From: wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis)
Subject: Re: Net's Funniest Kitchen Disasters
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 05:53:55 GMT

In article <1992Dec25.114527.27420@u.washington.edu> dst@hardy.u.washington.edu (Dale Tanigawa) writes:
>There are a few legends here at the UW involving Drumheller Fountain ...
>                                                    ...  Supposedly,
>a grad student dumped a failed experiment in the fountain where it reacted
>with all the duck shit to become something else entirely.  The resulting
>substance was a flourescent orange-yellow, and heavier than water so you
>couldn't see it from looking from above (due to aforementioned duck shit).
>When the fountain was turned on for its daily display, it sucked the stuff
>off the bottom and spewed it into the air, resulting in a nice orangey-yellow
>water plume, and lots of flourescent glow-in-the-dark ducks.

  This may be the same incident, or it may be unrelated, but maybe three
years ago someone dumped a lot of bright day-glo dye (a sort of yellowish
green) into the fountain. It was close enough to the usual color of the water
that out of the corner of your eye you might not notice it, except if
you look more closely it's obviously artificial. After a few days of
speculation as to what it was, it was discovered to be fluorescin (?), 
a dye used for marking lakes and streams. After a week or two it
decomposed harmlessly (or so they say... but if you look closely,
in the dark of night, the mutant fish can be seen scheming in the depths..
muahahahaha...!)

  There are a bunch of other legends associated with Drumheller. Its
unofficial name is Frosh Pond, and most people have a friend or
a FOAF who knows someone who was dumped in at some point. (Not unlikely;
I've seen at least two (presumed) sorority initiaition rituals there
in the middle of the night.) Other legends:
    -- It's bottomless.
    -- There are maybe 3 feet of water, covering N feet of gooey muck,
       such that if one were to jump in, one would become hopelessly
       stuck and drown, your body being added to the sludge.
    -- Somewhere in there, there is a Volkswagen (details of how it got
       there vary) which is just barely covered by the water.

Most of these were debunked a while ago when they drained the fountain
to clean it & do some maintenance on the water jets. A friend of mine
was standing nearby when they pumped the water out, and reported lots of 
mud, tree branches, misc junk, but no Volkswagen. For a while after this
it was possible to see the concrete bottom of the foutain, but the waters
have long since returned to their original opacity.

   Some mornings when the water jets are turned off, tired fowl will
congregate on the iron ring on which are mounted the smaller jets
(there's one central fountain surrounded by a bunch of lesser spouts.)
Since this ring is just under the water, it's not apparent that it's
there, or even that the birds are standing on anything, thus giving rise
to the solemn and mysterious phenomenon of the Mystic Circle of Ducks. =8)

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