Spinning Wheels Go Round

 Up at 5 AM this morning and doing nothing very important. 

CC came over yesterday and started working on the kitchen. I picked her up after the group thing yesterday. I think I will leave off my report of that for a separate post.

Around 5 PM, I wound up taking her boyfriend to work in New Castle. First time I had been down there since I do not know when. 2009?

Going through the email led me to some articles that I have read in the past 2 hours.  

This came to me from The Irish Star through Google News: Putin humiliation as $44m Russian warplane shot down by Ukraine forces. Good for the Ukrainians.

Russia did not immediately comment on the alleged loss of an Su-34. However, Ukraine's armed forces reported that around 4am "a Russian Su-34 aircraft was shot down in the Zaporizhzhia direction". Meanwhile, in a dramatic departure from his previous restraint, Trump lauded Ukraine's "bravery" and indicated it might retake territory captured by Moscow.

Gizmodo's Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say is crazy and silly and scary all at the same time. 

 PeakMetrics grabbed a sample of 52,000 posts made on X within the first 24 hours of Cracker Barrel’s announcement that it would be modernizing its logo to an admittedly very plain and generic design. In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. Those numbers climb even higher when a boycott is mentioned. About 1,000 posts in that first 24-hour period called on people to stop eating at Cracker Barrel, and 49% of those posts got flagged as likely coming from bots. In its report, PeakMetrics states that the boycott was unlikely to be an organic grassroots response but a “bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme/activist accounts.”

Crazy that Cracker Barrel would be the target; silly because too many people fell for it; and scary for the very same reason.

Not so impressed with Maher this week:

 Beyond Fest celebrates William Petersen, who made two iconic ’80s crime classics in one year (LA Times). Seeing the headline, I found myself curious what William Peterson was up to nowadays - no mention of that - and stayed to read what he had to say about "To Live and Die in LA" and "Manhunter". I saw the first in the theater back in the day; it was the only Friedkin movie I got to see in the theater. It sticks in my head as grim and nihilistic; Willem Dafoe was even scarier than in "Streets of Fire". I saw "Manhunter" about 10 years after it came out. I should watch it, again. It seems more modest than "Silence of the Lambs", or maybe it just has a different rhythm.

Million-year-old skull found in China could rewrite human evolution timeline, study finds: "This changes a lot of thinking" (CBS News) is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had not gone into the law, and it is something more important, too. It serves to remind us science is ever discovery. This should also inspire humility about human knowledge.

‘I lost everything!’ Chris Sarandon on Dog Day Afternoon, ex-wife Susan and the fraud that took his life savings (The Guardian). Just see "Fright Night" - Colin Farrell never came close to Sarandon in the remake.

US revokes visa for Colombian president Gustavo Petro after ‘reckless’ actions in New York  (The Guardian). I cannot tell if this more silliness, or another sign that The End Is Coming.

Is Life a Form of Computation? (MIT Press Reader) yes.

After taking CC home, I came home and piddled for a little while before calling it a night around 9 PM. 

I have dishes to wash now from dinner I fixed for us. I thought I had sausage, but it was ground turkey. With this, I did a version of what my mother called hamburger and rice. It is based on cream of mushroom soup, but I added onions and a sweet pepper and the turkey. I seasoned the turkey with curry powder. It turned out well.

 

 sch