- The link is so natural and obvious, it’s amazing no one thought of it before now. When someone says “Florida,” the automatic connotation in the mind of anyone with an IQ over 17 has to be “South Korea.” Thus, it is a no-brainer that from here on out, any Floridian who is age 18 or older, possesses a driver license and lives in South Korea can now exchange his/her driver license for a South Korean non-commercial driver license without taking the written or skills tests. The arrangement will work the other way as well, allowing any South Korean living in Florida and who meets the same criteria to get their Florida permit. Director of Motorist Services Sandra Lambert and the National Police Agency of the Republic of Korea Consul General He Beom Kim made it official by signing a reciprocal agreement Monday at Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles headquarters in Tallahassee. "The agreement streamlines the exchange process for valid South Korean license holders residing in Florida while valid Florida license holders residing in the Republic of Korea enjoy the same benefit," Kim said. “The agreement is another symbol of our strong relationship with the state of Florida and will encourage South Korean visitors to come to Florida.” Apparently the idea came from South Korea, although it was such an obvious choice that it clearly could have come from either party. "When the representatives of the Republic of Korea approached us, we were pleased to work with them," Lambert explained. "Our comprehensive review of the licensing process in the Republic of Korea clearly demonstrated that the South Korean process is consistent with standards in place in Florida. A written and skills test for a South Korean citizen with a valid Korean license would be redundant as it would be for Floridians living in South Korea." Redundant indeed, Sandy. South Korea and Florida are so similar, it’s eerie. Next stop: a similar agreement between Montana and Nepal…………
- Give the NCAA credit. It’s still an incredibly hypocritical organization built entirely for its own self-serving interests instead of looking out for the student-athletes it purports to be all about, but the organization does not how to throw an occasional bone to those who argue it needs to do more to share the wealth with the athletes who bring in its treasure trove of plunder. Its newest cheap ploy is NCAA President Mark Emmert saying he supports a proposal to allow conferences to increase grants to student-athletes by $2,000, "to more closely approach" the full cost of attending college in addition to the athletic scholarships athletes receive for tuition, fees, room, board and books. Emmert informed the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics on Monday that he expects the proposal to be finalized this week, after which he will ask the NCAA Division I Board of Directors to support it. In explaining his no-explanation-needed support of the proposal, Emmert wisely pointed out that student-athletes have limited opportunities to work outside the classroom and playing fields because of their time commitment to their sport. To offset this, he intends to ask the board to allow colleges and universities to provide multiyear grants, instead of year-to-year scholarships. "This week, I'll be asking the board to support a proposal to allow conferences -- not mandate anyone, but allow conferences, not individual institutions -- to increase the value of an athletic grant in aid to more closely approach the full cost of attendance," Emmert said. "We are going to create a model that would allow -- probably ... up to $2,000 in addition to" tuition, fees, room and board, books and supplies. Wow, big ups on that one. With the hundreds of millions of dollars the NCAA rakes in on an annual basis off the efforts of these student-athletes, chipping them off an extra $2,000 is verrrrrry big of the NCAA………..
