Calling All Icebergs!

An Australian billionaire said Monday he'll build a high-tech replica of the Titanic at a Chinese shipyard and its maiden voyage in late 2016 will be from England to New York, just like its namesake planned. 

Weeks after the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the original Titanic, Clive Palmer announced Monday he has signed a memorandum of understanding with state-owned Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard to build the Titanic II.

"It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic, but ... will have state-of-the-art 21st-century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," Palmer said in a statement. He called the project "a tribute to the spirit of the men and women who worked on the original Titanic."

Here's the thing: The Titanic was luxurious by the standards of its day.  By the standards of today's cruise industry, a first-class cabin on the old Titanic might as well be below the waterline of today's cruise ships.

Only the relative handful of private suites had their own bathrooms.  For the rest, the first class passengers had to make an appointment to take a bath.  Most first-class cabins were less luxurious than a room at  Motel 6.

Besides the changes in technology, the difference was the mission of cruise ships then and now. Before the Jet Age, cruises were taken for transportation.  Which, for the most part, is not why people take cruises today.

Sure, a lot of people will initially book a trip on Titanic II.  That'll last until word gets around that a Edwardian-age superliner was, by today's lights, cramped and boring.  My guess is that T-II will end up being parked somewhere as a low-rent attraction.  More likely is that it will be cut up for scrap before it is ten years old.

Still, the guy behind it will lose less money that was blown on LightSquared...

Shrink, I Wanna Kill; Cross-Country Moving Edition

It will be eight days after I told the movers that I wanted my shit delivered to the day when they tell me my shit will be delivered.  Seems that the moving company took "I want my shit delivered on XYZ" to mean "I want you to ship my shit from the warehouse which is thirteen hundred miles away on XYZ".

Now why any customer could give a rat's ass what day the stuff left the warehouse is beyond me.  It's when the crap gets delivered that matters.




I presume that there is indescribable fuckery to come before this evolution is concluded.

But since I don't have Internet access at home, I've not been  paying much attention to what goes on past the visible horizon.

The Real Surprise Is That the TSA Didn't Taze the Baby

Because there is no reaction like an over-reaction.

NEWARK, N.J.—A terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport was shut down for over an hour Friday after officials discovered that a baby hadn't been properly screened, Transportation Security Administration officials said.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, described the incident as a security breach that occurred at around 1:15 p.m. at a security checkpoint. Terminal C was evacuated and passengers had to go through security screening again.

The spirit of Osama bin Ladin has to be laughing itself silly.  This nation has spend untold hundreds of billions of dollars, at all levels of government, in this massive production of Security Theater. There is no rationality to it, anymore (if there ever was).  The politicians aren't going to dismantle it, for if any politico were to seriously go after our Ever Burgeoning National Security Apparatus, they would be labelled "soft on terrorism" by their political opponents.  And come the next successful terrorist attack, guess who'd get the blame?

There will be another attack of some kind.  So far, we've been lucky, in a way, that most of the wannabee terrorists are stupid enough to go for elaborate plots where they need lots of logistical support.  They've been oblivious to the point that the two of the asswipes who succeeded, the Norwegian Asswipe and the Fort Hood Asswipe, did their killing the same way:  They identified areas where there were a lot of people who could be counted on to be unarmed and they commenced to shooting them.  But we cannot continue to count on future attackers being as dumb as the Time Square Asswipe.

In the meantime, under the guise of "keeping us safe", more and more Americans are coming to regard their government as some out-of-control hydra-headed monster, with the Port Authority cops at Newark going into spasms over an unsearched diaper and with the TSA sponsoring police state style checkpoints.

Sooner or later, the massive national security apparatus is going to figure out that they have enough troops and guns and that they don't need to answer to the drooling boobs up on Capitol hill, let alone the President.

And then we all will be truly screwed.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same; Collegiate Edition

You have probably by now heard about how the University of Florida was planning to axe its Computer Sciences department and simultaneously increase spending on football.  Well, UF didn't care for the negative reaction that move generated, so they are walking it back.

Eighty years ago, the collegiate obsession with football was satirized by the Marx Brothers.

Cell Phone Follies

So there I am, in the Ma Bell Cell Phone store.  They're telling me about tablets and smart phones.  They show me that the plans for data, voice and text messaging is something like $110 a month.

Sheesh.

So then I see, in a corner, something called "Go Phones".  No contract, you buy the phone, and unlimited usage (text, data and texting) is $50 per month.  I asked this:  "Hey, this is so much cheaper, why the hell would I want to buy those plans on a two year contract for twice as much a month when I can get one a these for a lot less per month?"

Man, you should have seen the Scrambling of the Sales Assistants to come up with an answer to that question.  Finally, the Most Senior Salesman finds a coverage map and shows me that in the Rockies and Far West, the coverage isn't so good.  But I've been out that way just once in the last 25 years, so why should I care?  And if I don't like the Go Phone, hell, it's not like I have a contract with those guys.

No cable or intertubes at home.  Makes for really quiet evenings.  It's kind of nice, actually.

"Progress", My Ass!

