I hope everyone had a great weekend. I know I did, even if it was too short. But next weekend will be a holiday weekend for a lot of us so we have that to look forward too.
Yikes!
Italy in shock as 14 people die in cable car accident
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/at-least-eight-dead-in-italian-cable-car-accident
Belarus accused of ‘hijacking’ Ryanair flight diverted to arrest blogger
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/belarus-diverts-ryanair-plane-to-arrest-blogger-says-opposition
BLM activist Sasha Johnson in critical condition after gunshot to the head
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/blm-activist-sasha-johnson-in-critical-condition-after-gunshot-to-the-head
This is why we can’t have nice things.
The 2021 vaccination map looks like the 2020 election map
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/vaccine-map-2020-election-analysis/index.html
Sprots!
Phil Mickelson, 50 and glowing, wins PGA Championship to become oldest men’s major winner
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/05/23/pga-championship-final-round-live-updates/
I’ve been laughing at this for way too long:
See you later!
I dunno, that gorilla makes me so sad I’m going to cry, or maybe it’s the stupid police statement regarding Sasha Johnson’s shooting, or the 500 other shootings over the weekend…
…he does look a tad despondent…& I’m not clear why they went with kids furniture in the enclosure…but apparently he was returned to cincinnati zoo on account of ending up being on his own at the gorilla foundation…where he’d spent a few years with the female gorilla they somewhat famously had who could use sign-language…when she died that left him on his lonesome so I guess better somewhere with inappropriate scale furniture than effectively solitary confinement…but he doesn’t currently seem to be listed on the zoos website as a member of their “gorilla family” so I don’t have a picture for you of him looking less dejected, I’m afraid?
Working with kiddos who sometimes throw chairs, I’d *also* like to point out that these chairs can’t really be pulled apart into chunks of metal and/or wood, which might be deadly if thrown…
And that while YES, if that plastic chair were thrown *exactly* right it could kill someone, it’s highly more likely to simply leave a bruise, maaaaybe a broken bone or a concussion… but again, not typically death.
And I, too, initially laughed at the pic, but then when I realized he was the male gorilla who’d been brought in as a companion to Koko (iirc, this is Ndume), it just made me incredibly sad, because like us, Gorillas are social animals.💔
that was my thoughts too, that maybe they were using toddler furniture/toys because they are somewhat difficult to break?
Couple of observations on the gorilla:
1. That chair is amazingly strong. An adult gorilla weighs between 300-450 lbs.
2. There may be young gorillas in the same enclosure, and those may be toys for them. Gorillas are very social.
3. He may be imitating humans of his acquaintance.
4. I try not to get too sad about animals that have been raised in captivity. I know PETA would have us turn them all loose immediately, but like orcas and my turtle, letting them into the wild is a guaranteed death sentence. And considering how endangered they are, that might be the only way to preserve them. Okay, yeah, that’s sad.
…so…I’m not suggesting I know anything that isn’t in that article about the BLM activist that got shot beyond a brief snatch of BBC news…but I was surprised when it turned out to be from the UK…mostly on account of it still manages to surprise me when folks get shot in that part of the world simply because it’s a relatively rare occurence
…& I get that it’s often best not to take the description given by the police of these kinds of things at their word when they say things like there’s no reason to believe the attack was motivated by her activism…although sadly it seems almost inevitably true that she would have recieved a predictable spectrum of threats & abuse online that absolutely would have been
…that said…if you had a gun & an inclination to use it…& were in a position to come across her in the vicinity of a house party in peckham at around 3 in the morning…there’s a decent chance that you might not be a gun-toting crazy anti-BLM type out to make good on your fucked up online rhetoric…so there’s at least a non-zero chance the police might not be making it up when they say they don’t have evidence of it being someone following up on a credible threat
…there seems to be some suggestion that she wasn’t the intended target but was in a car that was shot at by people hoping to hit a member of a rival gang…which is just another kind of tragic, I guess?
So… a coincidence?! The fact that shootings are relatively rare makes that even less likely.
Brings to mind Sherlock Holmes, that redirection is more pleasant at least.
…shootings themselves are comparatively rare…but the unhappy truth is that in places like london the likelihood of someone who does have a gun also being someone involved in gang stuff is probably higher than the likelihood of them being some sort of racially-motivated would-be assassin?
