in other news A US family caused a bomb scare at Israel's main international airport after presenting an unexploded artillery shell at a security check. They had picked up the ordnance on a visit to the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, site of wars between Israel and Syria, according to authorities. Israel's YNet news site said in the incident on Thursday night a member of the family produced the shell from their backpack and asked a security official if it could be put in a suitcase.
According to Darwin, and it borders on common sense, the faster an organism reproduces the faster they evolve.
Except films trying to predict a future that is now the past. They’re up there in my top ten favourite films of all time, but just look how wrong Back to the Future 2 got the year 2015. It was almost a 1950s vision of the future, which was perhaps intentional given the original film’s 1955 links.
Have you noticed how gas stations play commercials out of the fuel pumps lately? They're typically blaring loud. On the fuel pump, next to each side of the screen, are a column of unmarked buttons. The second button from the top on the right hand side is a "mute" button. So far every pump I've used has the same setup, even at different stations. You press that button once and the commercial goes silent.
My first cell looked like this. I had to carry a pager so the boss could beep me to turn it on and call back since the battery was only good for about four hours. Less if you made any calls.
A man has just set a new WR by scootering (not motorised) from Land’s End to John O’Groats - a distance of 995 miles. He did it in 11 days. To my reckoning that’s 90 miles a day, every day. Well over three marathons every day. How is that humanly possible? I suppose considering the WR for the marathon is now under two hours if gives you plenty of time to complete three, but still.
I just called at the butty shop and bought myself a nice ham salad and a fat cream scone for afters. I walk back to the van to tuck in, and discover the bag with said cream scone is now empty, with small remnants of the cream and jam on the inside of the bag to remind me it once there. No doubt the local pigeons will enjoy it on my behalf, wherever it is. I suppose that’s what happens when you treat yourself on Friday the 13th.
Drove by a sign at an office building a few miles south of here that said, 'Gerry Mason, Attorney at Law'. Missed it by that much.
Ninety percent of plastic bottles which enter the recycling process are never recycled. "Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that," said report author Judith Enck [a former regional administrator at America's Environmental Protection Agency].
So just got done trying to wrap my head around the nightly news. Last year, during the height of the pandemic here in Japan, the government "requested" that all restaurants stop selling alcohol after 8pm because something something people talking loudly while drinking could allow the virus to spread more easily. One restaurant chain refused, which prompted stage two where the government ordered them to stop selling alcohol after 8pm. I never did understand why the law was written to make it a request first when a refusal triggered an automatic order, but that's the way it is. The chain sued the government saying that the (unspecified in the news) anti-corona measures they had taken were sufficient and there was no scientific basis for the "no booze after eight" rule, and sought damages for lost profits. The court concurred and said that the order was illegal because there was, in fact, no scientific basis for the rule. However, it declined to award damages because even though there was no scientific basis, many people thought that there was, so even though the order was illegal, nothing was going to happen. I'm out of absinthe, by the way. Ugh.
That's the best commercial the Army has done in decades. Of course, like all recruiting, less than a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent is going to get that job (there are a few of them in my military linguist community, and there are damn few of us), most will end up running buffers or busting rust on Humvees. I went for the more realistic option:
