Rio! The Raw Sewage Capital of the Summer Olympics!

Pee-Yew! And welcome to Rio de Janeiro and the Summer Olympics of 2016.  Won't the swimming events be Uber Cool!

Yes, according to the AP, all the athletes that will be coming to beautiful Rio next year for the Summer Olympics will be swimming and boating in water that's so contaminated with human feces that they'll become so violently ill that they won't even be able to compete in the games.

It seems that extreme water pollution is common all over Brazil and that most of the sewage isn't treated; it just runs down the hills through open-air ditches into the streams and rivers that feed the nice new Olympic water venues. And that's where over 10,000 athletes from over 200 nations will be competing in next year's Summer Olympics. About 1,400 of these boys and girls will be sailing in the polluted waters in Guanabara Bay, canoeing and rowing on the filthy waters of the Rodrigo de Freitas lake and swimming off renowned but polluted Copacabana beach.

"Dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria from human sewage," are everywhere in all the Olympic and Paralympic venues, according to the AP report. The results have alarmed competitors who are already in Rio for training, and some of whom already have gotten sick with fevers, vomiting and diarrhea, according to the report.

Brazilian officials have been pledging to clean the mess up for years, but the latest reports say the stench of raw sewage is still in the air when travelers land at Rio's international airport. Most of Brazil's prime beaches are completely deserted because the surf is thick with putrid sludge, and the official Olympic lake is currently littered with dead and rotting fish. Some tests measure up to 1.7 million times the level that would be considered hazardous in the U.S.

"This is by far the worst water quality we've ever seen in our sailing careers" says Ivan Bulaja, the coach of Austria's sailing team. Austria's sailors have already become sick with vomiting and diarrhea and have lost valuable training days because of the sickening water quality.

Medical experts say that most of the people in Rio have been so exposed over the years to the viruses in the water that they've built up antibodies in their systems, but foreign tourists and athletes who are visiting for the first time won't have that protection. Many will become violently ill as soon as they come near the polluted water venues.

Biologist Mario Moscatelli says that Brazilian authorities "promised the moon" so that they could win their Olympic bid, and now they aren't making good on their promises. Meanwhile, Rio says they will try to clean things up, but the Governor of Rio, Luiz Fernando Pezao, says there simply isn't time to clean up the water before the games begin.

Huh? Roads made out of Plastic?

America's roads suck. They're in terrible condition and most of the time they're being torn up by road crews just when we need to get somewhere else. The government says it'll cost 100 billion dollars every year just to maintain our current road system, much less upgrade it.

Meanwhile, there's something else you might have noticed in the environmental news lately, that we humans have been dumping plastic trash into our oceans for about half a century now and it's actually been piling up. Big time.

Researchers say that around 15% to 40% of our plastic litter goes directly into the oceans each year. That works out to from 4 million to 12 million metric tons of the stuff every single year, enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet.  And what's worse, scientists don't even know where about 99% of the ocean plastic debris is actually winding up, meaning that it's probably having a godawful effect on marine life and eventually our own food supplies. Plus, they say the annual amount of this junk is probably going to double over the next 10 years.

Yup, we are doomed.

Unless, of course, somebody comes up with a solution. And that's what a Dutch construction company called VolkerWessels wants to do. They've gotten together with the city of Rotterdam to take that same plastic waste and pull it out of the ocean to make, are you ready? Plastic roads!

If the idea works, these roads would be durable, quick to construct, and work a lot better than good old Arabian oil-based asphalt, because they are supposed to last three times longer than conventional roads.

Of course they'll be more expensive, but if they last three times longer, make utility access easier, can be built off-site and then can be installed quicker, these plastic roads might actually turn out to be cheaper in the long run.

The next step is to build a few and test them in the laboratory to make sure they work in wet and slippery conditions, etc. The city of Rotterdam has embraced the idea wholeheartedly and is ready to help put together a pilot project.

The company is planning to install one of the roads in Rotterdam’s street laboratory, and as soon as it's shown to be workable, we may be seeing the solution to one of our problems coming from fixing another one of our problems. How neat is that? Sometimes the human race may actually not be as stupid as everybody else thinks we are!

The Biggest White Elephant in Human History?

The Trillion Dollar F-35 Stealth Fighter is once again in the news. You remember the F-35, right? A plane that's supposed to be so technologically advanced that it would give the U.S. absolute air superiority in any future conflict. The world’s most advanced stealth fighter jet that's ever been created! And, of course you also remember that costs and delays on the thing have spiraled so far out of control that one commentator has warned that "our skies and seas are vulnerable."

Well there's news out today that this massive boondoggle of a fighter plane can't even fight. One of the F-35's test pilot has written a scathing five-page brief saying the plane can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane if it's in a dogfight or even dodge the enemy's own gunfire.

The "official use only" document says that the pilot flew an F-35A in a mock exercise with an F-16 over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California on January 14, 2015 and the stealth fighter was too sluggish "for every engagement."

