Saturday, November 6, 2010

WTF of the day Oops. Re-Edit

Okay, so I had heard the $200,000,000 (two hundred MILLION dollars) A DAY price tag for His Imperial Majesty's visit to India, and thought, "Holy crap! WTF, over?!" Which I figure is approximately what you thought, too...

Then I saw this:
New Delhi: The White House will, of course, stay in Washington but the heart of the famous building will move to India when President Barack Obama lands in Mumbai on Saturday.


Communications set-up and nuclear button and majority of the White House staff will be in India accompanying the President on this three-day visit that will cover Mumbai and Delhi.


He will also be protected by a fleet of 34 warships, including an aircraft carrier, which will patrol the sea lanes off the Mumbai coast during his two-day stay there beginning Saturday.
(h/t William Katz.)
UPDATE:  Glenn Reynolds says it's not true.  He links to Hotair, which has much debunkery, including that the $200 mil/day figure also seems to be exaggerated.  They do note that, so far as they know, His Imperial Majesty really is planning on using his Teleprompter when he addresses the Indian Parliament; I do find the Telegraph-started rumor re: the culling of coconuts to protect The Won's noggin to be  ridiculous...

What, he's insulted or dissed the Brits and the Israeli's, he's too busy sucking up to the ChiComs and the Iranians, so now he's got to dump on the Indians, too?  is it because they're a (relatively, for South Asia) free-market democracy?  They won't lend him money?  Maybe someone told him they've been getting friendly with the Israelis?

RE-EDIT:  Of course Obama's PO'd at the Indians, they were buddies with G.W. Bush!  Duh!

 Anyway, from links at Carl Bussjaeger's--buy his books!--reports of The Great Coconut Hunt seem to be factual.

And how did I miss this?:

On Monday, US secret agents visited the museum to plan Obama’s security detail.
They were accompanied by officers of Mumbai Police and civic officials of the D ward (where Mani Bhavan is located). While inspecting the route and the buildings lining up the route to the museum, the Americans detected a skyscraper near Peddar road and also found the area to be highly populated.
Since it is difficult to monitor such a congested area, they came up with a quick solution which left the Indians accompanying them amazed: A bomb-proof over-ground tunnel — to be installed by US military engineers in just an hour.
The tunnel would be a kilometre long and measure 12ft by 12ft — enough to let Obama’s cavalcade pass through. The tunnel would be centrally air-conditioned, fitted with close-circuit television cameras, and will be heavily guarded at every point, including, of course, its entry and exit.

 Now, that report comes from the same people who gave us the 34 ship Aircraft Carrier Battle Flotilla as support, so it may well be, um, exaggeration.  The only news source other than the Indian Daily News & Analysis--quoted above--to pick that story up, is the Daily Mail of London, and it cites... You guessed it, the Daily News & Analysis.  Which also gave us the 34-ship Carrier Battle Fleet.

That Daily Mail item seems to be a good aggregation of the "WTF?" items regarding this jaunt, BTW.

1 comment:

Carl Bussjaeger said...

"Anyway, from links at Carl Bussjaeger's--buy his books!--"

I realize this is a little late, but I just noticed it. Actually...

Don't buy my books. But thanks for the kind words.

I'm not being paid for them; no advance, no royalties. Near Space Press and the Benner family don't answer any comments, emails, or postal letters. I've asked them to pay. No response. I've asked them to stop selling my books for their own profit. No response.

You can -- for no charge at all -- download Net Assets (PDF) and the sequel, Bargaining Position (.doc) at my website. I may or may not put up the short stories from the anthology. I will not post the version which NSP is selling because it is crap; major misspellings, formatting errors, missing material (maybe 15-20% of what was supposed to be there), and unapproved changes.

I say "may" because this grand experiment in writing for a living is over, and I don't really want to bother with reformatting and assembling the stories again.