Category: TWTW

The Santa Barbara fire department rushed out to rescue what turned out to be a mannequin dangling from a cliff.

Like the eddy of a stream clogged with leaves, one dead end street in San Francisco became a gathering spot for lost self-driving Waymo taxis.

On National Coming Out Day, DC Comics announced that Superman’s son is bi-sexual.

Details of Jonathan and Diana Toebbe’s spycraft spilled into the news including details of how they passed secrets on an SD card hidden in a peanut butter sandwich. The criminal complaint is worth a read.

A man travelled to Germany to pick up his brand new Lamborghini Huracan and excitedly drove it back to his home in Norway. He was clocked by Danish police doing almost 150 MPH. His car was confiscated.

Another court document revealed that criminals used machine learning technology to deepfake the voice of a company executive and trick a bank into transferring $35 million to fraudulent accounts.

Jony Ive launched a website.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

Spectators of a flying drone light show in China ran in panic as the drones “went awry” hitting buildings and bystanders on the ground.

The Trump 2024 presidential campaign rebranded itself with a refreshed, albeit uncreative name, Make America Great Again, Again.

For the first time in 20 years, Donald Trump fell off the list of Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.

Two men who fired off flares off Block Island to celebrate a friend’s wedding have been fined $10,000 because of the resulting multi-hour rescue mission involving a surface vessel and two Coast Guard helicopters.

The shine is off as scientists who measure the glow of the Earth by looking at the light reflected off of the moon. Our planet has dimmed as climate change has “essentially scuffed up our planet.”

That 70s Show is getting a re-boot. The new show will be called That 90s Show.

Researchers at Bangor University in Wales have discovered high levels of cocaine and MDMA in a stream that runs near the site of the Glastonbury Festival. They concluded the seasonal spike is from festival goers urinating in and around the stream and that it is affecting the local fish population.

Last week it was Cup Noodle soda, this week it is Cracker Jack Pepsi. At least this one comes with a prize.

Netflix has been forced to edit out a few frames from the hugely popular Squid Game series. The scene includes a shot of business card with a Korean phone number. The hapless owner on the other end of that number has been getting upwards of 4,000 calls a day with his cellphone’s battery draining before he can use it.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

Inflation became reality as the Dollar Store started testing out items priced at over $1.00.

The markets were down sharply this week but a hamster trading crypto is outperforming the S&P 500.

I don’t know why you would but you could if you wanted to, buy and consume, a can of Cup Noodle-flavored soda.

A “naturopath” was ordered by a Canadian court to literally stop selling shit.

The South Australian government is using drones with facial recognition software to do a census of the koala population.

Amazon’s new domestic robot Astro looks like a cute version of the Echo on wheels but some are saying it’s a Roomba designed to hoover up loads of personal data about you and your house.

A Dutch artist was given $84,000 and commissioned to make a statement about people’s relationship with work. He delivered an empty frame and called the work, “Take the Money and Run.”

A team of music historians, musicologists, and composers teamed up with computer scientists and used artificial intelligence to finish Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.

An outfit called TinyCircuits made a tiny Gameboy from a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s called Thumby and can fit on your keychain.

Rolls-Royce is going electric in a big way. They announced their first EV, the Spectre, and an electric airplane.

Just one final approval is all that remains to allow driverless taxis on the streets of San Francisco.

“I felt a chill go down my spine when I heard that the monkey is back in the village,” said Jagadish who is being stalked by one disturbingly-focused Bonnet Macaque.

A Turkish man believed to be lost in the forest stumbled into his own search party and helped them for awhile until he heard them calling his name. “I am here” he said to the startled rescue party.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

The population of Alabama is shrinking. Due to the deadly combination of the pandemic and vaccination hesitancy, the state recorded more deaths than births.

Not to be outdone by AT&T’s Flying COWS announced a couple of weeks ago, the Verizon PR team trotted out their own emergency response solution, THOR.

Taking another step towards our Skynet future, quantum computers are now being deployed to design better quantum computers.

A large crowd gathered in Tokyo to say goodbye to the Sega Ikebukuro Gigo arcade. The nine floor video game parlor was closing its doors after 28 years.

A US military base on the outskirts of Tokyo is in a heightened state of alert because of a potential invasion from wild monkeys.

The CEO of Apple Computer, Tim Cook, said employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo.

Children in New Zealand who uncovered a unique set of fossils while on a field trip have now been credited with discovering a completely new species of prehistoric penguin.

Samuel Adams’ latest batch of its specialty Utopias line of beer (aged over 30 years in aquavit barrels with a touch of Vermont Maple Syrup) is so potent it’s banned in 15 states.

Following recent news the El Salvador government recognized Bitcoin as legal tender, the Chinese central bank officially declared all cryptocurrency transactions as illegal.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

As cooler temps set in and songbirds started their migration south, the annual crashing of birds into the Manhattan skyscrapers season began.

In-person schooling started but the bus driver shortage was so severe in Massachusetts that they had to call in the national guard.

Japan announced that they have successfully tested a new kind of rocket engine that uses shock waves instead of thrust sending a 30 meter rocket over 230 kms into space during a 4 minute flight.

A UK firm announced that it is working on a blimp. The Airlander 10 is the world’s largest aircraft and can fly 100 passengers, 4,000 kms over 5 days with nearly zero emissions. It also has a nickname, The Flying Bum.

Who says you can’t reinvent the wheel. Michelin announced its airless tires are ready for mass production.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully delivered four civilian astronauts into three days of orbit and a successful splashdown landing in a self-driving rocket ship. Elon Musk also sent the obscure cryptocurrency Floki Inu up 1000% when he named his dog Floki.

A prankster put out a fake press release announcing Walmart’s adoption of Litecoin, a cryptocurrency, in a classic pump-and-dump scheme.

