- Sometimes finding the resources to keep your ski resort running means installing a 253-foot wind turbine to provide power for your operations. Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, Massachusetts took that drastic step in 2007, with company president and CEO Brian Fairbank coming up with the concept after years of fighting the cost of making snow. The project was a major undertaking, with the requisite bureaucratic red tape a person encounters any time they try to do anything out of the ordinary on a large scale. The resort had to study everything from Federal Aviation Administration regulations to the structure's effect on airplanes, birds and endangered species. After jumping through all of those hoops, Fairbank and his team had another monumental challenge: hauling 500 tons of parts and equipment up the mountain, via a two-mile-long gravel road. "Once we got everything to the top of mountain, putting it together only took a couple days, but getting it up there was the biggest challenge," Fairbank said. By the fall of 2007, Jiminy Peak had its finished wind turbine and became s the first ski resort in North America to feature such a structure. The turbine even has a name: Zephyr, after the Greek god of the west wind. As I always say, if you pay $4 million for anything, you can name it whether it’s an inanimate object or not. Plus, the turbine is actually pretty badass, sporting blades that measure 123 feet, creating a 386-foot green machine. Maintaining it demands that employees undertake tasks like climbing 276 steps to change a light bulb, but when you consider that Zephyr produce about a third of Jiminy Peak's electric needs, shaving $450,000 a year from the resort's energy bill, it’s worth it - unless oyu ask the whack job environmentalists, who would have you believe that the wind turbines destroy the habitat that many animals live in, especially bats. Scientists claim that the bats’ bodies are affected by a low-pressure system caused when the blades move through the air and that they “sometimes die from hemorrhaging.” In other words, a ski resort does something ostensibly green and extremely beneficial to the environment and still environmentalists whine, good times…….
- I know it’s hard to call any salary paid to a professional athlete a bargain in the current economic climate, but the San Francisco Giants may have just found the biggest bargain (relatively speaking) in all of sports by signing ace left-hander Tim Lincecum to a $650,000, one-year contract. For a guy who is still very young and the defending National League Cy Young Award winner, that is a ridiculously low sum when compared with much bigger names who are raking in $25 million for the season and doing much less to earn that money (looking right at you, A-Fraud Fraud-riguez). Last season, Lincecum went 18-5 with a 2.62 ERA for a team that finished fourth in the NL West at 72-90. He also struck out a major league-leading 265 batters while logging a robust 227 innings, so he’s also a durable player. Getting a guy of his caliber for $650,000 is a coup for the Giants, although if he can replicate his 2008 season and rank third in the major leagues in ERA and winning percentage, and second in the NL in ERA and victories in 2009, the Giants will have to pay significantly more to keep him when he becomes eligible for salary arbitration after the 2009 season. For now, the team and its fans should simply enjoy watching a great pitcher at a cut-rate price and be glad that their team will at least have a chance to win every fifth day and maybe look forward to more than just newcomer Randy Johnson’s 300th career win, as the Unit signed with the Giants in the offseason (for a lot more than Lincecum will make in 2009)……….
- You are quite a human being, Bob Mugabe. In addition to being a brutal, repressive dictator who is steadily running his beloved country right into the ground, you find time to harass your country’s opposition groups, kill those who stand against you, lie about what you’re up to AND throw yourself a lavish 85th birthday party while your country remains gripped by an economic and health crisis. Zimbabwe Bob Robert Mugabe, you are undoubtedly a certified piece of crap. I don’t care that your people postponed the party past your actual birthday on Feb. 21 to raise funds to pay for it, because a) I don’t believe that claim, and b) even if I did, you don’t think that money would be much more beneficial to your citizens than you throwing the country’s bash of the year to honor yourself? Partying down in Chinhoyi with your ZANU-PF pals probably isn’t going to cure what ails Zimbabwe. Nothing about your party helps address the current cholera outbreak, food shortages or the spiraling hyperinflation ravaging the country. Thankfully Prime Minister and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai seems to have the right perspective, turning down an invitation to the party and instead visiting a hospital's closed intensive care unit that he said needed $30,000 to resume operating. Of course, there’s no shortage of people with a disorted perspective to balance things out, people like Mugabe's nephew Patrick Zhuwawo, one of the fund-raisers for the party. “I think it is going to be a great day for the legend and icon whose birthday we are celebrating today here,” Zhuwawo said. “The country might be having problems, but we need to have a day to honor the sacrifices the president has made for this country.” So many things wrong with that comment, but let’s go with the most obvious: you all are the only ones honoring Bob Mugabe. The people he’s slaughtering and oppressing certainly don’t want to celebrate him. Oh, and let me know how slaughtering 100 beasts for the birthday bash benefits the starving people of your country, because I don’t get that either. The hollow gesture of inviting schoolchildren from around the country to attend the party, held at Chinhoyi University, doesn’t do much either because how the frak are those kids supposed to get to Chinhoyi? Walk? Oh, and nice tough with the banner you hung in Chinhoyi that read, "Age ain't nothing but a number." You tell ‘em, Bob. Age cannot stop you from being a brutal, fascist dictator! No man or woman is ever too old to have his opponents, jailed, murdered, run out of the country and ripped off by sham elections! Quite a contrast when you look less than a kilometer down the road from Mugabe’s birthday bash and see a deserted Chinhoyi government hospital, with only few nurses attending to far too many patients. “There are no medicines. These patients have no option but to come here, but there is nothing we can do," said one nurse at the hospital. I know what you can do, anonymous Zimbabwean nurse: go to Bob Mugabe’s party! Screw the patients, either put them in a wheelchair and take them along or just leave them behind and go live it up! Forge that pesky cholera epidemic that broke out in August and which has since hit every corner of the country, killing 3,731 people and infecting nearly 80,000,
it’s time to have some Bob Mugabe birthday cake, pop some party poppers and play “Pin the Tail on the Ruthless Dictator.” Maybe join in a fun game of “Bob for the decapitated heads of slaughtered opposition members” if you want to get in line. Forget the fact that international aid group Doctors Without Borders says the country’s current issues are "clear symptoms of the breakdown in infrastructure resulting from Zimbabwe's political and economic meltdown.” Of course, Movement for Democratic Change leader Tsvangirai is actually trying to save his country, so you could also help him and support his appeal to the international community to help Zimbabwe's crippled economy, saying it would take $5 billion to stabilize the country. Just don’t expect Bob Mugabe to help or even give a damn, because he’s busy throwing balls at the dunk tank and opening his birthday cards…….
