Oh, you silly royals. Always getting into mischief.

The British press is in a tizzy over Prince William’s choice of transportation to his cousin’s stag party- a Chinook helicopter that costs about $10,000 an hour to keep in the air. From CBC:

The 25-year-old prince took off in a Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter for a three-day party on the Isle of Wight sometime Friday, hours after receiving his wings from his father, Prince Charles.

As part of his 80-minute flight, he also stopped at the Woolwich Army barracks to pick up his brother, Prince Harry.

Media reports said that by flying, William avoided seven hours of driving in rush hour traffic and a ferry wait, allowing him to land at about 4 p.m. local time for a weekend of touring the island’s pubs and clubs.

The Chinook was flown back to its base by an RAF crew.

Awww. He even picked up his brother on the way. What a nice young man.

Predictably, people are a little peeved at what appears to be a gigantic waster of money. For their part, the Royal Air Force insists it was actually a training exercise, designed to replace a ‘flying over water module’ that the Prince missed.

All of this seems a little moot to me. As I understand monarchical systems of government, Prince William technically owns the damn helicopter. So he can damn well take it out and crash it into a mountain if he feels like it. A historical fact: if you put them on your money, they will take  your expensive gadgets on holiday.

Well, Iran’s moron-in-chief launched another dinger today, claiming that the official account of 9/11 is ‘suspicious’ and was used as a pretext to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, he also questioned the bodycount.

True, 9/11 was used as a primary reason for the invasions. But to suggest that the USA did it on purpose, or purposely let it happen, is nuts. There is just no evidence to support it.

But my real problem with Ahmadinejad is that he’s just a liar. And a bad one at that. According to him, the names of those killed in the attacks were never published. That’s demonstrably false. In fact, the complete list is read aloud every September 11th at ground zero. But, like most dangerous ideologues, the truth takes a backseat to his agenda. Disgusting, really.

Well, ninety-six years to the day after the greatest millenial monument to mankind’s hubris- aka the RMS Titanic- went to an ignominious and watery grave, we may be a little closer to figuring out why the ‘unsinkable’ ship proved to be, in fact, spectacularly sinkable.

A few clever sciencey types have analyzed construction records and rivets collected from the wreck. Their conclusion? They totally sucked. Pressures to launch the Titanic, and its two sisters Olympic and Britannic, forced shipbuilders  Harland and Wolff to cheap out on labour and materials. The rivets used in the Titanic’s bow section were made of ‘best’ iron, not superior ‘best best’ iron. Of course, this also raises some disturbing questions about why anyone who uses a ‘best best’ scale had any business building ships.

The inferior rivets explain recent findings on the Titanic wreck itself. Marine archaeologists who examined the wreck expected to find a giant, iceberg-shaped gouge in the bow. Instead, they found six ‘seams’, where the bow plates had popped their rivets and allowed significant quantities of the North Sea to rush in. If the shipbuilders had used ‘best best’ rivets, or the steel rivets used in the centre section of the Titanic, 1,500 people might not have died.

Harland and Wolff is now in full damage control mode:

For its part, Harland and Wolff, after its long silence, now rejects the charge. “There was nothing wrong with the materials,” Joris Minne, a company spokesman, said last week. Mr. Minne noted that one of the sister ships, the Olympic, sailed without incident for 24 years, until retirement.

An interesting argument, although somewhat moot. The Olympic never, say, ran straight into a giant hunk of ice, making detailed comparison difficult.

Nevertheless, the lessons of the Titanic are clear: when taking a transatlantic journey, insist on better bolts. As they say, when it comes to ships, it’s best best or breaststroke.

In 1999, Nicholas White became trapped in an elevator. For 41 hours.

Yes. Forty-one. Hours. 2,460 minutes. Jesus.

And it basically ruined his life. In pursuit of a lawsuit, White stopped coming to work and was fired. And in the end, the owner of the building settled for a tiny fraction of White’s $25 million statement of claim.

Here’s the security camera footage of White’s ordeal, complete with piano soundtrack:

Amazing. You can actually see him going crazy. I’m impressed he made it out of there with some semblance of sanity. I would have gone completely bat-shazbot nuts in the first twenty minutes. Via Gawker.

It started off as a nice little story about drunken men harassing dolphins. But the write-up it got in The Guardian is epic.

After a night of drinking at a house party, two young men in Sandgate, UK went for a swim. Once in the water, they encountered a dolphin. And, being drunk, they decided to play with the dolphin. Local residents, alerted to the aquatic festivities by the sounds of revelry, called  police. The two men were charged with charged with “recklessly disturbing a wild animal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act”. Oh, and the dolphin is a local celebrity. Nobody knows why it’s hanging out in Sandgate, but scientists believe it became separated from its pod and decided to settle down.

