Priceless Lunar Rover Model Saved From Scrap

Last week there was a story in the news about a prototype lunar rover that was inexplicably sold by somebody in Alabama to a scrap yard and apparently destroyed. Yup, a one-of-a-kind 600 pound NASA model of the moon rover that we all remember bounced around over the surface of the moon during the Apollo missions of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Apparently some retard at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville picked the thing up and sold it to a scrap yard dealer. When word got out last week, there was a massive outpouring of disbelief, but what was done, was done ... at least as far as everybody thought.

But wait! It turns out that the heroic scrap dealer recognized what the thing was and saved the buggy after all. From his picture above, the rover matches the description given by NASA in its investigatory documents. The prototype rover appears to be the same one that is in the smaller insert above being driven by none other than Saturn V rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun.

According to Motherboard magazine, the scrap dealer says, "The man who originally bought it ... bought it at a NASA auction many years ago. NASA just discarded a lot of that stuff back then. When it was brought to my scrap facility, I set it aside because I knew what it was. The unit does exist today. It is not scrapped. I have that unit in storage."

The junkyard owner told Motherboard that he had been planning to sell the rover before Motherboard published its story on Tuesday. He says he still plans to sell the rover. Anyone interested?

Army's NORAD Blimp Breaks Loose Causing Havoc

Here's another fine example of your tax dollars at work! Remember last year we told you about the billion dollar surveillance blimps that our government was planning to launch over Maryland? These things were supposed 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.

Well, they actually did put a couple of the things up in the air and they've been hovering over I-95 northeast of Washington until, yup you guessed it, one of them decided to come loose yesterday morning and meander northward from its mooring base. On the way, it dragged along its 6,700 foot tether line about 150 miles up into Pennsylvania until it unceremoniously came down about four hours later in a densely wooded forest near Moreland Township. 

As the tether line bounced to and fro creating a path of destruction, school teachers herded children into their schools as the line raked across roads, bridges, highways, fields, homes and quite a few power lines causing about 35,000 to lose power in the Bloomsburg, PA area. The military scrambled helicopters and a couple of F-16 fighter jets came for a looksee from the New Jersey National Guard.

The 243-foot-long, helium-filled blimp that weighs about 10,000 pounds came loose from its mooring at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland at 11:54 a.m. according to the Army. No one there has yet been able to explain why it broke free from its mooring. The tether line is supposed to keep these things safely secured to the ground in winds up to 100 mph. But this is our government at work, so you know that when a little rainstorm came through with winds around 45 mph, that was enough to break it loose. And off it went!

The blimp landed in a dense Pennsylvania forest at the top of some trees and the Army fired over 100 shotgun rounds to blow enough holes in the thing to let the last of the remaining helium escape and allow what was left of the $235 million blimp fall to the ground. An Army Chinook helicopter is planned to lift the blimp out of the forest. Local residents said they were thankful that the blimp missed a nearby nuclear power plant when it descended. (I guess so was the rest of the eastern seaboard!)

The $2.7 billion blimp program was recently profiled in a scathing report by the Los Angeles Times describing it as the "quintessential runaway Pentagon project."

Guatemala Elects Comedian As President

In the news today is the stunning decision by the Guatemalan voters to send a former television comedian to the office of president. Jimmy Morales, who has never before held public office, won a landslide victory in Guatemala’s presidential election Sunday by taking a whopping 70% of the votes.

It seems Mr. Morales' platform of "Not Corrupt, Not a Crook" resonated throughout the voting public. According to The New York Times, Guatemala's political system has been "broken" for quite awhile and there has been ongoing corruption at just about every level. 

"With this vote you made me president," said Morales in a short victory statement Sunday night. "The mandate of the people of Guatemala is to fight against the corruption that has consumed us.”

The former Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina is currently in jail on charges that he was involved in a multimillion-dollar customs fraud case. 

Morales' closest opponent in the election, Sandra Torres, wife of another former President Álvaro Colom Caballeros, admitted defeat after it became clear that Morales had won with about 68% of the votes cast. "The people have made their choice," she said.

Numerous street protests have been going on throughout the early part of this year calling for Molina to resign because of the corruption. He did so in September and the election for a new president was held Sunday.

Morales' campaign was heavy on style but light on any solid policy proposals. Many said his campaign headquarters looked more like a television variety show, with a band and dancers, than a politician running for office. Morales' biggest pledge during the campaign was the same as everyone else's, to fight the entrenched corruption that caused Molina to resign. 

