May 1 (UPI) -- Officials at a zoo in Armenia said reports of a zebra that escaped from the facility were the result of a donkey that had been painted black and white as a prank.
Police in Yerevan, the nation's capital, received information Friday morning that a zebra had escaped from the Yerevan Zoo and was wandering loose Myasnikyan Avenue.
The zoo later released a statement to news outlet Shamshyan explaining the animal was not actually from the facility -- and wasn't even a zebra.
"The news story this morning was nothing more than a failed joke," the zoo said. "A citizen, whose identity is currently being determined by law enforcement, painted his donkey with stripes and took it to Myasnikyan Avenue to film a video. I would like to inform you that the zebras at the Zoo are safe and in their free enclosure."
It's for teaching a lesson about something without directly referring to that thing, for example a sorry about painting an ass in zebra stripes and then electing it president on a peace and prosperity platform.
Late in the day to mention this, but Vin Diesel has a connection to Captain Beefheart. Guitarist Gary Lucas was a member of the Magic Band just before Don Van Vliet decided to retire from music and concentrate on painting. Lucas had also been working as an A&R guy for Columbia. In 1982 Lucas met a skinny teenager in New York named Mark Sinclair. Neither Lucas or Sinclair could know that Sinclair would eventually be action star Vin Diesel. Instead they thought his future was as a rapper.
Boy, with all these airlines dying, it sure would be nice if we had... I dunno, some other form of long range tubular transport machine. Perhaps one that ran on a set of rails on the ground...
MCENANY: Is Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (D) your kind of man?
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: I actually prefer women to men. But to each his own.
“They think that kids should be able to change genders at recess. A lot of the looners hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun!”
“The faction in control of the Democrat Party is the LOON wing, the SOCIALIST wing. Its leaders are Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Mamdani, elder statesman Bernie Sanders. Mr. Platner is a member. They have deeply weird beliefs.”
Hometown hick/ Vanderbilt, U of Virginia, Oxford grad says what now?
He's hanging around where he encounters loons on yoga mats? Hell, I'm a self-proclaimed left-wing anarchist and I stay away from such places.
But he's clearly never darkened the door of an elementary school, if that's what he thinks goes on.
The beliefs he finds so "deeply weird" were mainstream Democratic Party beliefs barely 40 years ago. And way back then, there was an odd creature known as a "Moderate Republican" which held some, though not all, of those same beliefs. Because at that time, they'd worked very well for 50 years and had pulled America from the depths of the Great Depression to the position of Imperial Overlord of Earth, so it was difficult to argue against them, without lying.
Which was the genius of Reagan. He realized he could just lie about everything and there was a cult just ready to be formed.
Which is why Trump. Trump has never created anything but he's a damn good cultural appropriator.
But Fauxhorn Leghorn Kennedy, the Oxford grad, isn't nearly as good at the lying as Trump is and Reagan was.
It's quite likely that Kennedy, and (God Help Us All) Josh Hawley, are the two US Senators with the most, and most-prestigious, levels of education achieved. They're both certainly in the conversation.
So they know exactly what they're doing, and they're doing it on purpose.
🚨#BREAKING: Delta Air Lines are now mysteriously canceling hundreds of flights nationwide citing crew restrictions. The disruptions come just as Spirit Airlines has officially shut down, adding further stress and uncertainty across the U.S. travel system.
I'll go with "in denial". This all must be incredibly bewildering and demoralizing, that the highest court in the land would do something like this deliberately and knowingly.
Americans have been very carefully, and skillfully, directed to abdicate their own personal agency. To put their trust and critical judgment into systems and institutions.
So when those systems and institutions obviously fail, right in front of us, many of us are so terrified at the mere thought of having to reclaim our agency and critical judgment, we won't do it. We'll simply deny what's right in front of us, rather than have to take back up our responsibilities to and for our selves.
It's really weird but I see it happen all the time.
In another attempt to invade individual privacy Utah has passed a state law that holds websites responsible for determining the identity and location of people using VPNs in Utah under the guise of protecting underage users. Not only is that not reliably doable, but that ship left the dock long ago. How many pretzel twists will be necessary to enforce such a law, short of outright banning of VPN usage in the state, will be hard to predict.
Banning VPN's would be practically impossible. Especially because businesses use them all the time and will scream blue murder if anyone attempts to restrict that.