I must have spent over an hour in an on-line chat window with the dude from the local cable company.  Seems that they really want people to do this shit online and they heavily discourage (as in "it costs you more") signing up by finding the local office.

The local cable bastards offer phone service.  But the phone has to have a USB port.  And if your phones don't, because Western Electric wasn't building them in in the 1950s and 1970s, yer shit outta luck.

Some times I miss Ma Bell.

What is ICE and the DBP Doing?

Does anybody have an idea why the Customs goons plan on using 90 million rounds of .40 ammo per year?  That's what they seem to be buying:  450 million rounds on a five year contract.

ICE has 20,500 employees.  Not all of them are gun-toters, figure that maybe half of them are sworn cops, so ten thousand guys are going to each shoot  45,000 rounds a year?  That's just under a thousand a week, which might be understandable if they were all professional competitors in pistol shooting.  And why are they then not using somewhat cheaper range ammo for target practice, rather than higher-cost hollowpoints?

Anyway, look at what DBP's Office of Homeland Security Investigations does:  They supposedly investigate matters that threaten national security, including art theft, copyright violations, illegal parking, and child pornography.* If you know of a rational explanation of how any of those things have a bearing on the national security of the United States, I'd very much like to know.

Note that one of the areas that HSI claims as being in their wheelhouse is "human rights violations".  Oh, I really trust them to do that, since they are obviously doing a pretty good Helen Keller imitation in that they have closed their eyes and ears to the human rights violations done in our name.   When HSI drags George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, Jay Bybee, David Addington and John Yoo away in handcuffs, drop me a line.  I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

This comment is spot on, by the way.
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* I added one.  See if you can find it.

Light Blogging Ahead

Even if I were totally in love with the new Blogger interface (which I am not), I will have very spotty Internet access for the next several days.  Expect few, if any posts from me.  Please surf the blogrolls. 

If you want a series that'll make you think, go to the Bayou Renaissance Man and read his series on xenophobia as it relates to the War on Terror.

I'll be back when I can.

Memo to Wal-Mart: Tell Your Top Executives to Get Ready for Prison

The Sunday NY Times ran a seriously long story about how Wal-Mart got to be the largest retailer in Mexico by the old-fashioned way:  Bribing the shit out of everyone.  Of note is the point when some people at Wal-Mart's HQ became uncomfortable with things, the brass asked a Wal-Mart lawyer to investigate the allegations.

The lawyer was the same asshole who authorized paying the bribes.  Which is kind of like asking Capt. Renault to investigate gambling in Casablanca.



Don't worry, though. Wal-Mart will find some lower-level flunkies to take the Federal heat under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Those fall guys will go to jail and Wal-Mart will, out of the goodness of their hearts, ensure that their families will not suffer.  And when they get out of stir, Wal-Mart will find good jobs for them.

Which is the same way that the Mafia used to do it.

Dear Google: Why You Guys Now Suck.

I am writing this not out of a desire to take up my rhetorical bludgeon and beat the crap out of Google, but because I mostly like Google.

I really do.  I well remember the days when the leading search engines were Ala Vista and Yahoo.  A search would yield two pages of paid advertising, which you had to scroll down through before you could see your desired search results.  That was a real pain in the ass.  The results pages also had a lot of advertising graphics.  Because most people back then had had dial-up service through Assholes America on Line[1] and other dialup services, it took forever for the search results to load. 

Then came Google.  Its clean interface and relative lack of advertising were astonishing and users (including your humble scribe) began using Google.   Google grew and began offering (and buying up) other services.

The grownups at Google[2] have not messed with the search engine interface.  The search engine is Google's money tree.  Those early engineers, the guys who now have their own G650s or BBJs, would probably immediately fire[3] any one of the Google kiddies who mucked around with the search engine interface.

But the kids have to have their fun.  So Google lets them play around with the other, lesser, Goggle products.  That is why Google has, in this year, changed the interface for both Gmail[4] and Blogger.  Not because the changed interfaces are any better.  Not because the users were unhappy with what they had.  Google changed it because they can.

It is no different than the model changes that Detroit used to introduce every year.  Bigger tail fins!  More chrome!  New shades of color![5] It was change for the sake of change. And it was both wasteful and stupid.

A very long time ago, when I was but a butter-bar[6] in the Navy, a very senior officer came for lunch and talked to the young officers.  His comment about work was this:  "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong."  It's not like I make any real money doing this.  Blogging is sort of a hobby.  Google's changes to the blogger interface have made this less fun.

So I'm going to mull over where else I can take this blog.  But in the meantime, expect to see fewer of the "wow, I ought to put up a short post about that" sort of blog entries.  
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[1] There was a time when everybody in the freaking country would get junkmail from AOL with a disk containing the latest version of AOL, first 3.5" floppies, then CDs.  The CDs made good coasters.

[2] The few that apparently exist.

[3] Or simply have them killed. 

[4] I'm switching, slowly, away from Gmail as well.  Nice going, guys.

[5] And pretty much the same crappy frame, engine and drive train.

[6] Ensign.