protecting the earth from asteroids

The thought of an asteroid crashing into the earth and causing the end of humanity ought to be important, and NASA says they could find all the potential offending asteroids except that they don’t have enough money for it.

NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn’t enough money to pay for the task so it won’t get done. … “We know what to do, we just don’t have the money,” said Simon “Pete” Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center.

We’re only talking about the end of the world here…

Granted, they speculate the cost would be about $1 billion to find them all by 2020.  I don’t see what costs so much.  They can use currently-existing equipment, so you just have to pay the astronomers, right?  Apparently the official NASA astronomers are extremely expensive.  Granted, they are highly-trained and experienced, for sure.  But we can’t let a few dollars come in the way of saving the earth!  So I’m proposing a new plan to NASA.  The Buffet o’ Blog staff plus seven (7) carefully selected participants (for a total of 10 people) will handle this project for NASA at a fraction of the cost.  We might be slightly less trained and experienced, but we learn fast, and we know a thing or two about star-gazing and saving the world.

So here’s the “fine print” : Our 10 people will do this full-time for a cost of only $1 million per person per year, using equipment already in place.  That’s $10M per year for 12 years (if we start in 2008), which works out to $120 million.  This is a 88 percent discount from NASA’s price, saving the government $880 million (which is not a small number!).  Yes, we’re willing to do all this work for so much less than the high-priced engineers, in order to protect the earth and save money for the government.

Have your people contact my people, and let’s do this.

zombies, stew, cartoons, work, and nachos

Does the subject line intrigue you?  Are you wondering how I can work all that into a single post?  Well, hang on for the ride into randomness.  🙂

Earlier today I was searching through my e-mail archives for something, and came across this e-mail between Thomas Wayne and Mango-Man from back in 2001 :

Graveyards are peaceful… except when it’s late at night, like around midnight, and you can barely see, and you hear these groaning noises but can’t see anyone, then you feel this hand on your shoulder, and it’s all covered w/hair & warts, and you scream AHHHHH! and run away as fast as you can, dodging open holes reserved for caskets, all the while these people are chasing you, and their clothes are all tattered & torn, and they’re limping but somehow they keep up w/you, and you keep running but you never get to the end of the graveyard, even though it’s not that big…  well, maybe that’s just on TV… oh, wait, the TV’s off… ~ Thomas Wayne

and then there was that time… that you decided you were smarter than that wile e. coyote… & you think you CAN catch that old road runner … so you set a trap so that when he opens the door an anvil falls on his head… but after you spring the trap and catch the roadrunner you realize that its not really the roadrunner after all, but your older brother and he don’t think it’s funny.  in fact he’s pretty ticked off… and is screaming about all the terrible things he’s gonna do to ya… but that’s okay… because he’s tied up in a big ole pot full of water and carrots & tators… i mean, after all… what’s he gonna do??? ~ Mango-Man

Well, that was certainly random…  It sounds like they were working too much and/or had been watching too many cartoons.  Although, is it possible to watch too many cartoons?  That might be debatable.  But I know for a fact that it’s possible to work too much.  My personal “research” has proven that without doubt.  These things must be kept in balance.  I need to work less and watch more cartoons.  Or even better — find a job where my work is to watch cartoons… and eat nachos… and drink unlimited amounts of sweet tea.  If only I could figure out how to get paid for that…

pimped-out toilet sweepstakes

pimped-out toilet
We’ve had a discussion here on how to make the best bathroom, but we figured most of those ideas would never be realized (unless one of us becomes crazy-rich).  Well, Roto-Rooter now has a sweepstakes where you can win the ultimate “pimped out john”.  Yeah, it’s a toilet with almost all the luxuries you could think of.  There’s a 20″ LCD flat-panel TV, an Xbox 360, DVD player, TiVo Series 2 digital video recorder (DVR), cooling fan that you can move, refrigerator, pedal exerciser for your legs, a laptop (on a stand), a magnification mirror, a USB-powered cup cooler/warmer for your beverage, and the toilet paper holder is also an iPod docking station (and the iPod is included).  But wait, that’s not all!  It also comes with a megaphone (which they say is for telling people about the toilet or asking for more TP, but I suspect some people would find other creative uses for it).

By the way, this is for-real.  You can go to this website to enter : pimped-out john sweepstakes.  The sweepstakes is valid until April 2, 2007.  So tell your friends.  Who wouldn’t want this in your house???*

* Wives need not answer that question.  If a married man wins this, he would have to put his foot down and demand it be accepted.  There has never been a cooler toilet in the history of mankind.

BTW, you can enter once a day, to increase your odds of winning.  Although, realistically, you shouldn’t waste your time entering a lot, because I’m gonna win it.  🙂

the best ice cream ever

In one of our staff discussions today, we started talking about ice cream, specifically how adding Oreos to vanilla ice cream makes it so much better.  Our resident randomness expert, Turtle Dundee, suggested making an ice cream called “Awesome ‘n Cream”.  Start with vanilla ice cream and lots of crumbled Oreos, then add chunks of chocolate, cookie dough, graham crackers crumbs, more types of chocolate, etc.  He said it would be “ice cream that ate like a stew”.  I don’t particularly care for that analogy, but his point was that there would be many chunks of toppings — more than you could shake a stick at.  In fact, there would be more toppings than ice cream.

Perhaps Ben & Jerry’s could implement this, since they aren’t afraid to try new things.  Just remember that you heard it here first.  (And we better get some credit for it.)  It should be sold in reinforced buckets, with the slogan of, “This has so many toppings that the standard container couldn’t handle it.”

Another possible slogan could be, “This is the most awesome ice cream ever!”  Yeah, that sounds catchy.  The TV commercials could have the official spokesman say stuff like, “Our competitors are mad because we thought of this first.”