Saw this at There, I Fixed It:
I love this thing. It’s like poetry in tent form. It has a geodesic frame which you spend about 60 seconds pumping up, and it automatically pulls the rest of the tent into shape. No fiddling with tent poles.
Sure beats this mess.
Which puts me in mind of Romney comparing the cumbersome 33-page government change-of-address form to the simplicity of the Wawa touch-screen ordering system.
So, if the Obama administration were to “create a better tent for all Americans”, how would that work out, exactly?
I speculate thusly:
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1) Give design contract to deserving minority (at least 1/32 Native American)
2) Prop up company with $500 million loan guarantee
3) Slight delay for bankruptcy proceedings.
4) Give contract to second company, brag about jobs created by “innovative public-private partnership”.
5) Reject original design as “not green enough”. Insist tent come equipped with “flexible solar panels”.
6) Arrange second “innovative public-private partnership” with another company to invent flexible solar panels.
7) After flexible solar-panel company goes bankrupt, say “screw the solar panels” and just steal Heimplanet’s inflatable tent design, but make the air-pump battery-powered so that handless people can use it, i.e. American’s with Disabilities Act compliant.
8) Sell the tent for twice what Heimplanet does. Accuse Heimplanet of selling their product at “anti-competitive prices” and “undercutting the market”. Conduct extensive federal investigation that drives Heimplanet into bankruptcy.
9) After a rash of “inexplicable” battery fires, “innovative public-private partnership” company is sued into bankruptcy.
10) Cancel project. Blame Bush
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Brills.
11) Try to convince a majority of voters that this is normal Presidential behavior and aren’t we lucky to have him!
12) Plus, if he doesn’t
squanderspend our money on green projects like this, we’re all going to die of global warming, pollution and no jobs.I’ve always liked this analogy:
If you put the federal government in charge of beaches, within five years there would be a shortage of sand.
2 things:
#1. Where I live, nobody knows how to setup a tent, because “camping” means hauling a camper full of beer somewhere. Hiking is unheard of. I own three tents, I hike, there is no room for beer in my pack, and I do not have a camper and am thus a primitive according to the natives.
#2. I was in the Army National Guard. We didn’t bother with tents, we just slept on top of our sleeping bag, on the ground. And an M4 makes for a horrible sleeping partner, but is a great companion when one is awake. The mess had a tent…but we never solved the mystery of how they got that thing up (or when)…or what the eggs were actually made of. Nor did we know if the coffee was actually coffee. It was a black hot liquid.
Keln – You poor bastard. I was in the Navy, and I never had a to pitch a tent. 3 hots & a cot every day of the year. Steak & lobster once a month, plus special pizza & ice cream nights, and 2 beers after 45 days at sea.
‘course, being on a carrier during the Cold War, I had a Russian nuke aimed at my head the whole time, and God help me if things went south. Even worse, if it were conventional war, I’d die by drowning, since I worked below the water line.
Always the specter of a grisly death, but it never happened, so we’ll just say I had it easy.
Most importantly – NO TENTS!
Actually I had it even easir. I had a son and did not get drafted. Thanks! you guys. I do appreciate it!
Alternate step 10….Move the manufacture of the tents to China, and blame George (Bush’s Fault™) Bush for moving the operation there.
Calcpa – I was only in for 6 years. Raising a son is 18 to life. You’ve got the hard job.
Harvey – I did the Navy thing before the Army thing. I was on a submarine, and the food there was probably worse than the army. Carriers get all the good stuff.
I don’t think we ever had anyone aiming a nuke at us, we were hard to find you see. But I did have to sleep in the torpedo room for my first deployment, with a torpedo above me dripping grease on my blanket, and a tomahawk cruise missle next to me, to kiss goodnight. I always kissed it goodnight…just in case.
I worked in the engineering department, so I probably only saw daylight as often as you did.
But yeah, carriers are basically the Navy’s version of luxury cruise ships. Highly recommended for anyone considering the Navy, although they don’t always take requests.
As for me, when I was in, the Enterprise was staffing up for a upcoming trip to the shipyards for major repairs, so anyone asking for it, got it.
I asked for it. Mostly because I liked the name.
When I went into nuke school, “Enterprise” was called the “mobile Chernobyl”, and we had the impression that it’s not where you want to go if you’re a nuke.
The “bad” part about the Enterprise was that it was constructed entirely of cutting-edge 1950’s technology. I worked on a lot of equipment that was made before me and half my older brothers were born.
The other part – that’s either “bad” or “interesting”, depending on your point of view – is that they basically took the old design for oil-burning boiler-powered carriers and just dropped in nuclear reactors in place of the boilers. Sorta like using advanced, high-temperature carbon-fiber polymers to build a log cabin.
Now the GOOD part is that, with 8 reactors, the Enterprise could sustain a HELL of a lot of battle damage and not worry about losing all power and going dead in the water.
Modern carriers – 2 reactors. Two people have bad days, you’re sitting in the dark, not moving, and sure as hell not launching planes. Good luck, sitting duck.
So Keln was a fellow submariner but on a Nuc! You were still a target to us pig boaters, btw. We theoretically sunk every nuc fast attack in every war game we were ever in. I’d reveal more but it’s EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE!
lol…
Yeah, I was a nuke on a nuke sub. We played war games with some diesel boats from another country once, and it was pretty humbling in a tight operating area. However, when the scenario was stretched out to a long chase in a large deep area it was a whole different story. All a nuke sub has to do is wait for those battery driven toy boats to start running their diesel…and blam! Game over, nuke wins.
You know a diesel boat is technically not a submarine right? It is a temporarily submersible surface ship. 😉
You forget to include the step about receiving millions in campaign contributions from said “innovative public-private partnership”
Drama – I stand corrected 🙂