I've ever actually seen it before. Given the risks involved, I have to think that either the position pays very well or it was put into practice in less savory times...
In any case, thanks as always for the in-depth retrospective.
4891567
It's certainly possible. Petunia Paleo shows that Equestria is old enough for fossils, and thus buried inland seas.
From Roman times up, tuns out the local pits have been created all over, from commercial right down to household holes. Possibly the creation of the 18th centuary superroad through the local area for wool and cloth transport was also of assistance towards getting coal flowing. Theres multiple pits dug after the road was built which shafts are literally less than 50 foot from the road itself.
What coal once was.
I beleive the French face mining machine used in the Channel Tunnel is based on teh coal face Shearer?
Oops, forgot about teh early stone channels cut into flags for waggons wheels to run, be guided down, Early mineral wagon ways.
Apparently one of George Stephensons first working locomotives had a most unfortunate nickname for horses, especially if you have watched Young Frankenstein. even worse given it was for the Killingworth coillery.
re: this foto of horse's tail right after talk about possible left- or rigth-side preferencies ...
"Ow, looks like there is some sore region at the base of your tail " ... Seriously, I hope this is not sign of something really bad.
And there is one point I want to carry over from my more naive anti(dolphin/cetacea)-captivity days ..actually years ... Even if you can't tell story about the past without showing this past - merely showing it might have unwanted effect of reinforcing 'normality' of such situation of exploitation. So, may be some 'just horses, no strings and humans attached' lines (textual and graphical) will rebalance things ... Of course, it will be useless if humans will care about horses (and other..beings) ONLY on (internet) paper .... May be some of this dark history can be disassembled and reshaped in such way horses finally will find their home even in some cities, without anthropocentric assumptions. Horse is horse, why nearly no-one (outside of small and fragile, as I fear, circle of revolutionaries) can imagine they can be just friends, not beings to ride or to be used?! I can _imagine_ this (even with some real-world examples), yet majority of humans happy to exploit and don't give a flying thought about issue ....and about ones who give more than flying thought :/
4891616
Has the show ever said anything about salt? Jokes about salt licks, maybe? I don't recall ever seeing any reference. Only sugar cubes, which is hilarious to me.
Not surprisingly, salt mining was dangerous slave labor before the advent of better tools (and worker rights).
4891845
Well, there was the
saloonSalt Lick in Appleoosa, way back in "Over a Barrel."4891929 Ah yes, the
Braeburn mustdie!Applejack loves treesFluttershy is a treeAppleoosa episode. I remember, now—probably blocked that one out because Braeburn. Thanks! There's all kinds of oddness and questions attached to that joke...4892006
I always figured the drunkard was just drunk on alchool and made a drunk joke about eating salt since the saloon was called the salt block and the bar-stallion expulsed him.
But that is just my headcanon
4892066 Sounds plausible. I really get the feeling that this scene was part of an actual old western, but a basic search didn't turn up anything.
4891516
Yeah, that's true. A newer train would have been a little bit faster, at least assuming that they had put some more work into the route and modernizing the trackwork, but I think it would have been less fun overall.
According to Wikipedia, possible explanations for why we do it the way we do is in England, left-hand travel was common as far back as the Roman times (based on marching orders) and London Bridge had a rule that you had to left-hand run. It also said that quarries in Roman times ran left-handed (so the ponies' explanation of 'that's how mines work' is actually historically accurate). In the US, teamsters and drivers sat on the left wheel horse when driving heavy wagons, and preferred to run on the right side of the road so that they could make sure they were clear of oncoming wagons.
4891525
That's cool!
It makes sense to care about the voltage and possibility of a spark and to keep all the high-voltage stuff above ground . . . TWA flight 800 was brought down by stray high-voltage on a low-voltage wire in the fuel tank, which ignited the fuel vapor.
4891529
I can't find any pictures of the AT&SF steam locomotive #49. It was a class 037 locomotive, and sold to the NWP in about 1912.
4891542
Here's a fun fact: a lot of early railroads were close to rivers (since that was typically an easy route to follow) and were sometimes called 'water level routes.' Railroads that were build straight--as the crow flies--were called 'air lines,' such as the Seaboard Air Line and the Michigan Air Line.
In Jackson, MI, there's a road called Airline Road, and it's near the airport, so most people probably think that it's named for airplanes, but it's not--it's named for the railroad.
4891554
I meant to include a link to that video series and completely forgot. I even had it open in a tab in my browser.
4891567
My gut says that with pegasi, they'd be more likely to use the brine method these days. Even inland, now that they've got trains. Historically, though, they might had salt mines.
