Random News Stories

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

They were compromised at least three times that I know of...

1. During the tickling the dragon experiment. Look up "The Demon Core". Killed 2, and as many as six.

2. At Idaho National Labs, where not following correct procedures caused the SL-1 reactor to have a steam explosion. One person was impaled in the ceiling by one of the control rods. 3 people died.

3. Chernobyl. Not much need be said about this except no one really knows how many people it has killed so far.

[Leo Enticknap]

Another gasoline-related story, though this time unrelated to projectors. Someone installed a Rolls-Royce Merlin into a car!

'The Beast' heads to auction: The British-built classic car famed for being embroiled in a Rolls-Royce legal case - with a 27-litre aircraft engine that guzzles 8 PINTS OF FUEL A MINUTE

A classic car like no other is set to go under the hammer this month.

John Dodd's 'The Beast' is heading to auction, offering collectors and enthusiasts the opportunity to get their hands on a British legend.

The one-off creation is adored in the automotive world for its bonkers specification, which includes a 27-litre V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin plane engine, a weight of two tons, a 19-foot-long body and the dubious ability to gulp eight pints of fuel per minute.

Having shot to fame in a late nineties episode of Top Gear and still considered today as one of the greatest unicorn cars of a generation, The Beast's sale at a Car & Classic auction starting on 9 March is set to generate plenty of interest.

And if its eventual buyer chooses to use it regularly, it's guaranteed to keep petrol station operators in business for the foreseeable.

Dodd, the man behind the incredible vehicle, died in December at the age of 90.

His much-loved - and often fettled - car is now being offered to the highest bidder by his family who have chosen to part with his pride and joy.

Running on a specially created chassis built by Paul Jameson, The Beast began life in 1966 with a 27-litre Meteor tank engine produced by Rolls-Royce under its extensive bonnet.

Such was the level of power and torque generated, a bespoke gearbox was required to handle its enormous grunt.

That's where Dodd - a transmission specials - came in to help the project, and he would later buy the vehicle from Jameson with the intention of turning it into a monstrous road car.

The mechanical whizz set about creating a fibreglass body to cover the chassis to give the appearance of conventional car with elongated proportions.

Painted red and fitted - controversially - with a Rolls-Royce Corniche grille and the brand's Spirit of Ecstasy emblem (which we'll cover again later), the jaw-dropping car quickly did the rounds on television screens and magazine pages.

Unfortunately, during a drive back from visiting the King of Sweden (who reportedly wanted to see the car in all its glory) in 1974, The Beast caught fire and its engine and bodywork suffered significant damage.

Yet Dodd decided against scrapping it, instead rebuilding the chassis and restoring the car using the insurance payout of £17,000, which in today's money works out at around £121,000.

This saw the installation of a different 27-litre powerplant, this time a Rolls-Royce-produced V12 Mk35 Merlin plane engine - famously used during World War II in the Spitfire and Hurricane - linked to a three-speed automatic gearbox. It is said to return - at best - between one and two miles to the gallon.

It features panels and body parts from a Ford Capri, steering and front suspension borrowed from an Austin Westminster and independent rear suspension from a Jaguar XJ12.

With Rolls-Royce already unhappy about the original car sporting one of its grilles, Dodd chose another one of the British company's front ends for the reborn version of The Beast, this time from a Silver Shadow.

In 1981, disgruntled Rolls-Royce bosses issued a High Court writ, accusing Dodd of trademark infringement.

Dodd prodded the luxury car giant by attending hearings in the very car that was the reason for him being there, including 'accidentally' breaking down in the vehicle outside the Daily Mail's office on Fleet Street, which - unsurprisingly - generated plenty of media coverage.

The judge accused him of having a 'cavalier attitude'.

The judge eventually ruled in Rolls-Royce's favour and Dodd was fined a pricey sum of £5,000 and banned from driving it. However, the fine was doubled when, just two days later, he drove the vehicle with its Rolls-Royce grille to a Southend car show.

Having lost his appeal and refusing to pay the fine, Dodd was sentenced to six months in prison. However, with a warrant issued for his arrest, he fled to Spain with the car in tow to avoid extradition.

The anti-establishment motor eventually had its Rolls-Royce grille removed and replaced with the one it sports to this day so it could return to UK soil without anther legal fracas.

As well as featuring in an episode of Top Gear some years later, The Beast was also named in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most powerful car in 1977, saying it 'exceeded 200mph on many occasions on Continental roads'.

