Which Side Is The Corp of Engineers On, Anyway?

Okay, the Army Corp of Engineers comes and dumps a couple of thousand rounds of ammo on your beach and then tells you that you'll have to pay to have it removed. You'd think that after Katrina, they'd be a little more concerned about their public image. Of course, this is the same Corp of Engineers that screwed up in 1993 and almost washed Iowa City, IA off the map, so anything is possible. Here's the scoop. It's an AP wire report, so I'm including it all, since they're harder than heck to find again:

Army Corps Dumps Old Bombs, Charges Town
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 5, 2007

Filed at 10:01 p.m. ET

SURF CITY, N.J. (AP) -- The Army Corps of Engineers, which accidentally dumped sand filled with old military ordnance on Surf City's beach, now wants the town to help pay to remove it.

Local officials are angered by the suggestion that they should help foot the bill for a federal goof that already has cost the town an unknown amount of tourism business.

''If they're talking about getting any money out of Surf City to pay for their mistakes, they can forget about it,'' Mayor Leonard T. Connors told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Army Corps spokesman Khaalid Walls said local governments are routinely asked to help pay for projects.

''That's protocol. All our projects are cost-shared,'' Walls said.

The town had to close its beach in March after World War I-era ordnance, including fuses and other military hardware, started surfacing in sand pumped ashore during a $71 million beach replenishment project.

According to Walls, the Army Corps unwittingly took sand from an offshore site where the military had dumped explosives decades ago.

More than 1,100 explosives, each about 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches long, were removed from Surf City's beach.

Surf City reopened its beach over Memorial Day weekend with new rules: Don't use metal detectors, don't dig more than a foot into the sand, and report anything suspicious to lifeguards.

Even so, visitors since then have found about a dozen more munitions, the Army Corps says. The Army has an ordnance specialist at the beach full time to take charge of discovered explosives.

It's unlikely that one of the explosives would ever detonate, but it would be extremely dangerous if it did, said Keith Watson, the Army Corps' project manager.

The Army Corps, along with state and local officials, are considering a possible closure of the beach during the winter to clear out more ordnance.

The Army Corps might sieve the entire beach with machinery, or it might bring back the ground-penetrating metal-detection equipment used in the spring.

The federal government has gotten completely out of control. It was bad enough when they didn't care about us, but now they've actively turned to evil. I mean really, now. How can you accidently dump thousands of rounds of ammunition onto a beach? Getting the sand out of the dredge barge and onto the beach had to involve some kind of crane or bucket. And I'd be awfully surprised if they didn't run a bulldozer back and forth leveling it all out.

Freaking incredible.

Ad Rates for Blogs

BlogAds, the company that puts ads onto blogs, shows the number of weekly ad impressions for each "hive". The statistics are interesting, if not educational:

The Gossip blogs hive, with 93 blogs, has the most with 66,377,180 impressions. In fact, the top three hives are all gossip/entertainment-related with Hollywood blogs (108) at 52,668,824 and TV blogs (30) at 29,774,435 (a million impressions per week per blog is not shaby).

The ranking non-entertainment hive is Gay blogs (62), at 21,851,743 (a nice demographic to target).

Next comes Liberal blogs (117) at 20,588,252. It's another three places to Conservative blogs (162) at 7,373,020. Are liberals really three times more likely to read blogs, are they merely more likely to advertise using BlogAds, or is this just another attempt by the liberal media to smear conservatives by painting them as illiterate knuckle-draggers who get their opinions shouted at them by the neolithic cretins on Fox News?

Heading further down the list, we find Economics blogs (14) at 405,459 impressions. Looking at some of the blogs in this hive, I suspect that most of the impressions are in one or two blogs. I'm going to add The Oil Drum (http://www.theoildrum.com/) to my daily reading list for a while.

Gun blogs (11) at 290,671 beat out Oregon Progressives at (13) at 228,990. These, perhaps to the surprise of no one, beat out Evangelical blogs (17) at 169,396 and Christian Moms (17) at 165,797. The Libertarians (7) come in at only 80,201.

What's even more surprising is the cost per impression:

Gay blogs are a steal at $0.17 per thousand impressions. This is a highly favorable demographic, being on average wealthier and better educated than the typical breeder. I suspect that the rates are so cheap because of companies afraid to be associated with the gay market, but if I were selling something, I know where I'd be putting my money.

The gossip and entertainment blogs follow the gays in close order on cost per impression. In this case, I tend to agree with the pricing, as the audience for these blogs are probably not as affluent.

Liberals are still on the cheap side at $1.11 per thousand. Strangely enough, Law blogs are at $1.25. I guess that lawyers don't click on ads unless they're able to bill for the time.

The conservatives just slip in above the median at $1.78 per thousand, followed by evangelicals at $2.15 and Science blogs at $2.40. Jewish blogs are $5.14, which would make for the beginnings of a great joke, if not for the fact that Christian blogs are the third most expensive at $7.42. I suspect that what makes these blogs so valuable is the fact that the readers will believe anything that they read.

And the two most expensive hives? Wine blogs at $8.53 and our friends, the Oregon Progressives at a whopping $45.10 per thousand impressions. In the interest of science, I did some more homework and found out that the Or-Pro's price is artificially inflated by a single web page that wants $9,999 for someone to become the sole sponsor.

All-in-all, very curious. As you'll note, BS remains blissfully ad-free.