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KGB ReportObservations by and for the vaguely disenchanted. |
Tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. ISSN: 1525-898X Published Weekdays. Usually. |
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"Barkes writes like he speaks... incoherently."
Thought I was ready to go back to regular daily blog production, but several technical and professional issues have arisen.
The regular schedule should resume in two weeks.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Assuming I manage to stay out of Facebook jail, you can check here for updates.
Categories: KGB Blog News
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Feds raid Giuliani's home, office, escalating criminal probe. Federal agents raided Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan home and office Wednesday, seizing computers and cellphones in a major escalation of the Justice Department's investigationin a major escalation of the Justice Department's investigation into the business dealings of former President Donald Trump's personal lawyer.
America is running low on chicken. Blame covid-19, a sandwich craze and huge appetite for wings.
Turn up the thermostat. living or working in a cool environment for extended periods can lower core body temperature. That decreases metabolic rate – how fast we burn calories – and commonly causes weight gain.
On the other hand... Phoenix could become uninhabitable due to climate change. Also, Declassified satellite images show glaciers are melting faster than ever
The link between 'The West Wing' and Biden's address. Viewers notice remarkable similarity to a plan set out by Martin Sheen's character in long-running political drama.
Flu has disappeared worldwide during the COVID pandemic. The public health measures that slow the spread of the novel coronavirus work really well on influenza.
FDA moves to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. "Banning menthol—the last allowable flavor—in cigarettes and banning all flavors in cigars will help save lives, particularly among those disproportionately affected by these deadly products," Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said in a statement. "With these actions, the FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation, increase the chances of smoking cessation among current smokers, and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products."
Phasers on stun? US investigating possible mysterious directed energy attack near White House.
Well, this is disburbing: The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?
Physicists prove that the imaginary part of quantum mechanics really exists! The exclamation point is theirs, not mine. Still, scientists discover imaginary numbers aren't imaginary.
More good news: Omega-3 fish oil supplements linked with heart rhythm disorder. Omega-3 supplements are associated with an increased likelihood of developing atrial fibrillation in people with high blood lipids. That's the finding of a study published today in European Heart Journal – Cardiovascular Pharmacotherapy, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
Andy Borowitz: Explosive video reveals Biden plot to use his power to improve living conditions
I have the sinking suspicion I'm cheugy.
San Francisco sound engineer accidentally dosed with LSD while cleaning 1960s radio equipment.
Man cooking up ramen in a Speedo accidentally shoots himself in the nuts with 20 bottle rockets.
99-year-old Betty White's secret to a long and happy life is junk food. "She eats crap," her former Hot in Cleveland co-star Jane Leeves told UsMagazine.com in 2011. “She eats Red Vines, hot dogs, French fries, and Diet Coke. If that's key, maybe she's preserved because of all the preservatives.”
It's Bugs Bunny Day. On this date in 1938, a preliminary version of Bugs (named Happy) appeared in Porky's Hare Hunt.
Among other things, today is Adopt a Shelter Pet Day, Childcare Professionals Day, Day of the Child, Hairstyle Appreciation Day, International Jazz Day, Lag B'omer, National Animal Advocacy Day, National Arbor Day, National Bubble Tea Day, National Hairball Awareness Day, National Honesty Day, National Military Brats Day, National Mr. Potato Head Day, National Oatmeal Cookie Day, National PrepareAthon! Day, National Raisin Day, National Sarcoidosis Day, and Spank Out Day.
Have a great weekend! See you Monday!
Categories: Andy Borowitz; Astronomy; Betty White; Bugs Bunny; Cheugy; Chicken shortage; Climate change; Covid-19; FDA; Health; Jimmy Kimmel; Joe Biden; Mike Lindell; Phoenix; Porky Pig; Quantum mechanics; Rudy Giuliani; The West Wing
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Remembering Michael Collins (October 31, 1930 – April 28, 2021), who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969 while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the surface. Armstrong died in 1982 from complications of bypass surgery. Aldrin, the sole surviving crewmember, is 91 .
