The comments to crime videos are often more entertaining than the video itself.  I was checking the comments to a Stayawake video about a former boyfriend who murdered a former girlfriend with a bomb. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfDrht0zXIQ)

The woman who was killed, Ildiko, had an extensive sex life which presented multiple suspects.  Many comments wondered how she could manage all those relationships and still run her business.  Several stood out  

• @reignman30: Turns out Ildiko was the only registered female at the local sperm donor clinic, and she was considered a regular.
• @brycedaugherty9211: That's not a love triangle. That's a love dodecahedron
• @DoctorDerpman: She picked up more dudes than a city bus 

The description, "Killer Rocket Scientist vs Expert Detectives" was misleading.  The killer had a hobby creating rockets and was not a "rocket scientist" by any of several definitions.

Red Tree Stories - Chloe

"Red Tree Stories" is a YouTube channel with videos of police investigations. One particular post, "Chloe Thinks She Can Manipulate The Police" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPcmCNfJnTs) concerns a young woman who set up a drug by which resulted in the pusher being killed by one of the two guys she told bout the buy. The main feature of the video is a 17 year old young woman throwing a temper tantrum in the interrogation room.  Because she pounds on the metal table and screams the video has a number of warnings for and apologies to viewers with headphones.  My favorite caption read, ""More entitled ranting".

Seeing someone that age behaving like that is either funny or alarming. I'm sure that just a few seconds of the video is enough to keep parents talking for hours or not. In the end the shooter was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The young woman given a 20 year sentence for testifying against the two. The shooter's wingman was given a life sentence and an extra 75 years for the attempted murder of the man who drove the pusher to the place where the buy was to take place. (www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news/2015/06/15/1-491401/33964899007/)

Such a waste.

Trump's Helicopter Ride with a Black Person

Quoting from August 10th LA Times article  (www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/willie-brown-wasn-t-on-that-frightening-helicopter-ride-with-trump-here-s-who-was/ar-AA1ozVEC):

Ever since Donald Trump said Thursday that Willie Brown had bashed Vice President Kamala Harris years ago during a scary helicopter ride together, the former president has insisted that the story is true. This despite the fact that Brown, the former California Speaker, said he had never done business with Trump, let alone been on a flight with him.

But it turns out that another California official had.

In an interview Saturday, Nate Holden, the former longtime Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, recalled vividly what happened one day in 1990 when he had been invited by Trump to fly from Manhattan to Atlantic City on his chopper.

There are multiple ways this story can be spun: 

1. Donald Trump can't tell one black person from another.
2. Donald Trump's memory continues to fail.
3. Proof that Donald Trump isn't a racist because he let a black person ride in his helicopter.
4. God made sure that Donald Trump did not perish in a helicopter crash because God had great plans for The Donald.

The Whole Grail Typo

No, the title is not a typo.

CNN's travel article "They all say they’ve got the Holy Grail. So who’s right?" (www.cnn.com/holy-grail-leon-spain-valencia-genoa/index.html) contains a typo (or not).  The article lists at least 4 sites which claim to have the Holy Grail.  With the multiple locations in mind, here's the typo: 

"You might even be able to feel the mystical power of the Grail if you visit one of the many places it is said to be hiding, just out of SITE."

The last word would normally be "sight" not "site" unless the author was making a sly comment.  I tried to post a comment, but to do so I'd have to subscribe to CNN.  No thank you.

It wanted to send a message to the author, but, as is so typical, there was no easy way.  To contact her I'd need to join another site as a journalist.  So bag that baloney.  

By the end of the article the prototype of a multiple choice quiz with images materialized: From the following select the image which most closely represents your concept of the Holy Grail. One of the images was a sippy cup.

Temporarily Unavailable

Here are some things you don't want to see when you check your retirement account, especially if the market went into the toilet that day. 

(Don't cry for me.  I've got a year's supply of tuna fish and a waterproof sleeping bag.)

Dean Phillips: Political Cassandra

The article (www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/us/politics/dean-phillips-biden.html) states that Biden had trouble articulating his own agenda during his 2021 visits to Capitol Hill to push for his domestic program.  From the article:

“It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was the first jarring moment for most of us in the caucus,” Mr. Phillips recalled.

