Top Gun Aircraft Carrier Scrapped for a Penny

Ah, another great use of our tax dollars, or maybe we should make that tax "cents" instead.

Remember "Top Gun?" Of course you do! Well, Tom Cruise's favorite aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger, the one he was featured in when he made the movie, "Top Gun," has been scrapped by the Navy. Some people wanted to set it up as a museum but they couldn't raise the money, so the Navy has sold it for, are you ready? One penny! What a deal! I would have given them twice that, although I'm not sure what I would have done with a 66,000 ton doorstop.

The massive ship has been sitting in Bremerton, Washington, for about 8 years waiting for donations to pour in for the museum, but they needed about $35 million to set everything up and raised only about $100,000, so that idea was out.

The Ranger is one of only four Forrestal-class carriers the Navy completed. Built in 1957, the ship served extensively in the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm until being decommissioned in 1993.

The folks who'll be tearing it down for scrap, All Star Metals, are having it towed to their facility in Brownsville, Texas. That will take something like 5 months since they'll have to take it around the tip of South America through the Straits of Magellan, since it's too big to go through the Panama Canal.

Poop in a Box: Black Friday Special!

Remember Black Friday? Several million of us got online and bought stuff at great prices, right? Well, some others, about 30,000 or so, bought something absolutely insane, some possibly thinking it was something else instead of what it said it was, but in any case, everybody got it. And what was this insane something? The answer is ... are you ready? Bull sh*t! (replace the "*" with "i" if you aren't offended ;-})

Yup. There's a game manufacturer called Cards Against Humanity, and they have built a pretty strong following by offering people stuff that's politically incorrect or maybe taboo in some cultures. Their concept is to choose something funny or offensive, and that's what they did. They packaged some small piles of the stuff in a nice little box and sold it online on Black Friday.

When they announced the “offer,” some of their following thought they'd be getting something else, but they got exactly what the box said, according to Max Temkin, one of the company's co-founders. As a matter of fact, the company went out of its way to tell potential customers that what they'd be getting was going to be, in fact, the actual stuff, poop. 

Here's a video from YouTube of a client opening his own personal box:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57y1Ryr66cM

Billion Dollar Surveillance Blimps to Launch over Maryland

No it's not a blimp with a goiter, it's the latest government boondoggle! Another wild and crazy way to spend your hard earned tax dollars in the most bizarre ways possible. This time it's the US Army's turn as they're going to launch two massive billion dollar surveillance blimps and station them directly over Maryland. 

Yup, you heard it right, these gargantuan pregnant balloons are going to be sitting up in the sky to protect us against flying white elephants from Congress - no, silly - they're designed to protect us from a potential barrage of enemy missiles that might somehow be launched by evil villains presumably lying in wait off the Atlantic coast aimed at Washington or wherever.

It's the last remnant of an 18-year-long Army project, costing us $2.8-billion, originally designed to warn us against enemy cruise missiles or the like,  but some are saying they'll probably be spending a lot more time instead looking at cars, trucks and the boats of taxpayers who paid for the things.

It's a project called "JLENS," which is an abbreviation for “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.” It has high-resolution radar coverage of up to about 340 miles in every direction which means it will be able to see from North Carolina to Massachusetts and thwart those evil do-badders right in their steps.

Things could have been worse. When the things were originally planned, there were supposed to be three dozen of them, but apparently some of them crashed and costs escalated (Really? In Washington?) and they gave up on making any more than just the two prototypes they'd already built.

So, in a couple of days if you're driving up I-95 northeast of Washington, you'll be able to look up in the sky and it won't be a bird or a plane you'll see, but the mother of all blimps silently guarding you day and night at 10,000 feet above the Maryland countryside. They're about 240 feet long, about three times the size of a regular Goodyear blimp, so they'll be pretty hard to miss.

South Dakota Pulls 'Don't Jerk And Drive' Campaign

This is a true story. Honest. The South Dakota Highway Safety Office decided to promote a new campaign to keep people from over correcting their steering wheels in icy conditions. This is, apparently, commonly known in South Dakota anyway as "jerking" the steering wheel, so they came up with the slogan, "Don't Jerk And Drive."

