Friday, December 26, 2014

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.


Monday, December 22, 2014

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

Thursday, December 18, 2014

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.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

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.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

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!

Sunday, December 7, 2014

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."