Dowbrigade

SANTA FE — New Mexico has taken its fight against drunken driving to men’s restrooms around the state.

The state has ordered 500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded anti-DWI message to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.

The top of the devices feature the state DWI slogan — "You drink, you drive, you lose."

Some Albuquerque bars installed the devices this week.

And the state Transportation Department plans to distribute them to Santa Fe bars and restaurants as well as establishments in Farmington, Gallup and Las Cruces.

The state spent $21 for each talking urinal cake for the pilot program but will ask bars and restaurants to pay for future orders if the idea catches on.

from KOAT New Mexico

Turns out this is nowhere near as interesting as it could be. How about urinals that automatically do alcohol testing on the stream of urine? Think about it. All over America deadly dangerous drunken drivers on interstate highways are giving voluntary samples proving their guilt in the crime they are in the act of committing – and we ignore it!

The electronic urinal could issue a warning in cases where it detects a slight level of alcohol A small speaker mounted inconspicuously above and behind the miscreant could announce, in a menacing State Police style voice, "Excuse me, sir. It looks like you’ve had a few drinks tonight. Are you absolutely sure you are in control of your vehicle and your judgment. The State Police advise you to remain at this rest area until your blood alcohol level has fallen. Should you be apprehended for driving under the influence, your licence will be suspended. Coffee is available is vending machines outside this rest room."

In cases in which the blood alcohol level is above the legal limit, a direct alarm to the State Police Headquarters would be activated. A micro-camera facing the pisser head-in would record his features for posterity. The steely voice could announce, "You are in violation of State Law 156.88, Driving Under the Influence. Remain where you are. Do not attempt to return to your vehicle. If you do so you will be charged with leaving the scene of a crime."

The arrangement to catch female drunk drivers will have to be slightly modified, but we will leave it to a female expert to design the modifications.

Once the drunk driver has been identified, cameras mounted in the parking lots will follow him back to his car, recording the make, model and licence. How, you may ask, will the system avoid molesting drunk passengers? Simple! The answer lies in the selfsame parking lot cameras. At such close distances, they can record every face that gets out of a driver’s seat, and match them to the urinal cams! The technology exists today; it isn’t rocket science, and it isn’t even that expensive.

As to the invasion of privacy objections – wise up, wimps. Drunk drivers kill thousands of innocent people, men, women and children, every year. Using technology to get them off the streets should be a no-brainer.

The only problem we can envision is that once the plan goes into effect, drinkers will stop going to the bathroom, at least in the available public facilities. Some will try to hold it in. We now know, thanks to radio station KDND-FM, how dangerous that can be. Some will piss in empty bottles, beer cans, plastic bags, tennis ball cans, or try to. Others, desperate, will try to piss in bushes, ditches, or median strips, and be arrested for urinating in public. Many will end up pissing their pants, or their upholstery.

At any rate, drivers with alcohol in their piss would be severely inconvenienced Actually, that could be the most entertaining aspect of the entire effort. Lives would be saved, and hilarity ensued.

In typical blind-pig fashion, the Dowbrigade did not manage to find this soiree, even after being informed by the ultimate insider, the inestimable adamg of Universal Hub fame, that the secret location was "327 Summer Street – Second Floor – South Boston".

Is anybody who was there awake yet? We would love to post some links to blog postings or photos about the event.

Five paint-covered punks, suspected to be in town for a naked graffiti party in South Boston this weekend, were busted by MBTA police while trying to practice their illegal art on several subway cars, officials said.

Three of the five were visiting from Europe and were ordered by a Quincy District Court judge to turn in their passports, stay off the T and remain in the United States until the case plays out in court.

Officials believe the men may be visiting for a Web-advertised underground party tonight in South Boston with DJs and events featuring nude models who will be decorated with body paint.

from the Boston Herald

Naked Graffiti Party??!! Tonight Somewhere in Boston??! And the Dowbrigade wasn’t invited??!! Several minutes of intense searching has failed to reveal the location or any of the reported on-line fliers for said Naked Graffiti Party, which, considering the police attention and last night’s arrests, is probably the point.

