222 Fly Backwards Skinny Skyscraper

Marcia Smith 0:00
What’s the only bird that can fly backwards? Whoa, and where

Bob Smith 0:05
can you find the skinniest skyscraper in the world? Answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and

Marcia Smith 0:15
Marcia Smith, you Music.

Bob Smith 0:32
Welcome to the off ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy, take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. So there’s a bird that can fly backwards. Yes,

Marcia Smith 0:45
you know this bird. Think it through. What do you think it is? The reverse bird? So known as

Bob Smith 0:53
the bird that flies backwards. Is able to fly oh, is able? It can fly back, yes, and forward. Have you ever seen it fly backwards

Marcia Smith 1:02
out of our kitchen window?

Bob Smith 1:04
Really? Oh, a hummingbird. I never thought of that. They

Marcia Smith 1:08
are the only one that can do that. Go forward and backwards, up and down. Some hummingbirds fly at speeds greater than 33 miles per hour. Hummingbirds wings take up so much energy. Bob. Then they beat from 720 to 5400, times per minute. Wow, that’s hard to fathom. Yeah, that they spend the majority of their time just resting on branches and twigs because they’re exhausted. They’re flapping so just you know, when they’re out there eating, you’re just flapping away. And I bet you don’t know that they get their name from the humming noise that their wings make in flight. So

Bob Smith 1:44
that’s where it comes from. It’s the humming of the wings, not the fact that the bird is going.

Marcia Smith 1:52
I always thought I heard him. Is he humming?

Bob Smith 1:54
He’s out there going, hmm. Little food here. Little sugar

Marcia Smith 1:57
water. Okay, that sounds good. Is this Pepsi one, or is it real sugar? Okay,

Bob Smith 2:03
so the hummingbird, that’s a good question. Okay, all right, where can you find the skinniest skyscraper in the world? I will say in Dubai, Beijing, New York, Chicago, or London,

Marcia Smith 2:16
my guess was, fortunately, one of those. Chicago. No, no,

Bob Smith 2:20
it’s not okay, but it is in the United States. So that means it must be in New York, and it is the,

Marcia Smith 2:27
not the Empire State Building. No,

Bob Smith 2:29
it’s not. This is just 60 feet wide. It’s 1428 feet tall, but it’s only 60 feet wide. Does it have a name? I know, yes, it does, but you probably don’t know it and I don’t know It’s named after a famous piano, not Fred’s piano, not Marsh’s piano, okay, but the Steinway. So this is a new tower that was completed in 2022 it’s relatively new, but it’s got a height to width ratio of 24 to one. So that’s really unusual. Really. It’s as wide as a bowling alley is long. That’s it, or the distance between home plate and pitchers mount. And not only is it the world’s narrowest, but its height also places it among the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere. It surpassed only by the One World Trade Center and Willis Tower in Chicago and the Central Park tower. What’s in it, part of it is the original building where the Steinway company was. It’s at 111 West, 57th Street, 84 stories tall, and it’s a residence. So it has residence there. Oh, it’s already, yes, they have panoramic views of Manhattan and Central Park, but it’s prone to slight movements and heavy winds. I wouldn’t like that good to know. They say it might move several inches on a typical windy day and up to two feet on a rare 100 mile

Marcia Smith 3:46
per hour day. Count me out. Okay, all right, part of its base

Bob Smith 3:49
is a 16 story tall Steinway Hall, which was built in 1925 as headquarters for the legendary piano company the Steinway their original building, and it was a fully equipped concert hall that served as the home of the New York Philharmonic before Carnegie Hall was built. And they took that and built upon that, and now it’s the skinniest skyscraper in the world. I didn’t know anything about that. And then if you want a studio at the Steinway tower, the studio apartment that starts at 7.7 5 million, oh my and the penthouse living high and swaying will cost the lucky owner 66 million at the top of the Steinway tower. Anyway, that’s the skinniest skyscraper in the world. Okay?

Marcia Smith 4:30
Beauchamp tower, Bob is the first major building in Britain to be built from bricks.

