The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
porcine: (adj.) (pronounced: poor-sine) pig-like. No, she’s not porcine. She really is a pig. But she does have a wonderful personality.
Everyday History
On September 11, 1936, the Hoover Dam began producing and sending its first electricity. If you’re trying to find it, the dam is in the Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River on the border of Nevada and Arizona, just 35 miles east of Las Vegas.
Dating back into the 1920s when it was still being planned, the dam was referred to as the
Boulder Canyon Project, which was shortened to the Boulder Dam. Then, in 1930, the dam was officially named Hoover Dam in honour of President Hoover, not the vacuum cleaner. President Roosevelt, though, refused to call it Hoover Dam, because he refused to honour Hoover. He had run against Hoover in 1932, and even though the two liked each other before the campaign, afterwards they did not. So Rosevelt officially renamed it the Boulder Dam in 1933. It wasn’t until April of 1947, under a different president (Truman), that the name was officially restored to Hoover Dam by Congress.
And that dam thing is massive. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist at least one “dam” joke.) When it was completed in 1936 it was the largest dam in the world, and had the largest hydroelectric generators on the planet. Its base is 660 feet wide, and it goes up 725 feet. Over 4.4 million cubic feet of concrete was used on the total project, enough to build a two lane highway from coast to coast across the country. And all that concrete needs to cure. It needs to be kept at the right temperature and moisture level so it doesn’t crack before it completely hardens, which should be sometime in the 2030s. To keep it cool, close to 600 miles of cooling pipes carrying refrigerated water were embedded throughout the concrete.
It was not an easy dam to build. What with being so high off the ground and the way gravity works and all. Over 21,000 people worked on the dam, and around 100 of them died. And, no, none of them was left buried in the concrete, no matter what you’ve been led to believe by the lyrics in Johnny Cash’s song “The Highwayman.” The concrete was not laid in huge amounts. Each bucket of concrete only increased the height of the dam by a few inches. A crew of workers, known as “puddlers,” tamped down each bucket of concrete, insuring there were no air pockets. So if anything fell in, much less Larry, it would’ve been noticed and removed, because Larry, as well as any other debris, would’ve affected the overall integrity of the dam.
The Hoover Dam is an arch-gravity dam. A gravity dam uses its own weight to hold back the water. The arches direct the water into the canyon walls, which absorb some of the weight. This is especially useful when damming wide and deep rivers. And there’s a lot of water there to hold back... at least, there was. It took over five years to build the dam, from early 1931 to March of 1936, and it wasn’t until 1941 that the reservoir, Lake Mead, reached full capacity for the first time, becoming the largest water reservoir in the United States. When full, Lake Mead is right at 1225 feet above sea level, and holds back 9.3 trillion gallons of water. “Trillion” with a “T.” That’s a lot. Putting that into perspective, which is really hard with really big numbers, an Olympic swimming pool holds 660,430 gallons of water. Lake Mead would fill 14 million Olympic swimming pools.
However, the last time the dam was full was in July of 1983. Lake Mead’s water level has been drastically decreasing for a while now. A big part of why is from a decades’ long drought, the worst in over 1,200 years, more than likely caused from global warming, which doesn’t care whether you believe it or not. And then, there’s more people. The Desert Southwest has seen one of the largest population rises of the entire country. Why anybody would choose to move to a desert is beyond me, yet they do. The lowest Lake Mead has been since first filling was 1,040 feet above sea level, set in July 2022. As of August 2026, the lake is barely above that historic low, and most likely it will go lower. It is predicted that it could be as low as 1,000 feet by 2030. And that would put it right at 100 feet above Dead Pool level, which is 895 feet. If the water drops below that, there will no longer be enough to flow through the dam.
The government is encouraging people to conserve water, even paying them if they do, but it’s doubtful if that will be enough to keep water flowing to the over 25 million people in the United States and Mexico who get their water from Lake Mead. That includes such cities as Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, Tucson, Los Angeles, and Tijuana. The dam is now a National Historic Monument. There reportedly are plans to turn it into a drive-in theatre when the lake goes dry.
Cartoon of the Week
Stuff
The Great Dumbing Down
On December 19, 2041, late night talk show host “Blabb” McNaughten, in his opening monologue, commented that "anybody who is dumb enough to believe anything the President ever says should go to the kitchen – right now – and take out the heaviest cast iron skillet you have, and immediately wang yourself in the head with that skillet.”
What followed was a class action lawsuit, initiated by a Mrs. Leonard Falco, of Sandusky, Ohio, for the over 28,000 viewers, who, apparently, were not only dumb enough to believe anything the President had to say, but who were also dumb enough to go into their kitchens and hit themselves in the head with cast iron skillets. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured, though several skillets were seriously damaged.
Lawyers for Mrs. Falco argued that it was “unreasonable for the average person to comprehend sarcasm, irony, or even that somebody was ‘only joking’ and had not intended to be taken seriously,” regardless of the format of the original message. And they won, requiring Blabb to buy each person listed in the suit a bottle of Tylenol and replace all damaged skillets.
It did not stop there. In Upshand V. Rainsford Public Library in the following year, citing precedent in the Falco case, it was ruled that it was not enough that a book was placed in the fiction section of the library, or even that it was clearly labeled fiction on the spine. The library had a “moral responsibility” to ensure that readers realized what they were reading was not true.
Full disclosure waivers were temporarily used, but in the spring of 2045, in Packwin V. The City of Crossgrove, it was ruled that any kind of waiver was not acceptable since it required an understanding of what was being waived. As Judge Alfonso Grey commented “Hell, if they’re too dumb to realize a book about unicorns ain’t true, fat lot of good signing a waiver’s gonna do.”
The National Board of Librarians, in an effort to deflect litigation, themselves sued the Authors’ Guild, claiming that the true fault lay in those people who created fiction to begin with. In the spring of 2046, in a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Librarians. In further court cases, in particular Cordwood V. The National Enquirer and Billings V. Everybody Possible, it was established that intentionally writing anything that was not true, even if it were clearly marked as such, was a “malicious breech of civil trust,” and, depending on the mitigating circumstances, could even be seen as “a criminal trespass.” It was further ruled that it was unlawful to “write, publish, or otherwise disseminate” anything that anybody simply might not be able to understand. Which was just about everything, including the ruling itself.
Before the full of effect of this ruling was realized, however, it was all overturned. Blabb McNaughten, in an interview with the only remaining news station, Weasel News, in the summer of 2046, when asked for his opinion on everything that had happened as a result of his original statement, commented, “They’re all a bunch of morons.” In the subsequent lawsuit, Blabb was found not guilty when it was determined that, indeed, anybody who would ever suggest such legislation, much less pass it, had to be a moron.
Unfortunately, nothing much changed as a result of the ruling. Commented Mr. McNaughten, “What do you expect? After all, they’re a bunch of morons.”
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