Things I Like

This Sucker’s Electrical

Electric Delorean

Electric Delorean

That’s right. DeLorean Motor Company announced an all-new, all-electric DeLorean. It debuted last week, and the want it in production by 2013.

I did the math so you don’t have to. Given typical electrical efficiences of present-day electric cars, 1.21 gigawatt (hours) would power a car for about 7.5 million miles.

Lightning-powered cars. Tell your friends.

(Bonus question: how large would the flux capacitor have to be to power a car at 12 volts for a 30 mile round trip?)

Payment for Services Rendered

When an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 exploded, astronauts had to depend mainly on the Lunar Module systems, designed only for landing on the moon, to carry them safely through space.

According to Futility Closet, when the crew had returned safely to Earth, Lunar Module manufacturer Grumman sent a bill for services rendered to Command Module manufacturer North American Rockwell.

Inspection:                      $     20.00

Towing Charge @ $1.00/mile        300,000.00

Loss of altitude vehicle           24,100.00
 $20/day plus .08¢ per mile

Battery charge                          5.00

Air conditioning @ $5.00/day           25.00

Room and board @ $40.00 each          600.00
 per day

I haven’t been able to find any confirmation this actually happened, but it’s the sort of story that’s so fun I’m choosing to believe it’s true anyway.

Special Letters Unit

Okay, one more. These are just way too awesome. Here’s Law and Order: Special Letters Unit

“In the alphabet system there are 26 letters. The detectives who investigate these ABCs are members of an elite squad called the Special Letters Unit. These are their stories. [chung chung]”

Meal or No Meal

Sesame Street should get medals for this stuff. I hereby delightedly present: Meal or No Meal with Howie Eatswell.

I honestly can’t decide if my favorite part is the muppet’s earrings or the fact that he keeps taking calls from “The Baker”.

The Market Rate for Candy

Halloween has always been a great testament to the flexibility of our capitalist economy.

A Halloween Superstore took over a massive (previously abandoned) retail space at our town’s shopping mall this year — an anchor location that might once have been a Sears or a JCPenney. They converted half the space into an enormous stock room and the other half into display areas for packaged costumes, masks, wigs, makeup, accessories (like “Toto in a Basket” to accompany the quintessential Dorothy costume), and elaborate holiday decorations (like bloodied hands you can place strategically under your garage door to frighten unsuspecting children).

Of course, at dawn on November 1st, the entire operation became a liability. The remaining inventory was immediately reduced to 50% its original prices and sold off to people planning for next year. The store closed a couple days later.

The extra candy stockpiled at grocery stores across the country was also reduced to clearance prices on November 1st, kitschy candy buckets in the shapes of pumpkins and severed heads were thrown away to linger forever in landfills, and trick-or-treaters everywhere stuffed this year’s costumes back into dressers and closets to be forgotten until next year.

It’s capitalism at its finest. An industry emerges overnight and disappears by the next morning, all for the sake of profiting from a few hours of children’s entertainment.

But this doesn’t compare in brilliance to the economic transaction a friend of ours offers her children after every Halloween: “I’ll buy as much candy as you’re willing to sell for 5¢ apiece. Then you can use the money to go buy a toy you can keep forever, instead of candy that will be gone after you eat it.”

The kids get toys to play with and eat less sugar, while the parents get to devour Halloween treats without the guilt of taking candy from their babies.

JetBlue

This weekend was my first “real” JetBlue experience, discounting a quick hop from New York to Boston last year.  It’s not bad!  Let’s analyze some particulars.

First, in-flight DirecTV is a fantastic invention.  I did enjoy that the Travel channel remained “unavailable” for the whole flight (while everything else worked perfectly), as if to say, “You’re already on an airplane at 37,000 feet.  Just how much more travel would you like to be experiencing at this particular moment?”

I did not enjoy, however, the mandatory, unavoidable advertisement they play at takeoff describing how awesome DirecTV is.  If, hypothetically, the plane had just been sitting on the tarmac at JFK for 45 minutes, with one of its passengers happily watching Mythbusters, that passenger would be annoyed to have the ad kick in at the precise moment the Mythbusters were about to drop a car from a helicopter 4,000 feet in the air while racing another car at top speed across the desert toward the drop site.  In fact, that would be phenomenally terrible timing.

Second, although JetBlue does not include at-seat power ports for those of us with laptops and iPods, I appreciate that they do have a standard 110 volt AC outlet in the lavatory, for passengers who need to curl their hair or shave in preparation for landing (I imagine).

Finally, they seem to place particular emphasis on crew friendliness, based on the questions in their customer satisfaction survey.  One asks (I paraphrase), ‘Was the pilot professional and humorous?’  Oddly, yes!

Well, folks, some of you may have noticed that the sun has moved over to the other side of the plane, and that’s never a good sign.

Then, after we experienced the third largest jolt I’ve ever felt on an airplane:

Uhh, sorry about that bump, folks; that was just a little wake turbulence from another aircraft passing in front of us.  It’s pretty common around JFK; nothing to worry about.

The woman in front of me looked pretty worried anyway.  And if anyone’s keeping score, we still got the mandatory Airline Pilot Weather Report.

In the end, they did well enough to get me back on a few flights with their experimental All You Can Jet pass.

Drum Solo

I have a confession: I hate drum solos.  Sure, they start out exciting and cool, with lots of exciting rhythms building on each other.  Invariably, though, the drummer gets either tired or just confused and starts banging things at random, so I tune out and start wishing someone would start playing other instruments again.

So when Eddie from Ohio (Eddie Hartness) launched into a drum solo last night, I was skeptical.  I’m pleased to say I not only enjoyed this solo, but indeed liked it so much I’ve now set out to start listening to more of Mr. From Ohio’s solos on purpose.

Drummers everywhere, take a note: this is how it should be done!