Bob Smith 4:37
Beauchamp is that spelled B, E, A, U, C, H, A, M, P, okay. Beauchamp, it’s amazing, and we both got that, and we are not sitting side by side looking at the same script

Marcia Smith 4:49
either. It’s built from bricks, and it’s located at what historical site. I’ll give you choices, okay, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, House of parlance. Movement or black pool. So it is

Bob Smith 5:01
a building on one of those locations, right? One of the historical sites. Okay, so since you said it’s the oldest building in Britain made of bricks, you’ll say not stone, but bricks, right? I would say it’s located there on that little island where the White Tower is, or the Tower of London. Oh, good for

Marcia Smith 5:20
you. Okay, absolutely, we were there. Beauchamp tower, the first English building constructed of bricks, was built in 1280 Wow, 1280 it goes back a couple so

Bob Smith 5:32
before that, it was all cut stones, but never bricks, the kind of bricks we know today. Modern bricks were invented, gee, what was that? Almost 800 years ago. Yeah, it’s amazing. Okay, Marcia, you know, we talked about the Quakers and the Quaker presidents in our last ship, Nixon and Herbert. Hoover, correct? And I found actually 11 other celebrity Quakers. I’m gonna ask you, oh, really, what famous movie star of the 50s was also a Quaker? Uh huh. He was a young man. He died early in his career. Not James Dean. James Dean, no,

Marcia Smith 6:04
he was a Quaker, yeah, he was raised Quaker, well, that knocks my side,

Bob Smith 6:08
although that faith may not have played the biggest role in his career. Oh,

Marcia Smith 6:12
that’s fine. Maybe that’s why he was conflicted. And guess what?

Bob Smith 6:16
This famous Sure Shot marks person in the 19th century, with Buffalo Bills, Wild West Show and sharp shooting. Annie Oakley, really, she grew up a dirt poor Quaker, one of the other famous explorers of America, Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone was born a Quaker. His family emigrated to the United States from England, primarily for religious reasons. Oh,

Marcia Smith 6:40
no kidding, to be able to practice their faith. Yeah, right, okay. And

Bob Smith 6:44
then one more, a famous news man of television, very famous in the 1950s on television. Was it Edward R Murrow? Edward R Murrow, he was also a Quaker, huh? He was born in pole cat Creek, North Carolina Creek, to Quaker abolitionist parents, no kidding, didn’t know that. I think that religion has a there’s an affinity people have for that, because they know that was a pacifist religion, and they stayed by themselves. And, you know, very quaint, and I don’t know something interesting about that.

Marcia Smith 7:14
And Edward R was pacifist, and he was the big wartime reporter,

Bob Smith 7:18
yeah, right, when Nixon was a wartime president. I

Marcia Smith 7:21
know. Okay, Bob and I never heard of this before. You ever hear of the national park to park highway?

Bob Smith 7:26
The National Park to park highway? Yeah? No, I never

Marcia Smith 7:30
did either. So the question is, how many states does the National Park to park highway travel through? And how many parks does it connect

Bob Smith 7:39
the National Park to park highway, yeah, there’s a national park to park highway. I

Marcia Smith 7:45
never heard of it either, and it’s been around since early 1900s because they weren’t the roads to get from National Park to National Park. So my question is, how many states does this road travel through, and how many parks does it connect? How would

Bob Smith 8:00
I know? I don’t know. I’ll say it goes through six states and connects 12 parks.

Marcia Smith 8:05
Well, you’re not far off on the parks. There’s 13 parks it connects and 11 states. It was built in the early 1900s when national parks existed, but it was difficult to get to them. Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service helped develop the park to park highway. The route is one huge loop leading from Denver to Rocky Mountain National Park through Montana Glacier National Park, then west to Mount Rainier, south to Crater Lake, Yosemite, Zion Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest. It’s a 5000 mile, 76 day pilgrimage to all 12 national parks. Wow, and its roads were not even paved. This is

Bob Smith 8:49
in the early 1900s Yeah, wow, yeah, that’s amazing, yeah. All right. Marcia, a body question, what organ that you have? 3822 Marcia, what organ of the body, organ? What organ can grow back if some of it is removed? The liver. Yes, the liver is the only organ in the human body that can regenerate. However, some patients who have a diseased portion of their liver removed are unable to regrow the tissue. But for most patients with liver disease, a surgeon can perform a liver resection and remove the diseased portion of the liver, and a portion will grow back unless it’s really too far

Marcia Smith 9:29
gone. Yeah, yeah. I know. Interesting. Okay. Bob, what unit of measurement is named for Mickey Mouse? Oh,

Bob Smith 9:37
really, there’s a unit of measurement named for Mickey Mouse. Is it a Mickey is it a Mickey? Is that what we’re talking something is a Mickey. I thought that was a drink. Gee, honor no Marsh. Tell me

Marcia Smith 9:47
that the speed of a computer mouse is measured in Mickey. Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s funny, yeah, named after a Mickey Mouse animal base names are surprisingly common when it comes to measurement. Like. Like things like horsepower, okay, but there’s also the Mickey, a semi official means of measuring the speed of a computer mouse by computer scientists, and it’s named after a certain Disney character who’s probably the world’s most famous rodent. We

Bob Smith 10:14
know who that is, yes, so is there a measurement of the size of a Mickey?

