This is a good place to drop general and weird news, entertainment, and general show prep material that might be interesting to air talent or producers. Hot dog threads ALWAYS welcome.
One small but very important piece of legislation that was passed in the recently concluded regular session of the West Virginia Legislature slipped by, seemingly unnoticed by regular media outlets, but we think our readers would like to know about it.
Hidden inside of the bill known officially as HB4112, and less officially as "The Junk Yard Protection Act" was one of the best laws passed in this or any other legislative session in memory. Section 4, Paragraph 1 of this bill makes it mandatory for all restaurants in West Virginia that serve "sausage sandwiches, commonly known as hot dogs" to offer slaw as a topping. Three paragraphs of the statute take on the daunting task of defining what is appropriately called coleslaw and does a pretty good job closing loopholes. For the purposes of this legislation, coleslaw is defined as "finely grated cabbage with mayonnaise based dressing" and doesn't get into matters of texture, sweetness or tartness.
The statute has no provision for charging extra for slaw, so it's only a matter of time before we'll see a lawsuit filed by a consumer against some hot dog joint for trying to charge for this legally mandated condiment. Here at WVHotDogs.com, we are not taking an official stance on whether it is legal to charge for coleslaw, but we maintain that a moral obligation does indeed exist to include the cost of the topping in the stated price of a regular hot dog.
We applaud the tireless efforts of Morris County Delegate Nathan Mayer who sponsored the bill and for Martin County Senator April Simpleton for working so hard preserving the language of the original bill and taking it on the end of her Junkyard bill. On the surface it would seem to be a stretch to include a food service requirement in a bill that dealt with the rights of junkyard owners to use car parts as signs, but Senator Simpleton made it fit. Kudos Senator! You made us proud!
It should be noted that the passing of this bill was made much easier by the flood waters in Marion County that kept the entire Marion delegation preoccupied during the session. Tough break Fine citizens of Fairmont; See you in court.
This new law was signed into law by Governor Tomblin and will take effect on April 1.
The first step in a successful revolution is to defeat all competing revolutionaries.
March 31, 2012 at 11:52 PM
Ever since mankind could go fast, we have longed to go faster. And ever since we’ve done work, we have longed to have someone else, or something else, do that work for us. You might already be familiar with our self-driving car project. We’ve spent years working on a tough engineering problem—how to create a hardware and software system capable of gathering and interpreting massive amounts of real-time data and acting on that knowledge swiftly and surely enough to navigate innumerable varieties of crowded thoroughfares without ever once (among other human frailties) exploding in a fit of road rage at the guy who just cut hard left across your lane without even bothering to flash his blinker.
Well, our autonomous cars have now been test-driven (or rather, test-ridden) for more than 200,000 miles without a single machine-caused mishap. And today we're moving the project one great leap forward with Google Racing, a groundbreaking partnership with NASCAR to help self-driving vehicles compete in the world of stock car racing. We think the most important thing computers can do in the next decade is to drive cars—and that the most important thing Google Racing can do in the next decade is drive them, if possible, more quickly than anyone else. Or anything else.
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The program remains in its infancy; we’ll surely face numerous testing and competitive hurdles before our first car peels out into a NASCAR race. But I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities. NASCAR’s ambitious technology investments—from driver safety to green initiatives—and the sport’s spirit of challenge, effort and execution all beautifully embody our most deeply held values as a company. Having skidded around a parking lot last week myself, I’m pretty sure that none of those test miles were as hard as it will be for one of our cars to hold its own in a field of 43 jacked-up, 800-horsepower beasts screaming down a straightaway within inches of each other at upwards of 200 miles per hour. I can't imagine a more exciting challenge for our team than to race our autonomous vehicles against their carbon-based competitors.
Find more photos on our Google+ page
Larry and I have always believed in tackling big problems that matter, and we’re surer than ever that self-driving cars are one of them, capable of changing the world in all kinds of truly important ways, like reducing traffic and accidents by driving more efficiently, making correct split-second decisions and never shifting their focus off the road to check a map, text a friend, apply rear-view mirror mascara or dip a piece of tekka maki into a lid of soy sauce jostling over on the passenger seat. I hope that today’s announcement of Google Racing will mark another step along this path, and spur innovations that improve the daily lives of people all over the world. Or at the very least offer us a few cool new thrills on hot weekend afternoons.
Update Apr 1, 10:05 a.m.: As you probably guessed—no, Google Racing isn’t real. We were really happy to work with NASCAR on this April Fools' joke. The technological advancements this sport has made in the last decade are impressive and while we won’t be providing self-driving cars to compete in the races, we look forward to working together with NASCAR in the future on projects like their YouTube channel. What better way to drive change?
Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder
The first step in a successful revolution is to defeat all competing revolutionaries.
