We all know that first week back after Christmas and New Year can be a lonely and desperate time. Just ask Jasper. Many’s the time he can be seen skulking in the steel racks for hours on end when it’s quiet with nary a peep out of him.

I sincerely hope he’s not up to what this geezer in a Southampton fabrication shop has been up to:

A MAN who got his genitalia stuck in a steel pipe had to be cut free by eight firefighters using an industrial grinder. The heavy duty cutting gear had to be used to remove the three-inch long hollow pipe after medics were unable to release it. The painstaking operation, which involved eight firefighters, took around an hour.

The drama began after the man took himself to the accident and emergency department of Southampton General Hospital.

Restricted blood flow had left the man in a state of arousal, and unable to remove the pipe.

Staff there were so concerned that they phoned the emergency services and a crew from Redbridge Fire Station were initially dispatched. But they had to bring in backup from St Mary’s station which has a fire truck equipped with specialist cutting gear. A disc gutter cutter, with a four-and-a-half-inch blade, was used to slice open the stainless steel pipe.

The man, in his 30s, offered no explanation for his predicament but was said to be “quite concerned and anxious”. He had been given an anaesthetic to prepare for the procedure.

St Mary’s crew manager Adrian Johnson said: “It was a very delicate operation. We did not want anything heating up.

The person who did it deserves a commendation for his nerve and steady hand.”

Meanwhile, watch manager Greg Garrett from Redbridge station added: “I’ve only come across this type of thing three or four times in my 17 years as a firefighter. It’s not a daily occurrence.”

The man’s private parts were left bruised and swollen.

I’m generally fairly reluctant to post entire articles seeming it goes against Rupert Murdoch’s grain, but I really didn’t know which bits to cut out (as the fireman said to the bloke with his knob stuck in a steel tube). I mean, this is why you’d love to be a local journalist. Maybe a fireman as well, but not the guy doing the angle grinding or holding the pipe steady.

However, feel free to go and enjoy yourselves in the comments to the article.

How can you not love this collection of aircraft old, new, conceptual and fictional?

But if you thought that was a fairly entertaining use of aeronautical social media usage, you haven’t had the pleasure of of being exposed to Lockheed Martin’s open source proprietary social media tool.

And if we’re being perfectly honest, neither have I. But, it’s explained as:

Lockheed Martin has been developing proprietary social media technology to facilitate interaction between employees to create and share secure content using blogs and wikis. As a result, Lockheed Martin has become a leader of this technology in the aerospace and defense industry.

“Lockheed Martin has placed an emphasis on social media adoption by finding innovative ways to integrate a social dimension into our existing process and tools while reducing total cost of ownership,” says Linda Gooden, Executive Vice President for Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Services business area. “We are excited to now share our investment back to the open source community to help other organizations meet their knowledge sharing challenges.”

The proprietary social media tool that will be released under an open source license enables employees to consume, share, and discuss information from internal and external sources.

This tool provides a personalized experience for employees and enhances their ability to track and share information in an increasingly virtual work environment. Lockheed Martin will release the source code under an open source license and will allow interested parties to download, modify, and contribute to the open source project.

Now whether it’s supposed to be used as a tool to help develop crowd-sourced fighter aircraft or a missile defense social network, I’ve no idea. But, I can just imagine the fun you could have throwing virtual smart bombs at each other as opposed to lame pesky pokes like you can on Facebook.

If only I knew where you could download it.

Yes, wrap your motor in Duck tape.

How could I not venture to the Avon Duct Tape Festival this past weekend? Avon happens to be one of the two (there may be more) duct tape capitals of the world – the other being Sarah Palin’s home village of Wasilla. And yes, it’s kind of what you expect – an excuse to plonk a few fair rides on an uneven part of a field, get tipsy listening to 80s cover bands and take part in a parade with floats held together by the stuff.

It’s in no way tacky – well I suppose the tape is (ho-hum).

With it being a fair, my good lady was determined for me to display my undying whatever by winning her some kind of fair prize – a partially paralyzed goldfish or some stuffed toy made by Chinese orphans that would be more mobile than any goldfish.

It’s not that I’m a curmudgeon so much that I understand these things are rigged. Whether you’re talking about basketball games that have spring-loaded backboards to ensure the b-ball flies off into an adjacent county, or doctored darts that have you seeking the nearest specialist to check for the early signs of Parkinson’s, the fix is in.

