THIRTY PACKS OF SMOKES, 200 CUPS OF TIM HORTON’S COFFEE OR... How are you planning to spend your 300 bucks in Alberta oil profit? Most of our friends answer with a variation of this: on gasoline/heating bills. If they are representative, it means most of this money will go back to the energy companies. Hmmm.....
BEIJING’s DESIREAccording to Investors Business Daily, the Americans aren’t the only ones eying our tar sands with lust and envy. China is also angling for access and a bigger role in overall oil and gas development in Alberta. But China, where mouthy bloggers still get thrown into jail and the parents of executed prisoners are often required to pay for the bullets used to kill them, isn’t satisfied with efforts to procure more fossil fuels. The Beijing government is also investing heavily in nuclear power and clean, environmentally sound energy sources such as solar and wind power with an eye not just to meeting China’s growing energy needs, but to marketing alternative energy technology to the rest of the world.
THE MILE HIGH CLUB IS FOR WIMPSCanada’s expertise in oil, gas and mineral exploration should assure it a prominent place in the lunar base that NASA announced last week. As the Globe and Mail points out, the stunning engineering of the Canadarm will also give us an upper hand on similar moon-based projects. Meanwhile, there are already archtecture schools teaching lunar architecture, and Hans-Jurgen Rombaut of the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture in the Netherlands has designed a lunar hotel projected to open around 2050. Spaceref.ca says, the hotel ”will provide tourists space to indulge in ‘low-gravity games’ such as indoor mountaineering... and ‘flying’ using special suits with bat-like wings.”
You might one day be able to honeymoon ON the moon, but only in artificial gravity conditions. French scientific writer Pierre Kohler, who has devoted much time and brain power to this question, says sex would be possible but very difficult in low-gravity or weightless conditions. Paraphanalia like elastic belts, velcro straps and two-body sleeping bags would be needed to keep you and your partner from floating away from each other. And not all positions are meant for zero-gravity. "The classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible," Kohler says.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”
H. L. Mencken
