The Kraken is dead!
But fear not, for he shall rise again on the third day, and lo, the rampaging will be awesome.
(Actually, this is a giant squid washed up on a beach in South Africa, in 2020, so the resurrection is a bit belated. But then, risen gods always seem to be tardy. Be patient, and send money to his prophets while waiting.)
You know that Russian flagship that mysteriously caught fire yesterday? Well, it sank.
The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sank after an attack from Ukrainian forces triggered a “significant explosion” as the vessel floated off the coast of Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, with Moscow offering a competing claim about the cause of the destruction.
The alternative explanation from Moscow (which has acknowledged that it sank) is that…it caught fire.
Personally, I think the Ukrainian military has been drafting gremlins.
My grandnephew Alex (my brother’s daughter’s son — it can be hard to keep track!) is growing into a young man, which brings with it challenges most of us didn’t have to worry about. He was born with cleft lip and palate, which was surgically corrected…many times. It turns out that this is not a one-and-done kind of surgery, as he grows, his skull has to be continuously adjusted with more surgery and more gadgets. Right now he’s about to go in and get a device called a halo attached to his head for 3 months. It’s like braces for your whole face.
He has decided to document the procedure and his travails afterwards with a video series called HaloDays.
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How much should owning the rights to a picture of tweet be worth? If you asked me, I might give you, as an act of charity, a dollar before throwing it away. Not Sina Estavi! He paid $2.9 million for this:
Oops. I think I just committed grand larceny. It’s the first time I ever stole millions of dollars, and it felt good. Maybe I should steal more…oh, wait. Uh-oh.
Crypto investor Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever for $2.9 million in March of 2021. And after a year of constant hype for NFTs, most people would naturally assume Estavi might be able to turn a nice profit on his investment by now. But most people would be wrong.
Estavi put the NFT up for auction last week and bidding ended on Wednesday. The highest bid? Roughly $277 worth of ethereum, at current prices, according to crypto news outlet CoinDesk.
That’s a crushing disappointment. One moment I’m a glamorous international thief planning a weekend in Monte Carlo on my ill-gotten gains, and next I discover that my precious objet d’lucre is worth next to nothing, and if I could even find a fence for it at best I’d get a trip to the drive-through at my local McDonald’s.
I can laugh now, but I sure hope I don’t learn that my retirement funds are all invested in blockchain shit.
Russian media made a quiet announcement.
Ammunition detonated on the Moskva missile cruiser, the Defense Ministry said.
“As a result of a fire, ammunition detonated on the Moskva missile cruiser. The ship was seriously damaged,” the statement said.
The crew was completely evacuated. The reasons for the incident are being established.
Ah, yes. There was a fire in a warship during a war. We don’t know how the fire could have gotten there. We’re going to have to investigate. Very puzzling. Spontaneous combustion? Gremlins? Who knows?
It’s still floating! It hasn’t sunk! We are inwincible!
Moscow’s defence ministry said the Moskva missile cruiser was still afloat and its main weaponry had not been damaged.
Gosh. We many never know what happened except…
Russian and Ukraine agree that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, its Black Sea flagship, was taken out of commission on Wednesday, but there’s no agreement on how that happened. Russian state-run media, citing the Defense Ministry, said “ammunition detonated as a result of a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser,” the ship “was seriously damaged,” and “the entire crew” of 510 was evacuated. Hours earlier, the governor of Odessa said Ukraine had hit the ship with Neptune anti-ship missiles and inflicted “very serious damage.”
Either way, “one of the Russian Navy’s most important warships is either floating abandoned or at the bottom of the Black Sea, a massive blow to a military struggling against Ukrainian resistance 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his neighbor,” CNN reports. And “whatever the reason for the fire, the analysts say it strikes hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the U.S. Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.”
I don’t know about you, but I am persuaded by the side using the active voice and providing a reasonable causal agent.
Hey, this sounds strangely familiar.
According to a study conducted last year by the American Federation of Teachers with the Rand Corporation, one in four teachers were thinking about quitting their job by the end of the school year. Teachers were also more likely to report experiencing regular job-related stress and symptoms of depression than the general population, according to the study.
Texas has one solution.
A local school district in Texas has announced plans to reduce students’ school weeks from the traditional five days to four days for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year.
The Jasper Independent School District cited teacher shortage and retention when it announced the change in a Facebook post last month and said it had conducted surveys with parents, teachers and staffers before the change was voted on by its board of trustees.
Also, pay them a little more.
Teachers would get a $3,000 stipend while staff members, such as librarians, would receive $1,500 if they remain with Jasper ISD. The funds allocated would come from the public school district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) grants, a federal grant program under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act
They are having longer school days to compensate, so it’s not exactly free time. I’m also wondering what parents think: 4 day school weeks and 5 day work weeks don’t line up neatly, and there’s going to be an increased demand for day care.
Unless employers in the region go to 4 day work weeks, which wouldn’t be a bad idea…
Honestly, I think the Ark Park is doing better than I would have expected, and they do have a steady flow of gullible visitors. There’s a regional travel agency that advertises trips from Morris, MN to the Ark Park all the time — they have to load it up with lots of other stuff to make it appealing, though.
