Random News Stories

[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.

[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...

[Frank Cox]

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

[Jon Dent]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

[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!"

[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

[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!

[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]

You can add Three Mile Island and the Windscale accident of 1957 to that list, as well. Given that the primary cause of Fukushima was an earthquake, it's a debatable case, but it does beg the question as to whether this risk was evaluated when making the decision to build a nuke plant in that location in the first place. The fear of earthquake damage following Fukushima certainly contributed to the decision in 2013 to close the San Onofre power station on the Southern California coast (about halfway between LA and San Diego).

[Leo Enticknap]

This is an absolute classic:

Gwyneth Paltrow Says She Inserts Ozone up Her Butt for ‘Wellness’

Oscar-winning actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow revealed in a recent interview that she inserts ozone up her butt for “wellness.”

After being asked “What’s the weirdest wellness thing that you’ve done?” by Dr. Will Cole during her recent appearance on his The Art of Being Well podcast, Paltrow said, “I have used ozone therapy, rectally.”

“Can I say that? It’s pretty weird, but it’s been very helpful,” the Thanks for Sharing star added, laughing.

Rectal ozone therapy refers to the practice of inserting “medical grade ozone directly into the colon via the rectum,” according to the ozone therapy website, drsozone.com.

The rectal ozone therapy seeks to boost oxygen efficiency, balance the immune system, reduce oxidative stress, improve blood circulation, and “detoxify the body on a cellular level,” the website adds.

“There may potentially be a role for ozone therapy someday, but right now it hasn’t been studied enough,” Cleveland Clinic pulmonologist Vickram Tejwani said in December about this type of therapy.

“We need more data on the potential side effects, which could be severe, before we start offering it as a mainstream therapy or treatment,” Tejwani added.

During her appearance on The Art of Being Well podcast, Paltrow also talked about the public scrutiny she has received in response to her bizarre life choices.

“For years it still hurts your feelings,” the Talented Mr. Ripley star said. “I just let it go, because I realized you’re never, ever going to be able to win everybody over. And the pursuit of trying to win somebody over is so awful.”

“Why do we have so much obesity, depression, and type-2 diabetes?” Paltrow added. “We have autonomy over our bodies; what we put into our bodies — when we have a certain degree of mastery of ourselves, we can really start to change our lives and feel really good.”

Speaking of what one puts into their own bodies — in January, Paltrow reminisced about what it was like being a celebrity in the ’90s, telling late-night host James Corden that one could “do cocaine and not get caught,” as well as take home random men because there was “no paparazzi” or people walking around with camera phones, posting celebrities’ activity to social media for all to see.

I wonder what the effect of this is on global warming? If she ends up farting out the excess, presumably that'll help to rebuild the ozone layer....

[Harold Hallikainen]

Who thinks of this stuff?

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scrip...cfm?fr=801.415

(a) Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_...ohibits%20the% 20medical,%2C%20adjunctive%2C%20or%20preventive%20 therapy. .

Beginning in 1991 the FDA has prosecuted and sent to jail several people presenting themselves as medical doctors and selling ozone therapy products as a medical cure or operating medical clinics using ozone therapy for healing human illness.^[31][32] Arrests following similar activity have been made in other countries as well, including Uganda and Thailand.^[33][34]

Ozone therapy is sold as an expensive alternative cancer treatment in Germany. David Gorski has described the practice as "pure quackery".^[2] Proponents of the therapy falsely claim it is a recognized therapy there, but ozone therapy is not approved by the German medical establishment.

[Leo Enticknap]

If there is a history of prosecuting proponents of ozone "therapy" for peddling quack medicine, I find it interesting that Paltrow isn't actually selling it on her website (as she once did pebbles collected from a beach the claimed would deliver health benefits if inserted into the vagina). Presumably her attorneys have advised her that she would need to be able to show more than the placebo effect to stay out legal hot water on that score.

[Randy Stankey]

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone

Ozone is a powerful oxidant...and has many industrial and consumer applications related to oxidation. This same high oxidizing potential, however, causes ozone to damage mucous and respiratory tissues in animals, and also tissues in plants, above concentrations of about 0.1 ppm.

...as of 2012 at least five deaths had been reported due to [oxygen therapy]use on people with cancer.

If anyone can find this information with a dozen keystrokes on their computer's keyboard, why would anybody so stupid as to squirt it up their asses?

Oh...and...uh... Isn't this oxygen therapy supposed to have ANTI-oxidant effects? Hmm... That's a head-scratcher!

[Jim Cassedy]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

I recently went down a weekend rabbit hole of watching awholebuncha interesting documenteries
about nuclear accidents on You Tube. One guy in particular has a whole series of them. To be
fair, many of these incidents were the result of 'people who should have known better' bypassing
safety procedures and interlocks while doing their jobs. There were also alotta stories about
radioactive contamination as the result of abandoned medical equipment that was never properly
de-commissioned and/or disposed of. It's kinda scary when U C how many incidents there were!

