HISTORY LESSON … Railroad tracks. This is fascinating. Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding  of it will depend on the earlier part of the content.                                                           
                                                                                                                 
      The  US  standard  railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd  number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.
      Why  did  the  English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.                                                
      Why  did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
      Why  did  the  wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the  wagon  wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.                                                                                                 
      So  who  built  those  old  rutted  roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

  Therefore  the  United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
 derived  from  the  original  specifications  for  an  Imperial  Roman  war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
      So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?',  you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear
 ends of two war horses. (Two horse's asses.) Now, the twist to the story:                                        
                                                                                                                      When  you  see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides  of  the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory  in  Utah.  The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to    run    through    a   tunnel   in   the   mountains,   and   the   SRB's   had   to   fit   through   that
 tunnel.  The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as  wide  as  two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything...                
                                                                                                                 
 And current horse’s asses are controlling everything else.                    

That's a good and true statement if I've ever heard one! For some strange reason it posted twice but I only submitted it once.

Some of us could also say another kind of A**  in the last statement,besides horses,such as---DUMB.