Marcia Smith 10:18
It’s specifically used to describe the smallest measurable movement that your mouse can make. Okay, so you know, it equals a millimeter here, and 102 hundredths of a millimeter there.

Bob Smith 10:29
Interesting, yeah, that’s a Mickey. It’s a Mickey. Okay? Marcia, I have a animal question too. All right, how many buffalo now exist in North America? Not many

Marcia Smith 10:40
anymore. There’s a lot we’re talking it can’t be hundreds of 1000s. It’s 10s of 1000s.

Bob Smith 10:46
No, it’s actually hundreds of 1000s. Really, how many there once were untold millions. Today, there are 350,000 Wow. Now that’s amazing, because according to Ken Burns documentary, The American Buffalo, when Lewis and Clark crossed the plains in 1805, Mayor weather Lewis wrote, the whole face of the country was covered by the Buffalo. And then 84 years later. Only 84 years after that journey in 1889, how many buffalo Do you think there were 84 years after Lewis and Clark started across? There were a lot? No, there were only 541 89 years later, oh, my God, they had been hunted to near extinction, and that was due to the slaughter. They were slaughtered due to the intentional policy of the Department of the Interior to deprive Indians of Buffalo for food. Scene

Marcia Smith 11:34
that’s awful. Indians used them for for their fur and their food and everything.

Bob Smith 11:39
In fact, the Secretary of the Interior from 1870 to 1875 Columbus Delano actually proclaimed the eradication of the buffalo would be a good thing for the nation in its effect on the Indians. Oh my God. Who said that? That was the Secretary of the Interior from 1870 to 1875 Columbus Delano, things changed starting at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a coalition of groups, including Indian tribes, began preserving small herds of Buffalo, and we’ve gone from there. So today, the Secretary of the Interior is a Native American. Her name is Deborah Halland, first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, and she has a $25 million budget to combine bison restoration with grassland restoration, so we’re still trying to get the buffalo back, but we’ve got them back to about 350,000

Marcia Smith 12:25
now it’s amazing. You’ve come a long way, baby, 541

Bob Smith 12:29
it’s amazing that they hunted them down that far. Even when I was a kid, we went out west and we saw a small herd of them at the Custer State Park in South Dakota, and that was one of the few herds that existed at the time.

Marcia Smith 12:41
Well, I never saw one until you and I went to

Bob Smith 12:44
Yellowstone. Yeah, that’s right. They came right up to the car. They

Marcia Smith 12:48
did, oh, my God. They were huge, just huge. Okay, I

Bob Smith 12:51
think it’s time for a break. All right, you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment. We’re back Buffalo and all I brought my buffalo nickel along here. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We do this for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and its internet radio station and podcast platforms, which spread our show all over

Marcia Smith 13:14
the world. Yes, okay, Bob, it’s time for perhaps a new segment that I may or may not do in the future, and it is called define me. Define me. Yes, okay, what is a fun ambulance? A

Bob Smith 13:29
fun ambulance? Yeah, F U N, A, M, B, U, L, i, s t, exactly. Boy, you’re good at your spelling today. It sounds like somebody who has fun in motion in an ambulance.

Marcia Smith 13:39
Fun in an ambulance. Fun in an ambulance? No, what is it? The literal definition of a fun ambulance is tight rope walker. Tight rope walking. Walker, yes, okay, in Latin, fewness means rope, and ambular is to walk. In ancient Rome, tight rope walking. You’re right. It’s not easy. Was a popular site at public markets and gatherings today, you might see a funanbulus at the circus, but they aren’t limited to the big top. I

Bob Smith 14:08
had no idea. Went back to Roman times. Yeah, everything does, doesn’t it? Yeah, okay, all right. Marcia, There once was a building with a death ray. Do you know about this? Got a couple architecture questions here today.

