Talk radio can be serious business, to be sure. You make people seriously mad and seriously entertained at the same time.
What a way to make a living!
But every once in a while you just feel the urge to mess with folks’ minds, and that’s what prompted this particular Boortz tweet on Thursday:
“Pork: $4.6 M to dredge 6 ft out of Savannah River to make it easier for large cargo ships to get under the bridge and into the harbor.”
I posted that gem to my nearly 40,000 Twitter followers, then sat back to wait. Surely someone would respond with an “are you nuts?” line.
And I waited. And I waited.
Here are the first two responses:
“is it Pork or a way to import/export more — hopefully more of the latter than the former, at least for GA/SC”
“Dredging the harbor is not pork — it’s legit interstate commerce. But it should be its own single-subject bill ($ for harbors)”
Please tell me you’re not sitting there reading this and scratching your head.
Let me help: A ship is going to be the same height above the water line no matter how deep the water. I’m still getting messages from people who think that the deeper the water the lower the ship floats. But, someone has to vote for Democrats.
In my 40-plus years of talk radio I’ve made a practice of toying with the listeners. There’s the TV thing for instance.
About 20 years ago — before the age of the flat-screen — I told my listeners that the government had mandated a little device in portable TVs that would right the picture if you flipped the television upside down. The next day I received some rather angry calls from some of our — shall we say — more gullible listeners, generally women.
It seems that when husbands got home from work (remember, this was 20 years ago) these ladies called them into the kitchen and uttered the famous “watch this!” line. They then flipped their portable kitchen TV upside down and turned it on.
Then there was the airplane on a treadmill thing. Ohhhhh, did I have the listeners stewing over this one for a while.
The scenario was this: You put a small airplane on a 2,000-foot treadmill. As the pilot advances the throttle for the takeoff roll, the treadmill operator starts the treadmill running in the opposite direction. Lift-off speed would be around 60 mph.
Now, with the treadmill going 60 mph in the opposite direction, would the airplane take off?
You want to take a few minutes to think about this one? OK, call the waitress over to warm up your coffee and cogitate.
There. Enough time. I’m betting you’re saying the airplane could not possibly take off because it failed to reach takeoff speed. Well, you’re wrong.
The airplane would absolutely take off, and it wouldn’t matter if the treadmill was churning along at 500 mph. As long as the wheels hold together, the airplane lifts off.
I’ve had airline captains and flight instructors tell me that I was completely wet on this one. The controversy continued until those strange people on TV’s “Mythbusters” gave it a shot. Ta da! Boortz wins again.
Now I’m going to be treated to hundreds of e-mails to the address below from readers who think they’re ready to climb into my ring on this one. Save it. You’re only going to get bloodied and be carried out on a stretcher.
Look, about 30 years ago I had this very newspaper convinced that dolphins were boarding tuna boats off San Diego and finning the crews to death in retaliation for dolphins dying in their nets.
I would share that story with you, but it would be most certainly edited out. It’s enough that they carry my column.
Listen to Neal Boortz live from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays on AM 750 and now 95.5FM News/Talk WSB.
His column appears every Saturday. For more Boortz, go to boortz.com
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