The People’s Convoy of truckers continued their daily sorties onto the beltway surrounding Washington DC to protest mask & vaccine mandates by driving around and gumming up traffic. Commuters have gone from grimly tolerating them to opening flipping them off.
Customs and Border Protection agents reported hundreds of pounds of bologna were found hidden in cars crossing the US border and that contraband bologna smuggling is a thing.
A man was caught attempting to cross the Mexican border with 43 horned lizards and 9 snakes in his pants.
Houston police were called to wrangle a pig on the loose. The pig’s name is Bacon. Unfortunately, no one got video of police running around calling loudly for bacon.
Stephen Miller asked to block a subpoena of his phone records because, he argued, it would infringe on his family’s privacy. That’s when we all found out the former Senior Advisor to President Trump is still on his parents’ T-mobile family plan.
A Brooklyn man had to call 911 to mobilize county Search and Rescue units after getting lost in the mountains outside of Phoenix. In less than 24 hours, he did it again.
“Today was unacceptable, but the season has been very acceptable. And I’ll tell you, the season isn’t over,” said Duke basketball’s legendary Coach K to the crowd gathered to wish him well at his last home game (which they unfortunately lost). Tickets to the game were going for Super Bowl prices.
The highest price for a collectible sports ticket was set when someone bid $468k for a ticket to Michael Jordon’s debut with the Chicago Bulls in 1984. The record was broken again later that afternoon with a $1.75 ticket stub from Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers sold for a $480K.
The average national hourly rate for a babysitter jumped 11% to over $20.57/hour with the going rate topping out at $23.45 for NYC.
That flaming cargo ship loaded with over 4,000 Lamborghinis, Porsches, and Bentleys sank.
Netflix’s production of the third season of Lupin was briefly halted after thieves made off with over $300,000 worth of equipment. Lupin is a series about a master thief.
A Silicon Valley startup has deconstructed thousands of drinks to their molecular components and is taking orders for a machine that will serve drinks from it’s “molecular beverage printer.” Cana (get it, “i wanna cana…”) is due to ship in 2023.
President Biden gave his State of the Union speech at the US Capitol on Tuesday. Counter-programming at the Stage of Freedom event near the Washington Monument was disappointing. Organizers of the much-hyped event were expecting a crowd of thousands including The People’s Convoy. 12 showed up.
The 2-mile long People’s Convoy rolling traffic jam, inspired by the anti-vaccination mandate truckers in Canada, arrived a few days late and are making their way slowly around on the Beltway to protest the vaccine mandates just as many state and local and state mandates are being rescinded.
Howling winds cut short the men’s 50km Olympic cross-country ski race. At the finish line, Finland’s Remi Lindholm used a heat pack to thaw out his frozen penis. This is the second time this has happened to him.
Australian ornithologists have been confounded in their study of Magpies as the birds have figured out how to help each other remove the scientist’s tracking devices.
Remember that luxury skyscraper in San Francisco that is tilting, causing windows on million dollar condo apartments to crack? As workers rush to shore up the side of the Millennium Tower that’s sinking, they are now finding that the structure is also slipping and sliding.
Inflation has hit the tooth fairy. The average rate for a tooth under the pillow is now over five dollars.
A 500-pound black bear nicknamed “Hank the Tank” has been breaking into houses around the South Lake Tahoe area but has been spared euthanization or relocation thanks to DNA evidence pointing to multiple bears being responsible.
Last week a drama unfolded in public that can only be described as one of those uniquely New York moments. Someone lifted someone else’s magazine from the pile of mail on the ground floor of a walk-up apartment. This is something that I am sure happens all the time in cities around the world yet, due to the concentration here of people unafraid to speak their mind and media professionals willing to pay attention, a tenement-level spat exploded into an event followed by thousands. All thanks to the performative platform that is social media.
It all started with a note from Kareem in apartment 2L.
Flames had been fanned. 326 comments and 5,508 likes (as of this writing) on the post above and already large swaths of the city are now tuning in, looking on. Debates take place in hallways all over New York, private chat groups between friends and family and company Slack threads buzz with side conversations on who was in the right and who was in the wrong. What to do if your neighbor plays their stereo too loudly. We’ve all been there. Was this action justified to get their attention? But is stealing the latest issue of New York Magazine warranted? An audience formed, people took sides. We all tuned in to the Instagram account famous for curating signs found around New York city to get the updates.
Then we get this:
A very New York message
Right off the bat, an “alright buddy” set the tone inviting the perp to have a face-to-face conversation rather than “holding my magazine hostage.” New Yorkers hate the passive aggressive. If you have a beef with someone, just come out and say it. Talk it out. Things take a dark turn though when the demand is coldly set to return the magazine by 7pm “or else the deal if off.”
The response:
The light blue marker and cursive handwriting style are disarming but this response is quite literally a throw down, pushing back on the ownership of the magazine and setting the power dynamic squarely back to the person literally holding the final word. “I will return your magazine when I finish reading it.” acknowledges that they do not own magazine but they are going to hang on to it, regardless.
“I’m on the edge of my seat” comments @charmpants on Instagram.
$20 for an issue of the New York Magazine is a generous offer as the newsstand price is $6.99. This post is clearly performative. Kareem is playing to the crowd, trying to get people in the apartment (and greater NY) on his side so that the whole thing can be over and done with. But to those of us following the debate online, we are all curious as to why the note looks so huge as it appears to cover half the door. Others point out it must be posted on a mirror across the hall, otherwise the $20 bill would be the size of a dish towel.
The backstory indicates Kareem has asked the landlord to review the video tapes to see who might have stolen the magazine.