Balloon Darts

We hadn’t made half a circuit of the festival before I heard a redneck trying to tempt me into throwing darts at a wall of balloons. I was doing my best to ignore him, but with Steph having her heart set on something stuffed and ignoring anything I ever have to say, she’d already engaged the bugger in conversation and was shouting for me to stop.

Marvellous – some crap banter ensued between the hillbilly Barnum and myself about him not wanting to shout (even though he was turned way past 11) and me explaining there was no chance him understanding a word I was saying – which he obviously didn’t understand a word of.

He then thrust a dart into my paw and told me that whatever happened Steph would win a prize and that the dart was free. So, with my wife pleading with me via the medium of puppy peepers, and some hick blabbering nonsense, I cracked. I took a couple of steps towards the stall and languidly lobbed the dart in the general direction of the balloon board fully expecting it to explode mid-flight or drop to the floor three inches from the latex as if it’d hit an invisible sheet of Perspex. Or merely bounce off one of the balloons and do a King Harold.

No, I happened to pop two of the blighters.

I resisted the urge to clap myself or perform a Tiger Woods fist pump, and expected Steph to be handed her prize and for us to pop off for a corn dog.

Instead I was handed another couple of darts and told to pay a couple of dollars for the privilege. I was being hoodwinked and having the hoodwinkery explained to me as I handed over a $20. However, it was hoodwinkery that I have no idea what was being said. Before I could throw the next two darts, I was asked if I wanted to pay a further $5 to try and win a ‘medium’ prize.

I was being up sold without having bought anything in the first place. I hadn’t a clue what was happening, but was strangely enjoying the swift-talking swindler’s patter. The guy was a pro.

At this rate I was fully expecting to be taken into a port-a-potty and robbed of cards, cash and kidney.

Steph was starting to look stern and interjected on my behalf that we’d take our prize and run. At which he whisked the two darts out of my hand that I thought I’d paid for and reached for Steph’s prize.

Of course it wasn’t something dangling off the stall itself but something he rustled from underneath the counter out of an old plastic bag:

It basically looked like they’d partially wrapped some sausage meat in duct tape and tossed it in some boiling water. Even the dollar store would’ve considered themselves shysters for charging for it.

At least Steph found out I was right. And at least I don’t have to do that for a living.

Well not yet.

Considering quite a few sheet metal shops are experiencing a bit of downtime at the moment, we could all do one of two things:

1. Work our nuts off trying to find extra work in order to keep the wolves from the door.

or,

2. See what tunes we can get out of our workshops’ underutilised machinery.

I have absolutely no idea how legitimate this is, but it’s supposedly a laser cutter playing the Super Mario Bros. theme:

So, set to it people. Start cranking up your notchers and guillotines and tune them in to whatever melodious or malodorous cacophony you can muster.

Then again, posting videos of you whacking a generator with a spanner pretending it’s the start of the Test Match Special Cricket Theme simply won’t wash.

Large Hadron Collider

We all know this is some feat of engineering. However, it’s extremely difficult to get a scale of the project. Not only is it impossible to imagine the sizes of particles whizzing around at beyond breakneck speeds, but it’s even more difficult to get an idea of how bloody big the thing is from the inside.

They’ve hardly started doing guided tours.

Thankfully, a certain Peter McCready has been allowed access to the Large Hadron Collider’s gizzards and has photographed some awesome panoramic views of the thing that you can swush around in full 360 degree loveliness.

Click here and give it a second or two to load. He’s even added sound effects to get a general feel of the ho and the hum of the place. [cap doff]

But, if you swing around for long enough you’ll notice the entire thing is held together by bloody duct/duck/gaffer tape. (OK, I’ll go as far as fancy aluminium tape.)

Your average roll of duct tape

Right, so if we take a look round the LHC then it appears we’ve got gaffer tape roughly every half meter. We can’t exactly say that it goes all the way round the circumference of the inner core, but by the looks of things it could very well do. The width of the inner core is approximately 3.8 meters leading to a core circumference of 11.932 meters with a total collider circumference under the Alps of 27 kilometers. [via]

So, by my reckoning (if we’re saying there’s duct tape every half meter that goes around the whole circumference), that means 644,328 meters of duct tape tops, at a rough cost of $336,227 if I were to buy it in 6″ (144 mm) wide 55 meter rolls costing $28.70 ea.

Let’s hope they got a bulk discount.