Unfortunately, some drivers, who apparently thought more clearly than the people at the Highway Safety Office, thought the campaign slogan was a bad idea.

According to Trevor Jones, secretary of the Dept. of Public Safety, even though it was intended to be an important safety message, the ad was pulled because it apparently distracted from the goal of saving lives on the road because a few people appear to have inferred something else from the wording of the slogan.

Meanwhile, the Highway Safety office insists that the double entendre was inserted intentionally to get people's attention. (Huh?) In icy conditions, according to the office, drivers should avoid the urge of jerking the steering wheel. As the narrator says in the TV ad, "Resist the urge to jerk the steering wheel. Over correcting only creates more chaos. Besides, nobody likes a jerker."

South Dakota State Rep. Mike Verchio says he wants to ask the department exactly what it thought it was doing before the social media promotions and TV commercials were yanked.

Pay Phone of the Future Coming to NYC

According to the Washington Post, pay phones have not gone away but are resurfacing, at least in New York City, as web-based contraptions that they're going to call CityBridge Links. The machines may look sort-of like pay phones, but the things are going to do a whole lot more than simply just let you make a phone call.

New York has assembled a number of telecom companies along with technology and advertising concerns to deploy several thousand of these modern-day pay phones across the city, and they're going to not only offer free WiFi connections, but free calls to anywhere in the U.S.. They'll have touchscreen displays with direct access to a wide range of city services including direction maps for tourists and cellphone charging stations, and you'll also be able to connect to emergency responders plus receive alerts from the city whenever there's an emergency.

Obviously it's probably been quite a while since any of us used a pay phone. But as we know, it's been part of a lot of our culture for decades - even Clark Kent changed in a few of them - and the city has been trying to figure out what to do with the spaces where the old ones have been just sitting around. 

The new CityBridge Links are going to be funded, they say, by sophisticated advertising fine-tuned to each machine's location and they're projected to generate something like $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years of operation with half of that going straight back to the city. Additional revenue will come from auctioning off most of the old pay phones. However, they do plan to keep a few of the original Superman-style phone booths for posterity.

Construction of the new network is set to begin in 2015 with as many as 10,000 machines to be installed across the city, replacing around 6,500 of the older regular pay phones. Clark Kent would be so proud!

WTC Train Station to Cost More Than Skyscraper

The new World Trade Center is an astounding feat - rising 1,776 feet above the city as a tribute and memorial to the original Twin Towers destroyed a decade ago. Naturally it needs a decent train station nearby to accommodate the thousands of people who daily come and go, so they decided to build a new train station next door.

At just about the same size as Grand Central Terminal, the new station is planned to serve more than 200,000 daily commuters and visitors to the new World Trade Center and National 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It will feature "advanced signal systems, state-of-the-art fare collection equipment, and climate-controlled platforms and mezzanines with superior lighting and finishes. The Hub's new concourse will connect commuters and visitors to multiple New York City Transit connections and unsurpassed retail opportunities and other destinations."

So to put in the new train station, they first hired an architect, Santiago Calatrava, who explained  that his design would "seamlessly fuse state-of-the-art transportation and first-rate retail facilities." (See image above).

Calatrava is reputed to be quite demanding and has been sued several times because of his badly built buildings. But nevermind all that. It seems the project was rushed along so fast that a boondoggle of expensive problems happened.

Taking a page out of Boston's Big Dig, New York has now fumbled its way through mismanagement and incompetence to run the cost of the new train station up to an incredible figure, and the final cost - hold onto your hat - the final cost is going to be somewhere around 4 billion dollars.

According to The New York Times, "even the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is developing and building the hub, conceded that it would have made other choices had it known 10 years ago what it knows now.

“ 'We would not today prioritize spending $3.7 billion on the transit hub over other significant infrastructure needs,' Patrick J. Foye, the authority’s executive director, said in October."

