four hundred and eighty-three words...
Okay, the long-promised "Nate the Snake" joke.

There's this civil engineer who has a dream of a super-interstate-highway running from Los Angeles to Washington DC. After years of lobbying, he finally is awarded a contract to construct a perfectly-flat, perfectly-straight 16-lanes-each-direction highway from Los Angeles to Washington. So he employs all the best surveyors, to make sure the highway is a perfect straight-line from LA to DC and to make sure it stays perfectly flat. He subcontracts with only the best construction crews and uses only the best materials. He decides the existing tunnel-diggers and mountain removers just aren't up to the job, so he has bigger ones built, ones that can remove a half-mile swath of the Rockies in a week. They start in LA, and a few months later, they're overlooking the greater Washington metropolis.

Just one more hill to remove before they start work on the terminus and the merging into DC's outer belts. It's a small hill, really, but it's got to go. So they call in one of the smaller mountain-removers to remove it, and just as the machine's getting ready to erase the hill, a snake pops up out of the hill and screams "Wait!"

Obviously, this catches everyone by surprise, so they wait. The snake continues, "My name's Nate. Nate the Snake. You can't destroy this hill! You mustn't!"

"Why not?"

"Because there's a lever buried under this hill, and it's attached to a doomsday device. If the lever is tripped, it'll blow up the entire Earth!"

The engineer consults with his team. "What do you think?" "It's a talking snake." "Yeah, but do we believe him? Do we go around the hill, or do we plow it over?" "Do we believe him!? It's a talking snake! Who'd believe us?" In the end, they decide to err on the side of caution and build the highway around the hill. So, when they're finished, they've got a highway running from LA to DC that's perfectly-flat and perfectly-straight, except for this minor detour around a hill.

So they've got the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and as a perq for designing and building the highway, the engineer gets to be the very first person to use it. So he hops into his Lambourghini in LA at dawn and floors the pedal. 30, 40, 50mph. Shifts into 2d gear. 70, 90, 110mph. He keeps accelerating until the car just can's go any faster.

Shortly before sunset, he's approaching DC, and he remembers the hill. So he slows down to around 225mph to negotiate the slight turn. And he sees Nate crossing the road! He can't squish a talking snake! Especially one that kept them from blowing up the Earth. So he swerves to avoid hitting Nate, and plows into the hill at over 200mph. He trips the lever, and the Earth blows up.

The moral of the story...

Better Nate than lever.
(dxg, Sat 7 Mar 2009, 17:01, Reply)