“Moon dust and three cockroach carcasses, was expected to sell for at least $400,000.”
Category: Knowledge and News
“Toyota is recalling its first mainstream electric car because the wheels can fall off.”
But the radio works great!
There goes my plan for the weekend at Uncle Bert’s farm.
You probably think I’m kidding. Well, not the part about the CDC:
“Don’t kiss or snuggle backyard poultry.”
There is no advice on wild poultry – or even front yard poultry.
Ignored? Even the sheep? Even in Arkansas?
“Biologists love penises,” writes Rachel Gross in “Vagina Obscura,” noting that the vagina has typically been given short shrift.
After this ruling (Dobbs v. Jackson), about half of the states will enact near-total bans of abortion.
For example:
The Texas attorney general says abortion is now illegal in the state. He has given his staff the day off to celebrate and has declared June 24 an annual holiday for his office.
Fortunately, Texas has no other problems, allowing the police to spend all of their time arresting physicians and pregnant women.
“THE has been a rallying cry in the Ohio State community for many years.”
Damn! I already had my football uniforms ordered for THE Other Crap University. Our rallying cry is “Makes Trump U seem legit.” Since all of our students are in their 50s through 70s, we don’t have much of a football team, but we do beat Rutgers every year.
If ever an article was intended for Other Crap …
See the comments for an interesting addition.
USA:
On June 10, 2022, the 7-day average number of COVID fatalities per day hit its all-time low since they first had reasonably accurate numbers, way back in in April of 2020. The rate of fatalities per capita has now dropped lower than Canada’s.
In contrast, the number of reported cases in the States is not declining, but neither is it increasing. The 7-day average has been hovering around 100,000 since May 17. It should be noted that the case numbers are really unreliable now, because in-home rapid testing has become so widely employed. It is presumed that many, many positive tests are not reported to authorities.
Roughly half of the states have declined in the past two weeks, and in some cases by very large percentages. Nearly every Northeastern state has seen cases fall by 30 percent or more, led by Maine and Connecticut, which are reporting only half as many as a fortnight ago.
There are still areas of the country in trouble. Alaska, Colorado and Florida, for example, are all four times the red line for new cases and are still increasing. COVID hospitalizations are also increasing in all three of those states.
We may be through with the virus, but it is not through with us. The nation’s official testing percentage is 14%, which is well into the red zone, and about five times higher than it was in early April. We are fortunate that the most common current strains are rarely fatal.
Global:
As of last week, only 18 major countries were still in the red zone for new cases (1000 cases per million population per week). They are listed below, from most cases (per capita) to fewest.
Taiwan
N. Korea
Portugal
New Zealand
Australia
Singapore
Germany
Chile
Israel
Greece
Austria
France
Italy
USA
Finland
Spain
S. Korea
Brazil
Cases are still increasing in seven of those countries:
Israel
Austria
Brazil
Italy
Chile
Germany
Greece
And fatalities are increasing in four of those seven:
Chile
Brazil
Austria
Italy
None of those four are currently in the red zone for fatalities, so no countries made the devil’s quadrifecta.
There are only two major countries in the world still in the red zone for fatalities: Taiwan and Portugal. Both of those countries are in rough shape overall, but the “new cases” rate is declining in both. Unfortunately, the decline is from “extremely bad” to “still extremely bad, but less than last week.” Taiwan’s new case rate is still 20 times the red line, and Portugal’s is 11x. Taiwan is currently leading the world in both new cases per capita and fatalities per capita, while Portugal is third in new cases and second in fatalities.
To place Taiwan’s numbers into North American perspective, both its case rate and its fatality rate are approximately ten times as high as the USA’s.
“This 830-million-year-old crystal might contain life. And we’re about to open it.”
“It does sound like a really bad B-movie, but there is a lot of detailed work that’s been going on for years to try to figure out how to do that in the safest possible way.”
But the jurors admonished the prosecution for wasting their time.
there is no limit to the number of guns you can own in texas but there IS a limit to the number of dildos you can own (5)
— nicole tersigni (@nicsigni) May 26, 2022
Story here
When Ted Cruz was the Solicitor General in Texas, his office argued the following before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals:
“There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
“How to Murder Your Husband”? Say, that is romantic. Bronte sisters, step aside! There’s a new queen of romance in town.