Other reports said it could reach a top speed of 260mph, though in 1973 the RAC measured the car at 183mph.

In its current guise, there is no claim about its outright performance... though there had been plans to prove its speed in 2023.

Before Dodd died last year, he had made changes to The Beast as part of an effort to take it to Santa Pod and set a blistering quarter-mile time he hoped would clock under 10 seconds.

Among the modifications recently made was a new rear axle, which was delivered from the US and cost over £7,000 to install.

Unfortunately, Dodd passed before he and his car could be put to the ultimate test.

The vehicle's start procedure is as long-winded as you'd expect from a motor with an aircraft engine and includes a sequence of engaging fans and fuel pumps before the thudding powerplant can be fired into life.

That means this is a car not for automotive novices that will need lots of knowledge and maintenance skill.

The V5 is still present and John Dodd is still listed as the owner.

The cabin features just two seats, while a bank of red rocker switches controls the starter functions for the huge engine. The steering wheel is bespoke to The Beast too and features a 'JD' boss in the centre.

In full running order, Car & Classic says it 'believes' that it qualifies for MOT exemption.

It currently has just over 10,000 miles on the clock.

It will go under the hammer in a seven-day online auction starting 9 March at 13:00.

'Car & Classic was the logical choice for the first sale of The Beast in its 50-year history,' says the auction house's CEO, Tom Wood.

'Our online auction is now the largest in the UK and the site attracts millions of people monthly.

'Not that this car will need much promotion – it is so famous it can be referred by its nickname,

''The Beast', and classic car enthusiasts will immediately know which example of eccentric motoring heritage we're talking about.

'This is a genuine once in a lifetime opportunity and I hope the lucky new buyer continues to use and enjoy the car the way John did.' adds Wood.

Such is the uniqueness of the motor, there's no suggestion of a guide price. With this in mind, it could be one of the most exciting online car auctions to watch this year.

This thing is said to do 1-2 MPG. Just for giggles, I looked at the stats for the vehicle with which this engine is more usually associated - the Supermarine Spitfire - and found that it has a tank capacity of 167 gallons, and a ferry range of 1,030 miles. So in a plane this engine gives you 6.16 MPG, but on the ground, only 1-2!

[Leo Enticknap]

Obituary in Today's Telegraph (emphasis mine, and irresistable):

Donald Spoto, biographer who probed the seamier side of lives including Alfred Hitchcock and Laurence Olivier – obituary

onald Spoto, who has died aged 81, was a prolific American biographer who also chronicled the lives of several British stage and screen celebrities, among them Alfred Hitchcock and Laurence Olivier.

A former Catholic monk and trained theologian who also wrote lives of Jesus Christ and St Francis of Assisi, Spoto applied considerable scholastic rigour to his subjects, and his talent for conjuring an intimacy with them was much admired.

But his default modus operandi was to mine the seamier side of the lives he examined, and in his notorious study of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius (1993), he disclosed aspects of the director’s personal life with shocked disapproval, boasting that the “intensely private, secretive Hitchcock [had] eluded the serious biographer until now”, an assertion disputed by numerous reviewers.

He claimed that the greengrocer’s son from Leytonstone had propositioned Tippi Hedren in her trailer while filming Marnie (1964), and confirmed his reliance on the dark side by relating how during shooting on The Birds (1963) Hitchcock deliberately spooked Hedren’s daughter, the actress Melanie Griffith, by sending her a miniature replica of her mother in a coffin.

Written without the co-operation of Hitchcock’s family, Spoto’s hefty biography avoided close critical scrutiny of the lugubrious director’s films, one reviewer noting Spoto’s “thin, easy judgments” on the work. Nevertheless, it remains a definitive study of the life of the auteur of suspense.

Hitchcock, Spoto observed, “suffered no rivals for absolute authority on his productions”. In Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his Leading Ladies (2008), about the director’s toxic relationships – at times verging on the sadistic – with his actresses, among them Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, he revealed how the director was obsessively devoted to creating Grace Kelly as a “credible hybrid of elegance and sex”.

Befriending Grace Kelly, and having collected hours of taped interviews with her, Spoto reverentially revisited her in High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood the following year.

In Laurence Olivier: A Biography (1991), his claim that the thrice-married actor had a 10-year affair with the comic actor Danny Kaye attracted particular attention. Olivier’s youngest son Richard complained in The Daily Telegraph of a hatchet job.

