It’s an ADD, ADD world

One nagging hangover from Dub’s S.O.T.U. briefing: He mentioned Darfur more times than New Orleans. I mean, how dim are these bulbs in the White House? It’s a speech about the State of the Union, right? OK, so 16 months ago, one of those tsunamis came on in and crushed a large swath of the Gulf Coast, including our greatest drinkin’-eatin’-partyin’ city. Kind of a big deal. Biggest disaster in American history. The place is still positively reeling from the blow and probably wouldn’t have minded being at least mentioned by King Dingus the Brushclearer. Mission Step on Own Johnson (again): Accomplished.

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There’s one semi-cool thing about this Sunday’s national football seizure that’s probably been overlooked by the TV talking heads. This is only the second time that the Super Blort has pitted two teams from the old days of the NFL—as in pre-1960, before the AFL. With the Colts versus the Bears, you’ve got two truly old-school teams who were both playing in the ’50s, when there were only 12 clubs in the NFL. This has happened only one other time—in 1980, when the Steelers beat the Rams. This “old-school convergence” can only happen when the Colts, Browns or Steelers win the AFC championship, since they were the three NFL teams playing back in the ’50s who moved over to the AFC after the merger of 1970.

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Our own Republican dimbulb, Governor Gibbons, noted in his State of the State speech that Nevada’s biggest opportunity to cash in on an alternative fuel lies in the exploitation of our geothermal resources. While I certainly applaud wise and efficient moves in that area, I have to point out that Nevada has about 793 places that would make for utterly perfect and completely insane solar farms that would make geothermal output look like the weak sister it truly is. Deserted valleys that, once impaneled by the thousands, would positively spew electricity. If we were Germany or France, the entire state would already be 50 percent powered by these solar farms. At least.

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When President Weedwhack speaks of “clean, safe nucular power,” he still, conveniently enough, forgets this one nagging little detail about storing that poison excrement coming out of the nuclear colon. A new study from Cambridge University just showed that casks made of zircon ain’t gonna hack it. The hope was that zircon would give a good fight and hold tough under plutonium’s relentless barrage of radioactivity. Data shows, however, that zircon will begin to break down in as little as 200 measly years and fail totally within 1,500 years. Not real good when you consider that plutonium will kick a cask’s ass for approximately 240,000 years.