Two hundred years ago today, a 15-foot-high tidal wave of one hundred litres of beer swept through London.
100 litres of beer isn’t a tidal wave at a post match sup at the rugby club, let alone a 15 foot high wave.
Two hundred years ago today, a 15-foot-high tidal wave of one hundred litres of beer swept through London.
100 litres of beer isn’t a tidal wave at a post match sup at the rugby club, let alone a 15 foot high wave.
This shows one of the perils of the metric system when the innumerate attempt to use it. It’s just too easy to lose track of scales:
100l is 22 gallons. That might sound like a lot at first glance, but it’s no tidal wave. In beer terms, its 2 and a half of the small casks you might find dispensing beer under gravity on the back stillage in a pub. Annoying if it leaked over the floor overnight, but it’s half an hour’s work to wipe up for one bloke with a mop.
Other ways for the clueless to visualise 22 gallons might include: 11 normal sized buckets of water; the fuel tank of a reasonably large car; 176 bottles of milk.
Put in those terms, the 7.5″ milk bottle could reach 15′ piled up, if you stacked them 7 wide.
Yeah. I spotted that, this morning. S’pose three zeros got lost somewhere & the subs failed to spot it.
But it also illustrates the inability of some of our university educated to get their head around real world numbers.
Even 100,000 litres is only the contents of a very small, very shallow back yard swimming pool. But entirely reasonable for a C19th beer vat. As would one 15ft high be.(But WTF are we mixing measurement systems here?) And a 15 foot beer vat bursting could be pretty lethal in its immediate vicinity. But it wouldn’t serve to much more than dampen the average London street. For a fifteen foot tidal wave you’d need to lose one of the Chingford reservoirs.
For a real 15′ tidal wave from a vat of food failing, there was this: The Boston Molasses Disaster
It took 2 million gallons (US) of molasses (that’s about 1.6m Imperial gallons.)
Fans of GK Chesterton will recall that at the climax of his novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the hero threatens to puncture a water storage reservoir on Campden Hill, destroying an attacking army. Records show that this reservoir held a maximum of 3.5 million gallons, which is only about 13,000 cubic metres, so by the time the invading army had retreated a hundred metres or so the ‘flood’ would have been just deep enough to get their socks wet — if it hadn’t already disappeared down London’s efficient drainage system. Like the Times subs, Chesterton never let physics get in the way of a good story.
P.S. One hundred litres of beer is two-thirds of the average annual consumption by every man, woman and child in the Czech Republic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita
From later in the article:
“Misuse of Viagra can cause a heart attack during sex, as a 28-year-old Russian man discovered when he bet two women £2,600 that he wouldn’t be able to have sex with them continually for 12 hours”
He bet we *wouldn’t* be able to have sex with them and then he took Viagra? Surely that would have been the bet the women made?
Steve Crook – That Russian story is an odd one.
First… 12 hours? Really? Even with a box of viagra I could only see myself lasting maybe… 10 hours. Yes…10. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Viagra isn’t an aphrodisiac, it won’t help you unless you’re feeling randy. Now, I like doing sex to ladies, but at some point in the tragic shagathon, it must have become more of a chore than a pleasure.
Like when you’re halfway through assembling a piece of flatpack furniture and the charm of the instruction manual’s little squiggly men with question marks above their heads has given way to a litany of swear words and fingers rubbed raw by the shitty toy spanner included in the box.
He probably spent a good 8 hours grimly – yet efficiently – in sweaty, red-faced thrusting. Like a German.
Or, the poor guy collapsed clutching his chest after 10 minutes, and his dying wish was… tell… them… I went… 12 hours….
Steve, are you not taking this a bit literally?
Surely the point is he never had any intention of winning the bet?
Yeah love, course I can pleasure you for 12 hours, here, I’ll prove it.
Ten minutes later…
Well stone me, I lost.
@Steve
It was in the Telegraph. So there’s no reason it had to be true.
Perhaps the plan, they kill the sub-editors, print badly edited lies, safe in the knowledge that pedants will be so focussed on the poor editing they’ll miss the disinformation.
It was actually over a million litres of beer. But well done to whichever newspaper spotted the anniversary.
@Steve Crook
‘Focused’
(Sorry.)
Steve
According to a recent story in the much more reliable Daily Mash, bans on cigarettes have left couples unable to signal the end of sexual encounters. This will only get worse when the commies also ban smoking in parks.
So a 15 foot high tidal wave of beer.
Bunch of men died in that disaster? – though more than half of them were seen clambering to safety in order to go to the toilet multiple times before heading back into the tidal wave.
Jeremy wins this week’s internet!
JeremyT – “According to a recent story in the much more reliable Daily Mash, bans on cigarettes have left couples unable to signal the end of sexual encounters. This will only get worse when the commies also ban smoking in parks.”
Only for the Gay community surely? I mean, who has sex in a park?