Runway Fun United Airlines may be the first US airline to offer wireless in-flight Internet service, though it may have to do so from the ground if it can’t solve its plane-loads of debt and unfunded pension obligations. Maybe passengers and investors will Google United to see when it and its stock might get airborne.
Chinese Checkers No, not the game, the cars. Does a country with five times the population of the US really need to export its cars to us? We can’t keep GM going as it is, although its demise might not be a bad thing except for the 90,000 workers it will have left after axing 25,000 this week. Maybe instead of exporting jobs, the US should export people needing jobs—China might make good use of 25,000 American trained auto builders who can not only show them how to build substandard vehicles, but introduce them to the UAW philosophies and get that $2 per hour up to $37.
Ay Carumba! Mexicans with valid SS numbers and resident alien cards are renting them out to those not so fortunate. In the process, besides pocketing a fee for the service, these entrepreneurial ID renters expand their Social Security contributions thus qualifying for a larger pension down the road and collect income tax refunds. Identity theft is a huge problem, but maybe, inadvertently, these Rio Grande waders have come up with a solution for that problem as well.
Canadian Cuckarocha? Some nut from north of the border has invented a robot driven by something called a Madagascar hissing cockroach (for you NY apartment dwellers, it can grow to the size of a mouse and the hissing part doesn’t sound all that endearing so stop complaining) that he sticks in the driver’s seat with Velcro and then depends on the roach’s innate aversion to light to steer the robot away from light-flashing obstacles. He must have a couple of teenagers and old farts in the crowd though because it seems some of them like the crashing sensation while others sit idly for long periods of time, probably at intersections.
Stick That Whistle Where? Whistle blowing is a serious business ethics problem (apologies for using business and ethics in the same sentence). Consider Dr. Peter Rost, a vice president at Pfizer, one of the drug companies that we know and love. Rost ratted the pharmaceutical industry out on exorbitant drug prices, though I don’t know why he had to—like, it’s not a secret. First, his employees stopped reporting to him; second, his supervisors stopped returning his calls; third, he doesn’t know to whom to report; fourth, his secretary left; fifth, his office was moved near Pfizer’s security department in a different town; sixth, his company e-mail was cut off and his corporate cellphone stopped working. You don’t have to write mystery novels to guess what seventh might be. I think if I were Rost, I’d take my whistle and go tootle somewhere safer.
Kozlowski Kraziness & Scrushy Silliness If the juries for Denis Kozlowski, Tyco’s ex CEO, and Richard Scrushy, Health South’s ex CEO don’t get their acts together, these two super-rich oinkers may avoid the slammer and again make a mockery of our equal justice for all system.