More updates from Williamsburg. Now “Manegment (sic)” is posting signs of fines about signs. We recognize Kareem’s writing asking for clarification. You can see he is calculating the potential risks and cost of his very public appeal to his neighbors. More importantly to the Instagram public, this post clarifies the relationship of the door and mirror question raised earlier.
In the comments, the madding crowd screams, “Release the tapes!”
Blue Marker is upset that the notes are getting so much attention on the internet and asks Kareem to stop then drops the bomb, “I am sorry but I do not have your magazine.”
The city came out in full-throated support of Kareem in his time of loss. The cover story of the New York Magazine was an excerpt from an upcoming biography of New York’s very own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We all want to read that story – we are proud of our own.
Casa Magazines offers a free issue if Kareem wants to stop by their West Village store. Someone from New York Magazine who lives nearby takes a copy over and drops it off. We are all Kareem, just looking for some good reading material.
The final installment was posted yesterday. Unless, of course, Netflix picks it up and turns it into a three-part mini-series. Turns out that upon review of the video tape, the landlord discovers that the magazine was not taken by anyone who lived in the building after all but by a previous resident.
The city took a collective breath. All is well that ends well. We all learned to drop our suspicious gaze and give our neighbors the benefit of the doubt. Kareem now has two issues of this month’s New York Magazine and offers one up to anyone who might want to read it. New York Magazine’s real estate section even reached out and published an interview with Kareem and did their own Instagram bit.
“This sort of petty neighborly drama is what keeps New York alive,”
But note Kareem’s final message and invitation.
It did make me realize I’ve lived here for 6 years and don’t really know any of you . . . so if anyone would like to have coffee with me, just knock or leave a sign on my door.
Melania Trump’s auction of a piece of presidential history to raise some crypto had a winner. The former first lady.
Tuscaloosa police were called in after a report of two “suspicious packages” on the front steps of the federal courthouse. After setting up a perimeter and blocking traffic the police trepidly approached and discovered a Taco and Burrito Cravings Pack.
A priest in Arizona was informed that he had been performing baptisms incorrectly since donning the frock in 1995, invalidating thousands of baptisms.
A large flock of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell out of the sky and it was caught on video.
A car rear-ended a van during a Las Vegas pedestrian awareness event. This was the second time there was an accident at such an event. Earlier, a woman was almost struck by a semi-truck after finishing an interview on TV talking about how scary it is to cross the street.
Super Bowl 56 featured ads from many car companies introducing their Electronic Vehicles (EV) as well as a few crypto companies.
The failed attempt at the most innovative ad was goes to Coinbase which featured 60-seconds of a floating QR code (for those that were in the know, that graphic was an homage to an episode of The Office) Unfortunately their site crashed so the $14 million the company spent to hopefully acquire new users went to waste and Coinbase will forever be associated with the QR code that crashed their website.
A personal favorite of mine was from the FTX which featured Larry David (who has never featured in an ad spot until now) as the ever-present skeptic who misses out on all the great inventions of history. The ad’s theme plays right into the older generation’s FOMO and played in the premium spot right before the Super Bowl’s halftime show.
The tear jerker of the night was from Toyota which ran before the game even got under way. The spot told the story of the McKeever brothers from Canada who worked together to achieve greatness in Nordic Paralympic skiing. Brothers is a moving 60-seconds worth watching if you haven’t seen it. Here’s the backstory.
Of all the EV commercials trotted out over the course of the game, Polestar’s anti-ad was most effective for me. Taking aim at the market leaders VW (“no dieselgate”) and Tesla (“no conquering Mars”) Polestar’s spot doesn’t even show you much of their car which immediately piques your interest in who they might be?
Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene elicited howls of laughter when she accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of using the Capitol Police as her private “gazpacho police.”
The online game Wordle moved to its new home on the New York Times’ servers and all hell broke loose when players discovered their winning streak and stats were cleared out during the migration. Wordle also helped disrupt a crime in progress. For some Wordle variants, I’m keeping a list.
Eric Finkelstein and Scott Ambinder sat for an interview with The New Yorker after visiting every Citibike docking station in New York city, all 1600 of them.
The Australian government has officially listed thekoala as an endangered species.
For some reason, everyone with a Mazda in the Seattle area can only listen to the local NPR station on their car radio. Nothing else. Really.
Jonathan Pie is a fictional broadcast reporter created and performed by British comedian Tom Walker. The New York Times invited Jonathan for an in-character interview to explain why the British are fed up with Boris Johnson. But when Mr. Pie turned his sights on the “entitled arseholes” that make up the British government, what spilled out was a wonderful string of expletives that matched some of Captain Haddock’s best.
Cannibals. Self-serving parasites. Tapeworms in tiaras, swimming through the intestines of the state sucking all the goodness out of it for their own repugnant gratification.
Quite an image, eh?
The video was embedded the Op-Ed section of the New York Times (h/t @robertodevido) into which the paper felt it necessary to add the following disclaimer,
The video contains strong language and adult humor you wouldn’t normally see in The Times, but after being taken for fools, the British public is through being polite.
The sport of curling had its moment in the spotlight as the US curler John Shuster was the official flag bearer for the United States. This first time in US Olympic history.
A loose hen was found early Monday morning wandering around a security area at the Pentagon. The chicken was taken into custody and handed over to a local animal welfare group that said they were unable to reveal the precise location where the bird was spotted.
You can now take out a mortgage to purchase real estate in the metaverse. Unlike the real world, mortgages have much shorter terms (2 years instead of 30) which may indicate a lack of confidence in the stability of the virtual world.
Texas furniture mogul ‘Mattress Mack’ threw down another one of his famous hedge bets to cover his promise to make your purchase free if the Bengals win the Super Bowl. This time he used a mobile betting app to place his $4.5 million wager but had to drive into the next state to use it legally.
