Tab Clearing...

• Russian frigate sent to watch over "shadow fleet" tankers moving through the English Channel is now itself low on fuel and drifting.


• Russia, feeling the stress of Ukrainian counterattacks, believed to be preparing "provocation" in Baltic nations or Poland to test NATO resolve.


• New Jersey residents have to keep cool road sign greased up to prevent theft.

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Strange Attractors

I was today years old when I found out that Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, tutored Arlo Guthrie for his bar mitzvah, which is one of those weird pop culture trivia facts on the order of "Samuel Beckett drove Andre the Giant to school."

Coincidences like this feel like the universe is desperately trying to communicate something, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is.

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Robo-Grope

If the TSA gets their new tech to work, they'll be able to feel you up without touching you.

Basically, using the combination of augmented reality goggles, haptic feedback devices in gloves, and sensors like backscatter X-rays or millimeter wave radar, an airport blueshirt will be able to cop a feel or fondle your junk remotely.

The future is really gross and squicky.

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Ghosts in the Machine

Some people are really getting into their AI assistants... way, way in.

[T]he teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.”

If you ask the robot to tell you that you’re god, it will.

This is bringing Audience Capture to people who aren’t vloggers and Poster’s Madness to people who don’t post.

Think of it like a wheelchair ramp to Crazytown.

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Tab Clearing...

• Hooters has gone bust.


• OnlyBots: Dudes suspicious that they'd been talking to chatbots are suing OnlyFans.


• $10k a head to attend a "Meet a Mate" pro-natalist conference? Anybody who signed up for that shindig deserves whatever happens, under the principle that it is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.

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Tab Clearing...

• I did not know that the Eastman Kodak company operated internally on the 13-month calendar from 1928 to 1969. Since each month has 28 days and each quarter 91 days, it's a very pragmatic calendar for accounting purposes.


• Paypal redux?


• Is mindlessly consuming social media physically bad for your brain?

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That must have been a rush...

Most journalists go through their entire careers without an opportunity to write a headline like this.

10/10. Perfection. No notes.

Parenthetically, while "Stylish But Illegal Monkey" is a bit of a mouthful for a band name, you could always call yourselves SBIM. Throwing this idea out there for free if anyone wants it.

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UFO sighting...

Somewhere on my blog, although I can't find the post right now, are photos of this car in its former home, at the gas station on the corner of 56th Street & Keystone Avenue.

Thanks to Jerry the alert blog reader for sending the link!

(If the link gives you fits, you might try manually copypasta-ing this one "https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/missouri-deputies-pull-over-vehicle-resembling-ufo-out-of-this-world".)

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Scene of the Crime

You're probably going to hear about the weird multiple shooting in suburban Orlando yesterday.

A woman was found shot to death in a car late in the morning, before lunch. Po-po show up and do their crime scene thing, and later in the day a news crew from a local cable news channel is there doing their standup bit...you know, reporter talking to the camera saying something like "Police say the suspect is still at large," or whatever, when the suspect stops being at large and starts being right there.

For whatever reason, dude returned to the scene of the earlier shooting, shot at the news crew, killing the reporter and critically injuring the photographer, and then ducked into a nearby house and shot a mother and child, killing the little girl.

Cops arrested the suspect, who looks like a real pillar of the community.

This is 19-year-old Keith Melvin Moses, the suspect in a series of shootings today that left three dead, in OCSO custody. This is a sad day for our community. Three were murdered today, including a woman in her 20s, a 9-year-old girl and a @MyNews13 employee. pic.twitter.com/DXXkxzRHl5

— Orange County Sheriff's Office (@OrangeCoSheriff) February 23, 2023

A reporter getting shot doing a routine standup after the crime scene tape has been rolled up and the scene long cleared is going to hit really close to the metaphorical flagpole in newsrooms across the country, so this is going to get understandably outsized coverage.

Plus it's just a really weird crime, period.

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Unidentified Aerial Memes

2019: UFOs are a conspiracy theory
2021: New evidence shows UFOs are real
2023: We’re now at war with the UFOs

— Sweet Meteor O'Death (@smod4real) February 12, 2023

pic.twitter.com/fuO5lx244f

— Ani, Valentine Priestess ♈️♑️♋️ READINGS OPEN (@transmuteastro) February 12, 2023

A reminder that there is a longstanding problem here that we've been waving off as "UFOs".

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Bzzzt!

Ah, coastal Florida! The gentle sound of the surf, the glow of sunrise over the ocean, the smell of burning iguanas...

"An iguana caused “a large-scale outage” in Lake Worth Beach, Florida earlier this month – the third iguana-triggered outage in the city this year.

The outage impacted about 1,400 customers in Lake Worth Beach in Palm County, city spokesman Ben Kerr told CNN. The power was restored within 35 minutes, according to a tweet from the city."

