Bezos controls Bond, MLB robot umpires, falling space stuff, cosmic intelligence.
Now with less Trump!
Be sure to visit KGB Overset for all the memes, cartoons, humor, news, and miscellany that didn’t fit in today’s newsletter. Have a great weekend… see you on Monday.
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Knee Deep in the Hoopla
More like Neck Deep in the Hoopla. All the Trump/Musk stuff takes up excessive space and isn’t helping my insomnia, since there’s so much and a lot of it happens late in the evening. Instead of an increasingly futile effort to keep up with the rapid and insane deconstruction of our Republic, check out these comprehensive news summaries from Associated Press, NBC, Aljazeera, and The Guardian. Knock yinzselves out.
Seriously, this is giving me flashbacks to my time as city editor of the Homestead Daily Messenger back in 1973. No sooner than I’d go down to graphics, check page one and release it to camera, the damned AP machine would start ringing like an alarm clock, signaling that Woodward and Bernstein had just broken some new hot Watergate scandal.
The AP machine, the highest paid entity in the newsroom.I never had to dramatically “stop the presses”, but I didn’t make any friends in the circulation department, who lost newsstand sales for every minute after 1 pm the paper hit the streets.)
Oh, well. Better than SPECTRE, I guess. Bezos’ Amazon-MGM now controls James Bond.
Robot umpires are getting their first MLB test during spring training.
Tesla sues customers, reporters to silence negative press in China.
The Crash is coming; how big is not clear, but big. Soon. Keep your calendar clear for early summer.
AI-designed chips so weird that 'humans cannot really understand them' — but they perform better than anything we've created. It isn’t Cyberdyne, is it?
NASA lowers impact risk of 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 to 1 in 67 (phew!) But…
Strange objects fall on Poland from space for the second day.
New study: Intelligent life is likely very common throughout the universe.
Just not here.
Shirt of the day (click on image)
KGB Quote of the Day: Sacha Guitry
“Memory is the one paradise out of which we cannot be driven.”
--Sacha Guitry (Wikipedia link).
(More Sacha Guitry quotes from the KGB Quotations Database)
Among other things, today is- in no particular order of importance-
Card Reading Day, International Mother Language Day. National Caregivers Day, National Grain-Free Day, National Sticky Bun Day, National Woman’s Heart Day, Single Tasking Day, and World Kombucha Day.
Quotes by or about persons born on this date (Click on link after name for quotes):
1885 – Sacha Guitry, Russian-French actor, director, and playwright (d. 1957)
1903 – Anaïs Nin, French-American essayist and memoirist (d. 1977)
1907 – W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and composer (d. 1973)
1921 – John Rawls, American philosopher and academic (d. 2002)
1927 – Erma Bombeck, American journalist and author (d. 1996)
1936 – Barbara Jordan, American lawyer and politician (d. 1996)
1940 – John Lewis, American activist and politician (d. 2020)
1964 – Mark Kelly, American astronaut and politician
Other birthdays:
1875 – Jeanne Calment, French super-centenarian, oldest verified person ever: 122 years and 164 days (d. 1997)
1893 – Celia Lovsky, Austrian-American actress (d. 1979)
1925 – Sam Peckinpah, American director and screenwriter (d. 1984)
1933 – Nina Simone, American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 2003)
1934 – Rue McClanahan, American actress (d. 2010)
1937 – Gary Lockwood, American actor
1943 – David Geffen, American businessman, co-founded DreamWorks and Geffen Records
1946 – Tyne Daly, American actress and singer
1947 – Olympia Snowe, American politician
1953 – Christine Ebersole, American actress and singer
1953 – William Petersen, American actor and producer
1964 – Scott Kelly, American astronaut
1979 – Jennifer Love Hewitt, American actress and producer
1979 – Jordan Peele, American actor, comedian, director, producer, and screenwriter
1986 – Charlotte Church, Welsh singer-songwriter and actress
1987 – Elliot Page, (formerly Ellen Page) Canadian actor
On This Day:
1804 – The first self-propelling steam locomotive was unveiled at the Penydarren Ironworks in Wales.
1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
1878 – The first telephone directory was issued in New Haven, Connecticut.
1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument was dedicated.
1925 – The New Yorker published its first issue.
1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrated the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
1948 – NASCAR was incorporated.
1958 – The CND symbol, aka peace symbol, commissioned by the Direct Action Committee in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, was designed and completed by Gerald Holtom.
1972 – United States President Richard Nixon visited China to normalize Sino-American relations.
1975 – Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were sentenced to prison.
1994 – Aldrich Ames was arrested by the FBI for selling national secrets to the Soviet Union.
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