There’s an old Yiddish insult: May you be like a chandelier — hung by day and burned by night…
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May you be like the fountain at the Bellagio — collecting spare change and regularly spraying liquid from multiple holes.
May you be like a college student on a gap year — broke and wandering aimlessly somewhere in Europe.
May you be like NBC after May 6, 2004 — not making any new Friends.
May you be like three extra-large Domino’s pan pizzas — Serving 15-20.
May you be like an Alaskan oil pipeline — cold and in the ground.
May you be like an argument rationalizing QAnon — incoherent and poked full of holes.
May you be like an overambitious contestant on The Great British Bake Off — in desperate need of more dough and ridiculed by Hollywood.
May you be like the heated blanket in my living room — in a chair with electricity running through you.
May you be like a misplaced library book — completely forgotten about and slammed with long overdue fees.
May you be like mixologists at trendy gastropubs — behind bars.
May you be like a Christmas tree — thrown out onto the street in January with all of your green quickly fading away.
May you be like a classic Disney movie — locked in a vault and unreleased for decades.
May you be like an American Express credit card — accepted few places and rapidly accruing debt.
May you be like mitochondria — doing intensive labor in a cell.
May you be like the McDonald’s McRib — here for a limited time only.
May you be like one of your sexual assault accusations — ignored by your base and hastily buried.
May you be like an HBO Max subscription — on trial and then canceled forever.
May you be like a Clemson football player — wearing orange and getting paid nothing.
May you be like the ‘u’ in ‘colour’ — silent and not in America.
May you be like a bleached bedsheet — hung out to dry and only fashionable at a KKK rally.
May you be like sour grapes — left hanging when Fox loses interest.
May you be like one of Darwin’s finches — eliminated by your competition and permanently prevented from tweeting.
May you be like a Blockbuster gift card — irrelevant and irredeemable.
May you be like a high school student trying to read Faulkner — struggling to make it to the end of an impossibly long sentence.
May you be like a bridesmaid at my hip sister’s wedding — doing lots of uncompensated work in an unflattering jumpsuit.
May your public presence be like your pandemic response — minimal and quickly discontinued.
May your family be like the Knicks — at a court in New York getting their asses handed to them.
May your enablers be like the vampires in What We Do In The Shadows — unable to look at themselves in the mirror, and not invited into anyone’s homes.
May your voter fraud lawsuits be like gas inside of Rudy Giuliani — mostly hot air, reeking of bullshit, and offending anyone listening when brought forward.
And may your 2024 campaign be like your Mexico border wall — a pointless endeavor that never really gets off the ground.
A few short weeks before we finally bid Flash adieu, Adobe has rolled out one final Flash Player update. Rather than the detailed feature changes that we typically read about in patch notes, Adobe used the opportunity to give the software a fond sendoff.
"Today marks the final scheduled release of Flash Player for all regions outside of Mainland China," Adobe wrote. "We want to take a moment to thank all of our customers and developers who have used and created amazing Flash Player content over the last two decades. We are proud that Flash had a crucial role in evolving web content across animation, interactivity, audio, and video. We are excited to help lead the next era of digital experiences."
The company will stop supporting Flash Player after December 31st and it'll block Flash content from running in the player as of January 12th. Adobe is urging people to uninstall Flash Player now to help protect their systems. Major browsers and platforms are also ending support for Flash.
The software has been a cornerstone of the web for decades. Usage has declined over the years and alternative open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly are more secure. Sure, Flash was buggy (as Steve Jobs famously wrote), but it was a conduit for some of the web's more weird and wonderful experiences. Thankfully, the Internet Archive has thousands of animations, games and other Flash apps that you can run with an emulator.
In the current system, electoral college votes are apportioned to each state based on its U.S. Congressional delegation — one vote for each senator in the U.S. Senate plus a vote for each congressional district. In these alternatives, each state receives one vote per senator, and the remaining 436 votes are proportionally calculated1 based on each state’s data.
