2026 - Wk 20 - Notes and Links, including lawyers for chickens
Andy's Newslather
Ten items in the news this week
Wood heating is reintroducing lead into the air. That may explain a few things, actually.
76-year-old Foxy Brown actress Pam Grier says she’s living the best life. Ladies, guess how?
Detained man shares s***ty his skin care routine.
Amusing Digital Paintings By Russian Artist Lera Kiryakova.
Japan is using Robot Wolves to scare away bears. Haven’t these people read science fiction? I know what happens next.
Q&A: What it’s like to be a lawyer for chickens.
Why are some lucky people mosquito magnets? Not lucky for them, of course. Lucky for us.
It’s an even-numbered week, so coffee is good for you again.
YouTuber breaks Rubik’s Cube record while skydiving.
Someone shared a real Monet painting, pretended it was AI, and asked for critiques. One person even wrote an 850-word reply as to why the real Monet ‘obviously’ was not.
Tales of the Unintended
Is the apocalypse now? One man is tracking flights by the rich to find out.
Narcissists tend to view God as a punishing figure who owes them special favours.
‘Freedom framing’ is more effective for vaccine-hesitant Americans speaking about social responsibility or a government recommendation.
Why Beijing has failed to exploit Trump’s missteps.
Everyone’s looking at Eastern Europe for the European Union’s next member state. What about looking west? Technically speaking, this country shares borders with two European countries.
Publishers: Google’s Ebook ad ban blocked book sellers, not pirates.
Crazy Crime
If you steal one billion dollars, please dress better than this.
Alabama woman, 65, shot and killed husband, 69, because…
Nobody needs a doctor like this.
A racist idiot would film himself taunting people with slurs, hoping he’d be attacked. Well, guess what happened when ol’ butterfingers drew his pistol to ‘defend’ himself?
The Knight Rider car gets mailed a traffic ticket, even though it’s been in a museum for years.
Former IT contractor convicted for wiping 96 US government databases
‘Authentic follower of Christ’ pleads guilty to stealing $140M from MAGA donors.
If you’re also facing jail time, don’t brag about how easy it is to pay the fines. Guess who said the magic words?
Strange Headlines
Montreal strippers plan walkout for F1 weekend.
There is a word for the new trend that they utter in hushed tones in the Kremlin: kitaizatsiya.
FCC has an idea for ending the robocall problem in America. A terrible idea, but hey.
What does a Bowling monopoly say about America?
Pastor apologizes after claiming congressman said aliens invented Christianity. Wait. What?
Small Georgia town reinstates police officers and department two days after the mayor fired them all. Yes, it has to do with offending the mayor’s wife, who is the town clerk.
Stuff
Linguistic goof of the week: she hymms and haws.
Weird Wiki: people who died on the toilet.
Data this week
Low sexual frequency linked to worse cardiovascular outcomes, two US studies find.
Data points to a super El Nino.
Try this with your spouse to keep things hot - it’s science! (Definitely NSFW.)
Americans overestimate the number of social media users who post harmful content. It’s around five per cent. That figure correlates with this Far Side cartoon.
Since the 2010s, American conservatives have increasingly experienced worse health outcomes and higher mortality than liberals. Declining trust in medical professionals appears to be the mechanism, with lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice and believe in the effectiveness of medication. Enjoy the Ivermectin, idiots.
Shutting down USAID led to a rise in global violence, study says.
A paper argues that REM sleep exists mainly to keep the sleeping brain sufficiently alert to survive danger during vulnerable periods of deep sleep.
Science and tech this week
Regulators are calling VPNs a loophole. Really? ‘Cause it sounds like they are saying your personal privacy is a loophole that needs closing?
Why does cancer almost never attack the heart?
Companies like Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify use AI to let anyone build a web app in seconds, and in thousands of cases, spill highly sensitive data onto the public internet. Thanks for the APIs, by the way!