Google Fined $2000 for Cleavage in Street View

Apparently this has been going on a lot lately. Google's Street View has again been put to task for showing something that somebody was embarrassed about. This time they sued. And won.

The latest embarrassment for Google's Street View comes from Canada and a lady who was just sitting there on her front steps minding her own business and just happened to be leaning over checking her cell phone when Google's camera car came driving by. Click, click, and there she was, for all the world to see, unintentionally showing some rather ample cleavage to the rest of the world. 

Maria Pia Grillo found her image on Google and naturally was a wee bit embarrassed. But she got rather mad when several million others also found the image. Even though her face was blurred in the image, the cleavage wasn't. She says she sent messages to Google but got no response, then she sent Google a registered letter arguing that she felt that she was "at the mercy of potential predators" because of the picture.

And so, back in 2011, Ms. Grillo filed a judicial complaint against Google, and demanded it blur the rest of her body along with the license plate of her car which was also shown in the photo. She asked for $45,000 Canadian because she said she had suffered emotional damage along with mockery from her colleagues at her work. 

Now, a Montreal judge has agreed, at least with part of her argument, and ordered Google to pay her $2,250 plus interest, along with $159 in court costs.

Google can afford it. They made something like $60 billion last year.

Chocolate Each Day Makes Your Brain Younger

Scientists at Columbia University's Medical Center have just published a report that says eating or drinking a large amount of chocolate (yes, chocolate) can increase your brain's memory capability. The results were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience this past weekend. According to the study, one of the active ingredients in dark chocolate is group of antioxidants called flavanols, and flavanols given daily may give a typical 60-year-old the memory functions of a person twenty to thirty years younger.

A group of 37 volunteers from 50 to 69 years of age were split into two groups; one who drank a cocoa drink with a high dose of flavanols (900 milligrams) and the other the same drink but containing a low dose of just 10 mg.

Then the researchers did some brain imaging on all participants and measured the blood volume in a part of the brain that's age-sensitive and largely responsible for memory formation. According to Scott Small, professor of Columbia's department of neurology, the scientists found that typical 60-year-old participants who drank the high flavanol drinks had the memory of a typical 30- or 40- year old at the end of the study while the group that drank the low flavanol drinks showed no change at all.

The findings parallel those of a study at the University of Nottingham England in 2007 that reported eating chocolate helped sharpen up the mind and gave a short-term boost to cognitive skills. So, enjoy your daily dose of chocolate and you'll think you're a lot younger than you really are.

Google Exec Breaks World Skydiving Record

This is pretty strange. A 57-year-old executive at Google has broken a skydiving record by jumping out of a helium balloon and dropping 25 miles down to land (without breaking any bones) in New Mexico. In the process, Alan Eustace beat the world skydiving record and exceeded the speed of sound as well on his way down.

Mr. Eustace took off in his balloon Friday morning and jumped out from just about the top of the earth's stratosphere at an altitude of 135,890. According to reports, he didn't just get up there and decide to immediately jump, but hung around for half an hour or so admiring the scenery.

On his way down, he went faster than the speed of sound, reaching more than 800 miles per hour, creating a small sonic boom.

Over three years of preparation went into the jump. He wore a space suit specially designed by Paragon Space Development Corporation, a company dedicated to exploring the stratosphere above 100,000 feet.

The previous record was set by Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner who parachuted back in 2012 from a height of 128,000 feet.

Mr. Eustace also broke several other world records including the fastest vertical speed reached during freefall (822 mph) and total freefall distance of 123,414 feet, lasting four minutes and 27 seconds.

Wow, what a ride that must have been!

American's "Sex Toy" Sculpture Vandalized in Paris

There is an art fair going on in Paris at Place Vendome and one of the artists, Paul McCarthy, created a nice sculpture for the event. Paul, who lives and works out of Los Angeles, is rather infamous for creating ususually large objects, usually of a sexual nature, for display to the public. So, he created an 80-foot-tall inflatable sculpture that resembles, many say, a large green butt plug.