Taken while orbiting the moon in 1969, Collins is
the only human,
living or dead who is not in this photo.
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Quote of the day: "He was old and wise, which meant tired and
disappointed."
-T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia).
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If it Ducks like a Quack:
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Lifehack: Avoid frozen TV dinners that feature stuffing. TV dinner stuffing is treated by the digestive system in a manner similar to corn, the major difference being that corn is not cube-shaped with sharp corners.
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Yeah, I know how that feels:
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Among other things, today is National Peace Rose Day, National Shrimp Scampi Day, Poem in your Pocket Day, Viral Video Day, We Jump the World Day, World Wish Day, and National Zipper Day.
It's also International Dance Day
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Remembering Rod McKuen (b. Rodney Marvin McKuen-April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015), one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks and classical music. He earned two Academy Award nominations and one Pulitzer nomination for his music compositions. McKuen's translations and adaptations of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world. His poetry deals with themes of love, the natural world and spirituality. McKuen's songs sold over 100 million recordings worldwide, and 60 million books of his poetry were sold as well. (Click here for quotes by Rod McKuen)
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Willie Nelson (b. Willie Hugh Nelson on April 29, 1933) is 88 today.
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Remembering Tammi Terrell (b. Thomasina Winifred Montgomery; April 29, 1945 – March 16, 1970), a star singer for Motown Records during the 1960s, notably for a series of duets with singer Marvin Gaye.
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Tommy James (b Thomas Gregory Jackson on April 29, 1947) is 74 today.
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Jerry Seinfeld (b. Jerome Allen Seinfeld on April 29, 1954) is 67 today.
"You're a comedian with the President going nowhere.
Back it up."
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Kate Mulgrew (b. Katherine Kiernan Maria Mulgrew on April 29, 1955) is 66 today.
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Uma Thurman (b. Uma Karuna Thurman on April 29, 1970) is 51 today.
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On this date in 1992, riots erupted in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 63 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.
Categories: Apollo 11; Marvin Gaye; Michael Collins; Motown; Rod McKuen; Rodney King; Tammi Terrell; Tommy James; Uma Thurman; Willie Nelson
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased its guidelines Tuesday on the wearing of masks outdoors, saying fully vaccinated Americans don’t need to cover their faces anymore unless they are in a big crowd of strangers. So we grabbed the dogs and some grandkids and headed to the park to enjoy the 80° temperatures.
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A so-called audit of the 2020 election in Arizona was always going to be crazy. This is something else. The counting has just begun, but already the audit has become almost inextricable from the far-right internet. There, audit-watchers share tips and concerns about security offered by Ron Watkins, a man suspected of helping birth the QAnon craze.
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Thought of the day: "I think perhaps the most important problem
is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the
universe via a language devised for telling one another where the best
fruit is."
-Terry
Pratchett (b. Terence David John Pratchett on April 28, 1948 –
March 12, 2015) (More
Terry Pratchett quotes)
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Among other things, today is Biological Clock Day, Clean Comedy Day, Denim Day, Great Poetry Reading Day, International Guide Dog Day, International Noise Awareness Day, International Pay it Forward Day, National Blueberry Pie Day, National Cubicle Day, National Kiss Your Mate Day, National Superhero Day, Stop Food Waste Day, Workers' Memorial Day, and World Day for Safety and Health at Work.
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Remembering Lee Falk (b. Leon Harrison Gross; April 28, 1911 – March 13, 1999), American writer, theater director and producer, best known as the creator of the popular comic strips Mandrake the Magician (1934–2013) and The Phantom (1936–present). At the height of their popularity, these strips attracted over 100 million readers every day.
