Potpourri: Oct. 22, 2012
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The American Helicopter Society offers a $250,000 Sikorsky Prize to anyone who can build a human-powered chopper that can hover 10 feet in the air for one minute. A team of University of Maryland engineering students created a 105-foot contraption that hovered 50 seconds -- and the students vow to keep trying until they win.
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The U.S. Supreme Court struck down FCC "indecency" fines against TV networks and stations for offenses such as a seven-second glimpse of a woman's bare backside. You'd think Washington bureaucrats would have more important work than policing television for hints of nudity.
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WVU's football team is doing so poorly that the university may be forced to return its main focus to education.
WASHINGTON POST writer Zofia Smardz decided that, if any city is gung-ho for Romney for president, it should be Romney, W.Va. So she drove to the Eastern Panhandle community, but found little interest in the White House race. She says she finally "spotted a sign on a lawn at the edge of town -- for Obama." The most conspicuous thing in Romney, she wrote, is its Civil War history. "Markers say that during the war, the town changed hands between North and South 56 times. Wow. That. Is. Amazing." As for the Nov. 6 election, she quoted Romney café operator Chuck Johnson: "There's no controversy here. We all get along, Republicans and Democrats."
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Larry Gibson, who lived on Kayford Mountain in Raleigh County like generations of his family and died there Sept. 9, gained national attention in recent years for speaking against mountaintop removal. He testified before the United Nations and traveled the country and to South America to talk about environmental issues. He was remembered at an Oct.14 celebration of his life and work, and the Gazette's Douglas Imbrogno captured the moving tribute in this video, tinyurl.com/gazette1014.
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Bearing arms in West Virginia: Three young men were charged with invading a Beckley home and shooting Shawn DeWayne Rucker, 32, to death with multiple bullets.
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A spoofy book about sharks is subtitled "The Porpoise-Driven Life."
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The armed Militia movement attracts nuts. Remember when a West Virginia leader warned that secret U.N. troops would invade West Virginia for the Anti-Christ? Now, three leaders of the Alaska Peacemaker Militia have been convicted of plotting mass murder. One of them was recorded discussing a top-secret time-travel tunnel that allowed the U.S. government to whisk people from Washington to New Mexico in seconds.
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The American Helicopter Society offers a $250,000 Sikorsky Prize to anyone who can build a human-powered chopper that can hover 10 feet in the air for one minute. A team of University of Maryland engineering students created a 105-foot contraption that hovered 50 seconds -- and the students vow to keep trying until they win.
***
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down FCC "indecency" fines against TV networks and stations for offenses such as a seven-second glimpse of a woman's bare backside. You'd think Washington bureaucrats would have more important work than policing television for hints of nudity.
***
WVU's football team is doing so poorly that the university may be forced to return its main focus to education.
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