Category: TWTW

Researchers at MIT are working on an app that can successfully detect Covid-19 in asymptomatic individuals by processing recordings of an individual’s cough.

A Louisiana family was briefly one of the richest families in America when their bank mistakenly transferred $50 billion into their account.

Philip Morris asked the UK government to ban cigarettes within the decade.

Citizen, a mobile neighborhood watch app that used to be called Vigilante, will pay New Yorkers $25/hour to livestream crime scenes.

The Eastern District of New York sold off Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli’s one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Viewers of Olympic women’s field hockey were left hanging when, in the final minutes of the Argentina v. Spain match, the broadcast inexplicably cut to a cameraman focused on a cockroach on the sidelines.

A dispatch from rural New Zealand reports that the case of the “suspicious pair of footprints” has been resolved.

The people of the Isle de Jean Charles in the bayous of Louisiana became the first federally funded community of climate migrants.

A startup in Amsterdam introduced an electric two-seater car that can run entirely from sunlight collected on its solar-paneled roof.

A woman in Tulsa was located and arrested when she left a comment on the police department’s Weekly Most Wanted Facebook post inquiring about the reward for her capture.

Ford created a premium fragrance to be used in the new electric Mustang Mach-E GT to give owners a hint of that fuel and tire scent muscle car drivers crave.

The Western New York gardening group is having trouble discussing “hoes” on their Facebook page because their posts are constantly flagged by Facebook’s moderation team.

Scientists in Australia are changing the language around shark attacks in order to dispel a “culture of fear” around the threatened species. From now officials will use the phrase, “negative encounters.”

The WHO started using Greek letters to avoid the stigma of associating a the name of a disease with the place where it was detected. This left folks at Delta Airlines grumbling, where they now just call it “the variant.”

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a pilot program for new municipal trash cans designed by Gucci. They cost $20k each.

Poland had to send home swimmers from their Olympic team when they were told they brought six too many.

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, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.

With rising oceans and cataclysmic floods upon us, it only makes sense that Jeep is thinking about adding to their iconic 4-wheeler an underwater mode.

Confirming that global warming has arrived, Car & Driver published a review to see which convertible, left in the sun, has the hottest seat.

A Moscow-based company is proposing a traffic stoplight design with a more information-rich design.

Because of its high cost of living, New York City was ranked as one of the hardest places to live in the United States. True to form, an Upper East Side establishment notched a Guinness World Record for its $200 black-truffled french fries.

An unopened Legend of Zelda game from 1987 was auctioned off for $870,000. Not to be outdone, an unopened copy of Super Mario 64 went for $1.56 million. NFT that!

A Wyoming rancher was rescued after spending two nights trapped beneath his overturned ATV four-wheeler. He survived on several bottles of water and cans of beer which luckily landed nearby.

An Episcopal church in New Mexico announced that it paid off the medical debt for all of New Mexico.

Engineers at UC San Diego have designed a new type of biofuel cell that harnesses energy from the sweat of your fingertips. This technology could make it possible to charge your wearables without a battery pack.

A military paratrooper trainee, whose parachute failed to open correctly during a high altitude training exercise, sustained only “minor injuries” after a 15,000ft fall took him through some trees and the roof of a house in California, crashing into the kitchen in a burst of insulation and roofing material.

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, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.

An underwater gas line ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico and set the ocean on fire.

Locals in upstate New York are complaining that a power plant, taken over by a NYC private equity fund to mine crypto, is ruining the their nearby lake. “The lake is so warm you feel like you’re in a hot tub.”

The Chinese Navy has developed an aquatic surveillance drone shaped like a shark to avoid detection.

A crate carrying 100 homing pigeons fell off a truck in Florida. The birds refused to move, causing a hazard for drivers. “It’s the worst case scenario – homing pigeons that can’t find their home,” said a news release from Volusia County officials.

Kohei Jinno, evicted from his family home to clear the way for the National Stadium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, was evicted a second time 48 years later, when they rebuilt the stadium for the 2020 Games. He was given 170,000 yen ($1500) for the inconvenience.

A man who spent $40,000 on tickets in pursuit of the Guinness Record for most Olympic events attended was crushed to hear that fans would not be allowed to attend the Games in person. 

A 53-year old Japanese woman was arrested for trying to douse the Olympic torch with a water gun.

Jessica Springsteen, Bruce’s daughter, qualified for the US Olympic Equestrian team.

An Ohio state trooper saved a man’s life when he Heimliched a driver pulled over for speeding. The driver was choking on a baggie of marijuana he swallowed to hide from the officer. After coughing up the evidence, he was cited for speeding, failure to wear a seat belt and a misdemeanor for marijuana possession.

Two hundred white supremacists from Texas drove to Philadelphia to stir up trouble in the nation’s birthplace over the July 4th weekend. While marching around and chanting “The election was stolen!” they were summarily chased out of town by fed up citizens.

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, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.

The Hubble Space Telescope glitched out and “stopped collecting science data.” NASA engineers work feverishly to get things working again but are running out of options as backup systems also failed.

The U.S. government released a report admitting that due to “lack of data” it can’t explain 143 of the 144 cases of UFOs that have been spotted in recent years.

5,000 racing pigeons mysteriously vanished during a race in the UK.

A man was arrested for stealing 42,000 pounds of pistachios.

A robot ship using artificial intelligence to retrace the voyage of the Mayflower turned back to England.

Temps spiked to a record 118 degrees in the Siberian arctic.