This is one of many reasons why I feel like we'll never come back as the "United States". I fear our divisions are just too deep, and wannabe religious authoritarians too numerous.
This right here. We need a reckoning and a re-working of the Constitution. Get rid of the Electoral College. And expand SCOTUS, for starters.
We could have done it if we had completed Reconstruction in a heavy-handed way. IMO, it's too late now. They have their free speech rights to trample the rest of us now.
I have rarely, if ever, walked out of a movie.
Pitch Black is the lone exception I can think of.
I'm hoping I'm the only one here who got a bullshit 'Following' request from a fake Vin Diesel allegedly here at substack a few weeks back.
Pretty much the same as the fake 'ziggywiggy' who tried to steal her identity her several months back.
I offer this as a current reason I wouldn't watch *anything* with Vin Diesel in it, unless he released a film entitled "The Chronicles of Ulous"....
I love Vin Diesel...
The voice but not the acting!
Movie was good and quite spooky
Epstein.
'Escaped zebra' in Armenia was a painted donkey
May 1 (UPI) -- Officials at a zoo in Armenia said reports of a zebra that escaped from the facility were the result of a donkey that had been painted black and white as a prank.
Police in Yerevan, the nation's capital, received information Friday morning that a zebra had escaped from the Yerevan Zoo and was wandering loose Myasnikyan Avenue.
The zoo later released a statement to news outlet Shamshyan explaining the animal was not actually from the facility -- and wasn't even a zebra.
"The news story this morning was nothing more than a failed joke," the zoo said. "A citizen, whose identity is currently being determined by law enforcement, painted his donkey with stripes and took it to Myasnikyan Avenue to film a video. I would like to inform you that the zebras at the Zoo are safe and in their free enclosure."
Failed joke? It seems successful IMO.
Literally a side mission in Red Dead Redemption 2.
This is a metaphor for Fetterman, isn't it ? . . .
What's a metaphor?
It's for teaching a lesson about something without directly referring to that thing, for example a sorry about painting an ass in zebra stripes and then electing it president on a peace and prosperity platform.
I'd say it was a pretty successful joke.
Those damn onions are slicing themselves again today.
When ICE wrenches a mother in Chicago away from her three children (illegally, of course), a heroic neighbor steps in to care for them:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/05/01/chicago-immigration-midway-blitz-trump-children
Late in the day to mention this, but Vin Diesel has a connection to Captain Beefheart. Guitarist Gary Lucas was a member of the Magic Band just before Don Van Vliet decided to retire from music and concentrate on painting. Lucas had also been working as an A&R guy for Columbia. In 1982 Lucas met a skinny teenager in New York named Mark Sinclair. Neither Lucas or Sinclair could know that Sinclair would eventually be action star Vin Diesel. Instead they thought his future was as a rapper.
https://pleasekillme.com/vin-diesel-arthur-russell/
I remember reading RanXerox in Heavy Metal oh so long ago...guess it's no surprise he's the basis for Diesel's look.
https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/df647581-c256-48ff-88c6-30a2e1119c06?target_reply_id=50517dfb-b20a-4743-a47f-9b30e0223ade&showTarget=true
Boy, with all these airlines dying, it sure would be nice if we had... I dunno, some other form of long range tubular transport machine. Perhaps one that ran on a set of rails on the ground...
MCENANY: Is Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (D) your kind of man?
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: I actually prefer women to men. But to each his own.
“They think that kids should be able to change genders at recess. A lot of the looners hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun!”
“The faction in control of the Democrat Party is the LOON wing, the SOCIALIST wing. Its leaders are Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Mamdani, elder statesman Bernie Sanders. Mr. Platner is a member. They have deeply weird beliefs.”
He's a communist and a Nazi!
Hometown hick/ Vanderbilt, U of Virginia, Oxford grad says what now?
He's hanging around where he encounters loons on yoga mats? Hell, I'm a self-proclaimed left-wing anarchist and I stay away from such places.
But he's clearly never darkened the door of an elementary school, if that's what he thinks goes on.
The beliefs he finds so "deeply weird" were mainstream Democratic Party beliefs barely 40 years ago. And way back then, there was an odd creature known as a "Moderate Republican" which held some, though not all, of those same beliefs. Because at that time, they'd worked very well for 50 years and had pulled America from the depths of the Great Depression to the position of Imperial Overlord of Earth, so it was difficult to argue against them, without lying.
