The first fell under the headline, "Canadian leader to claim rights for Arctic," about how the Prime Minister says the Northwest Passage should fall under Canadian ownership. Here's the paragraph that made me put down my coffee:
"Canada claimed the passage in 1973, but competition to control the Arctic has intensified with global warming. Shrinking polar ice has raised the possibility of new shipping lanes and development of what one U.S. study suggested could be as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas."
Absolutely brilliant. Some great cyclical thinking going on there.
The next article was in the same vein of stupidity, but reduced down to one man's reach. Said man sold his inland home and bought a nice beachfront house in the Oregon Dunes. The trouble was, the dunes blocked his view of the ocean, and he wanted an ocean view. So he hired a bulldozer to flatten the dune in front of his house, moving about 200 dump trucks worth of sand, thereby giving himself a nice ocean view. Needless to say, the neighbors were not happy to see an entire dune gone from the Oregon Dunes, nor was the state, which technically owned that dune. As of yet there is no clear way how to punish the man because it's up to the county to dole out the fine, but the law is set up so that only the landowner (the state) can be fined, and of course the state did absolutely nothing wrong, so the issue is stuck in a perpetual loophole.
I don't know. I'm going to go out on a limb and say if you don't want a view of sand dunes, you probably shouldn't buy a house in the sand dunes.
I was sent a link to this last one by e-mail, and it baffled me so much I thought I should pass it on. It isn't necessarily stupid, per say, but it probably grants the appearance of stupidity to anyone who tries to navigate it. It is a Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England.
Sort of makes the killer roundabout in Pittsfield look like a game of hopscotch, don't it? The site also provides a handy chart of navigation, plus a video of what it looks like to drive through its clutches.
Me? I'm definitely sticking to the red dotty line. A-yup.
2 comments:
I saw this recently too! I know this looks scary at first, but as a convert of the roundabout, once you get the hang of these, they are actually quite brilliant! This allows for the continual movement of traffic (no stops...no waiting at lights...same safety record) with the same type of principles you use in a four-way stop: Right side has right of way, someone in the roundabout has right of way. The Swindon Roundabout actually diverts enough traffic to make a multi-lane roundabout of this size actually safer! Hard to explain... but true. Like anything, it is what you are taught and practice. I live in a place with only roundabouts (no four way stops). The people here have the same confusion when I try to explain how to use a four-way stop signed intersection.
I still have nightmares about that Roundabout in Pittsfield. I consider myself an ok driver, but every time I went in that roundabout, I thought I was going to die!
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