From England comes the fairly amazing details of that country’s metal-theft problems - an international crime ring costing authorities around a million dollars a month - and one relatively novel idea for tackling manhole cover theft: making covers and grates out of plastic, which has very, very little value - if any - as scrap.

It seems like an obvious solution, on the surface, so you have to wonder why it hasn’t been tried before. My educated guess is that there are rather a number of problems with this plan that haven’t been fully examined: tensile strength of the new lids, for one; is the plastic as strong as cast iron? If it’s overweighted, how does it fail: flexing and cracking, or completely shattering? Does the plastic degrade with exposure to sunlight? Exhaust fumes? Hydrogen sulfide? How abrasion resistant is it, compared to iron?
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Yep, I survived the RNC. (They ought to sell t-shirts with that on ‘em, don’t you think?) I even managed to do so without getting pepper sprayed, tear gassed, hit with an “impact round”, blinded or disoriented by a flashbang grenade, or arrested. Nobody got killed, the most serious injury I heard about was a woman who got stepped on by a horse, the anarchist’s plans largely came to nothing, and a lot of anarchists got arrested. So, yeah, it was a pretty good week.
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Look! Random stuff that has (almost) nothing to do with the Republican National Convention!

I’d like to point out here - this being as good as any a place to do so - that Entropic Memes will probably be on hiatus from roughly 27 August to 8 September, thanks to the above-mentioned NSSE. I’ll try to post pictures or anything else interesting during that time, but no guarantees. Not that folks who read this site are given to worry, or anything - but if I’m quiet for a few days during a local period of violence and instability, well… it’s at least a little bit by design.

Onward…
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With just under six weeks to go before the Republican National Convention takes over downtown Saint Paul, it’s to be expected that the city’s security efforts will soon start becoming implemented. Details of what those efforts include, nobody seems to know - or if they do, they aren’t saying. For all that it is the largest security event in Minnesota’s history, it’s probably not going to be much different than any past political convention (at least, those in the post-1999 Battle of Seattle era) or similarly high-profile event. As such, we can infer - that is to say, make educated guesses about - some of the things that are going to be happening.

One thing you can pretty well bet on is the widespread welding of manhole covers throughout downtown Saint Paul. This is de rigeur for any sort of event these days which overzealous raconteurs are anticipated to show up at en masse. It’s not that the Secret Service wants people kept out of the sewers - though I imagine they do - but, rather, a desire on the part of law enforcement to prevent those 75-pound steel discs from being upended and rolled down the street into, well, anyone or anything. That this doesn’t seem to happen very often doesn’t matter too much; this is cheap and easy security theatre at it’s finest. (Cheap and easy security street theatre, even.)

I have no idea when they’re going to start spot-welding manhole covers, but I suspect it might be fairly soon. Why? Well… because many of the manhole covers around downtown have recently broken out in Mysterious Blue Dots(tm):
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It comes as no real surprise, but the Army is no fan of urban exploration. In fact, they’re so against this pastime - one which requires such decidedly un-American traits as curiosity and an interest in history - that they’re not afraid to resort to misstatements, fabrications, and outright lies to discourage soldiers from taking part.
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