Physicists find evidence that the universe isn’t perfectly uniform at very, very large scales. This may help point to a new model of cosmology. Here’s a non-technical summary with a really cool photo.
Cisco announces record revenue and 4,000 layoffs on the same day.
Artificial Intelligence
Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part, and doctors didn’t notice. Even better, a medical AI transcriber for Ontario doctors hallucinated and produced nonsense. Can anyone please tell me why we keep believing the tech overlords who say AI’s going to take everyone’s jobs?
Data centers are wreaking havoc on North America’s power grid.
The most-cited AI-in-education study of 2025 has been retracted.
Infographics
What is dithering? I am glad you asked.
Resources
Every Cinematic Universe in a big, spiffy, clicky web site.
Need to track internet bots? Here you go!
A website that tracks songs mentioning dates, either in the title or the lyrics.
Viewing Pleasure
This week’s comedy clip: Late for work.
Every bunny was kung-fu fighting.
How to avoid common mistakes during insertion in colonoscopy.
Why are flat Earthers the way that they are?
The basics of riding a horse.
Listening Pleasure
What is the connection between this weird dance and ancient Roman soldiers? Apart from lonely nights at the edge of empire?
Tepid Dystopia
General Motors sold data on California drivers without their knowledge or consent, says California’s attorney general, despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so. The company made roughly $20 million from data sales. So, the fine will be at least $20 million, right? Right?
Black lung disease surges in America’s coal country.
Now comes the hard part: collecting.
Cellphone data reveals visits by Canadians to the US have cratered by 42 per cent over the last year.
Pentagon seeks record budget despite failing every audit.
A 3D printer firm decided to prevent users from running their own software. A software firm said this is dumb, and did an end run around the newly imposed locks. A right-to-Repair advocate stepped in to help, added his own software, and is daring the manufacturer to sue.
Conflict Studies
Spitzbergen Island would be my bet. You read it here first, remember that. Here’s some background.
What would happen in Ukraine if Putin fell? Well, the machine of people who are just like Putin might just trundle on with no change.
What’s that novel? I know why the caged boat sinks?
99 Luftballoon has been translated into Ukrainian.
The Russian administration is considering how to “sell” the end of the war to the people.
Twilight Struggle
FleetLeaks - Searchable database of 792+ sanctioned vessels with real-time intelligence on Russia’s shadow fleet.
A Californian Mayor pleads guilty to being an undeclared agent for the Chinese.
German intelligence offices snub US-owned Palantir.
Russia increases its foreign propaganda budget by 54 per cent to a record $1.85 Billion.
Quite coincidentally, the head of Canada’s intelligence agency says Alberta’s potential secession vote is susceptible to disinformation and foreign interference from players like Russia.
People Watching
I’m gonna apply. Wish me luck, everyone.
Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski: “In all this time, not one tech company has held up an AI-generated manuscript and said, ‘This contains greatness’“
No Pockets, No Power? The Feminist History of the Purse.
A wedding photographer has been ordered to hand over images after allegedly defrauding hundreds of couples out of an estimated $1 million.
Post of the week
(For the record, I don’t write these.)
I used to work at electrical substations, doing everything from wiring electrical sockets to maintaining 33,000V switchgear.
Shortly after completing my apprenticeship, I was sent out with someone who hadn’t been given any training in substations, and shouldn’t have been in them, but he was sent out with me regardless, because there was no one else they could dump him on that day.
We were fitting a special type of cable around the existing installation, just getting it in place, ready for another crew to connect it up.
I thought I’d put him somewhere “safe” - a little room with a separate door from the outside for a big industrial plant. The only link between these sections of the substation was a buried cable tunnel through which we were sending the cable.
He couldn’t possibly cause any harm in a 6*4 feet square room, with no big dangerous switches, right? Oops.
CLUNK. That’s the noise these make.
One of the 11,000V switches turned off next to me, and I screamed “WTF DID YOU DO ?”
He said “there was a button on the wall, so I pressed it” - he’d used an emergency trip button which cut off power to a medical chemical manufacturing plant.