I went through school in the 1960's & early 70's. I remember learning about how we were all
going to be living in an amazing 'nuclear future' - - where nuclear reactors were going to make
electricity so cheap, the power companies were practically going to be giving it away because
it would almost cost then more to bill for it than to actually produce it. I remember watching one
film which predicted that by the mid 1990's, we'd all have small nuclear reactors, about the size
of a 60gal hot water heater, right in our homes, which would provide all your heating, hot water,
and electricity, using about a dozen small nuclear fuel rods, which would only have to be replaced
about every 10-15 years. (That was assuming we didn't all freeze to death by 1980, due to
'global cooling' which was also predicted to decimate populations worldwide because even if
you didn't freeze to death, you'd starve because the cooler temps would not support growing
of most crops, causing worldwide starvation ) They were serious about this.There were articles
supporting this written by scholars and scientists in every major magazine, and they were all j
ust as serious and adamant about the their "OMG- we're all gonna die! " stories of impending
doom then, as they are about their "global warming/climate change' theories now, which is why
I'm somewhat of a skeptic. ( NOTE: I didn't call it hoax- and I'm not going to get into a hissy fit-
debate about it. You're not going to change my mind, and I"m probably not going to change yours.
So we'll just have to agree to disagree) Fool me once. . . . . etc...

[Leo Enticknap]

I remember once seeing a promotional film made when Britain's first nuke station opened (the sort of thing that schoolkids were subjected to on 16mm while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gym, as a supposed Friday afternoon "treat"), which repeated the very same claim: that nuclear fission power would prove to be so cheap that it wouldn't even need to be metered. We know how that prediction ended up! IMHO, the reason that claim proved to be so wide of the mark was that the costs of safety and decommissioning at EOL were grossly underestimated. San Onofre closed in 2013, and they reckon that it'll be 2027 before the site is totally made safe: even as of now, there is no totally finalized plan for the long term storage of the radioactive crap they are pulling out of it.

Returning to random news stories, there was quite a good Telegraph obit today.

‘Napoleon XIV’, recording engineer who had a hit with They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! – obituary

Jerry Samuels’s deranged ditty went to No 3 in the US and No 4 in the UK but rapidly descended the charts

Jerry Samuels, who has died aged 84, was an American recording engineer who, under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, concocted the irritatingly memorable and deeply creepy one-hit wonder They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

Issued as a single in the summer of 1966, the deranged ditty (it could hardly be called a song) consisted of “Napoleon”, accompanied by nothing more than a snare drum, a tambourine and hands clapping in unison, in a voice spiralling into a sort of manic falsetto, telling of the heartbreak, misery and subsequent mental disintegration that leads him to be consigned to a “funny farm where life is beautiful all the time”.

Only in the final line is it revealed that the cause of his angst is not a woman, but a runaway dog: “They’ll find you yet, and when they do, they’ll put you in the ASPCA, you mangy mutt!”

The single (whose B-side, !aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT ot gnimoC er’yehT consisted of the A-side played backwards) shot to No 3 in the US charts and No 4 in the UK charts before registering the biggest drop in chart history when US radio stations stopped playing it following complaints from mental health organisations.

From the 1970s it became a staple of radio broadcasts and compilation albums by a US DJ and novelty-record specialist calling himself Dr Demento, along with other Napoleon XIV numbers such as I Live in a Split-Level Head and The Nuts on My Family Tree, none of which troubled the charts.

When last heard of Samuels was working as a piano-bar entertainer for senior citizens groups.

Jerrold Samuels was born on May 3 1938 in the Bronx area of New York. He learnt to play the piano as a child and began his career performing in local bars. In 1956 he recorded his first song, Puppy Love (not the Donny Osmond song), for the Vik Records label.

By his 20s he was working at Associated Recording Studios in New York as a recording engineer and songwriter, co-writing under a pseudonym As If I Didn’t Know, which became a hit for Adam Wade in 1961, and writing The Shelter of Your Arms, a big 1964 hit for Sammy Davis Jr.

Samuels began work on They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!, as an experiment with new editing technology that would let him raise the pitch on a song recording without changing the tempo. He adopted the name Napoleon XIV, credited his composition to N Bonaparte and persuaded Warner Bros Records to release it.

The success of the single inspired Warner Bros to issue an eponymous album including other songs by Napoleon XIV on a mental illness theme (I’m in Love With My Little Red Tricycle, Photogenic, Schizophrenic You, and so on) and a riposte to the title track entitled I’m Happy They Took You Away, Ha- Haaa! by a female artist going by the name of Josephine XV.

The album was not a success.

For many years Samuels made a living playing standards at piano bars, latterly in what The Philadelphia Inquirer described as “senior living facilities”. At one stage he was said to have founded and run a business selling “roach clips” – metal devices for holding marijuana cigarette butts.

In 1984 he created his own talent agency in Philadelphia for performers on the “senior living” circuit.

In 1988 he recorded a sequel to his greatest hit, They’re Coming to Take Me Again Ha-Haaa!, but as Dr Demento observed, “it was not really very good... Still, he created a masterpiece and nobody can take that away from him.”

He is survived by his second wife Bobbie and by two sons. Another son predeceased him.

Jerry Samuels, aka Napoleon XIV, born May 3 1938, died March 10 2023