The new president rose to fame as a TV actor and comedian, and starred in the Guatemalan TV series Moralejas ("Morals") along with his brother Sammy.

Pro Tip: Don't Steal A Stick If You Can't Drive A Stick
The Huffington Post  |  By David Moye
Email
Posted: 06/19/2015 1:05 pm EDT Updated: 06/19/2015 1:59 pm EDT

Yes, it's happened once again. Something you've read and laughed about every time it occurs and wonder how in the world anyone can be so ... er ... inept? You'd think these people would get a life, but thankfully (at least for us) they don't, and we can sit back and marvel at their stupidity.

Providence, Utah police report that Mr. Alexander Katz, 19, and his girlfriend decided to steal a car. They found one that was sitting all by itself with the keys in the ignition, so they hopped in.

Mr. Katz then apparently looked in vain for the gear selection lever and the usual "D" for "Drive" in a little window somewhere. It just wasn't there. It seems the car was not an automatic but was operated by using what us older folks would call a "stick shift" transmission, something Mr. Katz apparently was not at all familiar with.

Police say that Katz and his girlfriend were able to get the car to go a few yards into a nearby supermarket parking lot but no further, where they jumped out, ran to the gas station next door and called a taxi to pick them up. (I can't help but wonder if the phone had been a dial-type instead of push-button, would Mr. Katz still be there?) 

YOU STOPPED HERE


. in a man tried to steal a car, then had to call a cab after he couldn't figured out how to use a stick shift.

Officers in Logan said they arrested Alexander Katz on Tuesday after the 19-year-old and his underage girlfriend allegedly stole a car with the keys still inside, the Deseret News reports.

Police said Katz' girlfriend knew how to drive a stick and attempted to walk him through the process.


"I'm not 100 percent certain why she doesn't just get around and get in the driver's seat so they can take the car and use it," Police Chief Gary Jensen said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Eventually, the pair ditched the car at a supermarket parking lot in Providence. They fled on foot to a nearby gas station where they called a cab, HJNews.com reports.

When the duo saw police, they ran off again.

Katz's girlfriend was soon arrested. Police said she told them that she and Katz had started the evening looking for Benadryl before deciding to steal a car, according to the website.

Katz was arrested a few hours later after police found him using information he had given the taxi company, according to Newser.

Katz was arrested on suspicion of transferring a stolen vehicle, a second-degree felony, and failure to stop at the command of law enforcement, KSL.com reports. His teenage companion was released to her parents. Her case was transferred to juvenile court.

Top Gear's Clarkson & Team to Rake in Millions

It's been official for a couple of weeks now that Amazon has outbid Netflix and everybody else to hire the former Top Gear team of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond and producer Andy Wilman to put together a brand new television program to replace our dearly loved but now departed Top Gear. 

As you probably know, the BBC dumped Clarkson after an altercation last March when Clarkson allegedly hit one of the Top Gear producers during an argument at a restaurant. After a thorough review, the BBC decided to let Clarkson go and May, Hammond and Wilman followed suit by leaving the show as well.

Top Gear was generating enormous profits for the BBC bringing in revenues of nearly 150 million pounds (about US $230 million) each year with an estimated 350 million viewers in 214 countries worldwide, making it the most watched factual TV program in the history of television, according to the Guinness Book of Records. The BBC is known for making top quality programs and documentaries but no factual program has ever managed to reach Top Gear's astounding number of viewers.

Top Gear will continue on the BBC but will be hosted by British Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, an avid car fan who's been a guest on the show countless times over the past few years. Evans has signed a three year contract to front Top Gear and is currently advertising for co-hosts to help him run the show. The general consensus is that the show will never garner the viewer numbers or loyalty as the original show designed and hosted by Clarkson.

Now that the new Amazon program is officially in the works, some financial details about the new show have come to light. Clarkson, who was earning about $1.5 million a year from the BBC, will be making a bit over $15 million each year with Amazon. Hammond and May, who were earning around $800,000 a year with Top Gear, will now be making around $10 million each, while Willmon will be producing the show and receiving a sum estimated between $10 and $11 million a year.

The new Amazon contract runs for three years. While each episode of the old Top Gear show cost the BBC about $1.5 million to produce, the new show with Amazon is being estimated to cost just under $7 million per episode, with about half of that going to salaries. That's quite a jump in salary for everybody concerned and for the show itself, so all Top Gear lovers around the world are anxiously waiting to see what sort of new show we'll be getting with Amazon's money.

The new show has no name yet but the first show is expected to be shown in the Fall of 2016 and will be broadcast exclusively to Amazon Prime subscribers.

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!