HORSEPOWER -

It has been a long while since I have had the time and the inclination to put more foolishness in writing.  I have to admit that for the last three weeks or more, I have been mentally and physically over-booked.  I have a fairly long list of things that have crossed my mind lately, and to tell you the truth, I have no idea why I chose this topic to break the silence.  It's just one of those things.  Just below this one you will find some deeper considerations about "Secret Thoughts," but this is bound to be more fun.
When I was younger, some 65 years younger, I remember asking EFR Dion the question that is the topic for today:  'What is horsepower?"  He looked at me and said, without missing a beat, "It is the strength that it takes one horse to lift 16 tons in one minute."  Well, I have lived all these years with the conviction that I knew exactly what horsepower is.  I have no clue of how to translate it into torque, or watts, or speed, or heat, or BTU's or calories, or any of that other fancy stuff, but I still remember my father's sure and solid answer.  Despite the fact that he was one half ton off the mark, as you can readily see, it was good enough to last all these years.  It would still be good enough except that I found the half-ton short-fall when I betrayed my conscience and second guessed Ol' EFR by going to Mr. Google in search of a horse.
A couple days ago, amid my clogged schedule, this idea came to me like a hair on soup.  The strange thing is that it would not go away.  So often, I get waves of inspiration like this and despite my best efforts, I forget what the inspiration was about. If I had a better memory or a faster pencil, I would have scribbled a lot more things than actually have found the light of day as a result of coursing through my brain.  This one though, kept pinging on the inside wall of my coconut, relentlessly.
The other thing that got me to smiling was how useless it was that I should have this fact tucked away on the dark, dank corners of my mind and neither one of my sons has ever asked me the question.  In this world of ours, where nanoseconds, picofareds, megapixels, kilobytes and terabytes, keyboards and quartz screens, smartphones and WIFI's, I'm practically dead certain that neither my sons nor anyone else will ever deem it necessary to ask me what horsepower is.  Horses don't move anything other that themselves these days, for which I am sure that they are quite happy.  So, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, that's the thought for today.  If I'm lucky, the Good Lord will slip me another one tomorrow.