- Water: It’s everywhere (except falling from the sky in Texas) and yet no one asks where it came from. Not in the “Where does rain come from?” line of thought, but more to the point of asking where the water on Earth came from in the first place. Even researchers have been unable to answer the question fully or to explain how an Earth they believe was far too hot to hold water or water vapor suddenly had oceans appear. A European research team believes it found something that could help answer that question, reporting the discovery of a very cold reservoir of water vapor in space that could explain where the water came from. Their find is located at the outer reaches of a dusty disk surrounding a star 175 light years away. In their current state, the star and disk are in the early stages of forming planets, much as Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago - according to science, anyhow. From the discovery, the researchers concluded that water was delivered to Earth via comets and asteroids known to originate in these cold but water-filled zones, which were assumed to also be present when our solar system was forming. “Our observations of this cold vapor indicates enough water exists in the disk to fill thousands of Earth oceans,” said astronomer Michiel Hogerheijde of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. Hogerheijde, the lead researcher for the team, laid out exactly how the research fits with existing knowledge of water’s presence on Earth. “Scientists have long suspected there were these reservoirs of cold water vapor hiding in the outer regions of planet-forming disks, but until now we’ve only found signs of water vapor in hot regions closer to the suns,” Hogerheijde said. “Since the comets and cold asteroids are formed in the outer reaches, this was a problem for the theory that comets delivered the water to Earth. But now we have the cold reservoir in the region where comets are formed, and so the theory gets considerably stronger.” From there, he and his team concluded that t water has also been delivered to some of the billions of exoplanets known to exist beyond our solar system, meaning there are likely to be many “ocean worlds” throughout the galaxies. Hogerheijde also claimed the star his team examined, TW Hydrae, is the closest planet-forming star yet identified. Water’s existence there was first detected by the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency satellite that looks for infrared light in the galaxy using the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared, or HIFI. Using more powerful instrumentation, researchers were able to identify the water vapor, which Hogerheijde called a small portion of the “ice reservoir” existing in the region. To read more about this riveting find, peruse your copy of the Oct. 21 issue of the journal Science and learn your brains out………..
- Hearing Jennifer Lopez’s music - or her movies for that matter - associated with uncontrollable weeping is not a surprise. Being subjected to the tone-deaf, lyrically stunted, overly synthesized garbage Lopez tries to pass off as music is enough to bring anyone to tears, as is having to sit through one of her insipid romantic comedies. However, it wasn’t a tortured member of the audience who ended up crying during a Lopez concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in Montville, Conn., on Saturday. She performed one of her terrible new songs (which sounds a lot like her crappy older songs), “One Love,” and the song brought her to tears. Given that she knew the song was coming and how awful it would be, seeing the “singer” broken up by the tune was surprising. Why did it happen? “After I sang the song, I’m standing there, and I realized that I did bare a little bit of my thoughts in this song. I also acted it out, kind of, for the audience. The way they received it was very touching,” Lopez stated. “I think that they felt what I felt, which is, you know, I’m just a girl, just like everybody else, trying to find my way.” Great, but why don’t you find your way off the stage, as far as possible from a recording studio and nowhere near a sound stage or TV camera? If that sounds a bit harsh for a woman who just split from her husband in July, so be it. The truth can be harsh, unforgiving and yet, it will set you free……or in this case, it will set the world free from having to suffer through any more of Lopez’s crap-tacular songs, albums or movies. Making the world a better place is something you must do one small step at a time…………
- What is the single biggest fear most travelers have when embarking on a trip in which flying plays a major part? One word: crashing. For all but the heartiest and most mellow of travelers, the idea that their plane might succumb to the laws of physics and fall from the sky terrifies them like nothing else. Any small turbulence or disturbance that suggests a crash could be looming is met with nervous looks, tightly gripped arm rests and racing minds by most inside a plane. How much worse would your in-flight gripping be if the crew of the plane was busy duct-taping around the edge of the windscreen on the pilot's window before your plane took off? That reassuring scene greeted the 200 passengers aboard a Ryanair plane scheduled to fly from Stansted airport in England to Riga, Latvia. Prior to the flight, the crew reportedly put tape around the windscreen and passengers, some of whom could see what was going on, were told nothing. “We were kept in the dark, and were terrified. I could see guys taping in the windscreen with what looked like duct tape or gaffer tape," passenger Anthony Neal said. In spite of the makeshift, home remedy-style repair job, the flight took off. Twenty minutes into the flight, the pilot decided it was unsafe to continue and turned back. "We were in the sky, then the pilot said due to damage on the windscreen, we were going to turn back," Neal recalled. Ryanair, a low-cost Irish airline known for its no-frills approach, insisted it followed normal procedures and that passengers and crew were never in any danger. Airline officials reportedly said the tape was being used as an extra precaution to secure a new window seal. Even if that’s the case, maybe you want to slap that tape on there a few hours before the flight just to be sure it’s going to stick and that way passengers don’t get the impression their plane is being held together with tape, gum and glue. Oh, and if the tape was merely a backup for the new window seal, then why did the pilot yank the proverbial rip cord on the flight and turn back…………
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