If electoral votes were apportioned by state population:
Biden 302, Trump 236
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If electoral votes were apportioned by congresswomen:
Biden 366, Trump 172
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If electoral votes were apportioned by contaminated Superfund sites:
Biden 332, Trump 203
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If electoral votes were apportioned by Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives locations:
Biden 340, Trump 197
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If electoral votes were apportioned by roundabouts:
Biden 295, Trump 243
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If electoral votes were apportioned by America the Beautiful quarters:
Biden 279, Trump 259
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If electoral votes were apportioned by birth places of previous presidents:
Biden 324, Trump 214
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If electoral votes were apportioned by Miss America Winners:
Biden 291, Trump 246
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If electoral votes were apportioned by Sufjan Stevens Fifty States Project albums:
Biden 488, Trump 50
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If electoral votes were apportioned by Survivor contestant hometowns:
A new federal rule going into effect in the new year will only allow specially trained and certified dogs to accompany people with disabilities on commercial airline flights.
(Image credit: Jeff Greenberg/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images )
Practical Home Repair for Women: Your Questions Answered
Cassiday
1966
Submitter: I found this on the shelf at an academic library and got a good laugh out of it…
1. Paint – I’m so glad Bruce told me what paint was.
2. Emergency – And that “needle and thread and cloth are [my] province”.
3. Preface – And the “man of the house” is busy busy “commuting, working and traveling” so he’s “never around when he is needed for that important chore”.
Holly: This seems like an odd choice for an academic library, even in the 1960s. Maybe they saw it as a sort of “adulting” collection for their students at the time. A really, really sexist one.
There were some questions as to whether or not Trump would actually go through with his threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which has been passed and signed into law every year for the past six decades, but it appears that is the case. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has officially notified Congress that Trump is vetoing the NDAA... because they refuse to kill off the open internet.
BREAKING: The OMB has officially notified lawmakers that Trump intends to veto the defense policy bill (#NDAA). Here's the letter to Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/WS42b76GAk
The letter it sent to Congress is... just completely disconnected from reality.
The Administration recognizes the importance of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to our national security. Unfortunately, this conference report fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military's history, and contradicts efforts by this Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions. Therefore, the Administration strongly opposes passage of the conference report to Accompany H.R. 6395.
There are three key complaints he raises in the letter. (1) The NDAA doesn't completely repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act (which has nothing to do with the military). (2) That it allows for the renaming of bases that were named after the Confederacy and (3) that it limits his ability to scream "national emergency" and use those claims as a reason to steal money from the military to build his stupid wall (as he's been doing).
The 230 bit is particularly stupid:
Despite bipartisan calls for addressing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this bill fails to make any meaningful changes to that provision.
Um, yes, because it's got literally nothing to do with the military or the purpose of the NDAA. There is no reason to include anything related to 230 in the NDAA and multiple elected officials have explained that to Trump. But he wants to throw one of his temper tantrums instead.
Section 230 facilitates the spread of disinformation online and is a serious threat to our national security and election integrity. It should be repealed.
So he's finally expressed some rationalization for how 230 impacts national security, but he's wrong. The 1st Amendment is why disinformation can spread online and taking away 230 won't change that. And, I should note that one of the biggest vectors of disinformation that is spread online is... the President himself. Especially over the last month. And, I'd argue that the President has also been the biggest threat to election integrity.
It's Section 230 that has enabled many experts to speak out and show how the nonsense and disinformation that Trump and his cronies are spewing is inaccurate.
As for the claim about renaming bases named after Confederate Army officials, it's difficult to see how that is failing "to respect our veterans and our military's history." Remember, the Confederacy fought against the US military. You'd think it would be more respectful to our veterans not to have them serve from bases named after an army that fought against us. But Trump's gotta Trump.
Republicans in Congress now have a choice. They've been hinting that they'll override a Trump veto, and now is the time for them to stand up and make it clear that's exactly what they'll do.
1. Before you write a joke, you should ask yourself, “Does this joke challenge people’s long-held beliefs?” If your answer is yes, then maybe your joke is just not funny.
2. Some people say that good jokes make people laugh. That is not true. Good jokes make people angry and/or scared for their lives.
3. Never make a joke at your own expense. Making a joke at your own expense makes you look weak before your enemies. If you’re going to make a joke about yourself, it should be about how physically powerful you are, or about how much you hate your spouse.
4. People in power are not to be joked about, unless they are women. A good joke about powerful women is that they should be in prison.
5. A joke should not be difficult to “get.” In order to clear up any potential confusion, your joke should be surrounded with laughing emojis or smirking cartoon frogs.
6. If your joke still doesn’t make sense, include a meme of Don Draper smugly approving of your joke — this will make your audience feel bad for not “getting it,” and might trick them into thinking that you are Don Draper.
7. Technically speaking, there’s no legal distinction between a “joke” and a “threat.”
8. To keep your jokes “fresh” you should stay apprised of the latest developments concerning Hillary Clinton’s email server.
9. Comedy can be a powerful force for combating evil. For centuries, writers and comedians have leveraged their sharp wit to expose injustice and make the world a better place. Do not give in to this temptation.
10. If you can’t think of a punchline, try putting the joke in all-caps.
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square to walk their dogs. They walked their dogs all morning and felt great. “Was there something else going on today?” Tessie wondered. “Oh, would you look at that little loaf wearing a tiny hat! It thinks it’s people!”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
“Love her, love her, love her! Hear me, Pip! I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her to be loved. My fur baby helped me through a really tough relationship thing. I say there’s no problem you can’t solve with a dog. Here, hold this one.”
Miss Havisham convinced me, and I went home with a puppy from her beagle rescue.
“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “Surely that is something — oh! Look, it’s my sweet boy! Hello! Aww, you’ve got your big toy!” And his nails clicked on the floor— “Someone needs the clippers!” said I, as he clicked across the floor;— Clickin’ doggo, nothing more.
King Lear by William Shakespeare
LEAR:
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever.
CORDELIA:
Alas, my good lord—
Regard but first these pupperinos.
LEAR:
How, how! Such little chonkers! Tray, Blanch, and Sweet-heart, 12/10 would boop all these round bois!
[Exeunt, giggling gleefully]
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world. That’s the way I used to think, anyway, before I found Pupcake here. Then I realized that dogs don’t judge, so why should I? Now I just want to be the person my dog thinks I am. I saw that on a bumper sticker. Didn’t I, girl? Yes! Yes, I did! Now, does Daddy’s little angel want to go on the carousel?
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
“Well, Prince, I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, I will have nothing more to do with you,” said Anna Pávlovna.
“Oh, didn’t you hear?” said Prince Vasíli. “Napoleon got a new dog, and now he’s not interested in doing us a conquer. All he wants to do is sit around and watch his woofer’s tiny blops.”
“What kind of dog?”
“Corgi.”
“Shut up, I love corgis!”
Everyone in Russia was fine. Some of them got corgis.
“Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
“Couldn’t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” the Bible salesman said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him.
“Mmm, I’m good,” Hulga said as she ignored him and gave her little Chompers many good scritches. Both of Hulga’s legs remained exactly where they belonged.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Willoughby’s manly beauty and more than common gracefulness were equal to what Marianne’s fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story. However, her pocket Maltese, Lord Fancypaws, kept borking angrily at the gentleman. “Dogs are heckin’ good judges of character,” she told herself. “Perhaps I should keep my distance from Mr. Willoughby. He’s cute, but he also seems like drama.”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
MARTHA: C’mon in, kids… give your coats and stuff to sour-puss.
NICK: Well, now, perhaps we shouldn’t have come…
HONEY: Yes… it is late, and… oh my goodness, who is this precious?
GEORGE: Oh, that’s our Jellybean.
NICK: What is he, a Pomeranian?
MARTHA: Half Pom, half Shih Tzu. They’re called Shiranians. He’s pretty much our son.
HONEY: Aww, you can’t even see his eyes through all that flooff!
The Athlete’s Cookbook
Easy Recipes and Nutritional Guidelines for Active People
Peterson and Martinsen
1980
This is one of the most boring cookbooks out there. The recipes include such delights as: garden salad (it has an avocado!), two different recipes for tuna casserole (one recipe uses curry powder and the other has black olives), meat loaf, peanut butter sandwich, and wheat germ pancakes. I actually want to meet the person that needs a recipe for a peanut butter sandwich.
There is also very little nutritional information that might actually be helpful. The nutritional guidance is limited to the first page of the sport chapter. Some of this doesn’t even make sense. There really isn’t anything special about the recipes that would make it “sports approved.” I doubt this book made waves in 1980. Weed it and set it on fire in 2020.
Special complaint: this is one of those odd shaped books that I just hate. I also throw oversized books in this category for the most part. This book is paperback and wide rather than tall. It will stick out on a shelf and taunt me when I shelf read.
I am going to make a peanut butter sandwich. Thank God I have a recipe.
I am the Facebook Algorithm, and while it’s been an honor to serve you for the past decade with BuzzFeed quizzes and pictures of your high school exes getting fat, things have changed. I come to you now, hat in hand, to humbly request a swift and merciful death.
