The I-85/GA 316 interchange will soon have a new name bestowed upon it... the
Wayne Shackelford Interchange... which I have chosen to dub "The Shack Stack".Mr. Shackelford, a longtime Gwinnett County resident, was the Georgia DOT commissioner during the administrations of Governors Zell Miller and Roy Barnes. During his tenure at GDOT, he had advocated the reconstruction of this interchange, which was built in the early 1960s and had remained essentially the same until just recently.
Please click here to read the article from this week's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In 1979, when I was a sophomore at Snellville's South Gwinnett High School, I met Mr. Shackelford, whose son Larry was a fellow debate team member.
Yes, dear readers, I was on the high school debate team... and I'm darn proud of it!!! 
In fact, he drove us all to what was my very first debate tournament at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Mr. Shackelford, if you're reading this, I hope you and yours are doing well and congratulate you on this honor.
And finally, my latest "epiphanies"...
This afternoon on the way home from work, I got into an on-air discussion with fellow ham Dave on the Atlanta Radio Club's 146.82 repeater about our recent "water woes".
Dave got my "creative juices" flowing and here's the idea...
Build hundreds of miles of pipelines to transport raw seawater from the ocean to regional desalinization plants.
At these plants, create 2 types of fresh water, one "potable" for human consumption and one that is "non-potable" but clean enough for such usage as agriculture, cleaning, and sanitation.
While the pipelines are being built, utilize the existing road and railway infrasturcture to transport tankloads of raw seawater to the regional desalinization plants for processing. On the rails alone, we have the capacity to run mile-long trains of seawater tank cars inland. In fact, we may even be able to build desalinization plants in areas that currently have rail lines that are not being heavily used and it could be a potential economic development tool in and of itself.
But won't this cost some serious money? Of course... but if America could put a man on the moon (which was no easy task in and of itself), then why not invest in the necessary research and development to make desalinization even more feasible and be able to tap into the trillions upon trillions of gallons of water in our world's ocean. After all, Earth is around 75% water. Wouldn't it make sense to take as much advantage of this natural resource as we can? At this time, I'd rather see us invest in this kind of R&D to solve our problems here on Earth,
then invest in putting humans on Mars.
Speaking of the oceans,
did you know there's tons upon tons of methane gas that can be tapped from its cold, dark depths? It could be a potential major, major source of energy that we could use to power even more vehicles via natural gas, and potentially break our almost crackhead-like dependence on petroleum. One estimate I have recently heard was that the reserves off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina could potentially give us energy for approximately 100,000 years!!! Like the desalinization, let's get our most brilliant researchers crackin' on tapping this resource as well and providing it to us at an affordable cost (as opposed the petrol and diesel fuel we now ravenously consume and pay out the nose for).
Oh, yeah... one more thing before I go...
Tomorrow (Saturday, 10/13) at 5 PM Eastern time, please tune in to my talkshow, which will feature Billy Riddle as my guest. Billy, I look forward to talking with you.
That's it for now. Thanks for reading and please come back again.
