are just that - Laws. Not hints, subtle suggestions, or occasional happenings. The whole deal is but one more example.

Here's something I bet most have never thought about: Happened about 10 years ago. Fad at the time was to have makeshift trail rides / cattle drives. Local horsie types would gather a few Mexican roping steers, a couple Longhorns, and a few hapless stock cows and spend the weekend driving the herd from point A to point B. No real purpose in the exercise other than to provide an excuse for some bed partner swapping and boozing during the afternoon and evenings and then spend the days in the hot sun, being hung-over and trying to stay astride your steed or atop the covered wagon. Anyways, some of the participants were also working folks that needed to break away from their cowboy type duties and tend to a minimum of farm work. At this point enters Rufus & Doofus (names changed to protect . . .). Rufus had a small patch of hay ground that he was in the process of flood irrigating at the time. Standard procedure there is to have a ditch full of water and use siphons to get the water out of the ditch and onto the particular part of the field. Central to this operation is what they call an irrigation dam. It consists of a length of 2X4 and a chunk of poly tarp that is fastened to the 2X4. 2X4 is laid where you want to dam the ditch and the tarp is laid upstream in the ditch. The water holds the bottom and sides down and creates a dam so the siphons can take the water onto the fields before it all runs down-ditch. As the siphons are moved, the dam is also moved until the field is all watered. Anyways, the one field had been watered and it was time to move the dam to another patch and water it. Likkered up cowboys were driving a 4-door sedan at the time and were presented with a problem of how to transport a 16 foot length of 2X4 in a Chevy car. Their solution was to wind the tarp around the 2X4 , roll down the back windows in the car and thread the dam through the open windows - leaving the excess length to hang out each side. They were only going down a country lane, so width wasn't much of a problem until they came to a 12' wide gate. At this point, Rufus closed one eye so as not to be confused by which two gateposts he should thread and carried on. When the 2X4 portion of the operation got to the gate it was too wide. Laws of physics being laws, they took over and tried to make the 2X4 narrower so as to fit the gate. They accomplished this by breaking the 2X4. As luck would have it, it broke nearly in the center, and at this point it did an imitation of two oars in a boat and came forward to slap Rufus and Doofus on the backside of their heads. Being cushioned somewhat by the layers of tarp, the blow from the timber only dazed them for a bit. When they awoke, they were confronted with a worthless irrigation dam and the sobering realization that the time it was going to take to get the dam fixed and the siphons set was going to mean a considerable loss of partying time.