Jennifer described the dashpot of a ZS carburettor thus:
~ >The dent is on the top part, which could
~ > pass for a hat for a small tin man.
This elicited the following response from Marcus:
~ Ahem. Pardon?
Perhaps Marcus, not being Born In The U.S.A., hasn't
seen the 1936 MGM classic motion picture "The Wizard Of
Oz" as many times as we colonials did growing up here.
For Marcus' enlightenment, there's a character in this
movie, The Tin Man, who wears an inverted funnel on his
head. The Tin Man was made, not surprisingly, of tin,
on account of a series of mishaps that befell him due to
the intervention of a wicked witch. He was a woodcutter
in his human form -- hence his alternative appelation of
The Tin Woodsman -- and first lopped off a leg when the
witch cast a spell on his axe. The town tinsmith built
him a new one; then he chopped off the other and used the
same workaround. Eventually his whole body became made
of tin, but the tinsmith forgot to give him a heart, hence
his big song (performed by Jack Haley) in the film: "If I
Only Had A Heart."
The obvious application for us on the SOL list is The
Bondo Car, of course. "Well, my roommate backed into
the car while it was under a tarp, so I Bondoed that
fender, and then my neighbors knocked a hole in the
door with a hand truck when they were moving in, so I
Bondoed that, and eventually the whole car became Bondo,
only the Bondosmith forgot to give it a working electrical
system..."
Now, I -- as a suave, sophisticated man-about-town --
think of an inverted champagne coupe with most of the
stem knocked off when I see the top of a Z-S carburettor.
Being who I am, I of course think of two related things at
approximately the same time: first, that this is the wrong
shape for a vessel for drinking champagne (which is best
enjoyed in a narrow, flute-shaped glass); and second, that
the classic champagne coupe was allegedly created by Marie
Antoinette as a wedding gift to her husband, Louis MCMLXVII
of France (or one of them Louies, anyway), its shape said to
have been modeled after (ahem) her bosom. Or, well, half of
it, to be more precise, I suppose. You get the idea.
Considering poor Marie's eventual fate, I suppose this could
be where they got the idea of the (oh my God, he isn't going
to say it, is he???) drop-head coupe.
--Scott "Rocky & Bullwinkle got NOTHING on this boy" Fisher
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