Working in Ottawa today --Play safe

Good morning good people,

I will be working in Ottawa today.

So before I get too carried away on today's blathering of rare earth magnets, questionable dietary practices and home experiments in cold fusion, I just read that James Holmes --the Colorado Joker massacre shooter may have sent a notebook of writings and self-promotional material to a Colorado psychiatrist prior to the shooting.

May have.  You see there are two reports of notebooks.  Fox News reported that a notebook had been sent to a Colorado psychiatrist but had lingered in the university mail room since July 12.  But that notebook was determined to be unrelated to Holmes by the FBI, but wait!  There is a second notebook, and reportedly sat in the same mail room for 2 days prompting a second probe to determine if the killings could have been prevented.

By having faster mail?  This is what it comes down to?  A lunatic can acquire tear gas and assault weapon and sidearm fire power over a few week period and take it upon himself to exact merciless and senseless killing of innocent persons for his own twisted effort at obtaining notoriety and satisfying some demon of delusions of persecution, grandeur and inadequacy and the investigation will focus on the goddamned mail?

Sure, blame the Posties, they can get blamed for their own rampages and others as well.

This also in the news.. In the U.S. the Consumer Product Safety Commission, largely dormant and ineffectual for the last dozen years (bet you weren't even aware of it), has banned the sale of BuckeyBalls.  No not the long chain carbon (element 6 on my wallet sized periodic table) molecule, but those wacky fulfilled rare earth magnet balls that the annoying guy in the next cubicle keeps arranging to look like a cube, cone, tetrahedron or Gumby.

Seems that if you ingest these magnetic balls (!) that they can seek each other out and then end up getting trapped by binding or pinching the wall of the intestines, requiring surgical intervention.

Gosh.  Craig Zucker, CEO of BuckeyBalls has vowed to not go down without a fight.  I find it a bit absurd to ban them on this basis.  They are not sold as a child's toy, nor as a food substitute, perhaps a warning label with a really cool graphic of open abdomen intestinal surgery.

Don't try this at home kids!

Damn.  Not enough time to write in much detail about cold fusion nor how I made a 2000 watt carbon arc lamp when I was 12 years old from a tobacco can, carbon rods from several C size batteries, a saltwater rheostat and a wing window from a '66 Buick.

Yeah.  About 2000 watts.  The kid across the street said it made the whole second floor of our house glow, even where there were no windows :)

Yes it blew the fuses.  Mom and Dad never knew.

Perhaps the CPSC should ban the sale of batteries.

Have a good day, play safe.

Working in Montréal today --Olympic blues

Good morning folks and folkettes,

I will be working in Montréal today.  See some of you there, others.. not so much.

I read today buried in a back page that the Olympics venues constructed for the Beijing hosted games today sit empty and losing money.

I thought, "how can that be?" .. "why, after all an Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby!".  Oh wait.. that wasn't me, that was Montréal's Jean Drapeau mayor of the fine city from '54 through '86 with a break of a few years in there somewhere.

Now Drapeau was a great mayor, built the Metro, brought baseball to the city, but the '76 Olympics.. niet!  After the revealing of the colossal loss in the budget newspapers ran a Mosher cartoon of a pregnant Drapeau on the phone, "ello, Morgentaler?"

So back to Beijing, like Athens, Montréal, Sydney, what of London?  Will the London Olympics lose money?  OF COURSE IT WILL.

What I can't figure out is why the lie of profits to be made and why do people believe it?

Hell, Vancouver even explored new ways of losing money, does any one remember the Olympic RV Trailer Park? Yeah, it lost $70,000 too.

Try this on for size, the London Olympics is counting on 1 in every 10 Americans to visit the London this year.  huh?  The prediction is only 12 million tourists during the Olympics, mostly from Europe, so when are these 30,000,000 visitors from the U.S. going to show up?

Are they expecting 3,000,000 Canadians?  I actually don't know anyone that has mentioned that they play on heading across the pond, so where does this fantasyland number come from and why do the Brits believe it?

Have a good day.