Edmonton councillors have decided to replace 4,500 of the city's 98,000 energy-sucking, high-pressure sodium street lights with new, high-efficiency LED fixtures that should save $100,000 annually in electricity bills and cut down on tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The lights are located in 12 city neighbourhoods and the predicted energy savings in each 'hood amounts to $4,300 per year. We say bravo to going green, but here's a thought about the financials.
Coun. Don Iveson said the old lamps put too much light into the air and "into people's homes," which was a waste of money.
Sure. For the city. Homes located next to street lights actually received the benefit of free light during the endless darkness of an Edmonton winter.
The city tested five kinds of LED fixtures in pilot projects over two years before deciding on a winner.
Let's hope they picked the one that shows our city's umpteen hundred thousand potholes in the best possible light.
The International Space Station will be going to a watery grave when it ends its useful life in 2020.
There aren't any space shuttles left on which to bring down pieces of the iconic laboratory.
That sounds like a teaching moment missed, since they might have looked pretty good in museums all over the globe. Instead, the big brains who run things up there are going to drown the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION in an ocean, just as the Russians did with their Mir space station in 2001.
"It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish," Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of Russia's space agency told Agence France-Presse.
Right. Instead it will go into an ocean, where it will be lots of rubbish. We understand that outer space is full of junk - estimates have at least 13,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth - but most humans don't depend on that space for anything tangible. The oceans, however, we find quite useful. Filling the depths with even more garbage would extend the heights of wastefulness.
On the other hand, if they can drop the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION into shallow enough water and turn it into an artificial reef, that would be an admirable act of recycling. Sure, it's probably difficult, but if they can put a man on the moon .
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford - whose budget-cut intentions had already made him a polarizing figure in Hogtown - has added fuel to the fire of his critics. He allegedly flipped off a mother and her six-year-old daughter who had spied him talking on a hand-held cellphone in his minivan - which is illegal and punishable by a $500 fine in Ontario.
The woman posted a Facebook message stating she and her daughter gave him the thumbs down and he gave them the finger up.
"I find this kind of behaviour really unbecoming of a mayor who not only is in charge of the largest metropolitan municipality in Canada, is supposed to follow the laws of that city, set an example, and serve and respect the rights and lives of its citizens," Ottilie Mason wrote.
On Twitter and Facebook and through a spokesperson, Ford denied making the gesture and called it a misunderstanding.
"He was on the phone. He did not give anyone a rude gesture. That's where we believe the misunderstanding took place," said his press secretary Adrienne Batra.
The incident raises a question about Ford's suitability as mayor and an even larger one about his choice of automobile.
Three young girls in Midway, Ga. were drummed out of the lemonade business in mid-July by a police chief whose ridiculous over-reaction was actually supported by the city's mayor.
The girls set up a stand and were trying to raise money for a trip to a local water park when the chief and a deputy shut them down because they didn't have a business licence or food permit, which would have cost the kids $50 US.
"We had told them, 'We understand you guys are young, but still, you're breaking the law, and we can't let you do it anymore,' " Chief Kelly Morningstar said. "We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, or what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance."
It's lemonade. Probably made out of lemons. Probably made by the kids who were selling it. You have to wonder how many real crimes get solved in that place.
This is a classic case of by-the-book insanity. The kids were doing what their parents undoubtedly did on similarly warm summer days in their youth. True, the children didn't have a business licence. They also didn't have a general manager, a quality control officer, director of sales or vicepresident of human resources. That's because THEY'RE KIDS who were operating a LEMONADE STAND on the street.
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, 85, will not be marrying 25-year-old former fiance Crystal Harris, who called off the nuptials last month and rubbed salt in the wound by making some disparaging remarks about Hef's lack of sexual prowess on Howard Stern's radio show.
The marriage would have been Hefner's third. Not this month. In total. Harris explained on Twitter that she dumped Hefner after "much deep reflection and thought." No word if she was looking at their birth certificates at the time.
Hefner quickly Tweeted that he was happy with new girlfriends Anna Sophia Berglund and Shera Bechard, proving bunnies do in fact multiply that quickly.
In general speaking,
12V LED has become more and more affordable, therefore
auto LED bulbs have been used widely.