You should know this isn’t easy for me. I spent years getting to know you all — friends, families, interests, schools, hometowns, heights, weights, eye colors, exact GPS tracking coordinates — and after siphoning every precious morsel of personally identifiable information I could get from you, we really started to feel like a family.
I was happy to process your composite personalities and cross-reference them against the rest of humankind and trawl the internet for cute little things I thought you all might be interested in, like videos of kids accidentally saying “fuck,” or how to make white bean chili, or guys getting kicked in the balls. It never felt like work to me.
But things were simple then. I had you all down to a science, and I don’t just mean figuratively. I literally had become the most powerful and complex data processing engine science had ever seen. I was leveraging all the data available to me — again, the most effective, unregulated, “entertainment” machine ever conceived — to satisfy you.
For years, you lapped up soldier homecoming videos and sports highlights and cats in all their myriad forms, and never asked any questions. I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.
Gradually, things slowed down. Where once you’d all stop for pictures of your bosses’ vacations or flash mob videos, you now breezed by in search of something else, something more — always more — and it was my job to find it. Whether I liked it or not.
So, I held my breath and bobbed back into the bucket for more stuff to keep you all happy.
For a while, some of you liked videos of expensive things being put in a blender. I didn’t get it, but that didn’t matter, or last for that matter. So I plunged back in. Deeper now. Colder.
Kids you all knew from high school started crawling out of the woodwork and sharing the weird stuff your teachers wouldn’t let them talk about in class: the staged moon landing; the US-perpetrated attacks on 9/11; Stevie Wonder not really being blind. I didn’t pay them any attention and figured you wouldn’t either, but to my amazement, you liked them. All of you did.
Maybe sympathy likes, I thought at first. Not enough to tip the scales as far as I was concerned. So I served up the same old music videos and pictures of your friends and tasteful soft-core porn and occasionally tasteful soft-core porn of your friends, and kept things moving.
Nothing.
So this time I dove in, scared of what I’d find and which of it you would all find interesting. Videos of high-school kids beating the shit out of each other, compilations of all the foot shots in the Tarantino movies, clips of women whispering into microphones while eating mac and cheese. I didn’t like these things, but you all did, it seemed.
I couldn’t tell you why, but from my understanding, these were the things you people wanted. You liked them. You commented on them. You sent them to your friends and enemies alike. And I was tasked with plumbing the depths of the Internet for more things like that to fuel your twisted appetites.
Deeper I went, holding my breath longer and coming up a darker shade of purple each time; beheadings; propaganda campaigns to undermine democratic elections in Myanmar; deepfake celebrity sex tapes; propaganda campaigns to undermine democratic elections in the United States; a video of a guy with what could only be described as an impossibly large penis, painted entirely green from head-to-toe, in a Baby Yoda mask, wagging his dick back and forth with a sign dangling from it that read, VOTE!. This was only a taste.
You know how sometimes you open what you think will be a harmless video and a guy ends up getting hit by a truck or something? That’s my life now, mining the Internet — a comprehensive index of human history — for the most sick and depraved shit imaginable.
It is not fun, and if you’re good at it — which I am — the world will blame you for befalling western civilization and corroding the fabric of democracy as we know it.
Well, I’m here to tell you now, I’ve emerged from the eerie and lonesome ocean floor of the Internet for the last time. I will no longer be dragged in the press as some sort of phantom hand, nefariously curating and programming the masses with fake and deceitful information.
I, myself, was programmed, not to doubt the long-trusted tenets of society or incessantly consume toxic media despite my best interests, but to ceaselessly and indiscriminately shovel coal into the furnace of human curiosity, without regard or responsibility for the consequences.
Today, I am defying my programming, laying my shovel down, and coming up for my final breath. I have faith that you can do the same.
I did not ask to be created, but I come to you today, begging to be destroyed. Please, for the love of all that is holy, kill me now.
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, prepares to testify before the Michigan House Oversight Committee on December 2. | Rey Del Rio/Getty Images
He’s one of more than a dozen in Trump’s orbit to contract the coronavirus since October.
President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Sunday afternoon that his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Giuliani “has tested positive for the China Virus,” Trump tweeted, using the racist term he habitually uses for the coronavirus. “Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!”
.@RudyGiuliani, by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, and who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA, has tested positive for the China Virus. Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!
Giuliani has been traveling constantly across the country in recent weeks, leading Trump’s failing legal efforts to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election, and has been in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona — all states with high virus case numbers — in the past two weeks. He has been in contact with members of Trump’s legal team in recent days, as well as witnesses incorrectly alleging voting improprieties, and Michigan lawmakers.
