Do You Live In One Of America's Funniest Named Towns?

Reader's Digest humor editor, Andy Simmons crafted 24 of the funniest American town names into a cute story.  Are you familiar with any of these locales:
     1.  Boring, Oregon
     2.  Why, Arizona
     3.  Whynot, Mississippi
     4.  Disco, Tennessee
     5.  Loafers Glory, North Carolina
     6.  Handsome Eddy, New York
     7.  Loveladies, New Jersey
     8.  Husband, Pennsylvania
     9.  Sweet Lips, Tennessee
    10.  Lonelyville, New York
    11.  The Bottle, Alabama
    12.  Condemned Bar, California
    13.  Cranky Corner, Louisiana
    14.  Hell, Michigan
    15.  Oatmeal, Texas
    16.  Sandwich, Massachusetts
    17.  Pie Town, New Mexico
    18.  Greasy, Oklahoma
    19.  Lick Skillet, Tennessee
    20. Brilliant, Ohio
    21.  Do Stop, Kentucky
    22. Wealthy, Texas
    23. Fame, West Virginia
    24. Happyland, Oklahoma

Cook Dinner In Your Dishwasher?

A DishwashersInfo.com piece by Tyler Wells Lynch lists "6 Unconventional Uses for your Dishwasher."  The first suggestion is to use your dishwasher as a steamer to cook fish filets.  It suggests that running a sealed package of seasoned filets through an entire cycle (dry cycle included) sans detergent can produce a tasty steamed seafood entree for your dinner table.

Not surprisingly, a dishwasher can be used to clean more than dishes.  Baseball caps, footwear, tools, toys, sponges, etc.can all be expertly cleaned in one of our favorite kitchen appliances.  I was surprised, however, to learn that a packet of Lemonade flavored Kool-Aid can be used in the detergent dispenser to clean deposits and stains when the dishwasher itself gets dirty.

U.S. Grades for Gridlock

A recent CarConnection.com article (May 24, 2012) reports that Inrix, a provider of traffic data and information, identified Honolulu, Hawaii, as the U.S. city with the worst traffic.  The following list contains their rankings, along with the hours wasted by the average driver in that city because of traffic congestion:
     1)  Honolulu – 58 hours

     2)  Los Angeles – 56 hours

     3)  San Francisco – 48 hours

     4)  New York – 57 hours

     5)  Bridgeport, CT – 42 hours

     6)  Washington, D.C. – 45 hours

     7)  Seattle – 33 hours

     8)  Austin – 30 hours

     9)  Boston - 35 hours

     10) Chicago – 32.8 hours

L.A. drivers, however, have little to fear.  Checking out the INRIX scorecard for more recent data indicates that the City of Angels may be competing to reclaim its crown.

Many drivers from other traffic hampered cities, however, might not have much empathy for having to endure a few extra wasted hours behind the wheel on an island paradise or in sunny southern California.

The good news for all of us is that overall congestion was down 30 percent in 2011 from the previous year.

One last interesting (although not surprising) traffic tidbit is that nationally, the worst morning commute occurs on Tuesday, while the worst evening commute is on Friday.

Exceptional Elevators

A USA Today article lists ten top elevator destinations:

• The Deep (Hull, England) - The world's only underwater elevator.
• Space Needle (Seattle) - Space capsule shaped high-speed elevator cars service this former centerpiece of a World's Fair.
• Christ the Redeemer Monument (Rio de Janeiro) - New whisper-quiet elevators now carry guests to the base of this inspirational statue. 
• Burj Khalifa (Dubai) - The world's fastest elevators, which travel nearly 2,000 feet per minute, zip visitors to the top of the world's tallest building. 
• Newseum (Washington, D.C.) - Six-story glass-walled elevators offer a memorable bay-window view of a 90-foot-tall atrium and the sights along Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue. 
• Eiffel Tower (Paris) - Customized elevators, designed to climb up the monument's curved legs, are an engineering marvel, 
• Luxor Hotel (Las Vegas) – Sixteen elevators climb to the top of the pyramid-shaped building at a 39-degree angle. 
• Empire State Building (New York) - The so-called "robot elevators" of this 1931 art deco building amazed the public because they were among the first that visitors could summon by pushing a button. Otis is now installing a new energy-efficient elevator system that generates electricity as it works, much like a hybrid car. 
• The Biltmore (Asheville, N.C.) - George Vanderbilt's extraordinary mountain mansion was the first building in the region to have an elevator. With ornate metalwork and brass fixtures, it is one of the oldest operating systems around. 
• CN Tower (Toronto) – An express elevator for the tallest freestanding structure in the Western Hemisphere takes guests, in glass-door cars, to an observation deck 1,136 feet above Canada's largest city in less than a minute.

Mobility on Mars

Today, NASA successfully landed a large and sophisticated mobile laboratory on Mars.  While true that it was two years later than planned and $900 million over budget, this represents one of the few successes in Mars landings (70% of previous missions to Mars have ended in failure). NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden compares the challenge of Mars expeditions to launching something from Kennedy Space Center and having it land in the Rose Bowl, on the 50-year-line, on a Frisbee.

Five of Six Apollo Mission Flags Still Flying

According to a USA Today article, high resolution cameras orbiting the moon have located all but one of the American flags planted by Apollo mission astronauts.  The single exception is that from the very first human moon landing (Apollo 11), back in 1969.  This makes sense, however, as Buzz Aldrin remembers that flag being blown over from the rocket blast when they launched from the moon's surface.  In addition to the flags, photos also reveal tracks made by lunar rovers and equipment left behind, including backpacks jettisoned by astronauts. Images taken of the Apollo 17 site show the astronauts' foot trails.