What’s An Appropriate Penalty For Defacing The Lincoln Memorial?

by Dave Seminara on

The Lincoln Memorial was closed early Friday morning after police discovered that someone had splashed green paint on the iconic 19-foot tall statue shortly before 1:30 a.m. A National Park Service spokesperson said that there appeared to be no permanent damage to the statue. The memorial’s portico reopened this afternoon after the cleanup was complete.

Honest Abe is a beloved national hero. Historians consistently rank him as one of our best presidents, and the Lincoln Memorial holds an important place in American history as the site where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. The online reaction to the brazen act of vandalism ranged from despair to anger to disbelief.”There’s not many things left in the country that could be considered sacrosanct..but this would have to have been one of the few,” wrote one Huffington Post reader. “Shame on whoever did this.”

CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin said on air that the defacement “made her furious.” Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary, tweeted that it was “very upsetting” using the hashtag #Protectthemall.

“Unreal! What is happening to this country?” tweeted Shari Starkey. And @Trinaelephant tweeted, “Someone vandalized the Lincoln Memorial? Here’s an idea. You don’t like the country, then LEAVE.”

I used to live and work in Washington, D.C. and the Lincoln Memorial was one of my favorite places to take visitors or to visit alone, especially late at night when few tourists are around. Police say they are reviewing surveillance footage to determine who committed the crime and I pray that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this senseless act of vandalism are caught and given swift, harsh justice.

Vandalism is typically a crime that merits just a slap on the wrist, but I hope the perpetrators do some time. Perhaps a little time behind bars would give them an opportunity to brush up on their American history. What do you think is an appropriate punishment for defacing this cherished memorial?

Why Are Customs Lines So Long At U.S. Airports?

by Dave Seminara on

Delta CEO Richard Anderson made news on Wednesday when he vented about U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) alleged inability to quickly screen passengers coming off of international flights at major U.S. airports.

“I must say I think it’s an embarrassment for our government that as much as we as an industry pay into Customs And Border Patrol that we have issues at not just JFK but at Newark, at Chicago, at Los Angeles where we cannot seem to get our government to perform a very basic service,” he told Airline analyst Helane Becker of Cowen and Co, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News.

I don’t disagree with Anderson. In fact, I wrote a piece venting about the fact that I waited 90 minutes to clear customs in Houston in February. But as a former Foreign Service Officer who has interviewed thousands of foreign nationals applying for U.S. visas and once spent a day alongside a CBP officer working at JFK, I can offer a little more context as to why the lines are so long, other than the obvious fact that there aren’t enough CPB officers to control the crowds.Most U.S. airports have two lines: one for U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents (LPR’s or green card holders) and another for foreign nationals. Interviews with American citizens are nearly always perfunctory but screening LPR’s can take longer. Many Americans don’t realize that green card holders can lose their legal status if they remain outside the U.S. for more than a year unless they can prove extenuating circumstances.

Because we don’t typically stamp travelers on their way out of the country, it can be time consuming for CBP officers to verify how long legal residents were outside the country. Also, many LPR’s don’t speak English, which can slow down the screening process. If we want to speed up the screening process for Americans returning home, the easiest way to do so would be to have LPR’s use the line for foreign nationals. They would hate that solution but if they aren’t U.S. citizens, technically, they are foreign nationals.

Obviously it would be preferable to simply increase CBP staffing, but with government coffers stretched thin across the board, this option seems unlikely. Why are the lines to screen foreign nationals so long? In short, because CBP officers face a very difficult task.

They have just a couple minutes to try to ascertain if the individual standing before them intends to abide by U.S. laws or not. Often times, these travelers speak no English — and most officers can also speak a second language, usually Spanish, but travelers come to the U.S. from every corner of the globe. They have a tough, thankless job and some are better than others at being friendly and welcoming.

Human-Powered Helicopter Wins Award (VIDEO)

by Sean McLachlan on


Oh Canada! First you gave us William Shatner, now you give us a human-powered helicopter.

A team of engineers called AeroVelo has won a $250,000 award for creating a human-powered helicopter that could fly three meters off the ground for 60 seconds while keeping the cockpit within a ten-square-meter area. The American Helicopter Society sponsored this Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition, and the prize money has been on offer for nearly 30 years.

Man-powering a helicopter is tough to do since humans don’t have strength to lift themselves off the ground without large rotors. Of course, large rotors are heavy, making it hard for a human to get the helicopter off the ground. This is the reason all those Renaissance-era experiments with birdlike flapping wings never worked. To cut down on weight, the team used super-light materials that are too delicate to be flown outdoors.

AeroVelo’s flight lasted 64.11 seconds, a world record, and reached up to 3.3 meters in altitude. As you can see from the video, drift was a problem with this and all other competitors, with the machine drifting up to 9.8 meters.

