Daughter's name?

We have Jesse, Jennifer & Jordan, yet you didn't mention the daughter's name, i need to know if it begins with a J as well.

-Where's the Paris angle on this?

I was...

going to post a witty comment but I decided it was too corny.

Damn English language

It always annoys me to see "near miss". So what, it was a hit then?

pop?

"Emergency crews quickly deployed a tractor to attempt to lift the remains of the structure and "high-powered blowers" to clear the corn"

were these blowers heated? would have made the evening more pleasant for onlookers to have some popcorn. With the mark-up on popcorn, they could have funded a new home for the family too. 12000 tonnes would be worth more than BillG once popped!

Never mind RoTM

This is RoTSFP(The Staple Food Products). Not as catchy I admit. Maybe the corn was fed up of being imprisoned by its evil human overlords.

Uhoh I think I hear the sound of black combine harvesters...

Dangerous

Silos and similar storage tanks have featured prominently on the Discovery Channel lately, but only in doccies with titles like "World's Greatest Engineering Screw-Ups" or "Things That Broke and Killed People".

Clearly the damned things are dangerous, whether they contain giga-litres of fuel, or something as innocuos as molasses or corn. Plonking one within spitting distance from a residence is just *asking* to get yourself sued!

Where was the Risk Evaluation? The Environment Impact Study? The legal department saying "Are you bloody crazy?!?!?"

Lots of pics here

http://www.kcci.com/slideshow/slideshows/9626231/detail.html

Stop talking the piss

<- Note

American news article

Ed Yelland - pics are impressive, but that's from a spill on August 3rd 2006.

Was about to post on the priorities of yanks, vis the "...they will try to salvage as much as corn as possible." being the most important part of the story, and then noticed the date on the story :-)

Andrew

Paris angle?

"Emergency crews quickly deployed a tractor to attempt to lift the remains of the structure and "high-powered blowers" to clear the corn"

"high powered blowers" - There's your Paris angle!

shouldn't the headline be ..

'Iowa farm house creamed by corn' - OR 'Iowa house popped by corn'

we all know that somehow M$ is to blame. It must have been one of those pre-alpha updates they're always slinging about.

But atleast they will have *plenty* of stuffing for the turkey!

"thousands of bushels of corn"

"500,000 bushels" of corn - how many swimming pools?

"weighing around 12,000 metric tonnes, by our reckoning" - what's that in, eh, what's the El Reg unit for mass, actually?

"maybe 25 feet" - how many linguine?

Lester, you co-authored the El Reg measurement system, so please no more imperial units!

good question

Where was the Risk Evaluation? The Environment Impact Study? The legal department saying "Are you bloody crazy?!?!?"

Let me ask George the younger and I will get back to you................

fishy units

There is a grain of truth in AC's comments:

You shouldn't use tons of units or units of tons,

just stick to the agreed-upon Reg standard.

Or maybe this is a deliberate pun because the

metric meter sits in PARIS and IT must be mentioned.

Houses and industry

While we have a different system here to control such things, it used to be that you could have an industrial site, with a large ventilation fan on a grain store, making a lot of noise, and people could get planning permission for a hour six inches from the store wall.

It's like the way councils will give you planning for a house on a floodplain.

Trouble is, unlike the floodplain the householder could then complain about the noise.

12000 tonnes is also a fair bit of traffic on and off the site--maybe there's a rail line as well--and 12000 tonnes in one batch sounds dodgy for all sorts of reasons: storage management, structural, vermin control, and handling.

But I've seen harvested grain in America just piled in a heap in the open air. You want cheap food, you'll ebd up with rat-piss and seagull-crap.

I for one..

..welcome our grainy, tasty when popped with a bit-o-butter-in-a-pan corn overlords.

Lester, I still want your babies. I knitted a teddy bear, and now i'm going to fill it with corn that we can kick it around to help me get rid of the stretch marks. its going to be so. damn. cool.

12,000 metric tonnes?

tonnes? What happened to El Reg's official standard for weight?!