Sorry, But I Think This TSA Agent Was Getting His Jollies

Image of the creepy TSA patdown of a 13 year old kid at
te Dallas-Fort Worth airport recently. Ugh. 

A lot of people have been yelling and screaming in social media about Aaron Henderson, 13, who got quite the NSFW patdown from a weird TSA agent at an airport recently.

This all started at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport when agents detected what might have been a trace of an explosive substance in the kid's laptop.

There are a lot of false positives with these tests, but I can't blame the TSA from taking a closer, second look at the laptop, and Aaron. Better safe than sorry, right?

However, the "patdown" Aaron got looked like foreplay in a porn movie, though Aaron was clearly not happy about this. I wouldn't be, either.

This apparently is a new policy at the TSA, giving them permission to really feel out people for contraband.

Sorry to blame everything on Donald Trump, but things are getting more police state-ish under his administration, so the TSA "rubdowns" might be part of this.

In addition, CBS News reports that this is part of new TSA procedures that came after an undercover audit in 2015 revealed major lapses in security.

 Aaron's mother, Jennifer told CBS News, "I believe he was patted down excessively. They went over his sensitive areas, a little more than necessary, especially given that he wasn't wearing bulky clothing or anything like that."

The TSA says new procedures took effext March 2.

I get it that they're trying to prevent terrorist attacks.

But working for the TSA is a thankless job which pays poorly. Most people don't want to work there. But the desperate, sometimes the stupid, sometimes the perverts also want to work there, since nobody else will.

This won't end well.

Here's the creepy video from CBS, showing the patdown. To me, it's almost child porn, so I was reluctant to show it. But we need to know what the TSA is doing, so I tried to overcome my qualms to post it.

Latest Outrage: Tennessee Bills Teen Nearly $2,970 For Wrecking Guardrail That Killed Her

Hannah Elmers, 17, died in a Tennessee car crash involving
an unsafe guardrail. The state of Tennessee later billed
her for the wrecked guardrail, but withdrew the
bill after public outcry.

Last November, Hannah Elmers, 17, was driving her dad's 2000 Volvo down Interstate 75 near Niota, Tennesees when she somehow lost control of the vehicle, traveled into the median skidded sideways, forcing the driver's side door to hit the end of a guardrail.

As USA Today reported, instead of deflecting the car, the guardrail pierced it, killing Elmers.

This would have ended up as another terrible local tragedy, a nice young teenager dying too young.

Except Tennessee decided to make things worse. Much worse, as Hannah's dad, Steven Elmers soon learned.

As USA Today describes it:

"Four months later, Steven Elmers of Lenoir City received a $2,970 bill from the Tennessee Department of Transportation, dated February 24 and addressed to Hannah for the cost of labor and materials to install 25 feet of guardrail at the scene of the crash. 

'I'm shocked, the audacity,' he said. 'What bothers me is that they're playing Russian roulette with people's lives. They know these devices do not perform at high speeds and in situations like my daughter's accident, but they leave them in place.'"

Wait, what?!?

It turns out, not only did Tennessee have the audacity to bill Hannah, they also know the type of guardrail they used is unsafe. And could kill other people.

Last fall, Tennessee transportation officials did decide to stop buying the type of guardrail involved in Hannah's crash, called a Lindsay X-Lite.

When a car hits the end of this type of guardrail, it's supposed to collapse like a telescope, theoretically minimizing injuries to the people in the car that hits it.

However, at high speeds, it doesn't collapse, and you get situations like Hannah's, where she crashed into it at high speeds. The stretch of Interstate where she was driving has a speed limit of 70 mph.

The state was originally going to leave existing dangerous guardrails in place, but now says they are  going to remove the remaining Lindsay X-Lite guardrails from other high speed locations in Tennessee.

They'd better. The Knoxville News-Sentinel says that since June, 2016, four people have died in Tennessee after colliding with this type of guardrail.

But what about that $2,980 bill?

A spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Transportation says the bill came from "a mistake somewhere in processing" and the department "greatly apologies for it."

Nice, but I don't trust it. How could somebody not catch this before it went out? I think the reversal and apology is more because of the bad PR that came when after the bill went out than any good intentions from the state.

By the way, the maybe unsafe other types of guardrails, made by Trinity Industries Inc. might be along highways in other states, like yours.

A whistleblower named Joshua Harman won a $663 million settlement against Trinity, after he alleged the company altered the design of one of its guardrails without getting approval from the Federal Highway Administration, the Knoxville News-Sentinel said. 

Virginia, citing the safety reasons, is removing a Trinity guardrail called ET-Plus for safety reasons. The city of Nashville, Tennessee did the same.

Adds the Knoxville News-Sentinel: 

"Trinity has since been involved in a slew of lawsuits nationwide in which crash victims alleged the unauthorized changes caused the guardrails to spear vehicles, resulting in injuries and deaths."

Hoo, boy, this company is in trouble. Let's hope any problematic guardrails made by this company get replaced before there are more tragedies.

Now Is Not The Time To Visit Atlanta, Georgia

The big fire that collapsed a major Interstate 85 bridge
in Atlanta Thursday.

That was bizarre, wasn't it?

In case you haven't seen the news, a major Interstate highway caught fire in Atlanta, Georgia Thursday and the spectacular blaze caused a bridge to collapse.

Luckily, nobody was seriously hurt, but I didn't know Interstate highways could burn.

They're saying there was a lot of PVC piping under the bridges and road bed, and that's what burned. I guess PVC was inexpensive and efficient, but in hindsight, maybe not the best material in the world.