The sculpture seems to have caused a bit of controversy among Parisians who walk by. Within two days, the piece was deflated by vandals. McCarthy told the press that he didn't want his masterpiece to be repaired or replaced, that it was only intended as a joke in the first place.

Meanwhile, the French Minister of Culture called the vandalism, "an attack on the principle of artistic freedom," and the art fair said they'd fix the deflated sculpture as soon as it could. McCarthy also told a newspaper that he had been attacked by a man who told him that the sculpture didn't belong on the street.

McCarthy says his work, entitled "Tree," was an "abstract work" based on a joke about a sex toy and that it was also inspired by a Christmas tree.

The mayor of Paris, Ms. Anne Hidalgo, described the attack as "unacceptable," and she also denounced the attack on McCarthy. "Paris will not succumb to the threats of those who, by attacking an artist or a work, are attacking artistic freedom," she said. "Art has its place in our streets and nobody will be able to chase it away."

CDC Screws Up Again with Ebola Virus

This isn't weird, cool or even fun. It's downright awful.

What was it, last month when we read about the CDC transporting Anthrax around in Ziploc bags?

Then a week or two before that, they found some cardboard boxes in an old storage room near Washington that were supposed to have been stored by the CDC that contained some decades-old vials of smallpox packed away that everybody seems to have forgotten about. 

Then another time, the CDC apparently mishandled some Anthrax and had to give their employees tons of antibiotics because they figured they might be infected. Wait a go, guys!

Now it seems they've screwed up again. This time it's with Ebola. This poor guy from Liberia flies to Dallas with Ebola and nurses there treat him. One nurse then comes down with the virus and another is planning to fly out of Dallas and starts to feel sick, so she decides to call the CDC and ask them if it's OK to fly on a plane with dozens of other healthy people. 

What do they say? They tell her YES, it's just fine. Her temperature is only 99.5 degrees so go ahead, you're fine, and it's perfectly OK to take your trip.

This has got to be just about the biggest OOPS! you could possibly find in the annals of human history.

Now they've figured out, finally, that the nurse, Amber Vinson, also has the Ebola virus. Wow, what a coincidence! Of course, she's been isolated, and now they're running all over the place trying to locate all the other 260 or so passengers that were on the Frontier Airlines flights she was allowed to travel in back and forth from Dallas to Cleveland and back after she was told it was OK to fly by the infamous CDC.

Almost 5,000 people have died so far, most in West Africa, during this year's horrific Ebola outbreak. So far, cases in the U.S. and Europe have been limited. The disease was only identified back in 1976, and causes fever, diarrhea and vomiting. It only spreads through bodily contact, they think, but it's highly contagious.

The motto of the CDC (US Government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is ...

"Saving Lives, Protecting People, Reducing Health Costs"

Yeah, right.

New Model Tesla P85D goes 0-60 mph in 3.2 Seconds!

He's done it once more. Elon Musk, the inventor of PayPal, SpaceX, Solar City and Tesla, has now come out with another version of his highly rated P85 electric car called the P85D. Not satisfied with a zero to 60 time of a slowish 4.2 seconds? The new model adds a second motor and all-wheel drive, giving it 691 horsepower and a one-second faster 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds, which is pretty darn fast in anybody's book.

The new P85D looks almost exactly like the regular Model S but under the skin it's added a new motor that sits between the front wheels and with four wheel drive it'll be great for people in the northern climates where ice and snow wreak havoc on driving during the winter months.

Musk says the car is "nuts." And he seems to love it. "It's like taking off from a carrier deck," he says. And it will be even more efficient than the current Model S, going about 275 miles on a single charge thanks to a newly designed system that shifts power between the two motors so each one operates at peak efficiency.

Musk also noted at the unveiling of the new model that all Teslas now come with new safety technology that allows them to avoid danger automatically by practically driving themselves. Adaptive cruise control has been added along with the car's capability to understand speed limit signs ahead and stop itself if it determines there will be a crash. 

Musk also said the new cars will include a radar system that can see through snow and fog and spot pedestrians, traffic lights and signs. To top it all off, the cars will be able to park themselves in your garage.