We weren’t allowed to operate the 11,000V switches ourselves and had to call in an engineer to restore supply to the customer.
After normality had been restored once more, we had to feed this cable around the front of an 11,000V switchbank.
As we did this, my colleague gave a big tug lifting the cable up, but he caught it under the handle of one of the switches - the problem being, this particular switch only needed the handle to be lifted ever so slightly to turn the power off.
CLUNK.
The power goes out across the whole industrial estate this time, affecting even more companies than before.
So once again, we had to call for an engineer, and fend off the very irate business owners for half an hour until the engineer could get there...
I mean, technically, I should never have been put in that position to start with, with someone with no substation experience, but shit happened.
My arsehole was clenching hard when I got called in to see our big boss that afternoon, I thought I might be getting fired... He just looks up at me from his desk and says, “I believe you’ve had a bad day...”
Quotes found Online
Disco was the Vietnam of rock.
My fiancé was so sick of the wedding planning that he took me to lunch at the courthouse and got married there.
There are some shady people nearby. One of them’s a dealer. For some reason, he’s taken a shine to my mother, and he pays for her insulin.
[On a] Roofing job, a guy fell off the roof, landed in the tar kettle, and died.
Well, a fun litmus test would be seeing if Tucker’s going to change his tone on ‘Zelensky bad’ now that the Qataris and Saudis are relying on Ukraine for anti-shahed interceptors.
I got the medal of honour, but honestly, it was a lean year.
At work, we have eight guys named Mohammad, nine named Davie, another nine named some variant of Michael and twelve Davids and another dozen Johns. We had a meeting about it, and everyone agreed on nicknames. That was a fun week. The best nickname so far is Harley, because he drives one of those bikes. Trek is the Star Trek expert, and Riker is the guy whose dad was a guard at Riker’s Island.
Dracula’s a neck romancer.
Wikipedia is actually more reliable than most textbooks, thanks to the unparalleled might of global-scale fully-weaponized autistic pedantry.
He’s the Kim Kardashian of evolutionary biology.
Stop saying tuna fish. We know it’s a fish.
I wish aliens would fund the world’s governments so that taxes wouldn’t be necessary.
The hope for a short, glorious war is a sign it’s time to dust off the guillotine.
I hate having existential realizations.
As a home insurance expert, I am terrified of trees.
Blue light reading glasses are more or less moron detectors.
Why does basic human spatial awareness completely disappear in grocery stores?
Why didn’t we make the meter a little bit smaller so the speed of light could be 30000000? Or change the second?
A friend of mine was hired to play guitar for background music at an orgy. He is the only person I’ve known who arrived late to an orgy when he was paid to be there.
The high-pitched whine of an old CRT. That’s a sound that is no more.
I thought Bdsm is Buddhism.
What did you want him to do? Hit the brakes? Go the speed limit? Stay in 1 lane? You don’t get any Internet clout that way.
I just tried putting toothpaste on my nipples to get high, then looked it up more and realized it was a joke. I feel stupid, but I don’t have any edibles, and I just wanted to try it.
A charger, a charter. My kingdom for a charger.
Giving mom her first edible before church was not a great idea.
I just realized I only grab my acoustic guitar over my electric guitar when I’m sad.
My theory is that the new happy Animal Farm film is an attempt to obscure the book in search results, just like turning Brave New World into a goofy coming-of-age teen comedy to keep people from learning those works’ real messages.
Brussels sprouts are a lot like anal sex. If you had it forced upon you as a child, you won’t want it as an adult.
My dad has given me many tidbits of advice over the years, but there are two he always repeats due to personal experience of someone dying: don’t get a motorbike, and don’t do work on your own roof, hire a pro.
With the amount of Botox Putin’s injected, I don’t think he can change his expression, even if the parade wasn’t a sad disappointment.
The marketing guy was beaten up by a mugger. Someone at the company is doing a GoFundMe for the assailant.
