Author: Ian Kennedy

Scientists at the MIT have created a plane which flies without propellers or jet engines. Electrons are removed from the air in front of the wing and added behind it, the flow of ions over the wing creating lift. It’s basically what powered the TiE (twin ion engines) in Star Wars.

A man posing as the owner of a building in Peoria commissioned an artist to paint a huge mural of the cookie monster styled after late-Soviet propaganda on a wall over the Thanksgiving holiday, then disappeared. “What the hell are you painting this weird-ass shit on my wall for?” said the real owner to the bewildered artist when he returned from the holidays.

The mayor of Austin apologized for imploring his constituents to stay at home and resist the urge to travel over the holidays in a video message delivered while he was on Thanksgiving vacation, in Cabo.

The Ohio High School Athletic Association published its guidance to prevent the spread of the virus during the wrestling season. Student-athletes are permitted to wrestle, but must refrain from handshakes before and after the match. The Ohio State – Michigan football game was cancelled due to Covid.

Australia, hard at work on their version of a Covid-19 vaccine, were forced to scrap the $750 million program after some trial participants falsely test positive for HIV.

The Yes Men issued a very real looking press-release which forced the Bank of England to correct the record and say that they were actually not going to stop buying fossil fuel-linked bonds. The next day, (inspired?) the $226 billion New York State pension fund announced that it would liquidate its fossil fuel holdings.

China has built a computer so fast that it can calculate reality on the fly. The photonic quantum computer is so fast, it produced results on a calculation in minutes that the world’s fastest supercomputer would take nearly 2.5 billion years to finish.

The People’s Liberation Army is apparently playing around with gene-editing CRISPER technology in hopes of developing soldiers with “biologically enhanced capabilities”

China is planning to expand its experimental weather modification program to cover an area greater than the size of India with artificial rainfall.

Even Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, on the border to China, grew a couple of feet.

A Chinese submarine dove into the Mariana Trench to a depth exceeding the height of Mount Everest.

Finally, to round out the week, the Chinese space program put a flag on the moon.

But my cousin has done the research and concludes China sucks at building aircraft. They certainly have no TiE fighter in the works.

Hanukkah Sameach y’all. Chin up and masks on. Just a few more months and we can beat this Covid thing!

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

We started off the week with Sarah Fuller, kicking off into history for Vanderbilt’s football team. “Mommy, are you crying?” said one ESPN reporter’s daughter to their mom.

Chris Kennedy of North Little Rock has put up a seven-foot Black Santa in front of his house for years. This year he got a racist note condemning his decoration and he read the note live on Facebook. Now his neighbors have all put up Black Santas.

In Japan, a fisherman caught a rare 9-legged octopus but didn’t notice the extra leg until he was already boiling it for supper.

It’s going swimmingly heading into the holiday season and climbing the expected second wave. This week the entire United States became one giant Covid Red Zone. New York Governor Cuomo is calling Covid the Grinch.

You know the series about the royal family, The Crown, is cutting close to the bone when the British government asks Netflix to place a warning on screen to remind “viewers the drama is fictionalised.”

An anti-LGBTQ Hungarian member of the EU parliament resigned after a “long period of reflection” following his arrest by Belgium police as he was trying to escape out of the window from an illegal lockdown orgy.

Residents of an Austrian village are fucking tired of their fucking town’s name and all the fucking tourists who rip off their Fucking signs. In January, all that comes to an end when they’ll live peacefully, in Fugging.

The House voted to decriminalize marijuana, tipping the scales in favor of the 36 states that have already legalized pot and clearing the way for federal decriminalization and eventually tax revenues.

San Francisco passed a law banning smoking inside apartments, unless you’re smoking pot.

We end this week with the latest on The Monolith. For those following along, last week it appeared in the remote Utah wilderness, then it disappeared. Here’s what happened just this week:

• 11/27 – Another metal monolith suddenly appears on a hillside in Romania.
• 11/30 – A giant wooden phallus disappears off a Bavarian mountaintop, leaving behind only a pile of sawdust.
• 12/01 – The Romanian monolith disappears. Joining the Utah monolith and the wooden phallus perhaps?
• 12/02 – A social media influencer comes forward to say that he and a group of friends removed the Utah monolith to protect the land.
• 12/02 – Another metal monolith appears in Atascadero, a small town in California, overlooking the Pacific coast.
• 12/03 – A group of kids drive five hours and livestream the destruction of the Atascadero monolith replacing it with a crude wooden cross.
• 12/04 – now even Vegas has a Monolith.

I can’t help but think the aliens are desperately trying to communicate with us but we are all too busy posting memes on social media to notice. Oh, and the giant radio telescope we used to listen to the cosmos just fell apart as well.

Stay safe everyone!

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128K to have them take 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair to the International Space Station for a photo shoot. This is, consequently, what they’d pay an Instagram influencer.

Seven people in Russia died after drinking hand sanitizer when the regular booze ran out at a party.

You can no longer sneak in Stairway to Heaven, Guitar Center, the largest musical instrument retailer in the US, filed for bankruptcy.

New York Governor Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” I posted some thoughts on Cuomo and New York’s love/hate relationship with their governor earlier.

In the space of 24 hours, President Trump pardoned a turkey and convicted felon.

While out counting bighorn sheep, a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter crew discovered a 10-12 foot high metal monolith standing upright is the desert. Reddit jumped in and solved the mystery. and then it disappeared.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Philadelphia busted members of the mob on charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, loansharking, and drug trafficking. Among the 15 defendants were 60-year-old “Joey Electric” and 73-year-old “Tony Meatballs.”

State officials uncovered what they are calling the largest fraud in California history. Prison inmates filed pandemic unemployment benefit claims totaling over $140 million. The claims used names such as John Doe, John Adams or, in one case, Poopy Britches. “Quite frankly, the inmates are mocking us,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.

A group of Princeton grads have won more than $6 million from lotteries in Indiana, Missouri, Washington and the District of Columbia. They say they are just lucky but they also incorporated themselves under the moniker Black Swan Capital LLC.

Dog-sized Argentine black-and-white tegu lizards have eaten their way across Georgia and South Carolina and are now threatening Alabama. “The entire southeast portion of the United States is at risk.” says Amy Yackel Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

If you’re looking for “hilarious COVID-19-themed ornaments” for your Christmas Tree, we’ve got you covered.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.