Which was the genius of Reagan. He realized he could just lie about everything and there was a cult just ready to be formed.
Which is why Trump. Trump has never created anything but he's a damn good cultural appropriator.
But Fauxhorn Leghorn Kennedy, the Oxford grad, isn't nearly as good at the lying as Trump is and Reagan was.
Life's real simple when you just misrepresent everything your opponents believe and advocate for.
He's a Rogue Scholar
Plus projection, transference, mommy issues, bad hygiene, spelling mistakes on the SAT, I could go on . . .
It's quite likely that Kennedy, and (God Help Us All) Josh Hawley, are the two US Senators with the most, and most-prestigious, levels of education achieved. They're both certainly in the conversation.
So they know exactly what they're doing, and they're doing it on purpose.
My great grandma would call him a dough-gutted dog.
@rawsalerts
🚨#BREAKING: Delta Air Lines are now mysteriously canceling hundreds of flights nationwide citing crew restrictions. The disruptions come just as Spirit Airlines has officially shut down, adding further stress and uncertainty across the U.S. travel system.
Trump is destroying American industry like no one has ever seen before.
"Crew restrictions"?
Like, it's against regulations to fly a crew on an aircraft without enough fuel to stay aloft?
Delta, oddly enough, owns their own refinery. Now, that doesn't get jet fuel to the airports; but it's an interesting business strategy.
Are the homes built of cards collapsing?
(I know everything is nuanced, but if there's one regime I'm confident can break it all - its this one.)
This dude is not nearly cynical enough...
"The supreme court trusts America not to be racist. I don’t."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/03/racism-supreme-court-voting-right-act
SCOTUS conservatives trust America to be racist af.
Anyone who thinks John Roberts and the Sleazy Six are making good faith argument based on sincerely held legal principles is stupid as fuck.
I'll go with "in denial". This all must be incredibly bewildering and demoralizing, that the highest court in the land would do something like this deliberately and knowingly.
Americans have been very carefully, and skillfully, directed to abdicate their own personal agency. To put their trust and critical judgment into systems and institutions.
So when those systems and institutions obviously fail, right in front of us, many of us are so terrified at the mere thought of having to reclaim our agency and critical judgment, we won't do it. We'll simply deny what's right in front of us, rather than have to take back up our responsibilities to and for our selves.
It's really weird but I see it happen all the time.
To be fair, judging by what people who did their own research concluded about vaccines, I'd say they would be right to doubt their own agency.
I long ago figured out what a scam "originalism" was.
We originally had slavery . . .
BONUS: Meanwhile, with the Party of Personal Responsamability...
𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘇𝗻𝗶𝘁 𝗙𝘂𝗰𝗸𝘄𝗶𝘁 𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗯𝗹𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗝𝗼𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻
𝘑𝘰𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘱𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘵 𝘈𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-196293751
https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mkv4h2ulgs2u
This is pretty cool
Why “neighborism” is having a moment
After decades of social isolation, people are realizing proximity is a resource.
by Sara Radin
Apr 30, 2026, 10:00 AM UTC
https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/486133/what-is-neighborism
I think I found Gallbladder on The Guardian, LMAO!!!!!!!!
In another attempt to invade individual privacy Utah has passed a state law that holds websites responsible for determining the identity and location of people using VPNs in Utah under the guise of protecting underage users. Not only is that not reliably doable, but that ship left the dock long ago. How many pretzel twists will be necessary to enforce such a law, short of outright banning of VPN usage in the state, will be hard to predict.
Banning VPN's would be practically impossible. Especially because businesses use them all the time and will scream blue murder if anyone attempts to restrict that.
This is one of many reasons why I feel like we'll never come back as the "United States". I fear our divisions are just too deep, and wannabe religious authoritarians too numerous.
This is an exercise in futility.
If a person with a VPN account should move to or even visit Utah would they be in violation? Who knows?
This right here. We need a reckoning and a re-working of the Constitution. Get rid of the Electoral College. And expand SCOTUS, for starters.
We could have done it if we had completed Reconstruction in a heavy-handed way. IMO, it's too late now. They have their free speech rights to trample the rest of us now.