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Old 12-16-2015, 10:18 PM   #15
NN5I
Carl, nn5i
 
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Tallahassee, FL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by W5DOK View Post
... I was mounted on an inch and half pipe ...
Trying to visualize Doc mounted on a pipe. Doc, were you punished by impalement?

From The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, about year 1890:

Impale, v.t.
In popular usage to pierce with any weapon which remains fixed in the wound. This, however, is inaccurate; to impale is, properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the victim being left in a sitting position. This was a common mode of punishment among many of the nations of antiquity, and is still in high favor in China and other parts of Asia. Down to the beginning of the fifteenth century it was widely employed in "churching" heretics and schismatics. Wolecraft calls it the "stoole of repentynge," and among the common people it was jocularly known as "riding the one-legged horse." Ludwig Salzmann informs us that in Thibet impalement is considered the most appropriate punishment for crimes against religion; and although in China it is sometimes awarded for secular offences, it is most frequently adjudged in cases of sacrilege. To the person in actual experience of impalement it must be a matter of minor importance by what kind of civil or religious dissent he was made acquainted with its discomforts; but doubtless he would feel a certain satisfaction if able to contemplate himself in the character of a weather-cock on the spire of the True Church.


The historical Romanian statesman Vlad the Impaler was Bram Stoker's inspiration for his famous novel Dracula. In Romanian, the moniker Vlad the Impaler is Vlad Dracul.

But perhaps, instead, Doc meant something like this verse of The Erie Canal, a song I learned long ago, about age five, from a Burl Ives recording:

The cook she was a grand old gal,
She wore a ragged dress.
We h'isted her up on a pole
As a signal of distress.
Oh, the E-Ri-E was a-risin'.
And the gin was a-gettin' low,
And I scarcely think we'll get a drink
Till we get to Buffalo-o-o,
Till we get to Buffalo.
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