My daughter might appreciate this. She’s writing up papers, getting ready for her Ph.D. thesis defense, and trying to raise a four year old, and all I have to contribute is…it could be worse.
I don’t think she has any mad Australian guardians living next door, unfortunately.
I’ll be streaming in less than an hour, if all goes well. See you then!
I have turned 66. Don’t bother to wish me a happy birthday, though, because I still have to go through another 600 of these before I come into my full beastly power, and you will all have to bow down before me.
Or is it 550 years? I don’t know. Some people say the number of the beast is actually 616, and that there was a mistranslation or something.
I don’t even know what the beast is supposed to do. Am I going to have to sprout some more heads? That wouldn’t be particularly cool. I guess I have time to figure it out, not going to worry about it just yet.
Anyway, if you needed an excuse to party, go ahead and celebrate that I’m not of an age to go all Revelation on your butts.
We might have a special guest participant: ChatGPT.
Elon Musk keeps sinking to new depths. In his latest escapade, one of his employees was so baffled by the confusion that reigns at Twitter, he asked for clarification on whether he was still employed or not. He responded by firing him, insulting him, and ridiculing him for having a disability.
That’s a lawsuit right there. The man’s disability is muscular dystrophy — he’s going to die from it. Also, one of the reasons for the confusion is that his employment was a special case. He’d founded a company that Twitter bought for $100 million, and he’d generously taken his buyout in the form of wages over an extended time, and the whole sum will come due when his employment ends. Like, when Musk fires him.
Also, he seems to be a genuinely good guy, a kind of anti-Musk.
Musk keeps detonating these bombs of incompetence. I agree with this fellow who thinks Twitter is doomed, and the collapse is coming fast.
It’s already real bad over there. Elon Musk said yesterday that ad revenues have fallen 50%. The site is experiencing major outages almost once a week. During the most recent outage earlier this week, Elon was laser-focused on the important stuff: reply-guying Jordan Peterson. The Twitter Blue rollout has been such a disaster that he fired almost the entire team. The company isn’t paying rent on its office space. It recently tried to create a new income stream by selling office plants to employees.
But take a deeper look and the company is in even worse shape than it appears. Twitter has two financial time bombs waiting to go off. My hunch is that Elon will file for bankruptcy as soon as one of these time bombs self-detonates. I can’t say exactly when that will be.
I give it about six months.
The two time bombs are 1) a battery of lawsuits from all those fired employees for unlawful termination, and 2) a collection of massive fines from the FTC and the EU. He can’t avoid those. He paid too much for a company he bought as a present to his ego, and he’s been making it cataclysmically worse. I’m just biding my time, waiting for the inevitable and spectacular splash when Musk crashes.
Too much ick this morning. Even grading is suddenly looking pleasant.
Here’s a palate cleanser: our granddaughter Iliana gets to take care of a couple of cats for a few weeks, and she seems happy about it.
Not our cat, obviously. Iliana has met our cat, it did not go well, but our cat seems to be a feral outlier.
Huh. All I had to do was write the title and my review is done. That was easy.
OK, a little more.
I’ve got so much grading to do that I have to prod myself with little rewards. I had to compose an exam yesterday, and I told myself if I got it done before 7 I could go to the theater. I finished at 6. The choices available to me were Creed III, which is probably the better movie, but I’m not into sports movies at all, or Cocaine Bear, which looked entertainingly stupid. I went for the light entertainment.
There was a real cocaine bear, a black bear that discovered a drug dealer’s stash, ate 70 pounds of cocaine, and died. That would make for a short, sad, boring movie. In this movie, a plane drops cocaine into a park, and the bear finds scattered drops and turns into a raging drug fiend, flitting everywhere and ripping the limbs off various ne’er-do-wells and goofballs while collecting face-fulls of cocaine.
It was Ray Liotta’s last movie. It features a couple of kids who are cute, sassy, and don’t get eaten. The adults meet their demise in various creative ways. It’s a bit gorey.
Final assessment: it was honest schlock, and much, much better than Quantumania.
(I’ve got lots more grading to do, and am about to head off to the coffee shop with a stack of papers. When I get that done, the reward is to spend a little spider time. Then more grading this afternoon — maybe I’ll goad myself on with something on Netflix tonight. Then more grading tomorrow.)
Much better.
Oh boy. You know some local right-wingers are getting their jollies off this story.
Apparently, someone donated a bunch of books to a school in Sartell, MN, and some ‘helpful’ local mom started going through them. She found a juicy one: an adult MM romance novel that contained explicit sex scenes. If I’d been that parent, I’d have just told the teacher/librarian, and given the rather strong descriptions in the book, authorities would no doubt have immediately agreed and swept it out of the general circulation, quietly.
But no! That’s not what this parent did! Instead, she made a big show of it, appearing at a school board meeting, and reading out loud the racy parts. It wasn’t about simply removing a book with inappropriate content, but about grandstanding.
I didn’t find it that disturbing, but agree that it didn’t provide much in the way of educational content, and should be removed from the school’s collection.
Now, of course, all the kids know about the book, and this was even news on Pornhub as well as Newsweek. I think the novel Him, by Bowen and Kennedy, might get a little surge in sales from all the free advertising. Good work, Kids Over Politics 748! You discovered that porn exists! Now start going over all the sites accessible over the internet to see if there’s anything problematic there.
Somebody needs to give that man an enema.