Romantic or not, it represents a tough job for a defense lawyer.
Her original title was to be “If I Did It,” but that was already taken.
The shooter was not an illegal alien, unless you consider North Dakota a foreign country, because that’s where he was born.
The shooter was not a transgender person. All of the photos purporting to show that are clearly identified as completely different people, who are understandably pissed off about how their pictures are being used.
It goes without saying that this was not a false flag operation. 19 aggrieved sets of parents are mourning the loss of 19 fourth graders. These parents are joined in grief to the friends and families of two educators.
The crazy begins. Leading the charge has been the ever gullible Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who spread two of the three rumors in a single tweet, claiming that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” In the past Gosar has supported various lunatic theories by tweeting doctored photos and once famously declaring that Antifa was responsible for storming the Capitol on Jan 6.
Is this a great country, or what?
Oh, sure, the U.S. Constitution defends this, but this is deeper than man’s law. The right to advertise beer with penis imagery was dictated by god himself. I believe you can find it in St Paul’s letter to the Dalmatians, 4:20.
Curiously, the Dalmatians never wrote back.
I guess they knew how to pick their spots.
Although there is probably some simple explanation, this does look really cool!
OK, maybe it should be called a “transit” rather than an eclipse, but it is still fascinating to see odd-shaped Phobos make its way across the sun.
It leads one to ponder the wonderful celestial coincidence that our moon and our sun appear to be almost the same size (and shape) from our perspective, thus creating such spectacular eclipses.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.
“No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”
Here is the full draft.
If the court upholds Mississippi’s law, which seems to be indicated, that state will allow no exceptions for rape and incest!
The USA would become just the fourth major country to tighten abortion controls since 1994, joining Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The full COVID update for Tuesday is here.
In the USA, cases are up 61% in the past two weeks, and there are now more states in the “new cases” red zone than out, 29 to 21. And the official numbers are probably low because more and more people are testing at home rather than heading out to a lab or clinic. Positive home tests have a way of staying out of the official stats.
The official testing percentages are creeping steadily upward. No states have re-entered the red zone yet, but a handful are getting close.
There is also some good news. COVID total hospitalizations and ICU cases remain steady, and fatalities are still declining. Only five states are in the fatality red zone.
Only one state (Kentucky) is in the red zone for both new cases and fatalities.
“In much of Earth’s northern hemisphere, this line of planets appears most nearly horizontal, but in much of Earth’s southern hemisphere, the line appears more nearly vertical. Pictured over the Sydney Opera House in southern Australia, the planet line was captured nearly vertical about five days ago.”
You political junkies know how important this was. The future of Ukraine, the future of NATO, and maybe even the future of the European Union hung in the balance. Macron’s opponent is a pro-Putin right-winger.
He did win by a comfortable 16-17 points or so, but consider this: (1) he defeated the same woman by 32 points the last time they faced off; (2) 41% of the French people voted for a pro-Putin candidate during a Putin-ordered war. We live in troubled times.
I’m sure you have all heard by now
* NY Times staffers report that McCarthy wanted Trump to resign, and other details embarrassing to McCarthy
* McCarthy denies everything
* Reporters pull a Hedley LaMarr (“Oh, sorry, I just remembered. I AM armed.”). Specifically: Oh, sorry, we forgot to mention. It’s all on tape.
About four years ago I mentioned that the smartest person dealing with Donald Trump was Omarosa. She had dealt with him numerous times in the past as part of his reality show, so she knew that he would simply lie about everything. She therefore taped every single conversation with him. Best of all, she didn’t immediately reveal that she had the tapes. She wrote or told interviewers about all the evil shit Trump had said, like a cagey lioness, hiding in the tall grass, setting her trap for an unsuspecting antelope, just waiting for Trump to deny everything. He was easy prey, the antelope predictably heading to the watering hole at sundown, insulting her and lying about everything right on cue, whereupon Omarosa went full Hedley LaMarr and said, “Oh, sorry, I AM armed – with tapes.” After a couple of lame attempts to have his spin doctors handle the situation, Trump finally let it go, a rare thing to see. He obviously didn’t want any more of her tapes becoming public.
These two NY Times guys have just sprung the same trap on McCarthy. They let him lie his ass off, deny everything, and rant about the liberal media, before they revealed that they had it all recorded.