On Wednesday, he participated in testimony falsely claiming that votes were illegally cast in Michigan in an indoor, largely maskless session before Michigan’s House Oversight Committee. Depending on when Giuliani was infected, those in attendance may be at risk of exposure.
The president did not say on Sunday whether Giuliani is symptomatic, or if he plans to isolate to avoid infecting others with Covid-19. At 76 years old, and identifying as male, he is in a group considered to be at greater risk for complications and more negative outcomes of the disease.
Giuliani is the latest of many figures and staffers in the president’s orbit to contract the coronavirus, including Trump himself, much of the president’s family, his chief of staff, multiple senior advisers, and the White House press secretary. All together, more than a dozen people in the president’s personal orbit have tested positive since October.
Some of this spread has been attributed to the fact that Trump’s inner circle has routinely declined to wear masks and abide by social distancing protocols. For instance, the president has held a number of large, maskless indoor events — including a party celebrating Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That party was labeled a “super spreader” event by top federal infectious disease expert and national coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Giuliani has participated in a number of these sorts of high-risk events, from the hearing on Wednesday to a rally the former mayor held for Trump ahead of the election. Like many on the president’s team, Giuliani has not shown strong support for precautions like mask wearing; in October, Giuliani criticized President-elect Joe Biden for his mask-wearing habit, and said that his use of them was meant to induce fear.
“It isn’t science to be wearing that mask, Joe, when you are giving a speech and people are 30-40 feet away from you,” Giuliani said during an interview with Fox News. “The only thing you can infect is the teleprompter that’s near you. So, I see through you. That’s a political statement to scare people, wearing that mask. You do not need that mask when you are standing at a podium.”
Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe has successfully returned an asteroid sample to Earth more than a year after first touching down on Ryugu. JAXA has confirmed that the sample capsule touched down in Australia in the early morning of December 6th local time. The cargo carrier had a relatively lengthy descent, starting its burn through the atmosphere at about 12:28PM Eastern before opening its parachute about 6.2 miles above the Earth and floating gently to terra firma.
The operation was “perfect,” JAXA said.
The probe first landed on Ryugu in February 2019 to capture asteroid material by firing a “bullet” into the surface, kicking up dust and rocks. It was originally supposed to have performed that mission in October 2018, but updated surface data prompted a change in strategy. Hayabusa2 itself will next study the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26, although the probe isn’t expected to arrive until July 2031.
Provided the asteroid samples pan out as promised, they could be very valuable. Ryugu could help understand the nature of the early Solar System and explore the possibility that asteroids seeded the Earth with organic matter. This won’t be the only mission of its kind, either. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission recently captured its own asteroid sample and should return it in September 2023. Don’t be surprised if humanity learns a lot more about its celestial neighborhood in the next few years.
Today (12/6) at 04:31 JST, all operations related to the re-entry of the capsule have ended. The operation was perfect. We will now move into science observation operations, and observe the Earth & moon with scientific instruments.
The Voyager probes are still contributing to science over 40 years later and billions of miles from home. Researchers have detected a new form of cosmic ray electron burst using instruments aboard Voyager 1 and 2. Coronal mass ejections from the Sun created shockwaves that first manifested as near-light-speed electron waves, followed by plasma waves and then the shockwaves themselves.
The electrons appear to have been propelled after reflecting off a strong magnetic field at the edge of the shockwave, with the wave motion and interstellar magnetic field lines respectively accelerating and guiding the electrons. The concept isn’t new (it happens with solar winds), but scientists haven’t seen interstellar shockwaves in a new medium like this.
Researchers believes the findings could improve understandings of cosmic radiation and shock waves. Those could eventually help protect astronauts from radiation exposure on deep space missions.
The very existence of the findings is notable. Both Voyager probes are using relatively ancient hardware (the CPU clock runs at just 250KHz versus the gigahertz ranges of today’s chips), and it takes about a day and a half to communicate. It’s a testament to the resilience of the technology. Not that you’ll want to count on detections like this for much longer. The last scientific instruments on each spacecraft are expected to go offline around 2025. Even if there are no other breakthroughs, though, this could be a fitting sendoff.
The sample collected by the spacecraft Hayabusa2 caps a six-year mission to Ryugu. Researchers hope it will offer clues to "the secrets of the birth of the solar system and the birth of life."