- I guess if you piss off enough people with “innovations” to your uber-popular website, offering all 150 million of its users to help you rewrite your terms of use and site governing doctrine is a nice mea culpa. Facebook made a colossal gaffe recently with its steps that appeared to be granting itself permanent rights to users' photos, wall posts and other information, even after a user closed an account. The new terms of service caused a vociferous backlash, including protests galore and the turning of Facebook’s very own site tools back on the site as means of voicing dissent. Now, the users have spoken and Facebook has apparently listened. The site is inviting its 150 million users to help decide how the popular social-networking site will be run. Site managers published the Facebook Principles, a set of 10 values, along with a proposed statement of rights and responsibilities governing privacy, content ownership and other issues. Users now have a chance to comment and vote on the wording of the documents. “As people share more information on services like Facebook, a new relationship is created between Internet companies and the people they serve,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a statement. "The past week reminded us that users feel a real sense of ownership over Facebook itself, not just the information they share.” Yeah Zuck, people are funny that way, they get pissed off when someone tries to rip their property and then pretend that’s not what they were doing. Until the new terms of service are written and put in place, Facebook will continue to operate under its old terms of use policy the site reverted to follow the user uprising. “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, including information about you and the actions you take," reads the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities. Going the opposite direction that the U.S. tax code seems to head each year, the document actually condenses 40 pages of legal jargon into fewer than six pages. As they review this new information, users will also have the chance to participate in virtual "Town Halls" over the next month as Facebook seeks to collect user comments on the proposed new principles and statement of rights and responsibilities. So far, more than 8,600 users have joined a Facebook group to solicit feedback regarding the proposed Facebook Principles, while more than 7,800 had joined a group that was set up to review the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities. All of this virtual debate and hashing out will continue until March 29, when the powers that be will review users' submissions, then republish Facebook’s policies to incorporate feedback. Additionally, all future policy changes would be subject to similar notice and comment periods. Oh, and get your posters and fliers all prepped and ready to go, because in the next few months, Facebook also plans to establish a user council to participate more closely in the development of future policies and practices. In other words, class officer and student council elections have gone virtual, so get your nominations ready. I’m not sure whether to be impressed or horrified that one little section, section 2.3 of the proposed statement of rights and responsibilities for a stupid social networking site, has inspired such response. Sure, the wording, which states that users will grant Facebook license "to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of ... any content you post" until a member deletes the content or closes an account, is disturbing, but how many of the losers who were so outraged by this situation actually give a damn about what’s going on in the world around them, the world that exists beyond their computer screen? Thought so…….
- I always say that rich people are no different than the rest of us, they just have more money. For those of you out there who doubt me, allow me to present yet another piece of compelling evidence: the not-so-curious case of Rihanna and Chris Brown. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, the two of them are back together a mere three weeks after Brown, 19, allegedly battered the “singer” on Feb. 8. Why does this prove how much rich, famous people have in common with the everyman? Simply put, it’s because you see the exact same thing in cases of domestic abuse and violence in people living in trailer parks that you see with these two. Women are physically abused by their husband or boyfriend and yet refuse to end the relationship. They accept the abuse and won't leave their significant other, shrugging off or excusing inexcusable actions. Battered women have a surprisingly difficult time getting out of abusive relationships, which is true whether you have $700 dollars in your bank account or $7,000 in change rattling around under the cushions of your designer couch at your beach home in Malibu. Didn’t take long for the reunion, either; the couple are currently spending time together at one of Sean "Diddy" Combs's homes, on Miami Beach's Star Island. Obviously, the reconciliation is mutual, with both electing to overlook the fact that Brown was booked by LAPD for making criminal threats and pretending that all is well. Of course, the case has not yet been presented to the District Attorney, and at this point you can’t exepct Rihanna to press charges and it wouldn’t be a surprise if this whole mess never made it to trial. So I guess maybe life is different in some ways for rich, famous people, because as one famous former NBA player put it, they don’t send rich people to jail, only poor people…….
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