Happy Friday all. Hope your Leap Day was hoppin’ (did you see what I did there?!?)
JFC
112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/more-than-a-hundred-dead-after-israeli-troops-opened-fire-near-aid-trucks-say-gaza-officials
I forgot about this kid.
Jack Teixeira will plead guilty in massive leak of documents on Discord
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/29/discord-leak-jack-teixeira-guilty/
“Nobody puts baby in a freezer” Johnny Castle
“What happens to those children that are left in that cold freezer, those babies?” Singleton said. “I want these mothers to be helped, but I just want to point out the hypocrisy here. We shouldn’t be legislating what a doctor should do.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/29/ivf-protections-alabama-legislature-bill/
Sprots!
Caitlin Clark, record-breaking Iowa basketball star, declares for WNBA draft
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/29/caitlin-clark-declares-wnba-draft-iowa-hawkeyes
Do you guys know about this Willy Wonka thing? If not, just don’t click. You’re better off.
Have a great weekend!
“Make it nice.” Awww. I miss Dorinda.
Also: “Nobody puts baby in a freezer.” Oh no. That was truly inspired.
“Things aren’t looking too good for Republicans.”
*snort*
“Of all the people sitting around this table,” Biden said, “do you think that’s appropriate to ask me?”
Hunter Biden turned the tables on Matt Gaetz when asked about drug use
This is a fun summary of Hunter’s deposition. Dude basically made fools out of the gaggle of idiots. After months and months of Republicans painting a picture of him as a drug-addled hobo, you forget he’s an attorney.
Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want
Even Axios can’t come up with a pro-GOP spin on this.
GOP’s post-Roe peril spreads like wildfire
A great Friday, up here in MN!
Tom, the Trucker Cat was FOUND a couple days ago, 9-ish miles from the Pilot rest stop where he went missing**
And his people DID manage to get a load to haul out this way, so if the weather holds, and ‘ol Smokey stays off their tail, they should be here pretty soon!😉🤗💖
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2024/02/27/tom-the-lost-trucker-cat-found-nine-miles-from-st-cloud-after-40-days-missing
**Yes, I’ve been to that truck stop before, it’s in the same area as the McDonald’s by the freeway.
It’s also the one where I got my current (AMAZING!) window scrapers, for $5.00 each, in the late spring a couple years ago.
They were clearancing out their winter supplies, and selling the $30.00 extensible scrapers for $5.00 each. I got one, realized once I got it out to Dad’s van, that it extended to 5′ long, AND had a turnable (locking!) brush, so went back in and bought 3 more–two for my roommates’ mom’s medical transport van, and a second one for Dad’s van.
Nine miles is a long distance for a cat to wander, especially if the original spot had dumpsters. I wonder if he hitched a ride at some point.
…it possibly depends on the cat to some extent
…some documentary thing a while back put GPS trackers on a street’s worth of cats & iirc a lot barely crossed the road…but one or two roamed around an area that at least had a longer perimeter than that, although I can’t remember what the farthest points would have been
…& one or two people I know have had cats that would take off for anything up to a week…but that was before airtags & GPS so no idea how far they went?
This study put the max of a few cases at a few kilometers, and that would be a significantly shorter distance than nine miles. The study notes the max in general was 350 meters.
https://www.earth.com/news/domestic-cats-do-not-usually-roam-too-far-from-home/
This cat appeared on the opposite side of the Mississippi River from where it first walked off, and would have had to go through a lot of frozen Minnesota landscape to get there, and for some reason abandoning the fast food options where it started.
I’m guessing somone either gave him a ride or else he managed to jump into the back of someone’s pickup.
Particularly if it’s cold. There have been lots of cases of cats hiding in car engines for warmth and then being found after the car was driven. I could easily see one jumping in a pickup truck bed if there was interesting trash (read: tasty) back there, too.
…so…surprising precisely nobody it’d be a BBC thing I was thinking of…technically a 2-part effort under the brand/series heading of “horizon” with the episodes themselves being “the secret life of the cat“…& lady wrote the whole thing up & hachette will flog you a copy of her book by more or less the same name if you fancy it…the second episode is called “little cat diaries“…basically they put go pro cameras & gps tracking on 50 cats in a neighborhood
…either way…as I recall…& it was over a decade ago now…there were some outliers…like the regular-size tabby that regularly killed & brought home foxes as presents for the people that fed it…& some of the ones that liked to roam had sort of collections of routes/circuits they frequented…as I say I can’t remember what the farthest point would be from home as the crow flies…but for some they seemed to cover the whole area at one time or another…but at least one ranged out in skinnier loops that went further & in more than one direction from home…so if you plotted it out like a gerrymandered district the border would have been…I think…somewhere in the 8-12 mile range
…I don’t think it necessarily walked that perimeter that way…but it certainly covered more distance more days than not
…the pre-GPS anecdata on the other hand…at least one of those was spotted in a neighboring village from time to time…which was certainly more than 6 miles away…possibly more depending on how far the other side the sightings were…& that was pretty regularly in that particular case…possibly farm cats play by different rules to truck cats…which would certainly make sense…but…the ones in the BBC thing were at best a generation or two removed from those…whereas the AWOL for a week or so one was several generations along precisely that sort of family tree…bordered on not really being an animal you could call a pet in some ways…like a working dog?
Naaaaaaah, it hasn’t really been frozen up here, allllll that much this winter!
We were cold the last couple days, and once last week… but we’ve been in the 40’s-60’s MOST of this winter–it’s NOT good, honestly, how warm we’ve been, because that means Alaska’s been getting absolutely DUMPED on, and so has Mongolia💔
We’re both unseasonably warm & mild, AND incredibly DRY this year… if we hit 70 this weekend (and it’s LIKELY!), That’s the first time since the 1800’s.
It was good for the cat, but it’s VERY worrisome for farmers, nature, watersheds, and animals.
This kind of investigation never turns out well:
New York Times Launches Leak Investigation Over Report on Its Israel-Gaza Coverage
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/new-york-times-israel-gaza-leak
It has an especially bad effect on a media organization, because the way reporters work isn’t usually some cloak and dagger handoff of a thumb drive. They mostly chat and gossip with their friends and colleagues at other outlets. They bounce ideas and frustrations off each other.
Within that cloud of back forth may well be someone who specifically shared a piece of information. But odds are the investigation is going to catch people who were careless about trivia rather than people who were aware they were going against policy.
What an investigation like this does is create a culture of paranoia which makes the information sharing worse. And the fundamental problem of the report in question is that it was badly managed.
https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/
That article is right that the mess of the Gaza story is ultimately at the editorial level. And the way the top management of the Times is reacting is to try to pin the issue on their reporters and shutdown internal discussion about it. They’re pretty much guaranteeing they’ll fail harder with worse consequences next time.
https://nltimes.nl/2024/03/01/us-government-can-gain-access-dutch-governments-emails
you know….not too long ago…this would have been shrugged off with a meh
nowadays…..i dont think we entirely trust yous anymore
….for some odd reason
That’s fair. Printouts could end up in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
Your government would be wise to just keep feeding us pdfs of “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.” You could supplement that with email chatter about the Dutch Royal Family, and maybe some marketing emails touting various weekly supermarket deals. I’m sure that the Dutch, like all of us, are obsessed with Taylor Swift, so you could sign up the US receiving email account to various Dutch fansites.
reasonably sure our gubment and wise do not go together in one sentence
not that we officially have one at mo… but at least its fun watching the right infight
far as taylor swift goes….uhhh…she’s popular…but nothing like on your side of the pond..lol
kinda like the royals….popular…but nothing like on your side of the pond
That Glasgow Willy Wonka scam was nuts.
One thing I didn’t know until now is that AI freaks out when it’s asked to put words into images, which is how you get the gibberish at the bottom of this image produced by the Wonka scammers.
It can handle STOP in a stop sign because it has been trained on the specific form of the letters, but asking it to write the word “stop” on a poster can fail horribly.
That’s the looniest part about this. Did no one actually use their eyeballs? The AI portions of the ads were like “cartchy tuns” and “sweet teats.” And obviously Willy Wonka with 64 fingers. If people are looking at this and saying “looks good, here is my money” we are DOOMED and we deserve to be.
Hold your breath
Give 40 quid to meeeee
Come with me and you’ll be
In a fake out of AI denigration
Take a look and you’ll see
Into this damnation
We’ll begin in a warehouse
Traveling in a IP lawsuit free of my “creation”
What you’ll get will be (your) exploitation
Speaking the truth but she is a woman so…
I would think a bunch of old white guys could support this, they experience “shrinkflation” all the time!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shrinkflation-bill-grocery-stores_n_65e0ae5fe4b0d2a247586441
Prices haven’t even stayed the same. Things that have NOTICEABLY gotten smaller (like cereal boxes, snack food bags, bottled/canned beverages, and TP) have gone up in price at the same time. Companies took advantage of whatever excuses they gave us during the pandemic and just kept doing it because they could. (Not just at the grocery store, either).