Tidy mouse

A man in Wales, UK has found that a mouse tidies up the stuff in his shed every night.

 After regularly discovering that things from the night before had been mysteriously tidied, he set up a night vision camera on his workbench.

It captured a mouse picking up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts.
…

The 75-year-old from Builth Wells, Powys, said the tidying ritual had been going on for two months.

“At first I noticed that some food that I was putting out for the birds was ending up in some old shoes I was storing in the shed,” he said.

“Ninety nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night.

No word on if the mouse is taking on new clients whose sheds need cleaning.

The decline of Boeing

Problems keep mounting for the Boeing aircraft company. In 2019, there were two crashes in quick succession of the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people and resulted in the entire fleet of that model being grounded from March 2019 to November 2020 for investigations and to fix the problem.

Investigations faulted a Boeing cover-up of a defect and lapses in the FAA’s certification of the aircraft for flight. The accidents and grounding cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees as of 2020, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. In 2021, Boeing also paid US$2.5 billion in penalties and compensation to settle the DOJ’s fraud conspiracy case against the company. Further investigations also revealed that the FAA and Boeing had colluded on recertification test flights, attempted to cover up important information and that the FAA had retaliated against whistleblowers.

Then last week, a panel of the fuselage ripped out of a brand new 737 Max plane operated by Alaskan Airways just after it took off and was ascending to cruising altitude. Fortunately there were no casualties and the plane landed safely but the fleet was grounded again to see what might be the problem.
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The further adventures of Kristina Karamo

You may recall my post of about two weeks ago about the Michigan GOP where a bonkers QAnon-supporting election denier Kristina Karamo and her followers took over the leadership of the state party just a year ago and promptly made a mess of things so that the party is on the verge of bankruptcy. This resulted in efforts by even those who once supported her bid for the leadership to try and oust her and yesterday, they managed to do just that.

But if you think that ended that saga, then you still haven’t understood today’s MAGA GOP. They never accept an election result unless they win. Karamo herself has still not conceded that she got trounced in the race for Michigan secretary of state back in 2022 claiming (you guessed it) that the election was rigged.
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Trump reveals new discovery about magnets

In their 2010 song Miracles, the Insane Clown Posse had the lyric “Fucking magnets, how do they work?”. That line has since become an internet meme. They also sang that they did not want to talk to any scientist because scientists lie.

In a speech in Iowa on Friday, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) reveals his knowledge of magnets, that pouring water over them destroys them.


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Behaving badly in theaters

Actor Andrew Scott revealed that while performing as Hamlet, he stopped midway through the play’s famous soliloquy because a member of the audience was using his laptop.

Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was “no way” he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away.

“When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop – not his phone, his laptop – while I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to fucking be’,” said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails.

“I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I stopped for ages.”

A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped.

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The curious psychology of getting free stuff

As some of you may have noticed, posting has been light recently. This is because I am fond of the card game bridge and there has been a big annual bridge tournament right here in Monterey where a lot of people come from all over to play. It is held in a large hotel and I have been playing in it all day for several days, which is not just time consuming but mentally exhausting, since you have to concentrate for about six hours.

The tournament is organized and run by the national bridge body but as the local club, we are assigned the hospitality desk, where volunteers from our club sit and tell people about things to do and places to eat in the region, and generally be as helpful and as welcoming as we can. One feature of our desk is that there is a large bowl where we keep a mix of various types of candy. The candy was purchased by our club and passersby are welcome to take one or two for free.
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Why is urine yellow?

I must admit that this is not a question that I had been wondering about, mainly because I assumed that the reasons would have been known some time ago, given our current ability to do microanalysis of pretty much anything.

So I was surprised to learn that researchers have only just found the reason, that it is due to a particular microbial enzyme.

The enzyme is called bilirubin reductase, and it’s a result of the degradation of red blood cells. Once they break down, a bright orange pigment called bilirubin is produced. Typically, bilirubin is secreted into the gut where it has to be discharged. It can also be reabsorbed, which in excess can cause jaundice, which is when a person’s skin and eyes become yellow.

“Gut microbes encode the enzyme bilirubin reductase that converts bilirubin into a colorless byproduct called urobilinogen,” lead author Brantley Hall, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, said in a media statement. “Urobilinogen then spontaneously degrades into a molecule called urobilin, which is responsible for the yellow color we are all familiar with.”

Now at any parties social gatherings, whenever the conversation turns to the topic of urine, you can impress your friends this little factoid.

You can read the paper that was published in Nature Microbiology here.

John Pilger (1939-2023)

The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.
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Looking forward to the end of lists

The end of an old year and the beginning of a new one is the occasion for the generation of lists of all manner of things and I for one find most of them unenlightening and tend to give them a miss. Fortunately these kinds of lists disappear after the first few days of the new year.

The most useless lists are those that try to predict what will happen in the coming year. They are just guesses based on the whims of the list creator. Retrospective tabulations of the major events of the past year are also not particularly enlightening, since I most likely knew about them anyway.

The only lists that I look at factual ones like those of people who died during the year, to see if there are some familiar names whose demise did not make big news when it happened.

The only non-factual lists that I look at are those of film critics whose views I respect that give the best films of the year, just in case I missed reading about some less-publicized but good film. If I find one, I add it to my ‘must see’ list.