Category: Snark O’ The Day.

Steve Byrne – 

Star Fleet Academy saved my father’s life. I was visiting him the hospital. He’s been unresponsive for days. I turned on the TV in his room & watched this new show.
Within minutes, my father woke up.
Then he got up and changed the channel.

I think that Operation Nitro Zeus never really ended.

Quip O’ The Day: ‘Cardboard factory’, suuuure

What the Hell Is Going on in Iran This Time?

Iran is on fire — literally, again — and nobody knows why. A massive power plant and a “cardboard factory” caught fire bigly in Iran over the weekend. But there is impressive new video of Iran’s port explosion from last week.

Iran International reported that a “series of incidents unfolded in Alborz Province, west of Tehran, on Saturday evening, including two fires, reports of an explosion, and a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, according to official statements and eyewitness accounts.”

Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn’t like the mullahs’ regime? Who knows.

For reasons yet unknown, the Montazer Ghaem power plant in Karaj, just west of Tehran, caught fire on Saturday. Here’s that video:


Those cooling towers make Montazer Ghaem look like it might be a nuclear power plant, but it burns natural gas and other fossil fuels.

Tehran posted undated video of the plant not on fire and claimed that there was nothing to see here, move along.

In the same province, also on Saturday, a “cardboard manufacturing factory” was seen burning brightly.

The Schools Reviving Shop Class Offer a Hedge Against the AI Future
Hands-on skills are staging a comeback at leading-edge districts, driven by high college costs and demand for more career choices

In America’s most surprising cutting-edge classes, students pursue hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, getting a jump on lucrative old-school careers.
School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college.
With higher-education costs soaring and white-collar workers under threat by generative AI, the timing couldn’t be better.
In a suburb of Madison, Wis., Middleton High School completed a $90 million campus overhaul in 2022 that included new technical-education facilities. The school’s shop classes, for years tucked away in a back corridor, are now on display. Fishbowl-style glass walls show off the new manufacturing lab, equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms.
Interest in the classes is high. About a quarter of the school’s 2,300 students signed up for at least one of the courses in construction, manufacturing and woodworking at Middleton High, one of Wisconsin’s highest-rated campuses for academics.
“We want kids going to college to feel these courses fit on their transcripts along with AP and honors,” said Quincy Millerjohn, a former English teacher who is a welding instructor at the school. He shows his students local union pay scales for ironworkers, steamfitters and boilermakers, careers that can pay anywhere from $41 to $52 an hour.

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