Russia is not negotiating from the lofty heights of inevitability.
Best nickname I ever heard was ‘Toeless Pete’.
If a programmer can’t write code without AI, they lack the skills to analyze AI-generated code.
America was like that for a long time before that. Americans just refused to see it. Remember when a whole country started mispronouncing « nuclear » because an idiot former coke head alcoholic nepo baby that Americans chose as their president could not pronounce it? Every American who says « nukular » was MAGA a decade before MAGA existed.
The great thing about peeing outside is pretending you’re a giant putting out a fire and saving a tiny village.
You can tell when Sci-Fi takes place in the future by the lack of trash cans.
Meant to put hiking as a hobby on Match.Com but it got there as wanking. True, of course, but still.
I had a patient who died because he got trapped inside one of those portable sauna bags. He was steamed alive and his main cause of death was actually deemed to be dehydration.
Speaking as an average man, what’s a doctor?
Could we genetically modify chickens to lay hamburgers?
Unfortunately, “trying to deescalate” is seen as a sign of weakness to a bully who is obviously trying to escalate.
The nice thing about two hacks going at it is they’re by nature fueled by ego, and they see the other’s ego as their biggest threat, and thus attack with verocity.
The male equivalent of the uterus is the prostatic utricleprostatic utricle (also known as the uterus masculinus or vagina masculina). It is a small, vestigial pouch located in the prostate gland, acting as the embryological remnant of the Müllerian duct, which forms the uterus and vagina in females.
I’m 60. Wonder if I need to start saving every bread bag I touch from now on as a special gift for whomever buys my house when I die.
Concerning male bladders, I was very proud to have peed 800ml once. Though doing it lying down in a hospital bed was really weird as your body is in “Don’t pee” mode and overriding it takes time.
Are we talking about diarrhea or cuckolding?
Weirdest death? Fainting while going pee and landed on the toilet plunger and it went through eye into the brain, resulting in death.
If I put a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign on my fence, but I actually just own a highly aggressive, territorial goose, am I legally protected from a lawsuit if the goose brutally attacks a burglar?
During both my labours, I was lectured for swearing. Not swearing at anybody. Just yelling curse words. I think being in Utah might have had something to do with that.
Couples who fart together stay together. I always blame it on the dog, at which point my wife reminds me that we don’t have a dog.
Looks like we need to cut back on nonviolent peacekeeping operations to pay for Iran.
How come nobody has ‘Having a wank’ as a hobby on all these dating sites?
This feels like Robert E. Lee telling slaves that they shouldn’t criticize him for fighting the North so hard in order to preserve the “right” of slaveholders to enslave them. It’s an inherently patronizing and blatantly bullshit take. He also seems to think unpopular just means “people don’t like it” rather than “it’s actually an unconstitutional power grab.”
When I think of something embarrassing I did, why do I get an urge to cut open my stomach and throw my organs all over the wall?
Existing rail lines are owned by people who make Hitler look like Mother Teresa. You’re not going to retrofit anything. New, fast rail lines need much larger radii than the freeway does. You can put one there, but it’ll need to slow down once in a while. New bus stops are cheaper than rail stops. What makes these kinds of undertakings very expensive is that Lower Podunk will hold up the project unless they get a stop, Upper Podunk is full of NIMBYs who won’t approve anything, and lawyers will be sending new BS for every inch.
Maple MAGA Albertans are not put off by the fact that the Russians are supplying them with propaganda; they’re happy with it. Historically, Alberta is a cargo-cult worshiping Texas oil money and right-wing race-based politics, so when they look at the Russians, they see how MAGA USA, home of the white nationalism and big-box-store evangelism they so favour, has adopted them as race saviours, making it the gods of their gods kind of thing. Maple MAGA Alberta is looking at the fascist consolidation happening in the US and drooling like Ole Yeller at the prospect of bringing that here.
Magnificent Memes
Bon Mots
Funny Photos