So will this be the new way to get to the hockey game? Probably not. The personal jetpack has been around for decades but never took off either. The Martin Jetpack company is trying to change that, although they haven’t yet made their jetpacks — which will probably cost in the six figures — commercially available yet. Popular Mechanics did an interesting article on why jet packs aren’t feasible.

The Plague Closes Los Angeles Forest

by Sean McLachlan on

Officials evacuated and closed parts of the Angeles National Forest after finding a dead squirrel that was infected with bubonic plague, the BBC reports.

Scientists are currently examining the squirrel to see if it died of the disease or of other causes. Park officials are using insecticides on squirrel burrows to kill off any fleas, which is how the disease spreads from one animal to another. The Twisted Arrow, Broken Blade and Pima Loops of the Table Mountain campgrounds are closed until further notice, although hiking is still permitted.

The plague killed about a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century but is not nearly as active these days. Only four people have contracted the disease in Los Angeles County since 1984. This map from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows each case of the plague in the United States since 1970. About 80% were of the bubonic variety and most cases were not fatal, since antibiotic treatment is usually successful. In related news, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany are developing an easy test to detect the plague in its early stages.

As you can see, there are two main clusters. New Mexico gets about half of all the human infections in the U.S. In the 1980s, the worst plague decade, it had slightly more than a hundred cases. Worldwide, most plague cases are in south central Africa and east Asia. People tend to get it while engaged in outdoor activities.

The Gastrointestinal Gamble: Kimchee Carbonara With Doritos

by David Farley on

The contents of the bowl in front of me looked familiar. In it, eggy noodles swirling with some variety on the theme of bacon. It was recognizable but at the same time it wasn’t. That’s because it also included kimchee and – wait for it – Doritos.

[Record scratch across the heavens.]

Welcome to King Noodle in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the stoniest stoner restaurant you’ll come across this side of San Francisco. Mirrored walls and a disco ball (relics from the space’s previous incarnation as a Dominican bar) and a ceiling lined with strips of red, blue and purple Christmas lights illuminate the spray painted walls of corral reefs on a Martian-like landscape (done by local artists at Secret HandShake). If the space seems like an electric Kool-Aid acid test, the menu reads like it was concocted after several hits from an evil wizard bong and a trip to the kitchen to see what’s in the fridge: Spam fried rice, mapo tofu with chili cheese fries, and rice cakes with krab and mozzarella in a spicy sauce.

And then there’s that dish I described above: kimchee carbonara. When I first heard about it – the restaurant just opened last month – I knew I had to try it.

I have a love affair with the Roman pasta dish carbonara. I wrote about it for Gadling after a recent trip to Rome in which I mostly only ate the egg-y pasta dish of contested origins every place I sat down to eat. And I happen to have just fused Korean and Italian tastes in a cooking competition my friends had just organized.

Here I was in Bushwick, a name that translates as “refuge” in Dutch. The neighborhood was once a civic wasteland, particularly after the 1977 riots that decimated the area. In the 1990s, artists began moving into the desolate warehouse and loft buildings, which had no heat and very few comforts. It wasn’t until a decade ago when galleries, bars and restaurants slowly and quietly began opening up here. Then in early 2008 came Italian restaurant Roberta’s. It has drawn people to the neighborhood ever since, especially now with the addition of Roberta’s upscale spin-off Blanca garnering rave reviews. Bushwick is now so self-sustainable that residents don’t necessarily need to drift into neighboring Williamsburg for decent eating and drinking.

King Noodle is a prime example, which sits next to The Narrows, a great cocktail bar. When chef Nick Subic, late Roberta’s, delivered my kimchee carbonara, I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

“It all started when my restaurant partner and I were at Snacky” – an Asian restaurant in Williamsburg – “when we got this idea to do a restaurant that evokes those weird second-floor, pub-like restaurants in Korea Town. But we wanted some stoner-dorm-room-vibe thrown into the mix. And that’s where the kimchee carbonara came into it all.”

He added: “We wanted to do something that was as inauthentic to Korean food as Taco Bell was to Mexican food.”

Goal achieved. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the dish is bad. In fact, I liked it very much. The Doritos gave it a nice textural crunch. And the lo mein noodles were the perfect size to wrap around the kimchee and bacon.

I can’t say that when I come back to King Noodle – and I will return – that I’d get the kimchee carbonara again. There’s something about stoner food in restaurants that almost feels like cheating. Part of the appeal, after all, is being stoned (which I wasn’t) and also inventing it yourself. And then, of course, thinking that you just created what might be the greatest thing ever eaten (and then, the next morning, realizing just how wrong you were).

[Photo by David Farley]