The South African decamom story from a few weeks ago was deflated.

The Norwegians, famous for squirreling away seeds in case of global disaster, announced they will also archive the “world’s most important music recordings.” Let the debate begin.

Canon has integrated its camera’s smile detection software into facial recognition hardware so that you need to smile before you can enter or reserve a conference room. We want to “encourage employees to create a positive atmosphere” said a Canon spokesperson.

The reintroduction of Tasmanian devils to a small Australian island may not have been such a great idea as they wiped out the entire population of little penguins.

A Greek computer scientist re-purposed computer eye-tracking software normally used in computer gaming hardware to enable someone to play the harp with their eyes.

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.

Akamai’s Denial-of-Service software inadvertently denied service to major banks and airlines in Australia.

A Chinese construction company built a 10-story apartment building, complete with all electrical, lighting, water supply, and drainage in 28 hours and 45 minutes.

At the G7 summit, US president Joe Biden gifted UK prime minister Boris Johnson a $6,000 custom bicycle handcrafted by Philadelphia-based Bilenky Cycle Works adorned with hand-painted US/UK flags. The Johnson gifted Biden a photo of a Frederick Douglass mural printed out from Wikipedia.

British authorities have impounded a massive replica of Noah’s Ark which they found unseaworthy.

Cristiano Ronaldo shifted two bottles of Coca-Cola which were strategically placed in view while the soccer superstar gave a press conference. Shares of the soft-drink company cratered, wiping nearly $4 billion off the company’s market value.

As is custom, visiting athletes at Japan’s Olympic village will have access to 160,000 condoms but are being told to heed Covid protocols and “avoid unnecessary forms of physical contact”.

Doctors have invented a device that cures hiccups.

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.

The fact-checkers at Snopes spent 90-minutes trying to figure out if former President Trump was wearing his trousers backwards.

Concerned about climate change, a Texas congressman asked the National Forest Service if they could do anything, “to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun.”

Arizona’s Department of Corrections is prepping to restart its gas chamber on death row and plan to use hydrogen cyanide, also known as Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis. Google’s head of diversity was fired over an anti-Semitic blog post.

National Geographic officially recognized a fifth ocean adding the Southern Ocean to all its maps. The people at 4ocean.com are pissed.

Following his ban from Facebook and Twitter, the former president started a blog, From the Desk of Donald J. Trump. Last week he shut it down due to lack of interest.

Cicadas were so thick in the air that they were showing up weather radar. They also got into the engines of the White House press corps plane, delaying their departure to Europe until 2am. Isn’t there something in the Bible about this?

Engineers at MIT have discovered a new way to generate electricity.

A South African woman gave birth to ten babies joining her six-year old twins. Guinness World Records is heading to Pretoria to verify but there’s drama around the marital status of the father.

A lobster diver, plucking crustaceans off the ocean floor near Cape Code, was swallowed whole by a whale and spat back up to tell the tale.

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, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.

A UN report stated that a drone aircraft autonomously attacked humans for the first time ever in Libya last year. Closer to home, a candidate for mayor in Albuquerque, had his speech interrupted (griefed?) by a drone-carrying a dildo.

In a reversal of last week’s policy that brought us the ConocoPhillips “chillers” used to firm up the melting tundra, the Biden administration will freeze oil leases in the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge pending further environmental review.

Someone discovered, tucked away in the royal decree of laws governing Belgium, specifically, Book V of the Code of Economic Law, paragraph nine of the French translation of article 13 of the section on pricing for drugs and medical devices, a recipe for asparagus gratin.

The Barron County sheriff’s office is thanking the Bovine Unit for shuffling into action and blocking a suspect in their car during a 13-mile chase.

Something any Japanese onsen fan could have told you, a Coventry University study found that a good long soak in piping hot water has some of the same health benefits as vigorous exercise.

A hat store in Nashville started selling yellow “not vaccinated” Star of David patches and were promptly cut off from Stetson, Kangol, and several other milliners. A Tennessee woman was arrested for driving her SUV at a high rate of speed through a drive-in vaccination facility yelling “no vaccine” and nearly hitting some workers.

A parking spot in Hong Kong sold for the equivalent of $1.3M breaking the record also set in Hong Kong.

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.

Climate change is moving vampire bats north to Florida. In California, Pacific lampreys, also known as “vampire fish,” are returning to rivers where they have not been seen for 40 years.

UK police nabbed a drug dealer because of his love of Stilton cheese.

Lawmakers in Texas passed a bill to allow people to carry handguns without a license. The governor signed into law a ban on abortions as early as six weeks, and another law that prevents Texas cities, counties, and public schools from asking people to wear a mask.

After their smash debut at the Los Angeles Public Library, the Linda Lindas signed a record deal.

To drill for oil under the tundra of Alaska, ConocoPhillips will install “chillers” into the permafrost (which is melting because of climate change) to keep it solid enough to support the equipment to drill for oil, the burning of which will continue to worsen ice melt.

It is now cool to wear socks with your sandals in a non-ironic way.

“The one high-stakes moment where they fucked up in a minor way that escalated into a really big deal,” is the summation of how a stripped wheel nut scuttled the Mercedes-AMG F1 team at the Monaco Grand Prix.

A mother died in motorcycle crash during memorial ride for her son who also died in a motorcycle crash.

A survey of over 5,000 people from across America found that 15% believe that the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.

My old hometown, Alameda, made the news as hundreds lined up to find out what death smells like.

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, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.