Marcia Smith 14:21
Sounded like the beginning of a little

Bob Smith 14:23
there was a building with a death ray. Okay,

Marcia Smith 14:27
this was not long ago, death ray coming out of the top. Well, it’s

Bob Smith 14:32
kind of interesting. It was a 37 story, concave shaped building in London at 20 Fen Church Street. Now the skyscraper was nicknamed the fry scraper, after after sunlight reflected from its curved surface that partially melted a nearby car. Oh my god, yes, that’s just because of the shape of it and the fact that the sun could come up and it would focus rays. Oh my gosh. So they had to spend millions of dollars to air. Add a sunshade to stop the inadvertent Death Ray,

Marcia Smith 15:03
unintended consequence. There you go. It’s

Bob Smith 15:05
like, Hey, okay, I got an idea for a building. It’s concave

Marcia Smith 15:09
on you, Mr. Architect, you’re melting cars. It’ll be shiny, and then the sun will hit it. It’ll be brilliant. They didn’t know it would melt a Honda,

Bob Smith 15:18
okay, amazing. Oh,

Marcia Smith 15:20
back to those wacky Victorian era women. Bob, why did they consume arsenic on purpose? Oh,

Bob Smith 15:28
dear. Was that to give their skin a certain pallor, a white pallor? Yes. Dick. Jay, yes.

Marcia Smith 15:34
Well, last week we talked, I really doubt their fashion choices. Bob, last week we talked about them wearing different heel heights so they could limp like the queen. And you remember the wigs they wore, sometimes included entire bird cages on top of their Oh, my God, these women. Well, back in the day, pale skin was considered high class, both because you never had to work in the sun and because of the look you got when you had consumption. That’s

Bob Smith 15:59
right, because if you had a tan, that meant you were a laborer in the field, nobody liked that. That’s right, not like today

Marcia Smith 16:06
and and if they didn’t already have a ghostly complexion, these little ladies would go out about it in other ways, like through long term slow exposure to arsenic.

Bob Smith 16:19
Oh, my goodness, which,

Marcia Smith 16:22
unsurprisingly, most arsenic eaters ended with, this is a nice way to put it. The doctor of the time said an inevitable infirmity of the body. Oh,

Bob Smith 16:31
no, kidding, or dead, or death, either way, not good. Wow, that’s just amazing. Yeah, they were pretty wacky. But, you know, that’s kind of one of those things, didn’t they know? You know, it’s probably like us having microwaves in our house. Someday they’ll go didn’t they know? Okay, Marcia, here’s a nature question. All right, this is one of those old fashioned things. You probably heard about it when you were a kid. You hear thunder five seconds after you see lightning. What does that usually indicate a distance the lightning is about a mile away. B, the storm will produce about three inches of rain. C, the storm is dissipating, or D, the storm will last about another hour. A, A, that’s right, every five second interval between lightning and thunder roughly equals a mile distance from the strike. Yeah, I used to think that you would count and the count would be lightning, one, two, yeah, three, and that would be three miles away. But, no, it’s about a mile away every five seconds, yeah, so 10 seconds, two miles, 15 seconds, three miles, and so on. Well,

Marcia Smith 17:36
we’ll count next time, maybe even tonight. Okay, Bob, did you know that all images coming into our retina are actually upside down? Did you know that

Bob Smith 17:45
it’s like a camera? Yeah, like the old cameras where they had a mirror in there, yeah? So really, so everything we’re seeing is actually upside down, yeah? So you’re walking on the ceiling Marsh. How do you do that?

Marcia Smith 17:56
And why? Because the cornea, the transparent part of the eye, covering the iris and pupil is a convex lens. Okay, okay, but what

Bob Smith 18:04
changes it your brain? Does it? That’s it. Your brain flips it around. When light

Marcia Smith 18:09
enters the cornea, it’s flipped upside down, because the brain’s job is to translate that inverted information.

