I hate people who try to show their intellectual superiority by asking people to answer esoteric questions. It only reveals them to be annoying pedants. Knowing random facts is not a sign of intelligence. Smarmy Piers Morgan tried to embarrass a person on a reality show by asking her “Do you know what Pythagoras’s theorem is to the nearest five decimal places?” and embarrassed himself instead, as this clip shows.
Ibrahim Diallo was fired from his job by a machine algorithm that, once set in motion, no one in his company seemed to be able to override however high they were in the administrative structure.
The story of Mr Diallo’s sacking by machine began when his entry pass to the Los Angeles skyscraper where his office was based failed to work, forcing him to rely on the security guard to allow him entry.
[Read more…]
Michelle Wolf laments the recent deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain and uses the occasion to reflect on the idea that social media seems to drive people to imply that their lives are better than they really are, and thus can depress others who are struggling.
A man accepted a Facebook friend request from an attractive woman he had not known before and before long, after several messages were exchanged, got a request from her for a video chat and he agreed. After several failed attempts, they managed to connect and things quickly got hot and heavy.
[Read more…]
Anyone who has loved a pet dreads the time when the pet seems to be suffering so much that you feel that the humane thing to do is euthanasia. But that decision is never obvious nor easy because there will be very bad days when you think that the time has come that are followed by better days and you are grateful you did not go through with the decision. This up-and-down can go through many cycles and you never get over the guilt of finally making the fateful and irreversible decision.
[Read more…]
No doubt many of you would have heard of this story about a raccoon that climbed up the outside of a 23-story building while people looked on aghast and afraid of a slip that would send it to its death. Fortunately, after many hours of suspense that lasted almost a day with the raccoon occasionally pausing for rest on window ledges, the story has a happy ending.
Lost in the fuss over the G7 and Singapore summits was the other big news of the week, that the Miss America pageant had decided to eliminate that portion of the competition that had the contestants posing in swimsuits, which apparently now consists exclusively of skimpy bikinis. This has given media the chance to run photographs of women in bikinis with double-entendre headlines like the one above. So I thought, why not me too?
The Ohio Department of Transportation released the following video.
What surprises m is that the police are really chill about the whole thing and let him, after he had rammed the vehicle several times, keep jumping on the car for a long time, only moving in when he falls off. I am glad that they waited for him to calm down since there was no one in the other car and it was a wreck already. But as always, I wonder how things might have turned out if he had been black …
There’s more on the incident here.
The news today has multiple stories about chef Anthony Bourdain who committed suicide in Paris at the age of 61. I am not a foodie, never watch cooking shows, and had never heard of Bourdain until he recently appeared on a TV show (I think The Daily Show) to talk about the #MeToo movement and distance himself from his chef friends like Mario Batali for their acts of sexual abuse. He also made an apologia, not because he himself had done anything on those lines (he said that he had not tolerated such things in the kitchens he ran) but because he felt that the fact that the women he knew (even his girl friend Asia Argento) had not confided in him with their horror stories was a sign that he was not seen as an ally.
[Read more…]
