Boondoggle

Among these activities were crafts classes, where the production of "boon doggles", described in the article as various utilitarian "gadgets" made with scoubidou cloth or leather, were taught.

In her 1993 memoir Nothing But the Truth, journalist Marguerite Young wrote of the 1930s: I thought official figures and events seemed to say the biggest thing was relief–feeding the hungry, made work such as raking leaves which gave the English language a new word, boondoggle.

[citation needed] One example is the RCA "SelectaVision" video disk system project, begun in the early 1960s and continuing for nearly 20 years, long after cheaper and better alternatives had come to market.

[13] However, at least 18 states are considering new laws to remove balanced literacy and instead use methods aligned with cognitive science research about how children learn to read.

[18][19] Target Canada opened 133 stores starting in 2013 but shut down completely after two years, producing a write-down for its parent company of over 5 billion US dollars.

Another example is "Cockcroft's Folly", a set of air scrubbers added, at great expense and complication, to the Windscale nuclear reactor late in the project's construction.

[30] When the tsunami of 11 March 2011 struck Fudai, the village was left virtually untouched, and residents now visit Wamura's grave to pay their respects.

[29] In a late 1961 interview, Norbert Wiener, a professor and mathematician at MIT, dismissed the newly proposed Apollo program to land people on the Moon as a "moondoggle".

[31] After its launch in 1990, and the discovery that a flaw in its optics meant that the Hubble Space Telescope was unable to carry out most of its science objectives, it was described as a "techno turkey".