I know that equines need salt and other minerals in their diet, but I wonder if even as an semi-industrialized society they need as much as we did? AFAIK the two biggest uses of salt in the US were for preserving meat, and now for melting snow on roads; neither of those things are likely to be something that ponies do, at least on any significant scale.
I did a bit of research on equine mineral needs (very brief) and discovered that a lot of mineral blocks contain selenium, cobalt, zinc, copper, and/or sulfur. Here on Earth, we often get iodized salt for thyroid benefits; I wonder if Equestrian salt would have some of the other trace minerals in it, which would of course change the taste and might make it something that humans don't want to eat.
4891570
I did find that horses are usually nostril-dominant when sniffing something new for the first time--usually their right, and I couldn't find much more on side dominance, besides that some breeds of 'emotional' French horses prefer to use their right eye, while the non-emotional French horses don't. Cats are also paw-dominant.
Trained horses probably typically start off on one particular hoof; untrained horses probably don't [years of marching band means that I usually start out right foot first] but they might. A lot of trained horses also prefer the gait that they're trained for, whenever they can use it.
I would assume that most animals are side-dominant to an extent; what I'm less sure about is how that's distributed in the population. Humans are most often right-side dominant; are equines most often right-side dominant (or left), or is it about a 50/50 mix?
I didn't know that. I haven't been there in a long time, at least fifteen years. Maybe more. I have been to a gypsum mine near Grand Rapids on a school field trip; they were using some of the old shafts for cold storage, since of course the ground temperature stayed pretty consistent and so they didn't have to refrigerate stuff as much. Apparently you used to be able to tour one of the Detroit salt mines, I'm not sure if you can any more.
They really ought to bring back the explosion demonstration. Everyone loves explosions.
4891598
Yeah, there's an art to both building a fire in a locomotive, and keeping it going. From what I know (and it isn't all that much), you're also got to plan ahead for what the locomotive is going to be doing and make sure your fire is sized right for that.
I also learned once that wood fires were built in some cold steam locomotives, because you couldn't start a fire with coal.
4891605
Huh, that's interesting. At least I ultimately got it right in the story!
I guess that's similar to pegasi/pegasuses.
4891616
If he married into a railroading family (or is rich enough to buy a controlling share in a railroad), it's totally possible.
Let's just say that it's going to be interesting and well-thought-out, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I don't think you'd get very many volunteers. While I don't know for sure, assuming that equine hemoglobin works like human hemoglobin, your sign that you had a CO problem would be when the pegasus passed out or died, and while that might work, you'd be hard pressed to get pegasus volunteers for the job.
4891639
Hey, you dig the holes where the coal is. I watched an episode of Smarter Every Day where he went opal mining, and that is also just a bunch of pits.
Yeah, coal's bulky, so you'd want a good road in order to transport it in any meaningful quantity. Before that, it would probably be local use only . . . having said that, some industries appeared where the coal was. There is (or was) a coal-fired power plant in Ohio that was built right next to the coal mine they used to fuel the plant. They had one of the last electric freight railroads in the US.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Sort of an inverted railroad track, really.
4891823
I'm not sure--it's a stock photo, so there's no explanation of that particular horse.
I believe this is best answered by Warner Brother's disclaimer:
ethicsalarms.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/warner-brothers-warning.jpg
There are certainly some people who keep horses just to have them, with no intention of riding them or having them pull anything . . . basically, just big pets. [In much the same way that people would keep a dog or a cat without needing it to do a job for them, such as guard sheep or kill mice.] I don't know how horses feel about that; is it better to keep a horse in a pasture and not ride it, or to get it out and exercise it by going along a trail or whatever? For that matter, how do horses feel about riding in trailers--once they're used to it, do they have fun like dogs riding in cars, or is it stressful for them?
4892352 4892066
He did appear to have salt on his muzzle:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/3/17/851341__safe_screencap_ol%27+salt_over+a+barrel_cropped_earth+pony_eyes+closed_inebriated_male_pony_solo_stallion.png
4893249
Yeah, finding what horse might want to do is one of big points and milestones..Humans can't run as fast and as long as horses - but same even more true for humans vs dolphins! Yet, latter pair can spend some useful (for dolphin!) times together ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP9o-m_kQV0 - may be not best video, but search for "Moko, dolphin".
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvxE-2P_Hx1y4YqjGRADp8A - this one jumpy as ...dolphin, and apparently he in all those decades only once miscalculated his jump ...
