MiniVan Yo', angels in Australia, a jet pack you can buy, golf to a nuclear bomb, more

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  Swaggerin' in the Wagon

  “Swagger Wagon“: Toyota scores a hit, yo’.

• Can beer and wine help avoid dementia? Well, in fact, yes. Can too much beer and wine hasten dementia? Well, yes, there’s that too. But not enough is bad too. See the video at the link.
• Repeat after me: “I am an Obama Scholar.”
• Cooking is chemistry: A chemist explains what really happens when you cook asparagus and how you can use an apple to ripen an avocado.
• Wanna buy a jet pack? Now you can. Bring your American Express Black card. (Don’t know what an American Express Black card is? It’s real, but see this.) That said, I’m not happy about these new jet packs.Jet packs are cool James Bond-grade stuff, but the price of these new ones disturbs me, and not just because I can’t afford one. At $250K each, these new ones seem to be no different — no better and no cheaper — than the originals a half century ago. I would think that with modern technology and materials it should be possible to build jet packs both better and cheaper than what was being built when Eisenhower was President. Is this the best we can do?
• Angels in Australia: A retired couple in Australia have saved more than 160 lives with nothing more than a cup of tea and a smile.
• “Gee, look what came up in the fish net.”: Taiwanese Navy loses a live torpedo, is offering a reward to anyone who finds it.
• Nice golf course, nuclear bomb included: Before you laugh at Taiwan losing a torpedo, consider another interesting incident: The U.S. Air Force loss of two large nuclear bombs over (actually under) North Carolina in 1961. Few Americans have ever heard about this, and even fewer realize that both bombs were accidentally armed at the time of release, one was found snagged in a tree and within inches of the required ground contact to detonate, while the other is still in the ground near Goldsboro, NC, deep below a swamp that makes the ground so unstable that the bomb cannot be recovered. So it’s still there, under the swamp, within sight of a local golf course.And that’s not the only one: The U.S. has accidentally dropped or lost nuclear bombs on at least eight separate instances. See this listing (excerpted from the Congressional Record of the 102nd Congress) for more info, this list of all types of nuclear accidents, and this compilation of accounts of such events from 1946 to 2004. Now stop whining and quit worrying about it. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?

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