Chapter 3, Where My Service Elephant Discovers Yoo Hoo

Nanci Pelosi (D-Hell) mandated masks on the House floor.
I predict never-ending amusement when the Ruling Class has to behave like the Ruled.


Your love is like one of those things in the toilet that won't flush.


Chinese hackers got to the Vatican's computer networks.
I demand proof: they should release the Vatican's Big Secrets.


Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos 'Can't Guarantee' Policy Against Using Seller Specific Data Hasn't Been Violated

Now they're just laughing in our faces.

Highlights of Lord Zuck's testimony before Congress: "Yeah, but we're not as bad as Amazon and Google."

New York Giants' Nate Solder will not play this NFL season because of health concerns

However, he will continue his work on circuit boards and general electronics.

On Sunday 3 May, the government of Nicolas Maduro announced Venezuela's armed forces had repelled an armed incursion. Operation Gideon was a deeply flawed coup attempt. But what would compel exiled Venezuelans and former US Special Forces soldiers to join a plan that, from the outset, looked like a suicide mission? 

The CIA?

After hundreds of years of requests, England's government will investigate why there are so many stones in the ground.

The latest Mars rover, Perseverance, launched the other day. 

The Martians are starting to formally complain that we're sending too much junk to the planet. They got tired of messing with the rovers, lining up rocks to say "Earthmen are pussies" and spray painting Martian graffiti on them:

• Earthmen go home!
• We're telling you, there's no one here
• HOW many genders?

I go to sit on the couch, my ancestral home, and the first thing I notice is a drug company pamphlet, asking "Are you having trouble swallowing?" Everybody swallows just fine, thank you.

The creators of an AI that tried to predict gender from their internet handle or email address shut down after the tool was found to be sexist. Among their complaints...

• anything with Nurse was female, Doctor was male
• there were only TWO genders!
• the opening screen said nothing about Black Lives Matter
• the program didn't take a knee before supplying its answer

My friend's wife thinks she was bitten by a bat. She rushed to the hospital and decided to self-quarantine for a week. I don't know what she's worried about: American bats are more likely to carry rabies, which requires a series of painful shots. She won't get The Flying AIDS unless she goes to China and gets bitten by one of their bats. If she starts foaming at the mouth, it's safe to remove your masks.

IBM Launches Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Toolkit for Linux

SJWs go insane (further), demanding IBM be canceled over homophobia.

Everything new is old again: my new laptop doesn't have an optical drive.

Way back when I started, all laptops had floppy drives only. If you needed a CDROM drive, you had to buy an external one. It also doesn't have a modem, which I stopped using in the 90s. Oddly, it has an SD card slot and too few USB ports.

There was a shooting at the 25th District police station in Chicago. 2 officers were down and the shooter was in custody. Most importantly, there was a report of police protesters en route to the station. The protesters are trying to get their response time down so they're on-scene before the police.

Hong Kong is on its 3rd wave of The Flying AIDS.

WTF is wrong with America, which is only on its 2nd wave? The US needs to lead the world in something other than military spending, knowwhatimsaying?

Feline Aviation and Beyonce for the Win

We're fighting with the cat again.  Still.

To be honest, it's been a battle from the beginning.  I'm not what you'd call a cat person. This one, however, is at least quite personable.  Unfortunately this doesn't balance against his propensity for destruction, evil, and general bone-headedness.

Ren earned the nickname Satan when we first got him.  He would leap onto the stove, turning on the gas on the way up.  Apparently the little bugger was trying to blow up the house with himself in it.  We had to remove the knobs for a few months.

Then came xmas and xmas trees.  Satan disembowled every xmas tree we put up, year after year until we gave up.  He ruined many old, treasured ornaments by hurling them to the ground, where they smashed into pieces too small to repair.

He is not allowed to sleep in the bedroom because he claws the bed or my wife when he's hungry and won't stop until you feed him.  Note that the dog does not do this, preferring to sleep in with his people.  The worst thing Marshall does in bed is steal a pillow or blanket.

Cat Food Ballet<tm> is getting past the point of frustration in the house lately.  Ren gets fed in the kitchen, with the door closed, then Marshall gets fed in the living room.  Marshall doesn't care, instead spending all of his time in front of the kitchen door, waiting for the Cat Food Gods to open the door so he can lick the bowl clean.  There aren't even microbes of cat food after Marshall is done.

Meanwhile Ren then runs over to Marshall's food and starts eating it.  Ren was pretty much cured of diabetes and is not supposed to be eating dog food so we tell him to move.  MOVE.  I SAID MOVE, YOU LITTLE BASTARD.  He doesn't even look up.  You have to physically get up and make a move toward him before he takes off.

Five minutes later, he's back, as if we never said anything to him.  If I had a squirt gun, I'd let it loose on him.  Instead, I have to keep getting up.  Yesterday I threw a shirt at him, which moved him a bit and he was back a few minutes later.

If the kitchen door isn't shut correctly, Marshall will open it and force his way into Ren's food.  You have to physically remove him from the bowl, in the most spectacular case of Selective Hearing I've ever seen.  Neither of the little bastards listen, except when convenient.

Meanwhile, Ren has also taken to urinating randomly on the rug.  He has two litter boxes and it doesn't matter.  He is in perfect health so this is simply an attitude problem.  One of his new nicknames is Caboose because he's the last cat we will ever have.  My house should not smell like cat urine because the feline who lives there has a bad attitude.

Ren has also discovered the out of doors and apparently doesn't mind rain or snow.  He has spent several nights outside.  He has all his claws so we're not worried about him protecting himself.  In fact he reminds us about his claws on the furniture all the time.  No matter how much we express our dislike for this annoyance.

Just to even things up a bit, Marshall has discovered Catbox as Snackbox.  Suddenly dog kisses just aren't the same.

Marshall is also inordinately fond of trash.  When he's not cleaning the cat bowl, he's trolling the trash for interesting morsels.  Marshall is a very interesting test of housekeeping.  If you can't see or hear him, he's in trouble; which was caused by one of the humans not putting something away.  Or he took yet another package of popcorn off the dining room table and ate most of it.  He has a genuine love for kettle corn (and sweets in general, like his daddy).

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HEY EVERYONE - did you watch the Superbowl?

C'mon, you know I am the AntiSports.  It's only mid-day and already I'm sick over my head of hearing about the Superbowl from my coworkers and online.  Rome is burning and all we talk about is WOW -that halftime show!   Some of us are actually watching tv for the commercials.  Some of us are so vapid that we must spend all our time talking about how fantastic Beyonce was and how fabulous it was that her old group showed up and how about their outfits and dancing?

Bread and circuses indeed.

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For some unknown reason, my company was meeting with people from Apple.  Overheard at the meeting: We don't really listen to customer input.  We create the future and everybody can just catch up.

That fellow must be in charge of the Kool Aid.

In other news, I jailbroke my iPad.  Went smoothly, worked on linux, allows a lot more freedom.

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Apparently most of our newspapers have been hacked by the Chinese.  This is a very perplexing happenstance.   After thinking about it for a bit, I have decided that this is a non-story: even if the Chinese decided to take over our newspapers, they could not do a worse job than the existing ones.  It's win-win for everyone.