About trailers - guess different horses have different opinions about it (yet I bet humans uniformely biased towards ignoring those mostly). If you want to know - try to become friend with some horses? I sort of fear repetition of same fiasco as with (captive) dolphins - just after few years - few dead/sold away dolphins, and no way to alter/stop any of this ..... I think I can copypaste a lot of text from bookz, but it will be nearly pointless? One citation still: "Begin from the Heart and Work Out" (John Cunningham Lilly , "The Mind of the Dolphin", p.210). My own (non-glorious) life with my dog strongly colored by what I was seeing in dolphinarium, read in books and did , finally (like walking with street dogs - because my first ever dog definitely had psychological problems re-entering building where I live, so he ended up making friends with another, even more "wild" dog, and those two lead me around, and lead me to third dog, with whom I currently live...not "how to save dog" textbook story, yet I saw more of dog's lives than possibly if you literally capture them from the streets and enforce your 'care' on them... Those walks also lead to more acute situations, so for now I can't say "I will defend my beings no matter what" - because in reality I once stood for my dog, and once flee away :/ ) .. No matter what some humans say - all those beings (horses, dogs, dolphins..list not ended with just those three!) first and foremost alive - and captivity and various forms of psychological pressure (and of course physical acts! just psychology tend to be less obvious) definitely acts on all them. So, in theory it all must be simple: just allow horse to be your dolphin and drag you around {figuratively speaking, hopefully} (or send you away, if not needed). In practice ..only practice/life will tell.
4893223
Funnily enough, the TGV cannot go fast in those parts, the tracks are taking too many sharp turn for that.
4893230
Huh... now that stuff i have never known. Was slways curious as to the reason behind the airline roads. Wonder if there are such things in the land of pony...
James Crow is just a hell of an unfortunate name for an historian.
4898963
I can't help but assume he's well aware of that, and why he goes by James rather than Jim.
4893833
There might be, depending on how advanced you think their railroad technology is, or how much earth-moving they will do for a railroad route. Obviously, some places like the Midwest, it wasn’t particularly hard to just go straight; in the mountains, though, that was a different story.
4911631
Ah, the mountains. Lots of black powder and, subsiquently, wicker baskets.
4911653
Yeah, loads of black powder. Still a thing, although with more modern explosives. There’s a few sections of the PA turnpike I was on that were quite clearly blasted through the rock.
4911656
Not surprised. Still a very efficent way for moving hundreds of tons of rock quickly and effectively. Im sure people are glad they dont have to hand drill the holes anymore. haha
There are a few places around here in the midwest (western Wisconsin and northern Minnesota) that had to be blow out of the rock.
4911667
I used to marvel at the big rocks that made up the jetties in Lexington. Most of them, you’d see the boreholes (well, half the borehole) where they’d blasted them off at the quarry. Not sure where they came from, honestly, but I have to figure that you don’t want to move Volkswagen-sized rocks further than you have to.
I would write "7 Dwarves' House".
5698828
One of the things I sometimes look for when I have trouble with a weird English rule is how it's used in other media. For example, when I was trying to figure out if it was the 'Nobles' Council' or the 'Noble's Council', I checked how Sheriff's Organizations used their punctuation. Unsurprisingly, I found both online, with no obvious preference.
As such, I just googled "7 dwarves' house" to see what I got . . .
"The Seven Dwarf's Cottage"
"the Dwarfs' Cottage"
"7 Dwarves' Cottage"
Seems like the jury's out on what it should be.
And it's possible that the show writers didn't know, either. One thing an author can do when faced with a weird grammatical situation like this is to just call it something else. According to the Wiki, it's called the "Cottage of the Seven Dwarfs", which neatly avoids the problem.
5698959
For things like "Nobles' Council", I count the Nobles. If it is only 1 Noble, I use "Noble's Council", but if it is greater than 1, I use "Nobles' Council". I consider the plural of "Dwarf" as "Dwarves". and, since we have 7 Dwarves owning something, I use "the cottage of the 7 Dwarves'".
Speaking about dwarves leads to dwarfism, an UmbrellaTerm for many medical conditions. Dwarves face terrible discrimination, but Peter Dinklage, by getting roles solely on his acting chops —— ¡not his stature! —— really represents dwarves as people deserving respect. ¿Did you see him in Cyrano?:
I went in skeptical because he lacks reach, but it was his leadership which earned him his position in the Guard. He would not let anyone join the Guard who could not beat him in combat, and he was no slouch in the art of SwordCombat. Less than 10% of applicants were good enough to best him, despite his short reach. I recommend Cyrano.
For what it's worth, this is more of a size thing than a bird thing. Having Pipp Petals feel the effects first is still going to be a thing if you're writing G5.