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I wonder what the cost of implementing this bylaw was on the tax payer, here is a guess: - Health and safety assessment by specialist HSE officer - £10k - Procurement of organic sustainable hay bale - £2k - Consultation with local community to ensure hay bale is not offensive to straw bale enthusiasts - £5k - Transportation costs - £500 - Lawsuit from worker hurting shoulder when mounting the hay bale over bridge sid…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The city adjacent to me has a law that all heads of households must have a firearm. In response to the gun law, the next city over created a law everyone need to have a rake for leaves. Unlike the straw bale laws, we don’t take it seriously. It’s also illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. In another city it’s illegal to eat fried chicken with anything but your hands.
I wish we had the back stories on more of these. Who was it who tied a giraffe to a telephone pole? What disaster ensued, such that "there oughtta be a law!"?
Most of these wacky laws are usually special cases rather than the verbatim text of the law. At least the ones I've looked into.
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Ancient website still uses archaic human-centric deci-mal number 301 to redirect traffic. Early humans believed these were powerful and called them "magic[al] strings".
They also apparently communicated the need for a hot caffeinated beverage with the sequence 418. It is unknown how the receiver of this code would communicate their intent to fulfill the request, leading historians to ponder if sending such a signal might result in a torrential flood of the beverage.
> The HTTP 418 'I'm a teapot' client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503.
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My brother always said, 'why can't people just do the things they were going to do 1 hour earlier/ later rather than changing the clocks' Sometimes the obvious is too sensible.
Probably because a clock is an easily changeable thing, but a schedule or an announcement is less so. Putting a "Opens at 8:00" on sign on your door involves a fair amount of effort of buying a physical piece of equipment. Changing an appointment may have required walking somewhere and talking to the right person. Before modern luxuries a million of such tiny adjustments would have required a lot of time and effort.
Besides, if you knew you'd be changing your opening times throughout the year, then when you ordered a sign you'd just order both signs at the same time, or maybe get a sign with replaceable numbers, or a sign with washable/writeable numbers for your opening times. Or you could just not bother, and pick a time that was "good enough" all year round.
Why would you need to change an appointment? You'd just make it for the time you wanted on the day you intended to start with.
But changing all the clocks, in a whole country (or on a whole continent), on the same day? You think that's easy? You've never got that wrong, or known anyone who got that wrong?
It is worth stating (because the word bylaw is not always understood) that a bylaw (by- is the Scandinavian word for "city", "town" or "village" depending on which modern Scandinavian language you use as your source) is basically a local law. It is not universal. It exists in a single place, and although they can be similar in many locations, they are strictly only applicable in the specific municipality that has the…
> I guess the US does use bylaw, but it seems to always be rules and regulations that companies make. In the USA we call local laws “ordinances”. In US English, “by-law” relates to a set of rules associated with a contractually-created body, like a homeowners association.
Daylight Savings Time was first proposed to save candles, everything after is a forced retcon. This equally anachronistic law fits with that quite well. We are all very good at being modern humans.
It might have been proposed for that reason but it was actually enacted in England (in 1916) for war time productivity during WW1. It’s not really clear if it ever would have been adopted if it were not for the war. Edit: really interesting snippet I happened upon: > This Bill, as your Lordships know, will have effect only while the war lasts. It may therefore be regarded in the light of an emergency measure, and as…
Ah, yes, England and its innumerable traditions; turns out, Gormenghast is actually a documentary.
Reminds me of the tradition of topping out a finished roof. You often see 100m+ skyscrapers with a pine wreath hanging on top as if we were still worshipping some forest gods.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-horse-skulls-hidden-in-the-dance...
This isn't just an old tradition. It's a coded signal - and one that the river users can be assumed to understand. There's no principle difference between this use of straw to caution navigators on water, and the use of (for example) " 300 status codes to signal redirection to to navigavators of the internet.
This isn't a criticism of the practice but I did think it might be more effective to use something in safety green or orange, maybe with reflective surface, or maybe blinking lights. But I'm not an expert with this, and I can see how a straw bale might also catch your attention.