Spoto’s life of Audrey Hepburn in Enchantment (2006) chronicled the rise of the Anglo-Dutch film star with an admiring fervour. “It is a pity that this new account of her is so reverent,” The Sunday Telegraph murmured. His authorised study of the actor Alan Bates, Otherwise Engaged (2007), sympathetically revealed a closeted life and a fear of exposure that prevented him from achieving the heights of stardom which slipped through his grasp.

Described as “one of the most respected researchers in the obituary business”, Spoto harnessed this facility for his study of Elizabeth Taylor (1995), an approach lauded by one reviewer as “responsible pop-scholarly with dashes of DIY psychology”. In the same year he published Dynasty: The Turbulent Saga of the Royal Family From Victoria to Diana, which included the unsourced and unsubstantiated suggestion that the late Princess Marina “counted among her lovers Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Danny Kaye, Robin Fox, David Niven and a small legion of famous and handsome gentlemen”.

Not only were the newly deceased unsafe in Spoto’s hands, noted the royal biographer Anthony Holden with disapproval, but also Princess Margaret, then still alive, who was described merely as “sexually enterprising”. Spoto reverted to British royalty in 1997 with an account of Diana: The Last Year.

In Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (1993), Spoto trawled 25,000 pages of previously sealed documents and interviewed more than 300 people as he sought to debunk repeated contentions that the actress had had affairs with both President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert, and that the manner of her death in 1962 was covered up. Spoto’s theory was that her psychiatrist had ordered what turned out to be a fatal overdose of barbiturates by enema.

Spoto’s penultimate book The Redgraves: a Family Epic (2012) presented an exhaustive investigation of Michael Redgrave’s homosexual affairs, quoting Noël Coward, a frequent partner who, strolling across Leicester Square with a friend, noticed that the Odeon was advertising Dirk Bogarde and Michael Redgrave in The Sea Shall Not Have Them. “I don’t see why not,” Coward famously observed. “Everyone else has.”

Spoto’s other Hollywood biographies included studies of Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman, whom he knew personally for the last seven years of her life.

The son of a salesman, Donald Michael Spoto was born on June 28 1941 in New Rochelle, New York. His mother worked in the local public information department. When he was 10, he saw Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and became a lifelong fan.

As a young man he was drawn to spirituality, studying languages and earning two degrees, followed in 1970 by a doctorate at Fordham University in New Testament studies. After 12 years as a university professor, he worked at an advertising agency in the 1970s to experience life in the real world, and taught a popular course on Alfred Hitchcock at a college in Manhattan.

In print, Spoto first focused on Hitchcock in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: 50 Years of His Motion Pictures (1976), which included an exhaustive study of Vertigo (1958), which he claimed to have seen 26 times and for which he visited many of the film’s locations. His book was lauded as a valuable work of film scholarship.

Tippi Hedren’s story, as related in Spoto’s biography of Hitchcock, was made into a film by the BBC and HBO called The Girl (2012), which controversially portrayed Hitchcock as the monster she described.

He drew on his theological training and study of Christianity for a life of Jesus Christ in 1998 and again for a hagiography of Joan of Arc in Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (2007). In the foreword Spoto wrote that the book was offered “within the belief that the world and everything in it belongs to God and matters to God”. He also published a manual on prayer.

Among the last of his 29 books was a life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on which an American television series was based.

For his Hitchcock biography The Dark Side of Genius, he received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1984. A regular visitor to London, he was a visiting lecturer at the British Film Institute and the National Film Theatre between 1980 and 1986.

Spoto’s husband, the Danish artist and school administrator Ole Flemming Larsen, with whom he lived in Copenhagen, survives him.

Donald Spoto, born June 28 1941, died February 11 2023

[Randy Stankey]

Oh, no! Standards are always there!
Some people just don't pay attention to them.

As evidenced by this recent incident in Australia where a mining company was moving some equipment with a radioactive caesium 137 capsule inside and lost it somewhere on an 870-mile stretch of highway.

https://apnews.com/article/science-o...2820474b67e832

PERTH, Australia (AP) — A mining corporation apologized for losing a highly radioactive capsule over a 1,400-kilometer (870-mile) stretch of Western Australia, as authorities combed parts of the road looking for the tiny but dangerous substance.

