Unless Road Salt Becomes a Precious Commodity, Cincinnati Just Wasted a Bunch of Money
Anyone who has shopped at Costco knows what it feels like next day, when reality rears its ugly head and it becomes clear that you probably won’t make it through the cement-bag-sized bag of pancake mix before your life ends. Buying too much stuff is really easy to do, especially when a government agency is involved. Councilman Charlie Winburn is righteously pissed off because there is a pile of at least 2,000 tons of road salt sitting partially uncovered on Beekman Street. According to WLWT, he’s even dubbed this outrage “Saltgate.” Winburn said the salt is supposed to be stored in one of Cincinnati’s four domes and that it is probably an environmental hazard to store tons of corrosive materials on the ground. To make matters worse, Public Services failed to mention the Beekman Street pile when Winburn inquired about how much salt it had and where it was being stored. Saltgate has cost the city more than $150,000, but no one has gotten around to trying to sell any of it to other towns to try to recoup some of the money currently burning a hole straight to the earth’s core. City Council has proposed scattering the tons of extra salt evenly inside the abandoned subway tunnels and the stalled path of the streetcar to better link our city government’s fuck ups from the past and present.
School Punishes Boy for Use of Imaginary Ranged Weapon
Americans have been desensitized by years of whining in the news about how bad of a job our nation’s schools are doing at educating children. Accepting that the next generation won’t be able to add, divide or figure much of anything out without using a computer is fine and natural. What flies in the face of our society’s norms and value system is the troubling trend involving administrators punishing students for playing schoolyard games that have been popular since the olden days. A fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., recently received a one-day suspension and threat of expulsion for running afoul of the school’s weapons policy. The student used his hands to mimic the bow strings on a pretend “bow” and shot imaginary arrows at a classmate who unlawfully used the powers of imagination to transform a folder into a gun. The teacher informed the child’s parent and the school’s principal of the use of “firearms” during the horseplay, which resulted in disciplinary action. While the students serve their suspension, school administrators are said to be considering charging the students with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon for their roles in a previous incident involving a rock, paper and scissors.
4Chan Helps Gamers Turn Xbox Ones into Xbox Nones
4Chan is an online community famous for brilliant pranks like rigging Mountain Dew’s campaign to name a new flavor so that “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” and “Gushing Granny” ended up being the top two vote-getters and spreading the rumor that iPhones updated to iOS 7 would become waterproof. Despite 4Chan’s track record, some people remained gullible enough to follow instructions recently provided on the site that render expensive next-generation video game consoles useless. The message falsely claims that steps can be taken to make the new Xbox One able to play games from its predecessor — the Xbox 360. Those who followed the steps to make their new systems backward-compatible ended up “bricking,” or rendering inoperable, their pricy new purchase. In response to all those who ruined their $500 consoles, director of programming for Xbox Live network Larry Hryb tweeted, “To be clear there is no way to make your Xbox One backwards compatible and performing steps to attempt this could make your console inoperable.” Hryb also tweeted that Microsoft will give any affected party a new system if he or she can jump over a chair like Bill Gates did during that awkward interview with Connie Chung.
NSA Bugs Gamers in Effort to Keep America Free
Edward Snowden would be a good novelist or story teller because he knows how to order and present information. His release of all the scary things the National Security Agency does has been organized in a way that each new revelation is just a bit more embarrassing and hard to believe than the one before it. By the time he finishes sharing what he knows with the media, it might come out that National Treasure is based on true events or something crazy like that. For now, Americans have to be content to know that the NSA has harvested data from online gaming networks like World of Warcraft. To make sure that terrorists aren’t using the servers to communicate, NSA agents got paid with tax dollars to set up characters and go questing in lands far, far, away. No terrorist plots have been uncovered yet, but intel gathered from the undercover agents’ online chats indicates that all online gamers have had sexual relations with the mothers of all the other gamers.
Mayor Cranley Opens up About Emotions Regarding Carden’s Withdrawal
Newly elected Mayor John Cranley is doing his best to get over his nominee for an important job at City Hall’s decision to not take it. Cincinnati Parks Department Director Willie Carden received the mayor’s nomination to become the next Cincinnati city manager but withdrew from consideration for family reasons. Two of the family reasons that may or may not be involved are Carden’s ethics investigation and the fact that he does not live within Cincinnati (which violates the city charter). Mayor Cranley told The Enquirer that he was “bummed out, disappointed” to learn of Carden’s decision. Cranley also acknowledged that it’s important that he tells Cincinnatians how he feels because his unsettling waxed eyebrows make it extremely hard for others to tell if he is happy, sad or surprised.
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