The Itinerary: Wednesday, June 15th – Travel to Dubuque, IA Pickup locations: 7:00 AM – Morris, MN 8:15 AM – Willmar, MN 9:15 AM – Hutchinson, MN 10:00 AM – New Ulm, MN Afternoon: Visit Field of Dreams in Dyersville, IA Hotel: Dubuque, IA Thursday, June 16th – Celebration Belle full day Cruise Dubuque to Moline 7:00am Depart on the Celebration Belle on the Mississippi River– we’re headed to Moline, IL! Your day can be what you make of it, a learning experience or simply a leisurely cruise down the Mississippi River. Come Hungry, no cruise would be complete without food! You’ll enjoy 3 fresh meals right aboard the boat! 6:00pm Boat docks Hotel: Moline, IL Friday, June 17th – Travel to Petersburg, KY 6:00am Depart hotel (We lose an hour to eastern time zone) 3:00pm Arrive at Creation Museum Hotel: Near Cincinnati, OH Saturday, June 18th –The big day 9:00am Visit the Ark Encounter Late Afternoon Visit Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby Hotel: Louisville, KY Sunday, June 19th –Travel to Moline 8:00am Depart hotel (We will gain an hour with central time zone) 3:45pm Seating for dinner at Circa 21 Dinner Playhouse dinner theatre 5:00pm Show – “Beauty and the Beast”- The Broadway Musical Hotel: Moline, IL Monday, June 20th –Travel day 8:30am Headed home! 10:00 – 12:00pm Shopping and Lunch on your own at Amana Colonies Price: $1,299 per person double; $1,199 per person triple $1,099 per person quad; $1,499 per person single
I’m already bored at the starting bus trip from Morris to Dubuque. Would my wife and I pay $2600 for a week of random Midwestern tourism? No, we would not. But then I suspect their market is church-going old people with lots of disposable income, and we don’t meet most of the criteria.
There were a lot of suckers born 60+ years ago, so they do have a constant dribble of yokels bringing shekels to the AiG attractions. But is it the economic boon to Kentucky that they promised? No, it is not, as Americans United points out.
Americans United never opposed Ham’s building of Ark Encounter, but we did stand against taxpayers being compelled to support what is clearly an evangelistic enterprise. We believe Ham and his Answers in Genesis (AiG) ministry should have relied on voluntary contributions from his co-religionists.
Ham justified the raid on the public purse by asserting that Ark Encounter would be a great boon to the nearby town of Williamstown, whose leaders agreed to float $62 million in junk bonds to get the project going. Town officials clearly believed the attraction would benefit the area economically.
You just had to believe! They suckered the Kentucky state government into believing this monstrous monument to ignorance would be a world-class tourist attraction, but it’s not. It’s a senior-citizens-from-Dubuque-class attraction.
“It has never reached even the minimum number of visitors for its first year of operation,” Trollinger wrote. “And with every passing year the tourist site falls farther short of what AiG promised.”
Trollinger and his wife Susan have visited the ark several times, most recently last month. He writes, “After our March visit to the Ark we drove through Williamstown. Six years after the tourist site was constructed, and as documented by the wonderful film, We Believe in Dinosaurs, Ark Encounter has had little noticeable economic impact on the small town that provided the tourist site with such gifts.”
What about all those jobs Ham promised? Apparently, local residents either don’t want them or don’t qualify for them. (Ark Encounter employees must sign a statement of faith saying they agree with AiG’s fundamentalist religious views.) Dan Phelps, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, keeps a close eye and Ham’s doings and pointed out recently that Ham has proposed hiring students from nearby Christian colleges and is raising money to build housing for them on site.
Worst of all (for AiG), they can’t recruit the gullible locals to come work for them at low pay, in a job that requires you to swear a loyalty oath to Ham’s version of the Bible. Not even the residents of Kentucky who voted to pay for a giant pseudo-boat are stupid enough to do that. He’s building cheap dorm housing for Christians whose fanaticism blinds their common sense, and now he’s playing the culture war card: move to Kentucky and work for cheap before the liberals teach your children it’s OK to be gay!
The man in the photo is Phil Murphy, the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey, and therefore a proxy for Satan. You can see the videos that give conservatives conniptions right here; they’re rather tame, just saying that masturbation and confusion about sex is normal in adolescents. You can see the game he is playing, though, using fear of sex as a tool to get cheap labor for his boondoggle.
I don’t get the point, though. As we all know from the Bible, he only needs 8 employees to keep the Ark running. Less, even, since his Ark is mostly empty with nothing but lots of dioramas and wooden crates full of plastic animals, and isn’t even a boat.
Of course, Noah didn’t need parking attendants and ticket-takers. Or a zip-line! Yeah, that’s probably it, the zip-line is a huge resource sink.
Oh boy! My favorite part of the class! Except that I don’t get to go on and on for a month or more.
I mocked Ben Shapiro. I shouldn’t have done that. You know he has legions of brilliant defenders who would leap to his defense, and now I am staggered by the sharp-witted repartee.
So that’s the kind of person who loves Ben Shapiro. I guess I better be careful or I might be fucked up
by these dazzlingly sharp-witted fellows…
Oh, wait…hard to breathe…I’m choking on my own sarcasm! The poisonous toxins of my very own horrible, laughing bile are rising up to strangle me <choke> <cough, cough> Kharma Agent succeeds in their devious plan to make me die! Tell my…family…that…I love…theaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgghhhhhhh.
P.S. Sorry that I didn’t black out their email address. I forgot, and then I, you know, died.
I’ve been having chronic back pain lately, so I indulged myself in a shiny new office chair with good lumbar support. It took me a while to assemble it, but hoo boy, it is comfy, exactly what I need.
The one catch: the instructions come in tiny red print on a black background, which is totally nuts. My eyes hurt now, although, admittedly, my backside is nice and cushy.