Bob Smith 18:16
So that is why, when you have a problem with your vision, and it’s your brain is trying to connect it like if you have a stigmatism, your brain has to try to correct that, yeah, and that’s why you get headaches sometimes, because your brain is trying to fix that image in your brain. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 18:31
Isn’t that interesting? That is interesting, another marvel of the old brain,

Bob Smith 18:36
okay? Marcia, I have another question for you, nature, okay, the three major cities with populations greater than 100,000 that get the most snowfall on Earth are in what country? Three cities with populations greater than 100,000 that get the most snowfall on Earth? Are they in Canada? The US, Russia or Japan? Russia? No, not Russia, Canada. No, not Canada. Us. No, not us. What

Marcia Smith 19:05
was the last one? China, Japan, Japan. Even with the name, I couldn’t get it right, Japan,

Bob Smith 19:11
Japan’s amor i City averages 25 feet of snow a year. Are you kidding? Yeah, the northern half of Japan experiences what they call sea effect snow. We have lake effect snow here with the Great Lakes. Sea effect snow is when cold Siberian air mixes with warm, wet air from the Sea of Japan and dumps all that moisture onto the Japanese Alps. So that’s why Japan has three cities that get most of the snow fall on Earth more than any other country in that little island, I’ll be darned, yeah, all

Marcia Smith 19:43
right, Bob, time for who am

Bob Smith 19:47
I? Whoa. There we are. Again.

Marcia Smith 19:49
Isn’t that cool? But I can do with my throat. I don’t know how you do that in this case, though, it’s Who are we. Okay? You ready? Yeah, in America, this group of people established trial by. Jury the protection of life and property by due process and freedom from self incrimination. Who were they? Who

Bob Smith 20:08
were they? Was this a religious group by any chance? Were they the Puritans? Yes,

Marcia Smith 20:13
okay, good. Call the Puritans these basic principles of law that the US abides by comes down from the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They created them and put them into effect, and we still do it well, it

Bob Smith 20:29
makes sense, because they came from England, which is where all that stuff came from, all those traditions, and it

Marcia Smith 20:33
was them that reinstated them here. It was they. It

Bob Smith 20:39
was it was it them? Was

Marcia Smith 20:40
it those guys? Those

Bob Smith 20:41
guys? Yeah, these guys. Okay, all right, true or false? Marcia, one more weather question. This is a good one to think about. Okay, house Windows should be opened in preparation for a tornado to equalize the pressure inside and outside, correct? False. I always thought that too. Really, whenever there’s a storm coming, I always break open the window a little bit. But apparently, opening windows prior to a tornado’s arrival will only allow powerful gusts into the house, inviting greater structural damage. Can you believe that they came from britannica.com who told us wrong? Well, everybody in the world, wow,

Marcia Smith 21:16
wow. Now you gotta unlearn that. That’s

Bob Smith 21:19
gonna be hard to do. More important, tornados coming, put the windows down. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it?

Marcia Smith 21:24
More importantly, Bob, what percentage of Americans have a jar of peanut butter in the house?

Bob Smith 21:29
Well, this is the most important question. More important than that? Well, depends.

Marcia Smith 21:33
Okay,

Bob Smith 21:34
so it’s tornadoes or peanut butter. Okay. What percentage, I would say about 80% of Americans have peanut butter in their house. According

Marcia Smith 21:42
to the National Peanut board, 94% of American households have at least one jar of peanut butter in the house. 90%

Bob Smith 21:50
9494

Marcia Smith 21:53
that’s amazing. Yes, they report that Americans eat an average of 4.25 pounds of peanut butter per person per year. Well, the interesting

Bob Smith 22:00
thing is, there’s a peanut board. I didn’t know that. Is it made out of peanuts, or what the peanut board? It’s

Marcia Smith 22:06
also interesting to note, because I didn’t know this, peanut butter is considered a condiment.

Bob Smith 22:13
Well, that makes sense. It does, yeah, you add that. You put that on top of other things, yeah, jelly or banana, it’s a spread. You know? They call it a spread, the peanut butter spread, yeah, but I didn’t know they had a board. I thought they might have a council or a Congress, but not a peanut butter board. The CEO

Marcia Smith 22:27
is Mr. Peanut with his little top hat and

Bob Smith 22:32
Monaco. Oh, we’ve gone off the rails

Marcia Smith 22:33
now. Okay, I got some more if you need them. Okay, all right, what famous author was an original member of a society called the ghost club in London, England,

Bob Smith 22:44
the ghost club, yeah, oh, that must be our favorite English writer who wrote the Christmas tale, yeah, Charles Dickens, correct.

Marcia Smith 22:53
He’s known for a good ghost story now and then, yeah. And he was a member of this very exclusive club interested in dissecting all things other worldly. They’d sit around and discuss ghost stories. The club started with informal gatherings at Cambridge University, and included such literary luminaries as WB Yates, Siegfried, Sassoon and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Bob Smith 23:17
Oh, really, from Sherlock, Holmes fame. That’s right, I’ll be down,

Marcia Smith 23:20
Bob. There are six foods that never expire. Well, one of those is honey. That’s correct. But how many others can

Bob Smith 23:27
you name? Well, there are five others. I can name five others, yeah, five other foods that never expire, right? They never go bad. No. So nuts. No, no,

Marcia Smith 23:39
no. Nuts, no nuts.

