A Snake Walks Into A Bar And The Bartender Says, 'How Did You Do That?' Tabs, Wed., Nov. 29, 2023
Come and get your Tabs!
Headline joke stoled from Alexandra Petri’s Washington Post livechat Tuesday (gift link) which I wouldn’t normally gift link, but it’s the end of the month so I may as well burn my gift links.
A far better use of a WaPo gift link is this very good but depressing investigative piece (gift link) on why more people died in Puerto Rico in 2022 than during 2017, the year of Hurricane Maria. The short answer is that the island is still a mess after Maria and the criminally fuckheaded Trump administration response. That’s been made worse by the departure of more than 120,000 people from the island after the hurricane, leaving behind an older, sicker population overall. In early 2022, a COVID spike killed more than 2,300 people, too. To make matters worse, medical personnel have also been leaving Puerto Rico. The territory had a 2022 death rate of 110 per 10,000 people, “a rate that is nearly 11 percent higher than in the United States overall.” It’s not a happy read. But it’s an important read. (Washington Post gift link)
Want some nice time instead? Here’s a neat Boise State Public Radio story about a family who decided, rather than buying a second car, to get e-bikes for commuting, shopping, and carting around their two young kids, aged six and two. Boise hasn’t yet joined Denver in subsidizing residents’ e-bike purchases, but it’s a pretty e-bikey place, even when it gets cold. The couple, Ryan and Melinda McGoldrick, see their e-bikes as a way to contribute something to reducing carbon emissions, even if it’s just a little bit. (Boise State Public Radio)
Texas women who were prevented from getting abortions despite having serious health risks are suing the state; the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Tuesday. The lawsuit isn’t aimed at overturning Texas’s abortion ban, but at getting greater clarity on what exactly the law’s vaguely written exception for the life of the pregnant patient actually means. (AP)
Sports Illustrated has a wee bit of an “articles written by AI and credited to authors who don’t exist” scandal. Yr Wonkette would never sink to such depths. When we use a Monty Python line for the 87th time, you know it’s a human. And if the line’s a few words off, you know it’s Dok. (HuffPost)
Elon Musk just can’t seem to stop promoting the long-ago-debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, and while he was at it on Monday, he created some brand-new misinformation, too. Sigh. (NBC News)
Students at Monarch High School in Broward County, Florida, walked out of classes Tuesday to protest the removal of the school principal and other staff while the state “investigates” the school for the offense of allowing a transgender student to play on a girls’ volleyball team. The kids, who are all right, chanted “trans lives matter” and called for the return of Principal James Cecil and the other staff, who were reassigned to non-school sites during the investigation. Fucking Florida. [WTVJ-TV]
Las Vegas now has a Punk Rock Museum, complete with a bar and a wedding chapel. The New York Times gets a few points for its headline, “I Wanna Be Curated.” (NYT)
Virgin Atlantic flew a 787 jet fueled with low-carbon “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF) from London to New York Monday, the first time a commercial airliner has made a transatlantic crossing using 100 percent SAF. The plane carried no cargo or paying passengers, just Virgin founder Richard Branson and some guests. The flight was intended to demonstrate that alternative fuels will have to be part of the solution to transitioning away from fossil fuels. Better than waiting for the Children of Kali to take action. (Reuters)
The Guardian ran a very long story Tuesday about how animals do sex, and we aren’t sure why, but it looks interesting, kind of. It seems to have been prompted in part by a recent study on a species of bats that reproduce by having non-penetrative sex, possibly the first known example of mammals what do that.
Scientists have long been perplexed by the fact that the male’s erect penis is much wider than the female’s vagina, making penetration problematic at best. They now believe that semen is transferred simply by contact with the vulva.
Also, whales what do foreplay for three hours or more. Educational! [Guardian]
Hallmark’s 2023 Star Trek Christmas Ornament is completely goofy. It’s from that episode where an alien entity claims to be the god Apollo, and grips the Enterprise in a hand-shaped force field. You can even poke a Christmas tree light into the back of the hand to make it glow. (Hallmark)
You’re probably ready for a Thornton photo by now, so here’s that good boy. He’s not one of those cats who sprawls all over a keyboard to keep me from getting work done. His game is more subtle: he sits politely to one side of the keyboard, completely blocking my view of one monitor until pettings and ear scritches are delivered.
Damn right I complied immediately after snapping this.
Keep the Black Friday action going.
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Lookeet dis babby! Sourced via the Pet Collective:
https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/wee-baby-thumb-sucking-kitten
Last night was my first in my own bed after returning from the US (aka the place that gave me COVID). I slept for about 14 hours and had at various times up to four kitties on me. It was snuggly and healing.