There’s a room at Hanford that no one has entered since 1976. They went in today. The AP story about it is excerpted below. Hanford is the worst place in the U.S., a gigantic nuclear environmental disaster. It was our plutonium factory for many, many years. An acquaintance of mine worked there a long time ago, and a long time after that she turned bright yellow and spent a couple of years in bed with an unknown liver disease. Then she got better. Who knows why? When I drove through Washington state I passed Hanford’s fence, which is some distance from where the real wasteland starts. The idea of “cleaning up” Hanford is humorous.

Let’s salute Harold McCluskey for making it to 75, though. Tough bastard he must have been.

Workers in protective gear Thursday entered a long-sealed room at the Hanford nuclear reservation where the complex’s worst contamination accident occurred nearly 29 years ago.

The August 1976 explosion contaminated several workers and resulted in one man being dubbed the Atomic Man. Radioactivity levels in the room were so high that Hanford workers only briefly entered a few times after the blast, and the room was sealed in 1989.

Thursday’s entry began the process of evaluating the room’s hazards and marked the next step in cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

[…]

The explosion blew out the quarter-inch-thick lead glass shielding workers, showering Harold McCluskey, a 64-year-old chemical operator, with nitric acid and radioactive shards of glass.

Within minutes, McCluskey inhaled the largest dose of americium-241 ever recorded, about 500 times the occupational standards for the element. Doctors isolated him for five months and injected an experimental drug to flush the isotope from his system. By 1977, his radiation count had fallen by about 80 percent.

When McCluskey returned home, friends avoided him and church members shunned him until his minister told people it was safe to sit with him, according to newspaper accounts. He died of natural causes in 1987 at age 75.

It’s hard to say anything about this other than what the fuck. This kind of thing is why no one pays any attention to the legislature, the state is run by manipulation of plebiscites, and we have a shitty Governator. Of course the editorialist makes this into a Democratic party issue, but whatever with that. The entire legislature consists of drunk clowns.

Assembly sticks nose into textbooks

Mercury News editorial

Maybe Democrats in the state Assembly should just go ahead and write textbooks for California’s students. They’re so confident they know what constitutes a good one.

For instance, who knew that making a textbook longer than 200 pages was such a bad idea that there needs to be a law against it?

Well, 42 Assembly Democrats knew. On Thursday they approved AB 756, a bill by Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, that says: Neither the State Board of Education nor a local school district “may adopt instructional materials that exceed 200 pages in length.”

what

http://www.trampjuice.tk/

This is your PORTAL! Found this during a discussion with zebulon_y of the worst beers there. They link to several other sites that celebrate the joys of “Super Lager”, the .uk equivalent of the .us “Malt Liquor” disaster.

Except these people have way less excuse for drinking this shit.

This all started earlier when Warren Ellis made fun of my first teen drunk, which was André “Champagne” chased with Moosehead.

Jack White got married in some bullshit culture appropriation world music eco-tourist pseudo native wedding where three rivers meet in the mostest sacredest bestest part of the Amazon jungle by a medicine man, or some such shit.

You jumped the shark, Jack. You’re Sting now.

The White Stripes are the Spinal Tap of indie music.

I know these things are dangerous, but..

http://www.pwcwatch.org/Accident%20Links.htm rectal/vaginal lacerations????

edit:

scromp: having fallen off a few pwcs i am not surprised at the rectal issues there

I love the dry, restrained prose of safety experts. They can’t just say “The damn things are too small, everyone’s an idiot, and they go fast. And stop fucking drinking!” From the California state boating safety report:

Representative Accidents

•  Two PWC operators were riding together, on a parallel course.  They were trying to converse and maneuvered closer to each other, but did so unsuccessfully and sideswiped each other.  A passenger aboard one vessel sustained a broken leg as a result.

•  A PWC operator approached a ski boat in a crossing situation and altered his course in order to cross behind that vessel.  He failed to see that the ski boat was towing a tube and struck it.  The tuber sustained a severe head injury and a broken elbow.

•  An operator was traveling too fast considering her proximity to the shoreline.  She attempted to avoid the wake of another vessel and quickly changed course, grounding the vessel.  She sustained a broken elbow and the vessel sustained major damage.

•  A PWC operator was traveling too fast in a 5 MPH zone. He shut off the engine as he approached shore and then lost steering capability and struck a beached vessel.  A person aboard the beached vessel sustained facial and internal injuries.

•  The PWC operator executed a donut at a high rate of speed, causing his passenger to lose his grip, fall overboard, and dislocate his shoulder.

Additional Safety Concerns

•  Many PWC operators do not realize that when they let off the throttle, they lose steering capability.  Numerous accidents have resulted from this lack of knowledge.

•  PWC sometimes present a danger to their riders because of the craft’s lack of visibility when it capsizes.  Riders who are attempting to remount their PWC are often not visible to other watercraft, and are liable to be struck by other vessels.

•  Although rare, lanyards sometimes present difficulties for operators.  In one case, the operator fell overboard and was injured, rendering him unable to swim back to the craft.  Since the lanyard was on his wrist, the passenger was unable to maneuver the craft to retrieve him.  In other cases, lanyards became detached and could not be reattached quickly enough to avoid grounding or colliding with another vessel.  These situations are rare, but noteworthy.

Comic Book Guy gets a burger.

via cruel.com

Most of you are white North American or European suburban or urban people in the 14-30 age range. Most of you who are not in this group are participants in the dominant monoculture and economic ruling class this group represents, which is why you’re using the Internet in the first place. The following is a list of things which you are not:

1. Anime characters
2. Rastafarians
3. Hip-hop musicians
4. Gang members
5. The suffering masses
6. Twelve-year-old Japanese girls (related to but distinct from #1)
7. Beatniks

Please make a note of these things that you are not, and keep them in mind when posting prose on the Internet.

Otherwise, I’ll have to kill you real hard, right in the head.

Those of you who actually are beatniks, little Japanese girls, etc.: please carry on, sorry I had to say anything.

When you host images on your own website and read your logs, one of the things you see is which friends group you’re in. This is usually pretty basic, like “locals” or “people” or “not_from_work”. As I think I mentioned once long ago, they can also be funny like “former_fucktoys” or “dumbfux” etc. I am on kateoninetails list called “not legal” although I am over 18, because she is in law school.

There’s been a few funny ones over the years but I am happy to say now that I have just found out I am on gordonzola‘s list called “white guys”!

Gang of Four put some re-recordings and remixes of old songs on their U.S. website, and they’re pretty good. They put them up with a flash player than streams them, however, which is as the kids say “weaksauce”. Communist rock band attempts to keep fans from downloading MP3s: hilarity ensues.

Here they are, in more reasonable mp3 form. Right-click and save, enjoy. If you want to give them to other people, please mirror them.

To Hell With Poverty (2005)

We All Want the Monster (mix)

What We All Want (mix 8)

These expire in a few days, or sooner if they get abused.

GO 49ers!

Another show stopper: “49ers love being in community. Very patriotic . . . support president and his George Bush erection.”

“Erection?” Reynolds asks.

“Yes,” the Chinese man responds. “It say, ‘You like Bush — then you like his erection.’

“My name is Suck Hung,” the Chinese man says as he’s leaving. “My brother’s name is Suck Young — my whole family suck.”

Worst PR director ever.