According to the report, the two jets played the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, designed by the Air Force to test the F-35’s effectiveness as a close-range dogfighter. The F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, trying to maneuver his plane in order to “shoot down” the F-16, while the F-16 pilot would do his best to evade and shoot down the F-35.

The pilot stated that his plane, the F-35, was flying “clean,” and had no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage, while the F-16 was heavily loaded with two bulky underwing drop tanks, which should have put the F-16 at a distinct aerodynamic disadvantage.

But the F-35 pilot says his fighter was so sluggish it couldn't reliably defeat the F-16, even when the older jet was carrying extra fuel tanks.

The pilot of the F-35 tried to target the F-16 with the plane's 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. Meanwhile, when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35 and had the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the F-35 pilot couldn't maneuver out of the way.

The F-35 pilot writes that there's no point in trying to fly the plane in a sustained, close turning battle with another fighter. "God help you if the enemy surprises you and you have no choice but to turn."

He also had some pretty nasty comments about the cockpit of the F-35. He said he discovered that he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That, he says, allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

The F-35 is the only new fighter jet the U.S. and its allies are currently developing . The F-16, meanwhile, has been around since the late 1970s.

The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

Criticism of the F-35 program in the U.S. has been mounting for years. Last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated, "The F-35’s engine’s reliability is very poor,” and reported that the total cost of the program is up from $233 billion in 2001 to $391 billion last year, making it the US Department of Defense’s “most costly and ambitious acquisition program.” 

Current estimates are that the F-35 fleet will cost a grand total of $1 trillion to operate and support in its lifetime. Yup, it's another example of your tax dollars at work.

Guy Cuts Everything in Half After Split with Wife

You've heard the saying about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Well, in Germany apparently it applies to at least one fellow who was recently divorced by his wife of 12 years.

It seems the guy who uses the name of "Der Juli" wasn't too happy when his wife told him she wanted a divorce. At the court proceedings, the judge told him he had to split everything up equally so each one would get their fair share. So, he got out all his cutting tools and really did divide everything they mutually owned in half. Literally.

Mr. Juli went online and posted a video on YouTube that showcases him going through the process of cutting up their chairs, beds, laptops, their Opel Corsa, an Apple Macbook Pro, mailbox and even a beloved teddy bear, exactly in half, so each of them could go their separate ways without having to argue about who got what. 

The caption to the video reads, "Thank you for 12 'beautiful years,' Laura! You've really earned half. Greetings also to my successor."

He shipped the ex-wife her halves and then decided to post his half of everything on the German version of eBay with the (translated) description, "From my half I must now separate, fond memories you can not remove."

If you're interested, here are the prices (in Euros) for the front or left side of a few of the items he kept:

Bicycle	40,50
Digital TV	27,60
Opel Corsa	671,66
Sofa	22,50
Teddy Bear	74,00
Apple MacBook Pro	91,00
DVD Player	20,50

Unfortunately, he isn't offering to ship anything to the U.S. so you'll have to go to Germany to pick up whatever you had your heart set on. And, honestly, I would doubt that if you got the other half of something from his ex-wife, you could put the two halves back together again and get it to work. By the way, he's only accepting cash. Maybe he needs to buy himself a few replacements?

I really do hope you enjoy these articles!!! If you do, please please please take just a second to look over the ads here and click on some of them if they look interesting. It would be really appreciated!!! Thanks!

Naked Tourists Jailed for Causing Earthquake

This is one of those stories you have to wonder if sometimes we've awakened on the wrong planet in the universe. It seems a small group of about ten tourists from Canada, the U.K. and the Netherlands decided to hike up to the top of Mount Kinabalu, a UNESCO World Heritage site that's 13,435 feet tall and is the highest peak in Malaysia.

They apparently were so excited upon reaching the peak that everybody decided to throw their clothes down on the ground, urinate on the mountain top and prance around, even though their guide told them to stop. To make sure this historical event was recorded for posterity, they took a bunch of nice Instagram pictures of the unruly scene and, naturally, they went viral on the Internet.

A few days later, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck the region, killing 18 residents who reported "boulders raining down” the side of the mountain into their villages.

A couple of Malaysian government officials quickly called a press conference and blamed the earthquake on the tourists, accusing them of angering the spirits of the sacred mountain. According to the Deputy Chief Minister of the state where the mountain is located, "It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly! ... There is almost certainly a connection. We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected."

During the next few days, anger spread throughout the entire country. Five of the hikers were arrested and detained, each facing a fine and up to three months in prison. The rest apparently were able to escape. A park ranger at the mountain, Daikin Anam, who first reported the hikers and their nudity to the police, says that the group should be severely punished for their actions after they deliberately “insulted the mountain spirit.” Calling Mount Kinabalu a holy mountain, he says the tourists showed "disrespect to our mountain and our people."

Tribal elders of the region agreed that the hikers should be punished in their native court in a more traditional way. One elder said, "To appease the mountain protector, the 10 western tourists who stripped and urinated on Mount Kinabalu should be fined 10 head of buffalo, according to local customs. According to local beliefs, the spirit of the mountain is very angry." 