All versions of the Model S will be available as D models. Prices for the Model S with a 60kWh battery will run from $71,070 to $75,070 for the two motor system. The Model S with an 85kWh battery will be priced from $81,070 to $85,070, and the top of the line Performance Model S will sell for between $105,570 to $120,170. Deliveries of the P85D should begin in December 2014 and all other models in February 2015.

1968 Moon Photo Shows 10 Mile Long Spacecraft

OK, hold onto your hats, my friends, there's a photo just released that's supposed to be from 1968 that was taken during a Lunar Orbiter mission to the moon that shows a spacecraft right in the middle of the Moon's crater Manlius. 

As if an alien spacecraft showing up in a moon photo isn't enough, they've measured it and concluded that it's ten miles long. Yes. That's 10 MILES long.

Most of the ship shows up quite well in the photo with the sun brightly illuminating almost all of it. Manlius is 20 miles wide and the ship takes up just about half of the crater, so that's how they figured it must be 10 miles in length.

The photo comes from a YouTube video released on October 4th. According to a blog post from UFO Sightings Daily on October 5th, the ship is a UFO that NASA was studying back then and was the actual target for some of the Apollo moon missions.

The video was taken by Lunar Orbiter III (frame 3073) sent back in 1967 to photograph potential landing sites for future Apollo missions.

For you non-believers, one possible explanation of the ship, er let's say "object" for you, is that it's an optical illusion because of a depression that occurs in the center of the crater. The "object's" contours, however, are outlined quite well by the sun's shadow where it meets the crater's rim, so it really is a spaceship, OK?

There's also a road up there. Yes. The Lunar Orbiter photo also shows even more evidence of something artificial there: a road that looks like it's about 60 miles long right there on the moon’s surface. The road is straight as an arrow and goes from one end to the other of the photo, suggesting that it's even longer than 60 miles.

Musk Plans Mars Colony by 2020 

He's at it again. The fearless inventor of Tesla and SpaceX now has his sights on Mars! It's the only way to save humanity from becoming extinct, says Elon Musk, and he wants to put his money behind his words by ferrying 100 travelers at a time to the red planet. By the end of the 21st Century, Musk says we can have a million people there, all waiting for Earth to extinguish itself either by its own stupidity or by some unknown calamity such as a wayward asteroid smashing into us or perhaps an alien attack.

We must colonize Mars or face extinction, says Musk. All we need to so is shuttle a few humans there at a time, and before you know it, there'll be a million people there, presumably all scurrying around in their electric Teslas that don't need air or gasoline to run around since the atmosphere on Mars is pretty much void of any breathable oxygen that internal combustion engines need to operate.

"Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people," Musk says in a recent interview with Ross Andersen at digital magazine Aeon. "But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people," says Musk. "In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high."

Musk further says in the interview that since there doesn't appear to be any noticeable life on any of the other planets we've examined, the days of humans continuing to populate the Earth are most likely quite numbered. Mars,  he says, could help mankind survive.

Earlier this year, Musk announced that SpaceX has made 'progress' toward establishing a small colony on Mars by 2020. He previously has said that the reason he created SpaceX in the first place was to develop the rocket technology to be able to eventually send travelers to Mars. The ticket for the one-way only trip is currently estimated to be around $500,000.

Half the World's Wildlife Has Vanished Since 1970

There's a new study out from the World Wildlife Fund that says humans have caused the population of wildlife around the world to decline over 50% between 1970 and 2010. It looks like not only have we screwed up all the oceans and the atmosphere with toxic fumes and pollution, we've killed off half the animals as well.

According to the group's Living Planet Report, the decline in wildlife population has been much greater than anyone ever anticipated. Totals for mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians in the wild have dropped so much that less than half the wildlife that was living in the world when most of us were born is now gone.

Most of the decline has been due to human activity including climate change, habitat loss, over-fishing and other man-related factors. The study also found that humans consume resources equal to one-and-a-half times the earth's sustainable rate.

The scientists conducted research on 10,380 different populations from 3,038 species to develop the index which measures trends over a specific period of time. Of all the earth's continents, South America had the largest losses where the land-based wildlife population decreased by 83%.

Freshwater species suffered the most decline worldwide, with animals such as geese, ducks, fish, salamanders and frog populations dropped by 76%.

According to the report, there is a distinct possibility that there will be a critical "tipping point" in the not so distant future, for most wildlife species. This would be similar to the well-accepted possibility concerning global warming, where a self-sustaining loss of major ice sheets becomes inevitable and the oceans rise and devastate most major coastal cities.

Calling the report a "wakeup call," WWF Chief Scientist Jon Hockstra says he hopes the decline in wildlife species can be reversed, but that the problems we face today in our environment are far more serious than we have originally thought. "There is a lot of data in this report and it can seem very overwhelming and complex," he says. "What’s not complicated are the clear trends we’re seeing — 39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone – all in the past 40 years."

Twitter Scores a News Bombshell

For the first time in history, the news networks have been beaten to a major news story by social media. It happened yesterday when Abdulkader Hariri in Raqqa, Syria tapped into his smartphone the immortal words 'Huge explosions shook the city' and Twitter followers around the world instantly found out about U.S. airstrikes hitting the country of Syria for the first time.

Those 31 characters were read and retweeted across the civilized world almost 30 minutes before U.S. Pentagon Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby stood before reporters and officially announced the operation. Upstaged, it seems, by Twitter.

Actually, this has happened before. In May 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one Twitter user reported the event accidentally by tweeting an account of the military operation and mentioned a helicopter that was hovering above the city. 

But yesterday's event wasn't just an accidental tweet. Hariri was purposeful and right on target, done not as a reaction to the event but as an eyewitness reporting about something that was monumental in importance, something that reverberated to the ends of the earth on Twitter.

Welcome to the 21st Century!

Texting & Driving Soon to be Under the Radar Gun

It had to come eventually. Now it's almost here. There's a company working on a new device to sell police forces across the country that not only measures whether you're speeding but also can tell if you're texting too.

Yup, big brother is getting more invasive by the minute. Welcome to the future. ComSonics, based in Harrisonburg, Va., makes handheld devices for cable companies to detect when you're stealing cable from a neighbor. They also make radar detectors for the police. Well, guess what? They've put their two specialized fields of expertise together into making a nice little hand-held device so police can spot you driving merrily along, weaving in and out of traffic, holding your smartphone and the steering wheel in one hand while typing out love notes to your girlfriend with the other. It looks and works just like a radar gun, but has text sniffing technology.  

The gadgets ComSonics normally sells to cable companies detect signal leaks. These occur when your wiring is put in wrong or gets eaten away by underground pests. Cable companies use them to spot exactly where digital data is leaking so that their repair crews can dig the cable up and replace it.

Now they've figured out a way to shift their expertise from the cable devices to spot digital data when it leaks out into the electronic universe when you send text messages. They figure that putting this electronics into their radar guns will prove to be highly popular in states where it's illegal to text and drive at the same time.

Even though the technology is relatively simple and straightforward, ComSonics says they still have a few kinks left to work out so the new radar/texting gun will work in the real world. As an example, if someone else in the car besides the driver is texting, right now the device can't tell whether it's the driver or not. We certainly wouldn't want to accuse the wrong person of texting if he wasn't actually driving the car, even if the car was going 80 mph in a 45 zone and weaving all over the place. Just a speeding and reckless driving ticket, thank you. At least for now.

But the company is determined to more accurately pinpoint who's texting and who's not pretty soon, so consider yourself warned. Big Brother is coming.

More Fights Breaking Out Over Shrinking Airline Seats

Have you noticed that more and more fights are breaking out in airlines lately? It seems most of them start out with passengers arguing about knee room since they're being squeezed by increasingly tight seating by the airlines.

The AP had a news story the other day about three U.S. flights that had to make unscheduled landings after some rather unruly passengers started fighting over them trying to recline their seats. It seems that disputes over something as trivial as a little bit of somebody's personal space in an airplane might seem a little petty, but when your knees are banging into your tray table to start with and then some inconsiderate you-know-what starts pushing it into your stomach, well, you get the idea. 

