Gadling

You know what happens when you ship a car with a Hawaiian license plate from Hawaii to the mainland? You get this sentence at every gas station:

“Hawaii huh? So how long was the drive?”

This, inevitably, is always followed by hearty laughter as if they are the first person to ever think up that joke. Often, the laughter is followed by coughing, then hacking up phlegm and then another trip to the bathroom.

Finally, however, after years of speculation and intense research, a private construction firm in California has reached a deal to construct a bridge from California to Hawaii, which will render the bad joke obsolete.

Beginning in Oxnard, California, and terminating in Kahului, Maui, “Interstate 2” is projected to take seven years to complete and will employ over 2,700 workers. Privately funded by various Southern California social elite who can’t stand renting a Ford Mustang while spending the obligatory one week per year in their Maui mansion, as part of a plan to reduce costs and simultaneously free up prison space, the firm has agreed to a deal, which would utilize California inmates who have a passable background in either engineering, construction or commercial diving.

As can be expected, news of the project has brought about mixed reactions.

Trevor C. McLeonard, a retired accounting executive from Newport Beach who spends eight days per year in his Maui home, seemed a bit ambivalent about the development.

“It’s going to be a long drive for sure,” he admits. “But it beats dealing with the TSA.”

Meanwhile, in Wailuku, Maui, county lifeguard Kimo Ka’ahui was all smiles about the new road.

“Ho, now I can drive my truck to Vegas! Shoots!”

[Image: Quasimime on Flickr]

A skateboard company has taken the concept of ‘baby on board’ to a new level. According to a press release we received, Gr8Sk8 Parents have released a skateboard that we find questionable. The skateboard, designed for parents, operates just as a traditional skateboard would, except a built-in bucket-like baby seat is situated in the middle of the skateboard. Parents find assurance in the placement of the baby seat.

“Noah’s always right between my legs while I’m skating. I feel safe and I think he does, too”, said a Boulder, Colorado mom earlier this week when asked about the newest Gr8Sk8 release.

The baby seat is equipped with a sturdy fastening system, but some still have their doubts. Should the skateboard fall out from the skater’s feet and send the board straight into traffic, what about the baby? Needless to say, we still have some questions over here at Gadling about the board. But should the board prove useful and popular enough, prepare to travel with your young one in an entirely new way. Imagine exploring a brand new city’s twisting alley ways via skateboard without having to leave your baby behind. The future is now.

The tiny South Pacific Island of Nauru, known for its spectacular beaches and obese residents (see photo above), unveiled a slick new marketing campaign designed to boost tourism yesterday. The new motto, “Feel Thin in Nauru,” refers to the fact that 94.5 percent of the country’s citizens are overweight.

“A lot of people say Americans are fat,” said Hoku Detemano, Nauru’s 5-foot-3, 368-pound Minister of Tourism. “But they’ve never been here before.”

Detemano said that the campaign was primarily targeted towards Americans, 74.1 percent of whom are overweight.

“We think they’ll feel really good about themselves here,” he said, noting that Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” is still charting in Nauru. “We have hotels that are offering special gastric bypass weekends and our national airline offers an all-you-can eat deal on ribs, and an in-flight magazine called ‘Gigantic Asses.'”

Detemano also noted that hungry travelers shouldn’t be concerned about food shortages on the remote island.

“We actually don’t eat that much,” he said. “We all just have really slow metabolisms.”

[Photo of Nauru resident via Willy Cypress on Flickr.]

Fresh off his groundbreaking win in “Top Chef,” Season 74, celebrity chef Grant Stone issued a press release this morning announcing the foundation of a new Chicago-based underground eating club. Named after the “grand architecture and aspirations of this wonderful city,” Erect will be a members-only eating club, catering only a select, worthy demographic and a small lottery of lucky winners who win tickets at the nightly table.

Each day the exclusive staff at Erect will create only one meal — thirty-eight courses for exactly one person. Erect’s exclusive dining room has space for only one person, making the chef to diner ratio an unprecedented 48:1. The diner will eat in a pitch-black sensory deprivation chamber, focusing solely on the “explosive bouquets of flavors, textures and vanities proffered by Erect’s unparalleled meals.”

Tickets, which run $750 per meal, will be offered to exclusive members of the foodie underground and on a limited basis to Web customers. For a chance to win online, prospective clients need to sign up precisely after tickets go on sale at a random time each week. Tickets typically sell out after 20-30 seconds, so it’s best to leave the browser window open 24/7 and voraciously mash the reload button until their release.

The first fifty contestants then take an SAT-style test combining food pop culture, celebrity chefs and multi variable calculus to determine their aptitude in the field. The top five remaining candidates will finally be matched tête-a-tête “Top Chef”-style trivia quiz gauging a wide spectrum of foodie knowledge such as the number of calories in an unladen African Swallow (braised) versus a European Swallow (boiled). That winner gets the chance to dine in the exclusive Erect dining room.Wicker Park resident Lian Sze was among the first Erect fans to make it into the final rounds of tests due to her innate ability to integrate imaginary numbers. A Ph.D. candidate in non-linear algebra, Ms. Sze was thrilled at the opportunity to participate saying, “The simple pleasure of sharing the same city block with Chef Stone makes my skin tingle. I can feel people looking at me differently now. I feel so validated.”

Underground eating clubs, for their part, have been growing steadily since they started appearing in the mainstream in the late ’90s. With Erect, the main difference is in the celebrity support. Whether Chef Stone will be able to create a unique experience beyond the traditional supper club is the real buzz among the foodie underground. Mike Lee, the creative and culinary mind behind the wildly popular Studiofeast series in New York thinks that he’s destined to fail because there simply aren’t any truly new ideas anymore. “What Stone is thinking of doing is basically making a giant steaming pile of bad idea meatloaf out of every discarded creative pitch that’s ever been heard at the Food Network and Bravo,” Lee told Gadling.

Elaborating, Lee said that he felt that Stone’s “47 wrongs make a one right” strategy just wouldn’t work today and that he should try and come back to Earth with his approach. “The greatest trick an ‘underground’ chef ever played was making people believe he didn’t exist. That’s why at Studiofeast I’m pivoting and just making beef stroganoff for people on their couches. It’s so far to the right of the normal chart that it’ll warp back to the other side and become the weirdest thing anyone has ever done. I’m willing to bet my sanitary inspection grade on it…oh wait, lolz!”

Regardless of the dialogue, the proof will be in Erect’s reviews. Scheduled for an opening this evening, April Fools’ Day, feedback is expected later this week.