However, the four hikers who were detained were released from jail after pleading guilty to committing obscene acts in public. They were sentenced to three days in prison, which was the time they had served since their arrests on June 9th, and fined 5,000 Malaysian Ringgit (what a great name for a currency!) which works out to about $1,350. I'll bet they never go back and take another tour to Malaysia again.

Attack of the Bladeless Wind Turbines!

Well, here it is, folks, the future of wind turbines. Yup, no blades, so the spotted owls and birdies will be safe to fly around them. And, you can put a couple of these in the same space as a regular whirling & spinning wind turbine. It's a no-brainer. The future is here and now. Well, almost.

We've all grown accustomed to seeing those 100-foot pinwheels that are popping up everywhere there's wind to generate electricity. They spin in the breezes as you drive down the highway, spinning and chopping up endangered birdies and whatever else happens to fly through them into tiny pieces to make pretty much a bloody mess on the ground below. 

But guess what? Now somebody has a better idea. A Spanish company by the name of Vortex Bladeless has figured out a way to generate electricity from the power of the winds in a radical new way. In a few years you just might be seeing a bunch of these gizmos on the horizon instead of blades up in the sky and, apparently, yes, they actually do produce electricity.

Of course, the things look like giant rolled marijuana joints shooting up into the sky, but what the hey. These things are supposed to do the same as the windmills but instead they turn the breezes into kinetic energy by the miracle of "vorticity".

Instead of capturing energy from the winds by a giant propeller, vorticity is an aerodynamic effect of spinning vortices that's long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers who normally try to figure out how to design their buildings so these whirlpools of wind don't rip them apart. Apparently, vorticity can start an oscillating motion in structures (if the wind is strong enough) and things will break apart and collapse. That's not such a good thing if you're making a building, but apparently if you use the energy and funnel it the right way, you can make it wobble around and produce electricity.

That's what the founders of Vortex Bladeless think. They take that energy and try to use it instead of avoiding it by turning it into something productive.

The idea of Vortex’s shape came about by using computers to make sure the spinning wind occurs all together at the right times and places along the entire gigantic joint, er, mast. In the current prototype, the elongated cone, mast, joint, or whatever it is, is made of carbon fiber and fiberglass which lets it vibrate even more normal. Then there are some repelling magnets at the bottom that jerk each other back and forth and all that kinetic energy is then converted into electricity. Really!

What a great idea! No gears or bolts or anything mechanical moving around. That makes it cheaper to manufacture and maintain. The guys who put the company together say the "Vortex Mini" will be about 41 feet tall and can capture about 40 percent of the same wind that a regular windmill would, but since you can put twice as many of these in the space of a propeller turbine, it works out pretty close to the same thing.

The company already has about $1 million raised from the Spanish government and from private capital and they're planning to try raising more funds in the U.S. soon.

Next, I'll bet they'll be painting the things so they even look more like giant smoking marijuana joints and sell advertising on them to the pot industries in Colorado where it's legal. Oh my! What would our parents think?

New Ban on Chinese Funeral Strippers 

A rather odd custom seems to have emerged in China during the latter part of the 20th Century that the Chinese government has now decided to completely ban. It seems that when people die and their families wanted to make sure there are plenty of mourners at the funeral to show that the person had been well known and respected by the masses, strippers were hired to sing and dance and remove their clothing. Some of the strippers even performed with snakes in order to attract larger crowds to the deceased’s funeral. This brought a lot of people to the services. A lot. And it made the guy look like he had been extremely popular, and loved by everyone, so of course this made the families happy in their grief. 

According to Chinese custom, a large crowd at a funeral would also be a harbinger that good fortune would come to the deceased in his afterlife. “It’s to give them face,” according to one villager, “otherwise almost no one would come to the funeral."

The practice might seem a bit strange to you and me, but apparently it made sense to the Chinese, and stripper performances became rather commonplace, at least until the mid 1980's when the government passed laws against full nudity in public. Even so, the practice continued to occur regularly with professional singing and dancing groups over the next few decades until last Thursday when the Chinese Ministry of Culture told police to crack down on the performances.

Pictures that were taken last month during a funeral in the city of Handan were widely circulated over the Internet showing a dancer removing her bra in front of parents and children of the recently deceased. A spokesperson for The Ministry of Culture also cited “obscene” performances in Jiangsu, another Chinese province, and warned the public that there would be a crackdown on these "lascivious last rites."

In the Handan incident, the Red Rose Song and Dance Troupe performed a strip-tease after the funeral. The group took off their clothes after performing a traditional song-and-dance routine, the ministry said. Six of the performers were cited for violating public security regulations. The group's manager, surnamed Li, was jailed for 15 days and fined 70,000 yuan (over $11,000) by authorities for "corrupting the social atmosphere."

Ah, it seems this healthy and, er, unnatural tradition may be coming to a close. What a shame. I wonder if the deceased will miss the attention. Maybe not?