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Remembering Harper Lee (b. Nelle Harper Lee; April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016), novelist best known for her 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. (Quotes by Harper Lee)
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Remembering Carolyn Jones (b. Carolyn Sue Jones; April 28, 1930 – August 3, 1983) American actress of television and film. Jones began her film career in the early 1950s, and by the end of the decade had achieved recognition with a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "The Bachelor Party" (1957) and a Golden Globe Award as one of the most promising new actresses of 1959. Her film career continued for another 20 years. In 1964, she began playing the role of Morticia Addams in the original black and white television series The Addams Family.
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On this day in 1930, the Independence Producers hosted the first night_game in the history of organized baseball in Independence, Kansas.
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Remembering Madge Sinclair (b. Madge Dorita Walters on April 28, 1938 – December 20, 1995) Jamaican actress best known for her roles in "Cornbread, Earl and Me" (1975), "Convoy" (1978), "Coming to America" (1988), Trapper John, M.D. (1980–1986), and the ABC TV miniseries "Roots" (1977). Sinclair also voiced the character of Sarabi, Mufasa's wife and Simba's mother, in the Disney animated feature film "The Lion King" (1994). A five-time Emmy Award nominee, Sinclair won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series for her role as Empress Josephine in Gabriel's Fire in 1991. Sinclair, in her brief uncredited role as the captain of the USS Saratoga in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", is commonly cited as the first female Starfleet starship captain to appear in Star Trek. Years later, Sinclair played Geordi La Forge's mother, captain of the USS Hera, in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Interface".
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Ann-Margret (b. Ann-Margret Olsson on April 28, 1941) is 80 today.
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On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to demonstrate that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.
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Jay Leno (b. James Douglas Muir Leno on April 28, 1950) is 71 today. (Jay Leno quotes)
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On this date in 1965, CBS aired the special "My Name Is Barbra," Barbra Streisand's first television special. A solo performance, she sang 26 songs during the one hour program. The show was nominated for six Primetime Emmy Awards in 1965, for which it won five. Streisand won the award for "Outstanding Individual Achievements in Entertainment." It also won the Directors Guild of America Award for "Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Television" in 1966.
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On this date in 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, recorded at Abbey Road Studios reached number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, beginning a record-breaking 971-week chart run. The album is in the top 25 of the list of best-selling albums in the United States. Although it held the number one spot in the US for only a week, it remained in the Billboard album chart from 1973 to 1988. The album re-appeared on the Billboard charts with the introduction of the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart in May 1991. (Older "catalog albums" had been dropped from the weekly list between May 1999 and December 2009). In the UK, it is the seventh-best-selling album of all time and the highest selling album never to reach number one.
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"Florida hasn't always been the weird state claims the book "The Thing About Florida" which was written by, er, a Florida man. Speaking of Florida, here's a stupendous obituary from the Tampa Bay Times.
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Memes of the day:
Categories: Ann-Margret; Barbra Streisand; Baseball; Carolyn Jones; CDC; Covid-19; Florida; Harper Lee; Jay Leno; Kon-Tiki; Madge Sinclair; Meme of the day; Obituaries; Pink Floyd; QAnon; Republicans; Star Trek; Terry Pratchett; The Big Lie; The Dark Side of the Moon; Thor Heyerdahl
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I'm scheduled to be released from Facebook "jail" today, a week after I was suspended from the social networking platform for a satirical cartoon I posted six years ago that supposedly violated "Community Standards." My only guess is that it popped up in the daily "Memories" feed and got tagged there. Bear in mind, the post was perfectly okay in 2015, when I shared it from another account.
Ah, Community Standards... a vague set of rules established to protect Facebook from criticism that it harbors Bad People Thinking Bad Thoughts. But the standards are subjectively interpreted, and randomly and arbitrarily enforced by buggy AI software that doesn't understand the concepts of satire, sarcasm, and parody.
I was suspended two years ago for this picture, which Facebook's artificial intelligence bots tagged as "hate speech":
It's an obvious, self-deprecating male joke. I was offending men? Women? The dog?
Facebook has an appeal process, and for several times each day in the past week I stated my case in the form supplied, hit the send button, and received this:
I think it's hard coded into the page.
