A British manufacturer, BCB International, is flourishing, buoyed by sales of its Kevlar underwear, at $65 a pair, to U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan.
However, soldiers and Marines must buy them directly.
The “Bomb Boxers” are not supplied by the Pentagon even though nearly 10 percent of battlefield explosive-device injuries result in sometimes-catastrophic genital and rectal damage.
According to a report in Talking Points Memo, the Pentagon’s currently issued protection is inferior to BCB’s but is less expensive.
Although the Pentagon fully funds post-injury prostheses and colostomies, it could purchase about 7,700 Bomb Boxers for the price of a single Tomahawk missile.
Oh, no,
that would
have made sense
In what a cement company executive said is “one of those bureaucratic things that doesn’t make any sense,” the city of Detroit recently built wheelchair ramps at 13 intersections along Grandy Street, despite knowing that those ramps are either not connected to sidewalks or connected to seldom-used, badly crumbling sidewalks.
The ramps were required by a 2006 lawsuit settlement in which Detroit pledged to build ramps on any street that gets re-paved, as Grandy was.
No one in city government thought, apparently, to attempt a trade of these 13 intersections for paving 13 more-widely used ones in the city.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa Fla. 33679 or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.)