In other news, Iguana-Triggered Outage is the title of my band's next album.

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Links...

• Amazon posts a $4B loss for Q1 of '22, causing its share price to go on a "10% off!" sale, in case you wanted to get mom a few shares of AMZN for Mothers Day. (It's still nearly three grand a share, so you'd have to really like mom to do that.)


• What is it about tsars and kooky prophets?


• Private spaceflight is still pretty cool. Here's video of the first rental capsule returning. I hope Axiom gets their deposit on Crew Dragon Endeavor back.

Pattern Recognition...

Every morning of late, I've been following a pretty familiar pattern: Get up, grab a soda, throw my watch on the charger, spin up the computer, and before I commence any writing I solve the day's Wordle puzzle and post the score to my smallest Facebook friends list as well as a little running Telegram chat I have with a few friends.

It's a fun little brain-teaser and if nothing else, I start the day having accomplished something, no matter how inconsequential.

Plus, good habits can save your life!

Apparently Meemaw over there in Illinois didn't text her older daughter her Wordle score, like she did every day. Worried about her mom, the daughter had a neighbor check on her. The neighbor rang the doorbell and got no answer, but told the daughter that her car was still there. So they called the po-po for a wellness check. The po-po made entry and arrested the naked, scissors-wielding lunatic who'd been holding Meemaw hostage.

Now, we'd never have heard this story if Meemaw had plugged the lunatic with a Shield EZ like she should have... but we'd never have heard it if she didn't play Wordle, either.

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Choking the ol' kangaroo...

It sounds like a weird euphemism, but it's actually a news item from the northern Nashville 'burbs, where a Tennessee man strangled his neighbor's kangaroo. Literally.

The neighbors went onto the fenced-in property, where the female neighbor was assaulted by the kangaroo. The husband then stepped in, strangling the kangaroo.

Man, you don't get to write news stories about choking the neighbor's marsupial just every day. You want to savor that assignment.

Can you imagine the conversation amongst the dispatcher and responding po-po?

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Every time you think it can't get more 2020...

Who had "Japanese combatting bears with robot monster wolves" as their guess for November? Because this is pretty lit. Bears fighting robot monster wolves is like the sort of stuff we used to draw in third grade, or a strip idea from The Oatmeal.

Also, what gun for robot monster wolf?

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This year just keeps getting weirder.

•  Cockfighting...which is legal under certain restrictions in the Philippines...has been banned during the Time of the 'Rona, but there have been underground cockfights still happening. The po-po raided one of these illegal events and, as the spectators scattered, one of the officers scooped up an illicit combat chicken. In the struggle to corral the hostile cock, its razor sharp spur opened the officer's femoral artery and he bled out on the spot. Killed by a chicken. (Insert ad for PHLster Flatpack here.)


• Swordfish in the Mediterranean Sea are frickin' impaling sharks to death, just the way they did in those ocean cross-section drawings I used to do in second grade. I KNEW it!


• Halloween, a blue moon, DST ending, and the election, all within a few days!

Fraktured Fairy Tales

How had I not seen the official video of Rammstein's "Sonne" before? It's so...German.
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QotD: Bizarro World Edition...

"I had the weirdest dream last night about a bizarro 2020 America where the Republican President was saying "total authority" and the Democratic governor of New York was talking about States' Rights." -Paul Simer

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From a discussion elsewhere...

In answer to the question "Why is the world so goofy?" made in response to one or another of the thousands of weird little fandoms and social groups that dot the digital savanna:

"It's always been goofy, it's just that the internet...and specifically social media...lets you see the wackiness and the stupidity in the head of the average person.

Essentially, the World Wide Web has given everyone an extra tall flagpole from which they can fly their freak flag.

Also, it allows them to spot others whose freak flag is like their own, and they can then congregate, at least virtually, and compete to see who can fly their club's freak flag the highest."

We now live in a world where people issue threats of physical violence to each other over the internet about which video game or cartoon characters can have fanfic romances with which other video game or cartoon characters. These arguments consume them for months and years at a time and are treated as very serious business. Wrap your head around that if you can.
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This timeline is weird...

Imagine trying to explain this to someone in the Eighties...or the Fifties...

Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq early Friday, wasn’t just an infamous terrorist organizer and one of the regime’s most powerful officials — he was also one of President Trump’s social media antagonists. 

International experts have long known of Soleimani as the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force and the shadow commander of proxy conflicts across the Middle East, but many Americans first heard of the general in 2018, when he started arguing with Trump via memes on Instagram.

Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (#IRGC) #Quds Force Major General Qassem Soleimani responded to #US President Donald Trump’s announcement that ‘sanctions are coming’ with a Game of Thrones-inspired meme of his ownhttps://t.co/336UFrTL8E pic.twitter.com/5uh1qtQPMB

— Tasnim News Agency (@Tasnimnews_EN) November 3, 2018