The capsule was part of a device believed to have fallen off a truck while being transported between a desert mine site and the city of Perth on Jan. 10.
The truck transporting the capsule arrived at a Perth depot on Jan. 16. Emergency services were notified of the missing capsule on Jan. 25.
Western Australia emergency services have called on other Australian states and the federal government for support finding the capsule as they lack equipment. The capsule measures 8 millimeters by 6 millimeters (0.31 inches by 0.24 inches), and people have been warned it could have unknowingly become lodged in their car’s tires.
The caesium 137 ceramic source, commonly used in radiation gauges, emits dangerous amounts of radiation, equivalent of receiving 10 X-rays in an hour. It could cause skin burns and prolonged exposure could cause cancer.

The chief executive of the mining giant Rio Tinto Iron Ore, Simon Trott, on Sunday said the company was taking the incident very seriously and apologized for causing public concern.

“We recognize this is clearly very concerning and are sorry for the alarm it has caused in the Western Australian community,” Trott said. “As well as fully supporting the relevant authorities, we have launched our own investigation to understand how the capsule was lost in transit.”

The search has involved people scanning for radiation levels from the device along roads used by the trucks, with authorities indicating the entire 1,400-kilometer (870-mile) route might have to be searched.
Western Australia’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services publicly announced the capsule had gone missing on Friday, two days after they were notified by Rio Tinto.
Trott said the contractor was qualified to transport the device and it had been confirmed being on board the truck by a Geiger counter prior to leaving the mine.
Police determined the incident to be an accident and no criminal charges are likely.

And...the only thing that the people who lost it can say is, "Oopsie!"

[Jon Dent]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

[Frank Cox]

Well, you know what they say about sub-standard!

[Leo Enticknap]

Daily Wail:

Furious Navy chiefs order investigation after 'workers on Trident submarine glued broken bolts in a nuclear reactor chamber'

• Allegedly unsuitable repairs made to bolt heads that had been over-tightened
• HMS Vanguard is one of the UK's four Trident nuclear submarines in service
• All will be replaced by the new multi-billion pound Dreadnought class from 2028

Defence chiefs have launched an urgent investigation after workmen allegedly repaired broken bolts inside a nuclear reactor chamber on board one of Britain's Trident submarines by using glue.

The unsuitable repairs to the bolt heads, which had been sheared off through over-tightening, were discovered during a routine check aboard HMS Vanguard, The Sun reports.

Repair work was being undertaken as part of a dry dock refurbishment at HMNB Devonport in Plymouth, which is behind schedule by four years and had rung up £300million over budget.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is said to have demanded 'assurances about future work' carried out on the 16,000-ton vessel by established contractor Babcock, following the discovery.

One Navy source said the situation was 'a disgrace', adding: 'Standards are standards. Nuclear standards are never compromised.'

Former sub captain Cdr Ryan Ramsay added that such repairs '[make] you wonder what else has been done poorly.'

As a result of the delayed works, the UK's other Trident submarines - HMS Vengeance, HMS Victorious and HMS Vigilance - have had to endure lengthy patrols.

All four will be replaced by the Dreadnought class, which will carry the Trident deterrent, from 2028.

The submarines, whose name derives from the motto 'fear God and dread nought', carry nuclear missiles and are designed to remain at sea undetected for months.

They will be larger than the current class at 17,200 tonnes and measuring just under 153 metres, with an expected lifespan of 30 years.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: 'As part of a planned inspection, a defect was found from work done in the past when HMS Vanguard was in dry dock.

'It was promptly reported and fixed.

'In light of the issue, the Secretary of State spoke directly with the Chief Executive Office of Babcock to seek assurances about future work.'

MailOnline has contacted Babcock for comment.

How on earth did those bolts come to be overtightened in the first place? Scary that such an elementary error could be made working on a nuclear reactor in a top secret military asset. Even I, a lowly movie theater tech, know what a torque wrench is and how to use it! Makes you wonder if the Royal Navy is hiring Bart Simpson to maintain their subs...

[Randy Stankey]

I bet you a nickel that there's a room (one or more) where the (presumably) solid state relay or dimmer racks reside. That rack should have either a control panel and some breakers or switches. Even if you can't assume local control from there, you should be able too shut off individual circuits with breakers.

Every single stage I have worked on has had lighting dimmer systems that, if your light control console fails, you can take over emergency control so that you can, at least, bring up the lights to let people exit safely.

Even the Tom Ridge Center, where I worked, had a computerized light system that allowed you to command the building lights from the dimmer racks. It was clumsy but it worked.

I say that this "problem" is little more than a case of apathy and weaponized incompetence on the part of the school administration.