Here's the trouble: Atlanta is the Los Angeles of the South in terms of highways. The Atlanta metro area is laced with freeways, all of them congested most of the time.

The Interstate 85 fire, including the bridge collapse, is going to be a stunner.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has wisely declared a state of emergency, since nobody is going to get anywhere in the Atlanta area until this is fixed. You can imagine the economic impacts.

Plus, you can't rebuild a major Interstate bridge in an urban area in a day. It's going to take a lot of time.

I also love and am frightened by this detail of the fire from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The fire was near a bunch of popular adult entertainment businesses, which had to close because of the dense smoke hanging over the region. The fire was also near the headquarters of the Orkin pesticide company.

Lovely.

Politicians from Donald Trump on down keep saying we have to sink a lot of investments into infrastructure, but they never do it.

This weird fire is one indication that maybe all these leaders should put their money - or, more accurately, taxpayer money -  where their mouths are.

I wouldn't mind seeing some of my tax money going toward road construction instead of the president's golf trips, no?

Videos:

There were some technical hiccups with this news chopper view of the Interstate 85 bridge collapsing in Atlanta, but it's still pretty dramatic:



A brief, scary view of driving by the raging fire:

 

Here's A Completely NEW Take On The 1980s Classic "Sledgehammer"

Postmodern Jukebox, with Noah Guthrie singing lead
here, dramatically rework the 1980s classic "Sledgehammer"

A lot of you remember that big hit in the 1980s, "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel.

It was the catchy song with the innovative, trippy dippy stop motion music video with coordinated singing fruit and dancing chicken meat.

OK, it was different, but the song and the music video was fun, you have to admit.  

I always like it, though, when somebody comes up with a completely different way to do a song, and the group Postmodern Jukebox rose to the occasion. (Postmodern Jukebox is really a musical collective that brings in different singers and performers to work with them, and then release videos as often as weekly. )

They give "Sledgehammer" a great 1950s rhythm and blues take which is just awesome. The video of the song is below.

Postmodern Jukebox got Noah Guthrie, who you might remember from "Glee," to do lead vocals.

H/T BoingBoing

Here's the video:

Races With Wolves: Canadian Woman Has An Interesting Commute

Rhonda Miller in northern Canada spotted this fellow commuter
on a highway during her commute to work. That's an
enormous wolf you see there. 

I can literally see Canada from my house, I kid you not.

And the more I hear about the way things happen in Canada, the more I want to live there.

One example: Here in America, the people are wild and the animals tend to be more normal. In Canada, the people are tame and it's the animals that tend to put on a show.

So it was when a teacher Rhonda Miller commuted down wintry Highway 3 in Canada's Arctic Northwest Territories when she unexpectedly encountered some traffic.

Miller was in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn't other cars that complicated the commute. It was wolves, notes the CBC.

Big, bad, huge, wolves.

Luckily, she was safe in her car, but these two enormous wolves were blasting down Highway 3 just as Miller was. She was trying to get to work in time. I'm not sure what the wolves were up to.

Miller said she was traveling at 40 to 50 mph and the wolves were going almost as fast.

Below is the excellent video she shot on her smart phone. The music playing on her car radio made it all seem even better. Bet your next commute to work won't be this interesting:

Scary: Escalator Reverses, Speeds Up, Tries To Kill Shoppers

In an image taken from a video, a Hong Kong escalator
suddenly reverses direction and speeds up, sending
people crashing into a pile at the bottom. 

I'll take the stairs, thank you.

I'm always told to take the stairs when I want to get from one floor to another. It gives you a bit of exercise. It's healthier. Maybe you'll live longer.

An escalator in Hong Kong proved that point dramatically.

Dozens of shoppers were on a shopping mall escalator when this happened, according to Consumerist.

"In Hong Kong over the weekend, a 150-foot fall escalator abruptly reversed direction and flung screaming shoppers to the ground, injuring 18 of them.

Of course there's video, from multiple angles, because this was a terrifying event, that happened in a public place in 2017. One mall-goer happened to be taking video of the escalator before the mayhem started."

That video is at the bottom of this post.

The escalator normally moves people from the fourth to the eight floor of the mall at Langham Place in Hong Kong, Consumerist reports. When it reversed, it also picked up speed, going at least twice the speed it normally does.

The South China Morning Post reported that safety inspectors think the problem sarted with a malfunction of one of the escalator's two brakes and its non reversing mechanism.

Well, yeah, gee, that makes sense.

The escalator supposedly passed an inspection on March 23, and inspections are carried out twice a year, with routine checks once every two weeks or so.

Still, something obviously went wrong, judging from the scary video, below. Two mechanics have been arrested and charged with tampering with the escalator to make it reverse direction and speed up.

Meanwhile, I think I'll take the stairs.

Lucky Or Unlucky Motorists Feel Like They Were Hit By A Ton Of Bricks Because They Were

Watch the video below to see what happened when this
truckload of bricks tipped over on top of a car.

On March 14, in Chengdu Province, China, a truck loaded with a gigantic pile of bricks couldn't stop in time at a traffic light.

The truck swerved over the curb and initially avoided the cars stopped at the light. However, the truck tipped over.

Three of the motorists dodged the resulting avalanche of bricks but one did not. As you can see in the very scary video below, a car was totally buried beneath the bricks.

The good and miraculous news is that the two people in the car buried by the bricks were quickly pulled out and did not appear to suffer serious injuries.

But nevertheless, I'm sure they felt like they were hit by a ton of bricks.

Watch: