No betting on nuclear bombs; Pete spends millions on seafood; AI wreaking havoc on Amazon; "Doomsday plane" over CA; Memory tricks; stop smoking with magic mushrooms
It's National "Eat Your Noodles" Day!
Trump goes on deranged rant about dead soldiers walking around.
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—Kevin G. Barkes
(Most) everything you need to know for today:
March 11 is the 70th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 295 days remain until the end of the year. As of this writing, 1,045 days remain in Trump’s term of office.
Knee-deep in the hoopla:
The latest on the Iran war from the Associated Press.
What Americans think about the war in Iran, according to recent polls. (AP)
Trump can’t decide whether the Iran war is still going on. The president seems to be at odds with both himself and his secretary of defense about the status of the conflict. (The Atlantic gift article)
Pentagon Pete blew a fortune on crabs in multibillion-dollar spending frenzy. Included in this spending was $2 million on Alaskan king crab last September alone, as well as $6.9 million on lobster tail and $1 million on salmon. The Defense Department also spent nearly $140,000 on doughnuts, $124,000 on ice cream machines, $26,000 on sushi preparation tables, and a whopping $15.1 million on ribeye steak. (Daily Beast)
The return-to-the-office trend backfires. Across practitioner reports and peer-reviewed research, including a new report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, organizations that commit to highly flexible models, including remote-first, report strong output, healthier engagement, and faster growth than mandate-driven peers. (The Hill)
Amazon admits extensive AI use is wreaking havoc on its core business. More coding with more AI with more human oversight, but fewer humans? We’ll see how that works out. (Futurism)
A dose of psilocybin helps smokers quit in new study. At the end of six months, those who had taken just one dose of psilocybin had more than six times greater odds of being abstinent from cigarettes than their counterparts who relied on the nicotine substitute. (NPR)
Well, this a relief: Polymarket takes down betting on nuclear detonation after backlash. Polymarket archived a market on whether a nuclear bomb would be detonated by the end of this year, just days after the betting company faced criticism for allowing users to gamble on the commencement of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran. (Truthout dot org) But wait,
Gray ‘Doomsday Plane’ spotted flying low over California. A 150-foot-long Boeing E-6B Mercury, colloquially known as the "Doomsday Plane," was seen flying low over California this past weekend amid the escalating war between the U.S. and Iran. (SFGate)
Subway systems have an extreme heat problem. Temperatures in the underground stations can easily top 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). (Gizmodo)
Human waste backing up in basements is a gut-churning sign of US infrastructure problems. The January collapse of a pipe as wide as a car dumped so much sewage into the Potomac River that officials tracked a spike of gut-wrenching bacteria drifting slowly past Washington for weeks, prompting an emergency declaration and federal assistance. (AP)
This is somehow reassuring: Why you can remember every word of a song from 25 years ago – but not why you walked into the room. TLDR: Music is neurologically extravagant: it recruits multiple systems at once – rhythm, language, movement and emotion. That multiplicity strengthens memory encoding. (The Conversation)
Can’t sleep? Try this. (Video)
Late Night:
NBC News Poll: Stephen Colbert trails only Pope Leo in favorability. Colbert’s +10 net favorability score placed him behind only Pope Leo, who posted a +34 net rating—and made the two men the only names in the survey to receive a net positive favorability score. (LateNighter)
Jimmy Kimmel Live: We are on day eleven of Trump’s war with Iran and he is saying that it could end “very soon,” the price of oil has skyrocketed over the past ten days and some of his advisors want him to declare victory and pull out, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is trying to calm those concerned about the duration of the war, a damning report from a government watchdog report revealed that Hegseth blew through $93 billion last September alone, Iran announced their new Supreme Leader who is the son of their old Supreme Leader, Trump’s former real estate attorney turned expert on foreign wars Alina Habba had some on-air blunders during an interview, Trump suggested that the Tomahawk missile that hit an Iranian school for girls wasn’t from the U.S., and Melania’s new documentary is now streaming. (Video)
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: President Trump is trying to have it both ways on the Iran war, Pete Hegseth oversaw an historic surge in Pentagon spending on food and housewares, and the president is making all the men in his orbit wear shoes from Florsheim. (Video)
Cold open: Open up and close it because we’re stopping and beginning, the end. (Video)
Late Night with Seth Meyers: Seth addresses President Trump working from his Miami golf club and more in his monologue for Tuesday, March 10, before Late Night writer Amber Ruffin recaps what’s happening in pop culture news. (Video)
Keep scrolling… lots of interesting stuff in Quote of the Day, Holidays, On This Day, Birthdays, and Deaths. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll learn something new.
History highlight:
2011 – An earthquake measuring 9.0 in magnitude struck 130 km (81 mi) east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people. This event also triggered the second largest nuclear accident in history, and one of only two events to be classified as a Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
Quote of the day:
A week is a long time in politics.
--Harold Wilson (Wikipedia link)
(More Harold Wilson quotes from the KGB Quotations Database)
Today’s holidays:
Debunking Day, Dream Day, Johnny Appleseed Day, National COVID-19 Day, National “Eat Your Noodles” Day, National Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day, National 311 Day, National Promposal Day, National Sofrito Day, No Smoking Day (UK), Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist Day, World Day of Muslim Culture, Peace, Dialogue and Film, World Plumbing Day, and Worship of Tools Day.
On This Day:
2021 – US President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law.
2020 – The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 virus epidemic a pandemic.
2011 – An earthquake measuring 9.0 in magnitude struck 130 km (81 mi) east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people. This event also triggered the second largest nuclear accident in history, and one of only two events to be classified as a Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
2004 – Madrid train bombings: Simultaneous explosions on rush hour trains in Madrid, Spain killed 191 people.
1888 – The Great Blizzard of 1888 began along the eastern seaboard of the United States, shutting down commerce and killing more than 400 people.
1851 – The first performance of Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi took place in Venice.
1779 – Congress established the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
1702 – The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time.
(For comprehensive lists of the day’s historical events, check here, here, and here.)
Some Birthdays:
1993 – Jodie Comer, English actress\
1989 – Anton Yelchin, Russian-American actor (died 2016)
1982 – Thora Birch, American actress, producer, and director
1980 – Mark Rober, American YouTuber and engineer
1971 – Johnny Knoxville, American actor and entertainer
1969 – Terrence Howard, American actor and producer
1968 – Lisa Loeb, American singer-songwriter
1965 – Jesse Jackson, Jr., American lawyer and politician
1963 – Alex Kingston, English actress
1959 – Nina Hartley, American pornographic actress/director, sex educator, sex-positive feminist, and author
1958 – Anissa Jones, American child actress (died 1976)
1954 – David Newman, American composer and conductor
1952 – Douglas Adams, English author and playwright (died 2001)
1950 – Bobby McFerrin, American singer-songwriter, producer, and conductor
1950 – Jerry Zucker, American director, producer, and screenwriter
1946 – Mark Metcalf, American actor
1945 – Dock Ellis, American baseball player and coach (died 2008)
1936 – Antonin Scalia, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (died 2016)
1934 – Sam Donaldson, American journalist
1931 – Rupert Murdoch, Australian-American businessman and media magnate
1926 – Ralph Abernathy, American minister and activist (died 1990)
1916 – Harold Wilson, English academic and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (died 1995)
1903 – Lawrence Welk, American accordion player and bandleader (died 1992)
1890 – Vannevar Bush, American engineer and academic (died 1974)
(A more complete list of today’s birthdays.)
Some Deaths:
2025 – Clive Revill, New Zealand actor and singer (born 1930)
2015 – Jimmy Greenspoon, American singer-songwriter and keyboard player (born 1948)
2006 – Slobodan Milošević, Serbian lawyer and politician, 3rd President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (born 1941)
1996 – Vince Edwards, American actor and director (born 1928)
1992 – Richard Brooks, American director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1912)
1971 – Philo Farnsworth, American inventor (born 1906)
1970 – Erle Stanley Gardner, American lawyer and author (born 1889)
1957 – Richard E. Byrd, American admiral and explorer (born 1888)
1955 – Oscar F. Mayer, German-American businessman, founded Oscar Mayer (born 1859)
1955 – Alexander Fleming, Scottish biologist, pharmacologist, and botanist, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1881)
1931 – F. W. Murnau, German-American director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1888)
(A more complete list of today’s deaths.)
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