That was a great move, but the best news of all for us political junkies is that the reporters assert that this tape is just a drop in their immense bucket of recorded material! This means that politicians really can’t deny anything they have written in their new book. While they may not have tapes to support every single claim in their book, they may have just that. That means that any denial of their story is a major gamble because it could make things much worse if there is tape to back the story. The politicians will have two choices – either admit they are guilty as charged, or risk a denial that might be refuted on tape – thereby proving them both guilty and dishonest, while simultaneously prolonging the life of a negative story in the media cycle.
(Their trap is also a helluva marketing scheme. That book is already #1 on the best seller charts, and it hasn’t been released yet.)
All of this raises a fascinating question. Who made these tapes? Liz Cheney was on the one they have already released, but she swears that she is not the culprit. So where did these tapes come from?
I think you history buffs will find a lot to hate in this article.
Robert E Lee had some successes, but was not an especially effective general, and there are far greater ones left off the list. Two examples might be England’s Henry V and America’s Andrew Jackson. And I hear that Genghis Khan guy was pretty good, not to mention Hannibal, Frederic the Great and Jan Sobieski.
Napoleon? Well, he’s on the list and Kutuzov isn’t, but the last I heard, Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 men and was lucky to return with his horse and a couple of stale baguettes. Kidding aside, he left about 500,000 of his men dead in the Russian snow. As I’ve noted several times, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was arguably the single stupidest thing any human being has ever done – in any field, not just restricted to the military. So he was bold and won many victories, but is maybe not the best general of all time.
(Yes, I know that Andrew Jackson was a despicable human being, but his military record was astounding. I suppose you could posit that his legendary victory at New Orleans was the result of incompetent opposition, but either way it was one of the most impressive triumphs in military history. He cobbled together a rag-tag army, and absolutely slaughtered a force of 8,000 British regulars, losing only 13 men in the process. For decades, January 8th and July 4th were celebrated with almost equal fervor.)
A fire broke out at the MÜV Medical Cannabis Dispensary off U.S. 19 on Thursday afternoon, disrupting traffic on the highway and prompting at least a dozen firefighters to the building. At least twelve very relaxed firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation.
So … pretty much like every decade.
Gizmodo is really into Uranus. Their least surprising Uranus headline of the past decade: Uranus Smells Like Farts.
I used to watch a lot of Westerns on TV in the late 50s and early 60s. Even though I have not heard most of the theme songs since then, I can still sing a couple dozen in their entirety, even when I can’t really recall the show. I’m not just talking about The Rebel and Have Gun Will Travel, because those songs became charted hits and still pop up now and then. I mean the really obscure ones that I’ve never heard again in the past 60 years. For example, I can sing the themes to Johnny Ringo, Bronco (Layne) and The Adventures of Jim Bowie, although I can’t picture anything about the shows. And the songs bring back vivid memories of the old shows I really liked, like Sugarfoot, Yancy Derringer and Cheyenne. If the lyrics to the theme songs from Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were poems or snippets of prose, I’d never remember them, yet I seem to remember every verse verbatim.
My favorite was one with quite a touch of bittersweet poetry:
Cheyenne, Cheyenne, where will you be campin’ tonight?
Lonely man, Cheyenne, will your heart stay free and light?
Dream, Cheyenne, of a girl you may never love
Move along, Cheyenne, like the restless cloud up above.
The wind that blows, that comes and goes, has been your only home.
But will the wild wind one day cease and you’ll no longer roam?
Move along, Cheyenne; next pasture’s always so green.
Driftin’ on, Cheyenne, don’t forget the things you have seen,
And when you settle down, where will it be? Cheyenne
In a similar, less personal vein, if you have ever run into an occasion where the theme songs to The Brady Bunch or Gilligan’s Island have come up, you realize that almost every baby boomer can sing these songs word for word, note for note. That was an old-time thing wasn’t it? So many shows used to have theme songs that explained the entire premise of the show.
People even recall the tune and words for songs they used to hate, like Copacabana. It is an amazing phenomenon, and not always a pleasant one, as you know if Seasons in the Sun has ever become an earworm.
A group of researchers asked people to describe the biggest asshole they knew, then created a profile of the asshole stereotype.
“Insults matter. We do mean certain things by using them or we associate them with certain characteristics.”