[Frank Cox]

I get the impression that this school is just mesmerized by the technology.

Wikipedia says they have 7000 lights but I'm sure a lot of them are ganged. All of the lights in the second floor ladies bathroom would likely come on at once; there would be no need to individually control the light over each stall.

Aside from the above mentioned fascination, wouldn't it be cheaper and future-proof to rip out that fancy control system and rewire it with standard light switches and an electrical panel? That quoted cost for replacing their system works out to $171.43 per light fixture, which seems like a lot of money to me, not to mention the ongoing excessive amounts being paid for power to light a building around the clock when it's unoccupied for most of the day.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's surprising how basic building management stuff can slip through the cracks like this. It usually happens because it is one person's responsibility to do something (e.g. power down the building at the end of the day as the original architects designed), that person leaves under, shall we say, difficult circumstances, and there is no formal handover.

Example - I once worked for a small chain of arthouses in England, and was sent to another site over a weekend on an emergency basis, after the chief had been fired. He had been making unwelcome advances to female staff members, which eventually progressed to the level of serious harassment. Immediately he left, they found kiddie porn in the booth (this was in the days when it was on paper) and the police got involved. This was a single screen changeover house, and he'd basically worked seven days a week, with just the odd relief coming in on days when he was sick or on vacation. There was no other projectionist on the permanent staff. So when he was fired, and then very shortly after arrested, that place was in big trouble.

One of the things I found was that he'd been leaving the projector lamps on 24/7. I have no idea why on earth he would do that: all I know is that per the chart on the back of the lamphouse, they were changed a month prior and had already done around 1,400 hours. The managers confirmed that he was ordering new lamps every 2-3 months when, given the usage pattern at that site, it should have been more like every 5-6. There were DTS readers on top of the projectors, which appeared never to have been used. No discs were being delivered with the prints. They had long been complaining that the auditorium had been getting hot and stuffy, in response to which the ex-chief told them that theaters built in the 1930s just got like that, and that nothing could be done. Checking things out, I found that every single belt in all the air handling units had worn out and broken. Replacing them fixed that problem. I found several other issues like that, too.

Presumably he had taken over from someone else, no basic building management knowledge had been passed along, and his own lack of training and initiative had prevented him from figuring this stuff out himself.

[Jim Cassedy]

The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off

I heard about this story on the radio last night. In the early 2000's, I worked in a building that put in some sort
of remote energy management system, and after hours, all the lights would automatically shut off, except for
a bare minimum of safety lighting in the halls & offices. if I wanted to stay late or come in and do some work
after the building was closed for the day, I had to call somebody in St Louis to turn the lights on, ( ! ) and
either give them an estimate of how long I was going to be in the building, or call them back before I left
& have them turn the lites off.
After about a year of doing this, the system was changed to where motion detectors were put in some
parts of the building, and in other parts of the building, there was a swtchplate with a button you could
push which would turn the lights on in that area for an hour- - although we discovered that you could
push it several times & get a maximum of 3hrs of light before having to push it again.

More recently, I worked in a screening room where there was a water fountain that ran for over a year
because nobody could find the valve to shut it off. (No, it wasn't behind the fountain- - I looked)

[Frank Cox]

The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...turn-rcna65611

The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off

Blame it on the pandemic and "supply chain problems," says the school district's assistant superintendent of finance.



Jan. 19, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC
By Corky Siemaszko
WILBRAHAM, Mass. — For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can’t turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.
The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”
Osborne said it’s difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly.
“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.
That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.
Still, having the lights on at Minnechaug all the time is a conspicuous waste of taxpayer money, Wilbraham’s town selectmen said in an Aug. 8, 2022, letter to the members of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.
“The image it projects is one of profligacy in a time when many families in the communities the District serves are struggling with their own energy costs,” they wrote.

But there’s hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed.
Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.
“And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won’t happen again,” said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.
Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The original high school building, which dates back to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square foot structure in 2012.
One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.
But in August 2021, staffers at the school noticed that the lights were not dimming in the daytime and burning brightly through the night.
“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”
Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.
In the meantime, Lilli DiGrande, who is now a 16-year-old junior and a co-editor of The Smoke Signal, the online high school newspaper, published an article on Nov. 3, 2021, with the headline “What’s Wrong With The Lights?”
Lilli DiGrande wrote a story about the lights for the school's news site in November 2021. Matt Nighswander / NBC News “The teachers were complaining because they couldn’t dim the lights to show videos and movies on the whiteboard,” DiGrande told NBC News. “The teachers now try to get around it by unscrewing light bulbs. But the lights seem to be on everywhere in the school.”
Soon, Wilbraham’s town selectmen began hearing complaints from residents.