Any hot tipsters out there who clue us in to the 411 can rest assured we will not divulge any of the details until after the fact…..

Transforming the rough craft of lobstering into a gentle art, a New Hampshire outfit has persuaded Whole Foods Market to waive its ban on live lobster sales at a new store opening next week in Portland, Maine.

For Whole Foods, an upscale grocery chain promising "animal compassionate" foods, the decision marks yet another effort to provide its customers with the delicacy while giving the lobsters what it considers a decent demise. Whole Foods brought a national debate to a boil last year after it first offered little condos for lobsters in holding pens so the animals would not attack each other, and then scuttled the idea and banned all live lobster sales, equating current lobster catch-and-ship techniques with torture.

from the Boston Globe

We like to kill our own lobsters with an overdose of heroin, so we know they don’t suffer. Two of my Latina students tried to convince me in class today that South American lobsters scream as they are being boiled alive in the lobster pot. Can this be true?

Haven’t been posting much lately, as a result of real, interesting work in our non-blogging existence, lack of any specific focus for our spleen or wit, and general indolence.

However, any readers interested in the application of technology to higher education may want to take a look at a mashup we created with our Nikon hand-held still camera, Final Cut Express and a fantastic beta site called Atlas, which allows you to tap into the Google mapping APIs through a super-simple, almost fool-proof interface (hey, even we figured it out our first time through).

It allows users to creat custom Google maps, of any dimension or variety, and place pins (many different colors and shapes provided) wherever. You can also select the size and content of the info window which pops up at that point, which can include text, images or even video. You can also control other aspects of the map.

So far we have used it to show our students Shopping Venues around town, movie theaters with showtimes, and now, a video tour of Harvard Square. If we could request one additional feature, it would be the ability to design and upload our own icons….

Atlas by Faneuil Media

WASHINGTON — A much anticipated US intelligence report warned yesterday that the rising violence in Iraq could permanently tear the country apart and, in the worst case, create a state of anarchy with no legitimate authority that combines "extreme ethnosectarian violence with debilitating intragroup clashes."

The secret National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the first in more than two years, said Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence now far outpaces the anti-US insurgency.

from the Boston Globe

Could the fact that we are so darn good at keeping those "Top Secret" reports and documents secret be a symptom or a contributing factor to the fact that the most powerful military in the history of the human race is getting smeared over the streets of Iraq by a rag-tag gaggle of demented turbaned fanatics?

As time passes and the death toll of innocents rises (including the tricked, trapped and betrayed GI’s) a partition of the country into three independent enclaves is becoming more and more a viable and attractive alternative. In the mainstream press, it has moved up the list of options, from an unthinkable disaster to the least of an evil list of possibilities. Of course, it is attractive only in comparison to the alternatives. The globe story continues:

The report by President Bush’s top intelligence analysts said that if the violence continues to get worse, there are three possible outcomes: The country will disintegrate into three separate enclaves (Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish), a strongman will seize power, or anarchy will set in, bringing with it "the greatest potential for instability."

As usual, the mainstream press refuses to look beyond the next turn in the road. The real risk of a power vacuum in Iraq is the Horror Next Door. There is a very real possibility, which the Dowbrigade believes to be a probability, that when we withdraw Iraq will quickly become a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Revolutionary Council of Iran.

In addition to the direct threat of a radical Islamic state close to going nuclear, Iran represents the seed of a Greater Islamic Republic (Empire), the common aspiration of the Ayatollahs, Usama bin Laden, Al-Queda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and fundamentalists around the world.

What that eventuality, a nuclear-armed Empire of almost a billion Muslims, in control of the majority of the world’s oil reserves and dedicated to opposing the American agenda and the destruction of Israel, would mean for the United States staggers the imagination, and is uncomfortable to contemplate. Developing contingency plans would be a nightmare.

But we sure hope someone at the State Department is working on it.