What's particularly frustrating is the whole banning business is totally opaque. You're told you can't post for a specified period of time, and then are directed to review the Community Standards to make certain you don't do it again. But in many cases, Facebook doesn't tell you what it was you were doing that triggered the censorbot: violating some advertising rule, promoting hate speech, etc. It's like being pinched by the feds, having them hand you the U.S. Code, and telling you to read it to discover why you were arrested.
And of course, there's no way to actually contact a human being at Facebook. If you go to the page to report a problem and send them the details, you just get a pop-up acknowledging submission.
The guy in the video sums up the whole thing. Understandably NSFW language, but it's no worse than some of the stuff that appears on Facebook that, for some reason, doesn't get flagged for violating community standards:
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Thought of the day: "I rise only to say that I do not intend to
say anything. I thank you for your hearty welcomes and good cheers."
(Known as Grant's perfect speech.)
-Ulysses
S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant, April 27, 1822 – July 23,
1885)
(More Ulysses S. Grant quotes)
Speaking of dead presidents... on
this day in 1994, Richard
M. Nixon was buried on the grounds of the Nixon Library in Yorba
Linda, California.
Contemporary Thought of the Day: Just think, in 30 years this country will be run by people who were home schooled by alcoholics.
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Among other things, today is Babe Ruth Day, Marine Mammal Rescue Day, Matanzas Mule Day, Morse Code Day, National Devil Dog Day, National Prime Rib Day, National Tell a Story Day, International Design Day, and World Tapir Day.
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On this date in 1810, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (WoO 59, Bia 515) for solo piano, commonly known as Für Elise. One of his most popular compositions, and one of the most famous piano pieces of all time, it was not published during his lifetime, only being discovered (by Ludwig Nohl ) 40 years after his death.
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On this day in 1897, Grant's Tomb was dedicated. Officially the General Grant National Memorial, President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia Grant are entombed there. Thus, "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" is a pedantic, trick question. No one is buried there.
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Sheena Easton (b. Sheena Shirley Orr, 27 April 1959) is 62 today. She had 15 US Top 40 singles, seven US top tens and one US No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1981 and 1991.
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The current junior United States Senator from New York, Cory Booker, (b. Cory Anthony Booker, April 27, 1969) is 52 today. Notable quote: "Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children." (More Cory Booker quotes)
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On this date in 1981, Xerox introduced the first commercially available computer mouse.
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Why the world should worry about India. The world's largest vaccine producer is struggling to overcome its latest COVID-19 surge—and that's everyone's problem.
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When you see a headline like Biden isn't banning meat, USDA chief says, you just know it's just another conservative delusion.
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Now this is great investigative journalism, no sarcasm intended: the REAL reason McDonalds' ice cream machines are always broken.
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This looks interesting, but is it really necessary? Of course, the original 1961 film was a yet another take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which itself was based on the 1562 narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet and a 1556 work by William Painter.
And speaking of movies, the television rating for the Oscars® plunged 58% from 2020, with less than ten million viewers tuning in.
Categories: Computers; Cory Booker; Covid-19; Facebook; Florida; Ice Cream; Ludwig Nohl; Ludwig van Beethoven; McDonald's; Oscars; Republicans; Richard Nixon; Romeo and Juliet; Sheena Easton; Steven Spielberg; Ulysses S. Grant; Weather; West Side Story; Xerox
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One of 51,823 quotations from the KGB Quotations Database, selected by Random Text. Click here to search for words, authors or phrases. Search page design and software contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
Current weather
from my backyard in South Park, PA.
How Network Solutions, Inc. Made Me A Child Pornographer
Brief History of the Gregorian Calendar
Requiem for a fictional Scotsman
Oh My God! They Killed Library!! Those Bastards!!!
Pissed off?
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The Dailu Show with Trevor Noah
Evolution is science. Intelligent Design is religion.
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Old stuff, as far back as the 20th century...