That’s pretty weird. But then the story goes straight into Crazytown.

Crazy thing #1: The dolphin is a female, and is well known to be a girl. Yet for some reason, the townsfolk call her ‘Dave’.

Crazy thing #2: This paragraph:

 Jukes denied witness reports that he had grabbed the dolphin’s dorsal fin and tried to climb on to its back. “I didn’t hurt the dolphin in any way. I didn’t think I did anything wrong.”

Crazy thing #3: This paragraph, which puts the previous one to shame:

James Barnett, a vet with nearly 20 years’ experience who has been involved in many marine animal rescues across the country, said that if dolphins become too familiar with humans they could become unpredictable and dangerous and even make sexual advances.

Sexual advances? Kind of casts SeaWorld in a whole new light.

Suffice it to say, I will be watching the outcome of Dolphingate with great interest.

You just keep your fins to yourself, mister. 

You’ve probably heard the news that Vanilla Ice, aka Robert Van Winkle, was arrested yesterday for domestic assault. The temptation is to chuckle and add this to the rolling disaster that is Mr. Van Winkle’s career/life/legacy. But not me. The truth is, I think we’re all a little responsible for the tragedy of taste and talent that is VI. And I think we should each give him a dollar.

Look, it’s our fault. Through a spectacular societal lapse in judgement, we somehow allowed Van Winkle to sell 15 million copies of Ice Ice Baby. This despite the fact that he was the worst rapper in the history of the genre. Just awful. I mean, have you actually listened to any of his music? It’s like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer repeatedly, because it feels so good when you stop.

So, when everyone inexplicably bought this terrible music, it must have convinced VI that he had some talent, or at least some ineffable mass market appeal. Everything he has done since is an attempt to recapture his fleeting popularity, to prove that he is, in fact, a legitimate recording artist. Which he isn’t. And since we all understand this implicitly, Van Winkle’s quest is a neverending experiment in futility and frustration. Hence his drinking, crying on ’The Surreal Life’ and reprehensible treatment of romantic partners.

Who knows? If we had all done the responsible thing and let Ice Ice Baby flop, Van Winkle would have figured out he totally sucked. And then maybe he could have redirected his energies into something he was good at instead of pursuing a ‘music’ career that never was. How does Vanilla Ice Attorney at Law or Vanilla Ice MD sound? Yes, vaguely terrifying. But only because of what we did to him. There’s probably an alternate dimension where Robert Van Winkle is a productive, stable member of society. Maybe when the CERN Large Hadron Collider comes online later this year we’ll find it. But until then, we must continue to contemplate the burnt-out wreckage of Mr. Ice.

And I’m just not comfortable with that. So here’s what I propose. Everyone out there, go find a dollar. Mail it to Vanilla Ice. Maybe write ‘I’m Sorry’ on the envelope. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, you can end the suffering.

Oh, and if you happen to have Van Winkle’s address, leave it in the comments. That would be helpful.

The British National Party, everyone’s favourite band of xenophobic, proto-fascists inbred frogspawn has sunk to an all new low. Despite literally decades of anti-semitism, they are now actively courting Jewish voters by exploiting anti-Islamic sentiments. Ruth Smeeth, of the Community Security Trust, had this to say about the new campaign:

“The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel and at the same time demonises Islam and the Muslim world. They are actively campaigning in Jewish communities, particularly in London, making a lot of their one Jewish councillor, their support of Israel and attacking Muslims. It is a poisonous campaign but it shows a growing electoral sophistication.”

This from a party whose leader (grade-A douchebag Nick Griffin) had this to say about the Holocaust:

“I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter-day witch-hysteria.”

Now, Griffin sings a different tune:

“It stands to reason that adopting an ‘Islamophobic’ position that appeals to large numbers of ordinary people – including un-nudged journalists – is going to produce on average much better media coverage than siding with Iran and banging on about ‘Jewish power’, which is guaranteed to raise hackles of virtually every single journalist in the western world.”

 Bigots, of all stripes, are among the universes most pathetic organisms. But this business demonstrates the BNP are racists of an altogether lower order: they aren’t even principled bigots. They’re opportunistic bigots. If you’re going to adhere to a repugnant worldview, you might as well make it internally consistent. The BNP don’t stand for anything real except ignorance, misdirected anger, complex personality disorders, and a desperate quest for validation. That’s not an ideology. That’s not even a coherent thought.