“The Board of Selectmen members have received, and continue to receive, complaints regarding the lights being left on at night at Minnechaug Regional High School,” they wrote in their Aug. 8, 2022, letter. “The lights that are being referred to are the classroom lights, not the outdoor lights. There is a significant amount of concern expressed by citizens that this is a waste of energy and, in turn, taxpayer dollars.”
The town leaders added that “this issue may be one of lesser cost or importance in the overall operation of the District, but it is, unfortunately, a visible one.”

Osborne, along with Schools Superintendent John Provost, assured the town leaders they had been working on the problem.
“After many weeks of effort, we were provided a rough estimate in excess of $1.2 Million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response.
That estimate was from Reflex Lighting, Osborne told NBC News.
But with the pandemic raging, the contractor would not have been able to start doing the job until the following summer, Osborne said.
So Osborne and Provost, in their letter to town leaders, wrote that they hired a software consultant to see if it would be possible to “patch the system” to override the default system. And when that proved unworkable, they explored the possibility of having simple timers installed or even an on/off switch.
Matt Nighswander / NBC News “This was eventually deemed not possible and the district moved on to looking at physical solutions that would retain some of the energy-saving intent of the original lighting management system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in their response.
Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company’s electrical engineers, they came up with what he described as a “piecemeal” approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, the lighting control boards and other hardware.
In November 2021, the parts were ordered and the repair job was supposed to start in February 2022.
But the replacement main server wasn’t delivered to Wilbraham until March 2022, which Osborne and Provost described in their letter to town leaders as “relatively on schedule.”
“It was very frustrating, but we were dealing with the pandemic and supply chain issues,” Osborne said.
Osborne and Provost also reported that “the remaining equipment has been back ordered multiple times” and the district was given a new delivery date of Oct. 14, 2022.
“While we are hopeful this will be met, we are of course skeptical,” they wrote. “So, for now, the lights are stuck on.”
It turned out they were right to be skeptical.
The Christmas 2022 season came and went and the replacement parts were not delivered and the lights remained on at Minnechaug.
Holiday decorations at Minnechaug Regional High School.Matt Nighswander / NBC News
“The final lighting system transition did not happen over break as expected because our vendor contacted us on the last day school was in session to reschedule the transition work,” Osborne said in a subsequent Jan. 3 letter to the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee. “This was surprising and disappointing to us: we had this date locked with Reflex since October.”
Now, Osborne said, “we’re not expecting them to come until February, but we are pushing to do it sooner.”
But he's confident that waiting it out was the right decision.
“We could have accepted the $1.2 million bid to rip the system out and start over right away, but I suspect we would find ourselves in the same position,” he said. “As I see it, there wasn’t an alternative.”
Mustone said the pandemic essentially shut down the factories in China that produce the components they need to do this kind of work. He said it’s a lot cheaper to build things over there, but lots of American companies like his are now paying the price.
“I have been doing this for 42 years and I have never seen this kind of supply chain disruption,” he said. “We made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to China.”

[Randy Stankey]

Hey! You can’t park there!

[Martin McCaffery]

At least it didn't burst into a ball of flames.

[Leo Enticknap]

Not only has he built spaceships, but Elon Musk has now proudly unveiled his first submarine!

tesla_submarine.jpg
LA Daily News:

Tesla ends up in Pasadena pool, family of 3 rescued

Two good Samaritans rescued a 4-year-old boy, his mother and his grandmother after their Tesla crashed through a wall and fell into a backyard pool in Pasadena on Tuesday, Jan. 10.

While firefighters checked the child at the scene as an abundance of caution, no one was hospitalized, city spokeswoman Lisa Derderian said.

It happened around 9 a.m. in the 900 block of West California Boulevard.

The driver had stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake, the Fire Department said.

It was raining at the time, Derderian said.

Two staffers from nearby Pacific Oaks Children’s School came to the aid of the driver and the passengers, jumping into the pool and pulling them out, Derderian said.

The two men, reportedly a teacher and a maintenance man, and school officials couldn’t be reached for comment.

Derderian didn’t think the residents of the house were home at the time of the crash.

A tow truck removed the car from the pool.