OnStar Almost As Bad As Apple Maps

(CNN) – Police began drilling Friday outside a suburban Detroit home in the search for Jimmy Hoffa, the labor strongman whose disappearance is one of the most notorious and mysterious in U.S. history.

A tipster told police that a body was buried at the spot in Roseville, Michigan, about the time the Teamsters boss disappeared in 1975.

CNN.com, Sept. 28, 2012

There are a whole lot of things in the world that don't make any sense at all to me lately. Here's the first thing.

The City of Greensboro's sidewalk people have been working on my street for a while now. Not long ago, they came in with bulldozers and concrete trucks, dug up the front of the yard right across the street from me, and they laid down a shiny new sidewalk.

Then they worked their way down to the end of the street, came back up my side of it, and, a few months ago, they plopped a Port-O-Potty down right next to my driveway and began digging up my yard, where they also put in a brand new sidewalk.

When they're putting down sidewalks in your area, it's a big deal because the sidewalk people make a lot of noise with jackhammers, and there are a lot of big trucks beeping. The noise starts early in the morning and goes on all day. Sometimes, you can't even get your car in and out of your driveway; and, even when you can, it takes a really long time because the big trucks have to move out of the way for you to get through.

So, of course, while I didn't like the idea of a sidewalk in front of my house, I was glad the work was finally over and my street was done – and all of us could return back to normal life as we knew it. Also, with the nice weather we've had lately, the grass the city had torn up had come back, and my street no longer looked like downtown Beirut.

So, anyway, the other day, I was sitting there and I heard all the noise starting up again, and I looked out my window, and all the sidewalk people were back with a vengeance. They were frantically working on the sidewalk across the street: digging up the concrete they had just put down.

I watched for a while, and I tried to figure out why in the world they were digging up the brand new sidewalk. I had no idea what they were doing or, come to think of it, whether they were going to shortly dig up my sidewalk just as they were doing across the street.

With practically nothing to go on, I started a list of five possible very good reasons why the city sidewalk people might be out there digging up the pavement they'd just put down.

Here's what I could come up with:

(5) When they were laying the sidewalk the first time, a woman had come jogging by and later she realized that she had lost her heirloom wedding ring. She had looked everywhere else that she'd jogged that day – so she felt certain the only place it could possibly be was somewhere underneath the concrete that, she remembered, the city workers had been laying while she was jogging that day.

So, after searching for but not finding her ring for a couple of months, the woman contacted the city sidewalk people and asked them if they would be nice enough to dig up the sidewalk and see if her ring was down there. In my theory, I have no idea whether they found her ring or not.

(4) The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that city workers would do that for just any random person, so, in this version of the theory, I'm going to say maybe it was the wedding ring of Greensboro City Manager Denise Turner Roth.

(3) Those men weren't City of Greensboro workers at all: They were actually Hollywood actors on a location shoot for an upcoming sequel to the 2003 movie Holes.

(2) Inmates from the county Prison Farm had run out of rocks to break at the farm, so the sheriff was now taking chain gangs around to different sidewalks in the city and having the inmates smash the sidewalks up instead.

(1) Right after they laid the sidewalk across the street, they got a very good tip that Jimmy Hoffa's body was buried there. I do know for a fact that, not long ago, authorities in Detroit were still digging for Hoffa's body 30 years later – so maybe the same thing was happening here.

I really had no idea why they were tearing up the sidewalk that they had just laid, but I did feel confident that, as efficient and well run as the City of Greensboro is, the city people certainly wouldn't do something like that unless they had a really good reason.

Last Thursday, I picked up The Rhinoceros Times and I saw that Editor and Publisher John Hammer, who lives near me and drives by this spot every day, had actually investigated the matter.

The city people had told him that it was one stretch of sidewalk that just came out too slanted or something. They said they are laying a whole lot of sidewalk and everyone makes an occasional mistake. But that still brings me back to a big mystery: Why are they putting sidewalks down where they aren't needed in the first place?