…it’s hardly a comforting thought but in the same way that kids in london took to calling the police “the feds” having a gun & threatening (&/or using it on) rival gang members is something of an attempt to emulate the stateside model…it’s an unpleasantly ironic form of interpretation about “keeping it real” for a wannabe “roadman”…so for what little it’s worth it does seem like she wasn’t the intended target…but I can’t claim to have found much detail about it…she seems to have made it through surgery but be in a critical condition…but some reports say she was at the party when she was shot and others mention a car…possibly it was an attempt at something of a driveby?
…whatever the facts on the ground are it’s a damn shame & I was/am sorry as hell to hear about it
I don’t have time to read the article before I have to head off for work, but in the U.S., a lot of BLM activists have been turning up dead in pretty suspicious circumstances, that are being downplayed by the cops…
The 2021 vaccination map looks like the 2020 election map
I will never understand the Republican “strategy” here. You have razor-thin election margins, and you’re encouraging your voters to die.
My mother-in-law refuses to get vaccinated at age 86. She says her doctor told her not to. That may not be true, but my MIL is a hypochondriac, so it’s doubtful that she’d do the opposite of what the doctor advised. She quickly discovered that she was barred from attending certain social functions, like her DAR meeting. Oops.
But the doctor thing bothers me. She’s in rural Florida, and this doctor also missed her cancer, so the doctor probably sucks. But still, it’s incredibly irresponsible to tell people to not get vaccinated. But I’m assuming he’s a Trumper. So is this the level of care you get in the boondocks? This is the same county where the Villages are located, so there are a LOT of old people there.
And the other members of the DAR got vaccinated. So is her doctor trying to kill her? I mean, it is my MIL, and I wouldn’t vote to convict him if that’s true, but he’s not supposed to do shit like that.
I don’t really have a point here except the whole vaccine resistance thing is WEIRD.
What makes it doubly irrational is that cheeto has been vaccinated. Classic do as I say not as I do. It’s a very interesting position to take, our members are diminishing, let’s do all we can to cling to power but nothing to keep our numbers up or increase them.
The point is to maximize the craziness, so that their voters will never accept a rational argument. When Herman Cain died of Covid after going maskless to the Tulsa rally, his family doubled down. That’s what they want.
I think it’s fair to ask if that wins nationally. But I think they are headed toward either secession or a strategy of surrender to us or we’ll crash the plane.
If they can keep the pandemic going it serves a few purposes:
1) They can claim that people died on Biden’s watch too so it wasn’t Trump’s fault!
2) The economy won’t recover if we don’t get the virus under control and people confident to travel and go back to work again.
Plus, they know it no longer matters how many people vote for them, they are never going to win a popular vote. They just need to pick who can vote and who counts the votes and they will take power back the way God intended.
its farscys movie review monday!
for like the first half an hour or so…that was really on track to be the most awesomest movie of all time
then it fucking lost the plot and turned into a hot mess….
plenty fucking entertaining tho…just 90 minutes longer than the stories coherency
some really good covers in the soundtrack too
anyways…i probably shouldnt quit my day job in favour of movie reviews
I’ve worked with Dave Bautista – super nice guy and actually incredibly humble. Loves dogs and his wife. Glad he’s getting to do his thing.
dudes bigly….
(farscy is perceptive like that)
anyways…his acting was a-ok…this movie just fell on its ass with the story telling
Wishing Bob Dylan a Happy 80th Birthday today!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE6-uc1zr3s
arrrrgh, still can’t get linkys to work.
whenever people arent convinced music used to be better…..you can just point them to dylan.
This is a hilarious bit about him hating magic from 50 years ago. (Can’t say I disagree in this case.)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2HiagbXIAAhaf-?format=jpg
Music, dammit autocorrect, not magic.
Although the idea of Dylan sitting down to watch a guy in a tux pulling rabbits out of a hat is pretty funny too.
I can see Bob in a tux pulling rabbits out of a hat!
or …
A warning to all (drug-dealing) cheese lovers:
Feeling blue: drug dealer’s ‘love of stilton’ leads to his arrest
What triggered popo to analyze his fingerprints? That’s amazing but holy crap, big brother.
According to the National Crime Agency, EncroChat was used “exclusively by criminals” to carry out criminal activity including drug and weapons dealing, as well as money laundering. About 60,000 users of EncroChat have been identified worldwide, with about 10,000 of them in the UK.
(Emphasis mine. ) From this, my guess is that they could reliably assume that anyone on that app was up to no good, and start poking around his other transactions on the app? I dunno – more detail would have been helpful, but my guess is that the police are not releasing more info until they get a trial under way.