From: mjd@SAUL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Huge Fierce Green Snake) 
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre 
Subject: Claim to Fame 
Date: 9 Mar 92 16:09:25 GMT 
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU 
Organization: Martin Bormann's Cranial Splints 

A couple weeks ago, Kibo posted this to alt.folklore.college: 
>> You can help Nasadowski with his research on Crash and Kibo. For extra credit,
>> report on the Chrinitoid and the Podular. 
> What about Mark-Jason Dominus and the time he cut the Union in half with 
> a chainsaw? 

One of my co-workers, Dania Egedi, saw it, and sent me mail: 
> To: mjd@saul.cis.upenn.edu 
> Subject: alt.college.folklore 
> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 92 11:45:04 EST 
> From: "Dania M. Egedi" 
> 
> Well? Inquiring minds want to know! 
> - Dania 'i always wanted to know someone famous' egedi 

She seemed interested by the story, so I thought I would tell it to you all. 

If you've ever been to Troy, you know it's in the Hudson Valley,
which means that the river is at the bottom of a steep hill and the 
Institute is built on the hill. You can imagine that they have a big 
erosion problem. You hear all these stories about building sliding 
down the hill, but of course it's not really as dramatic as that. 
Really they just subside at one end. In the case of the chemistry 
laboratories they were able to build on a bedrock outcropping, but for 
the student union, which is long and narrow (I don't know why they 
built it that way) they put an expansion joint into the building so 
that it would bend instead of snapping in two. 

I had a friend down from Skidmore, which is about forty-five 
minutes north of RPI, who is a sculptor. At the time he was just 
beginning to be a sculptor, and his project involved taking these huge 
tree chunks and cutting grinning, rough-hewn faces into them with a 
chainsaw, kind of like the Easter Island heads. He came down to visit 
me for the weekend and brought the chainsaw with him as a joke. About 
two in the morning we were feeling festive, and so we went out and cut 
open the expansion joint with the chainsaw. 

I have no idea really what it was made of, but it wasn't that hard 
to do. Because of the way the Union is built it's really easy to get 
up on the roof and so I slit the whole thing along the top and up one 
side and down the other. At the beginning the cut was pretty narrow, 
you know, about the width of the chainsaw blade, but when we were done 
we went back to the starting place and saw that the gap was already 
opening up as the west end of the building subsided. I later heard 
from a sophomore Civil Engineering major friend of mine that they C.E. 
department had had their students survey the building and they 
discovered that it had subsided three inches over the following 
semester. 

They pinned tarps over the gap in the building, but I left soon 
afterwards and haven't been back since, so I don't know what they did 
about it. It was a pretty irresponsible thing to do, and I'm kind of 
embarassed about it, and I kind of wish people would stop talking about 
it, because I'm afraid I might get in trouble, but what can you do? 

The night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details. 
Mark-Jason Dominus mjd@central.cis.upenn.edu