Kanye [Ye] West made news by unfollowing his ex-wife Kim Kardashian on Instagram. He made news again by re-following her. The last time there was this much excitement on the IG Follow beat was back when Drake followed Kim when K & K were married.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

Snow came early to Mt. Fuji. 21 days earlier than last year.

AT&T restored cellular service to the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Ida using flying drone antennas, also known as Cell-on-Wings (COWS).

College football started up again to packed stadiums of hopefully vaccinated fans. The Hoosier uniform staff had to explain how they misspelled their state and University of Miami fans found a new use for the American flag.

A recent power outage in the New York subway system was traced to someone accidentally pushing an “Emergency Power Off” button.

Singapore is testing patrol robots to look out for “undesirable” behavior. The robots, named Xavier (after the Jesuit missionary?), will roam public areas and use onboard 360-degree cameras to scan for violations such as smoking in prohibited areas, illegal hawking, and non-compliance with COVID-19 restrictions and send real-time alerts to the authorities.

An unspecified Southeast Asian military service placed an order for two jetpacks.

A standoff between police and an armed suspect was briefly interrupted when a naked woman drove a golf cart in between the two and refused to heed commands to take shelter. There was “a distinct odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from her person, and she was completely nude.” The event took place in Florida but authorities were quick to point out the woman was from Boston.

A first edition Spider-Man comic book sold for a record $3.6 million, beating out Superman.

The El Salvadorian government officially recognized Bitcoin as legal tender to make it less expensive for its citizens abroad to transfer money home. The price of the cryptocurrency promptly plummeted.

Ben John, a 21-year old Nazi sympathizer, was found with over 9,000 right-wing and terror-related documents on his hard drive which he claimed he collected due to his “academic fascination.” To avoid prison time, a British judge ordered Ben to read Austin, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, and Trollope and agree to be tested on what he read.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

Toyota took its self-driving buses out of service after one of them struck a Paralympic, taking the judo athlete out of service. Toyota apologized for the “overconfidence” of its vehicles.

In Ida-flooded Louisiana, a man was eaten by an alligator. The Humane Society removed an 80-pound cougar from a NYC apartment.

According to the British National Corpus of Conversation, “fuck” overtook “bloody” as the swearword of choice in the UK.

A judge declared that only humans, not artificial intelligence algorithms, can be declared inventors under U.S. patent law.

The New York City Department of Emergency Management canceled their press conference on National Preparedness Month because they were busy responding to Hurricane Ida.

“All ye of little faith, bury this Sakara” were the last words of Zambian pastor James Sakala to his followers before they buried him alive in hopes he would rise again like Jesus.

In response to the Texas heartbeat bill that invited the general population to report on their neighbors, the Texas Right to Life group set up a website allowing people to submit information about suspected violators. You can imagine what the internet did next.

Trump’s $20 billion border wall, that has been circumvented by $5 ladders, is now partially washed away by torrential rains along the Arizona border.

Spencer Elden, who was was posed as a baby swimming after a dollar bill on Nirvana’s Nevermind album, is suing the band for child pornography.

The famous leaning tower of San Francisco shifted dramatically just as a massive shoring up project was started. Engineers are regrouping to figure out their next move.

A Russian man defected to Japan by swimming.

The drought in the Western United States is so bad they are airlifting water to animals by helicopter.

Someone is building a near-earth space station but the company contracted to build the life-support system will not say who.

A Swedish firm announced they have successfully figured out how to produce carbon-free steel, a huge step forward to cleaning up the environmentally unfriendly steel industry. The first customer? Volvo.

Someone pranked Newsmax and called in to an interview about the Afghanistan situation posing as Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to say “The next time we have two trillion dollars lying around, let’s spend it on something useful like health care or education.”

Tesla announced they are building humanoid robots to be used for unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks. “In the future, physical labor will be a choice,” said Elon Musk.

Disney announced they are developing “sentient” robots and will have them wander their parks free amongst the guests.

Robotics firm Boston Dynamics demonstrated how their Atlas robots can now jump, flip, and do parkour.

Westworld, the dystopian thriller where sentient robots take over and kill their masters, resumed filming for Season 4.

Roblox, the virtual world software marketed towards kids, is having a tough time stamping out recreations of mass shootings built on their platform.

The Peacock network thinks it’ll be fun to watch humans play a “live-action real-life” version of the Frogger video game. Thankfully the gameshow takes place in a studio and not on the streets of NYC or Vietnam.

A burned out shell of a home in Walnut Creek sold for $1 million. “The potential is limited only by imagination,” the listing gushed.

Sensing rough waters ahead, the secretive big data analytics company Palantir loaded up on $50 million in gold bars.

A 1909 baseball card was auctioned off for $6.6 million, smashing the previous record of $5.2 million. Major League Baseball, sensing greater profits ahead, announced an end to their 70-year deal with Topps in favor of the sports apparel company, Fanatics.

A Wisconsin woman accidentally shot a friend while using the laser sight on a handgun to play with a cat.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.

Australian canoeist Jessica Fox found a perfectly stretchy, waterproof material to fix the tip of her kayak at the Tokyo Olympics: a condom.

After asking the UK government to ban its cigarettes, Philip Morris is pivoting to asthma inhalers which it views as a growth market.

London Bridge may not be falling down but it did get stuck.

In a sign that we have completely saturated terrestrial advertising, a Canadian startup is sending a satellite into orbit and is selling space on it for advertisers.

Two North Carolina men who were mourning the loss of their brother at the spot where their brother was struck by a train, were killed when they were struck by a train.

In a plot twist that didn’t surprise anyone, Batman’s sidekick Robin came out as bisexual.

The Mesa County officials responsible for maintaining the security of elections are under investigation by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office for a breach in security of its election system.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Also available via email.