The airlines, in order to make even more money than they already do, are adding even more rows and rows of seats. United and Southwest both took out an inch from every row on certain of their jets recently so they could add six more seats. American Airlines has added 10 seats on its Boeing 737-800s for a total of 160 (all even more cramped than before). Delta has gone them even better by installing new, smaller toilets in their 737-900s, just so they can squeeze in four extra seats. (Remember the last time you tried to use an airplane toilet? ;-}) And JetBlue cut the distance between coach seats by one more inch, just so they could make room for some nice new beds on their overseas flights.

You know as well as I do that today's flying experience is nowhere near as glamorous as it once was. You wait in long lines so you can go through security screening, then you get pushed and shoved at the gate while you try to be the first to board, and then you have to fight just to get a little extra space in the overhead bin.

On a United flight back in August, a man prevented the lady in front of him from pushing her seat back by using a delightful little gadget called a Knee Defender. For $21.95, you can get one too. It attaches to your tray table and locks the seat to prevent the person in front of you from being able to recline. An attendant on the flight told the man that he had to unhook the device. He said no, and the gal in front of him threw her cup of water at him.

Then, on an American flight three days later, a couple of passengers started fighting about another reclining seat and the flight on its way to Paris from Miami had to turn around and make an unscheduled stop in Boston.

According to the Associated Press, there were almost 15,000 flight diversions by U.S. airlines over the twelve months that ended last June. That's over 40 flights per day on average making unscheduled landings for one reason or another. It looks like banged knees and frayed nerves are the cause of more and more of them.

Politician 'Cursed' for Orangutan Remark

Roberto Calderoli, who is a Senator in the Italian parliament, apparently said something last year that has gotten him into a whole lot of trouble. It seems the Senator mentioned that the new Italian Integration Minister, Cecile Kyenge, who is Italy's first black minister by the way, reminded him of an orangutan.

I assume that Ms.Kyenge didn't appreciate being compared to a species of the great ape family and she apparently mentioned this to her daddy, Clement Kikoko Kyenge, who is a minister of the religious kind residing in the African Congo.

At his next prayer meeting, the right reverend Preacher Kyenge said a prayer in which he asked God to free Mr. Calderoli from his most evil thoughts. Then, Preacher Kyenge placed a nice photo of Mr. Calderoli in front of an altar that was dedicated to all of the village ancestors.

It seems, all of a sudden, Senator Calderoli begun having all sorts of strange things happen to him. According to the Senator, over the past year of so he had a bunch of misfortunes that included some six hospital operations, a couple of broken fingers, two vertebrae broken and his mother died, all he says are proof that Mr. Kyenge placed a curse on him.

Capping off his unusual year of bad luck, Mr Calderoli tweeted a photo of himself this month holding a rather large six foot snake which he said that he'd found and subsequently killed at his home. He decided to apologize to Ms. Kyenge, but apparently it didn't do any good.

Some friends of Mr. Calderoli also gave him a "lucky" charm shaped like a red chili pepper. It was supposed to ward off evil spirits, but apparently it mysteriously snapped in half the next day. A mystic, he says, "saw a tremendous force active around me."

Meanwhile, Preacher Kyenge has denied that any curse was placed on Mr. Calderoli. He says, "We are Christians like him," and that he has been forgiven in their prayers.

Yeah, right.

The Preacher says that if Mr. Calderoli was actually sincere in his apology to his daughter, the case is closed. However, he says, if Mr. Calderoli hadn't been so contrite, then the ancestors might have become a little nervous.

Ms. Kyenge, who's been living in Italy for over 30 years, has dismissed any talk of curses. She says, "I ask what religion Mr. Calderoli practises?" She says she is Catholic and doesn't believe such practises and rites, and that they are irreligious.

Senator Calderoli is now facing prosecution for his remarks. Perhaps he owes Ms. Kyenge a more sincere apology?

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