The most upsetting aspect of this for me is that I read columnists in the NY Times who had talked to Biden and claimed that the President was as astute and clear as he'd always been.  Woodrow Wilson's exposure to the public after his stroke was tightly controlled by his wife and his physician.  Were those around Biden doing something similar?

Was Biden OK for 20 minutes before sliding downhill?

When I mentioned this to a right winger he said that the media he consumed had been saying that for years.  My only response was that it was not easy to separate bias from news on his choice of media.

We'll know in a few years.

'Press this button to die'/David Blue

 Who knew?  A Do-It-Yourself suicide machine (https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20240717-first-suicide-pod-use-soon-in-switzerland-campaigners).

It's not yet available, but Switzerland may be the first place you can off yourself for only $20.   By quickly replacing the oxygen with nitrogen in the capsule the user dies of hypoxia in about 5 minutes.

I spent an hour searching in vane looking for a reference to a song with the lyric remembered as a "suicide machine strapped across their chests".  

Thinking it was from David Blue song I ended up reading David Blue's Rolling Stone obit  (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/david-blue-singer-songwriter-mystery-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-1005073/) with a side trip reading about Judee Sills before finding that what I was misremembering:

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road" on his “Highway 61 Revisited” album.

One fact in a BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162) mesmerized me: text in the body of the story indicated that the blueprints for the capsule would be available for free. Under the picture of the capsule I saw this:

I can see adapting part of it for my Engineering Drawing class.

I passed along articles about the Sarco Capsule to people as a franchise opportunity.

Venus Outline

A piece by Riley Black bidding farewell to a park in the current issue of Sierra magazine (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2024-2-summer/eyewitness/arches-national-park-one-last-day-utah-slickrock) has a reference I don't understand.  What is a "Venus outline" as in "If there weren’t so many other hikers at Double O Arch, I would have thrown off my clothes and left a Venus outline in the cool, orange sediment."

I've a bad habit of trying to understand what I read.  Accordingly I searched the web for "venus outline".  This is what was returned:

A free image by Design Circle from freepik.com (www.freepik.com/icon/venus_983300) is what I'll associate with the term.  Did the writer intend to create a similar image to generate a theory about aliens leaving a symbol of  their planet?  

On the other hand, given that the writer is referred to as "she" is "Venus outline" a sly mirrored reference to guys "writing their names in the snow"?  

Another great mystery of life to which I can be blissfully ignorant.

Wokeness

This came from  Quora

Dustin Hertel

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B.A. in Public Policy & Economics, Mount Royal University (Graduated 2021)Jan 8

Why do liberals love wokeness?

I’m going to start with a bit of advice my first Philosophy prof gave us in our intro class. He said, “If you can’t paraphrase somebody else’s position in a way that they would agree with, you don’t understand it, and if you don’t understand it, you can’t debate it.”

I would bet good money that’s the problem you’re having: you don’t really know what one (or either) of these terms means.

If you stop just taking on-board how right wing outlets and pundits represent those words and look at what they actually mean, the answer is pretty obvious.

In short, “woke” means someone is aware of biases and systems in our society that create biases and inequality.

What you call “liberals” (and isn’t actually what that term means) is almost certainly what most people would call “leftists” or “progressives” - a group for whom one of the main shared values is equality/justice.

So now, let’s rephrase your question based on these definitions: “Why would people who care about equality be aware of, and want to fix, systems that create inequality?” …..sounds pretty obvious, right?

"Famous author ripped after trashing the Bible"

The headline comes from an article is on Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/media/famous-author-ripped-after-trashing-bible-work-fiction-fertile-ground-for-hypocrisy), but I got it from MSN (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/famous-author-ripped-after-trashing-the-bible-as-a-work-of-fiction-fertile-ground-for-hypocrisy/ar-AA1mViRw) 

From the article:

"Oates declared, "The bible, as you call it, is a work of fiction; or rather, an anthology of fictions. It is not ‘the’ bible for much of the world's population & those who claim it as their own select those verses that appeal to them while ignoring other verses. Fertile ground for hypocrisy."

Various right wing and religious people weighed in.  My own feeling is simple.  Joyce Carol Oates is renown as a brilliant author.  Who better to recognize a work of fiction, an anthology based on the variety of styles, and the use of selected quotes for misuse?

I rest my case.