Bob Smith 23:40
Okay, tell me what they are, right? They

Marcia Smith 23:42
are honey, vinegar, white rice, sugar, salt and vanilla extract.

Bob Smith 23:47
See, I don’t think of salt and sugar as foods, but I guess they are. These are ingredients. And I certainly don’t think of vinegar as a food, and I think of it as something that you put in food, but it’s a

Marcia Smith 23:57
condiment and vanilla extract, I wouldn’t have guessed that lasted forever.

Bob Smith 24:01
Wow, that’s good to know. So if I’m on a desert island, make sure I have a little cabinet full of that stuff and a peanut board

Marcia Smith 24:08
so you’ll have white rice and you can put all this stuff on top of it. Oh, my goodness. Okay, Bob, where is the most linguistically diverse country in the world? In other words, who speaks the most languages?

Bob Smith 24:22
I think I read that it’s New Guinea. Oh, good. Yes, you

Marcia Smith 24:26
read. And remember, hard to believe is this. They have 8 million people and 839

Bob Smith 24:32
languages. That’s just amazing. So they have all these aborigine tribes and groups of people that came there 839 languages. That is amazing, isn’t that? When we had a story on a week or two ago where they came there as seafarers, oh, that was actually Australia, Australia, so nearby, but not not the same island. Wow, that’s amazing. Okay, Marcia, you talked about restaurants. I have a question for you, yeah, where is the world’s highest revolving restaurant? I would say, Well, let me give you a hint here. All right, is it in Bolivia, Switzerland, Turkey or Japan?

Marcia Smith 25:08
Dubai? It’s

Bob Smith 25:10
not in Dubai. I don’t know. Okay, here’s a second. Hi. Okay, I’ve been there. Oh, Switzerland. That’s it. Okay, yeah, the world’s highest altitude revolving restaurant is on Schilthorn, which is a mountain in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. It’s about 10,000 feet above sea level, and it’s a revolving restaurant known as PIs Gloria, meaning the glorious peak. And it was featured in the 1969 James Bond film. Oh yeah, I remember that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In fact, when the filmmakers were getting ready to do that film. They heard about this restaurant being built, and they said, we’ll help you fund that if we can shoot there. Oh, really, yeah, so smart. They actually helped to finance its construction in exchange for using it in the film. And today, in addition to the dining and drinks, they have an interactive James Bond exhibit there called Bond world.

Marcia Smith 25:57
Oh, that’s cool. Did it turn real slow, like the one downtown here does? Yeah, it

Bob Smith 26:01
turns in. But the interesting thing is, you’re looking at mountains, different mountains is what you’re seeing, as opposed to different buildings in your town, yeah? So it’s pretty cool. Yeah, I shared a drink with my Rockwell colleague, Albert Fisher, at that revolving restaurant in Switzerland. But getting to it, this is what I remember being, an amazing trip. You start way down in the valley. There are several ways to get there, but from the louder Broughton valley floor, it took four cable cars in 32 minutes to get to this peak. It’s 9744 feet at the summit of Mount. Children and some of our fellow passengers were dressed far less casually than us. They came with skis and ski poles. So I looked around and thought, are these people actually going to ski down these Alps? Because they are much steeper than the Rocky Mountains. It’s amazing. Oh, man. So they made their way back down on the mountains on skis. I thought they were some of the bravest souls in the world.

Marcia Smith 26:52
I really did. Yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing that. Okay, I’m gonna wrap it up with Winston Churchill. Who better? Yeah, I got two quotes here. His first one, he said this long before the internet, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth as a chance to get its pants on.

Bob Smith 27:11
That’s true. And he was speaking of the Nazi propaganda, oh, I’m

Marcia Smith 27:14
sure. Yeah. Okay. And finally, he said, a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. That’s

Bob Smith 27:24
absolutely right. Yeah, that’s excellent advice. Words of Wisdom. Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed our wisdom, what we’ve been able to impart, and we hope you return to listen to more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on

Unknown Speaker 27:36
the off ramp.

Bob Smith 27:39
The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, visit us on the web at the offramp dot show at.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai