Shiny Things

hello! i am crumb cat!

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it’s called a Hawser and is the thick cable or rope used for towing/mooring a ship

This is a line designed to hold in place a moving object that can be easily in excess of 10000 tons. AND THEY CAN BREAK FROM THAT TENSION ALONE.

You’ve heard of the term, “Going haywire,” right? Ever spared a thought to why that term exists?

See, time was there was a prototype automatic hay-baler. But this was in that magic period juuust before we really got into standardized sizes. So calibration of the machine was handled manually - a mix of guessing and learning from the results of guessing. If you’ve read Raising Steam by Sir Terry Pratchett you know that many people don’t get to learn from the results of their own guesses, due to being dead.

A poorly calibrated hay-baler had the mechanical strength to smush the hay into a tight bundle, wrap the wire around it, and tie that wire off to maintain the bale’s form. But the pressure of the over-packed hay was a constant outward force. Each bale made by an over-tight baler was potential energy in physical form. We have a word for “potential energy in physical form” and that word is “bomb.”

So sometimes, a man would toss a hay bale and it would land with a twang and the man who’d been reaching down to pick it up where it landed was dead.

Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.

There's a series of mysterious, otherwise unconnected deaths happening across the country, where the only things that the deceased have in common are that they had at least one enemy who would want them actually-for-real-fucking-dead, but who invariably always had a solid alibi of where they were during the time of death, and almost every time there's an eyewitness who insists that they saw a large black horse, with no reins, harness nor saddle, walking loose by itself somewhere in the area, walking away from the location the death occurred. Even in places where a horse would be an extremely unlikely sight, like at 3 am in the middle of a city without a stable anywhere nearby.

The black stallion becomes known as an ill omen, a messenger of mysterious deaths of generally somewhat-signifcant people, all unlikely but ambiguously accidental. People have ambivalent feelings towards it, some consider it simply a dark and evil, terrifying thing, while some point out that none of these black horse incidents have happened to "innocent people"; It's always been someone involved in some kind of shady business.