Anyway, speaking of things that don't make much sense to me …

I was looking in the iTunes store the other day trying to find some ring tones for my iPhone 5, and there were some pretty fun and cool ones in there. You can get everything from air raid siren sounds to short jingles where famous people sing, "Someone's calling you!" or whatever.

The ring tones usually sell for 99 cents or $1.29 each. OK, now, as I was going through the list, I saw one, selling for 99 cents, which was called "Silent ring tone."

It was exactly as it sounds. You could click on it to hear a sample and it was just dead silence.

So, I didn't understand that, and I didn't buy the ring tone, but it did inspire me to release my first album on iTunes.

For only $7.99 you can have all 12 great tracks on my new album with such hits as "No Woman, No Sound," "Mime after Mime," "Don't Say It Isn't So" and "Give Me Just a Little More Time … In My Sensory Deprivation Chamber." There's even a bonus Christmas track, my sequel to Silent Night – "Silent Day."

Check it out and purchase your copy today.

Here's another thing that recently made me go "Huh??"

The other night, I was just about asleep in front of the TV – you know how sometimes late at night you're on the couch fading in and out. And one of those late night commercials came on. The first thing I heard in my groggy state was: "… incredible Flexible Hose; get your Flexible Hose today! Go to FlexibleHose.com."

The commercial said Flexible Hose was "Designed to bend and stretch but never kink!" and "You can easily guide Flexible Hose anywhere you need without tangling!"

I only woke up fully right as the commercial was going off, so I can't tell you many of the details.

The last thing the commercial said was, "This offer is not available in any store."

Well, I certainly hope not – to tell you the truth, I didn't even know they could advertise something like that on TV.

At the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas this year, Lenovo unveiled a new 27-inch tablet computer: the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC. They're calling it the first "interpersonal computer" — in contrast to a "personal computer."

...continued on page 2

...continued from page 1

The big selling point Lenovo representatives were pushing was that "You can "lay it flat, get the whole family around it, and play games of Monopoly on it."

Hey, Lenovo, do you know what else you can play Monopoly on?

A Monopoly board.

I mean, if you don't have a few grand to drop on a new 27-inch tablet computer, you can just use the piece of illustrated cardboard that Parker Brothers unveiled in 1934.

OK, this last thing isn't something that made me go "Whaaa?" – instead, it's something that made my sister go, "Whaaa?"

My sister Sharon lives up in New Jersey and she has two kids who are very into sports. Anyway, her son, Brandon, had to play in two out-of-town baseball games in the same day – one in the morning and another in the afternoon. They knew they had just enough time to make it to the afternoon game if they hurried.

So after the first game in an unfamiliar area of the state, Sharon and Brandon and another mother, and three other kids who were also playing in both games, got in the minivan, and Sharon asked OnStar the shortest way to the other place, which she had heard was a couple of hours away.

My sister was unfamiliar with that area of the state, but she started following the directions that OnStar gave them and, after driving for a while, my sister looked at her friend in the passenger seat and said, "This doesn't feel like we're going the right way," and the other woman said it didn't seem right to her either.

So Sharon called OnStar back and said she wanted to check again to make sure OnStar had her going the right way. The OnStar lady asked their destination again and then the OnStar lady said, "Yes, I'm positive; you are on the shortest route to your destination."

So Sharon kept driving and driving, and then the road came to a dead end at this giant body of water, and they were in the middle of nowhere with a road than ran straight into the water.

Then my sister noticed that it wasn't exactly a dead end: it was a landing where you got on a ferry.

So, all they would need to do was wait a couple of hours for the ferry to come, ride to the other side, then exit the ferry and continue to the game.

My sister, who was very frustrated at this point, called OnStar and was like, "What the hey?" and the OnStar lady said, "Well Ma'am, you did request the shortest route, and that is the shortest route."

Anyway, they turned the car around and, I'm sure, sped like crazy to get to the ballpark.

In case you were wondering, Sharon said they zoomed up to the ballpark, opened the minivan doors, and the kids all jumped out and literally ran straight onto the field for the start of the game, just in the nick of time.