Yep, even back in 1949, this one generated a lot of outrage over the then-new store in Portland's Hollywood district's promotion of a free giveaway of a two month-old baby.
Well, it did generate a considerable amount of interest ahead of their grand opening.
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But the duplicitous Tom Steyer is another thing. And to Biden's credit, he killed Tommy's "environmentalist" baloney.
During the Democratic debate on Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden attacked environmentalist billionaire investor Tom Steyer for making his money by investing in coal. Steyer has made fighting climate change his key issue in the 2020 race, so Biden's attack was particularly powerful.
Steyer may be rich, thanks to his daddy and mommy, but he's still as dumb as a box of coal.
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But 30 minutes northwest of Tucson, you can pick up this beauty - and 13 acres of land - for less than that. Of course, there are a few caveats:
A decommissioned subterranean missile complex just went on the market, and at just about 30 minutes northwest of Tucson, you get both solitude and the option of rejoining society.
This place is bringing all the industrial-chic vibes, complete with three blast doors made to withstand shockwaves, an access portal, a command center and a decontamination area, according to Business Insider.
Once home to a Titan II nuclear missile, the site was closed in the 1980s, so you can't play "Global Thermonuclear War", as the missile was removed.
The only way to win the game is not to play at all.
The place has a lot of history to it, though.
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Both characters would inspire awe through their sheer power, and both rose to and fell from grace, leaving behind a trail of debris that would captivate people for decades to come.
The massive sperm whale came first, three days earlier in fact, when all 45 feet and eight tons of it washed ashore on a beach near Florence, about a mile south from the mouth of the Siuslaw River. Local officials weren't sure what to do with it, and as the whale carcass began to stink people started coming out to see it.
The problem was, as KATU reporter Paul Linnman said in his now-famous broadcast of the event, "it had been so long since a whale washed up in Lane County, nobody could remember how to get rid of one."
You could bury the carcass, but waves would just unearth it eventually. And it was certainly too big to burn. With no better ideas, locals turned to the Oregon Department of Transportation, which decided to treat the sperm whale like a troublesome boulder and simply blow the thing up. Once disintegrated, their thinking went, seagulls and scavengers would take care of the pieces.
They couldn't cut it up and bury it, because nobody wanted to cut it up. And so, dynamite it was. 20 cases of it, in fact.
"The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere," Linnman reported.
Chunks as big as three feet square descended from the sky, forcing everyone to evacuate the area. One piece landed on a car, caving in its roof. Miraculously nobody was hurt, however "everyone on the scene was covered with small particles of dead whale," Linnman said.
What's so incredible about Tonya Harding and the exploding whale are not just the characters themselves, but the infamy that followed them for decades to come.
In 1990, a year before Harding landed her famous triple axle, humor columnist Dave Barry resurrected the exploding whale in an article titled "The Farside Comes to Life in Oregon."
The exploding whale was a harbinger of things to come, as Tonya took center stage in Oregon's Infamy Parade.
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The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses due to high winds on November 7, 1940. On November 7, high winds buffeted the area and the bridge swayed considerably. The first failure came at about 11 a.m., when concrete dropped from the road surface. Just minutes later, a 600-foot section of the bridge broke free. By this time, the bridge was being tossed back and forth wildly. At one time, the elevation of the sidewalk on one side of the bridge was 28 feet above that of the sidewalk on the other side. Even though the bridge towers were made of strong structural carbon steel, the bridge proved no match for the violent movement, and collapsed.
Today, the remains of the bridge are still at the bottom of Puget Sound, where they form one of the largest man-made reefs in the world. The spot was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in order to protect it against salvagers.
The old bridge is still often referred to as "Galloping Gertie".
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(CNN)A boat stuck on rocks above Niagara Falls for more than a century has been unmoored by high wind and heavy rains.
It's apparently been flipped onto one side, drifted downstream about 50 feet, and is now hung up again on a different set of rocks.
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Actually, it was yesterday, so he's out in time for tonight's festivities.
Portland Police today arrested Terry Bean, the Portland real estate investor, political fundraiser and LGBTQ pioneer.
He's also a pedophile. His former criminal attorney, Derek Ashton, was also arrested. It seems likely that the latter will eventually be disbarred.
Both men were arrested in connection with a series of events that led to the dismissal of Lane County sex abuse charges against Bean in 2015. Ashton represented Bean in 2015 when Bean first faced sex abuse charges in Lane County relating to a 2013 incident in which Bean and another man, Kiah Lawson, allegedly had sex with a 15-year-old boy in a Eugene hotel.
Ashton until recently represented Bean, a wealthy Democratic donor and a well-known gay rights activist, on charges that Bean sexually abused a 15-year-old boy in a Eugene motel room in 2013.
Lawson's already done two years in jail.
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The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated “news bulletins”, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a ‘sustaining show’ (it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the program’s quality of realism.
I hadn't realized that it aired the night before Halloween.
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It took only four years, seven months and three days from the start of the building of New York’s first subway until it opened to the public, 115 years today, Oct. 27, 1904. Irish and Italian immigrants using picks and shovels dug a 9.1-mile railroad with 28 stations from City Hall up to Grand Central, across to Times Square and up to 145th St.
All the more impressive, as these days it takes about that long to find a working restroom in Grand Central.
Given the multi-year struggle Seattle had in boring a 1.5-mile tunnel to replace the old Alaskan Viaduct, maybe they should have studied the earlier tunnels. But that wouldn't have been Progressive enough.
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The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.
Defense news site C4ISRNET today cites officers from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron – the unit that actually manages the system – in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives were replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
Those eight-inch floppies have a capacity of 80k worth of data and were developed back in the 1960s. Today, the smallest USB thumb drives hold 4 gigabytes. And they're way faster than magnetic disk drives at R/W retrieval and storage.
Less expensive, too.
The upgrades are long overdue.
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