Like clockwork the weekend arrives and it is up to IST to provide the news that was too boring to be included in the evening news.
First the Deep South, my region, is in the middle of a extreme heat wave….daily highs are 100+ and nights 90 and no measurable rain in 3 weeks….anything planned for outside is on hold.
Now onto the news….
One of the best stories was the two nerds that want a cage fight…..
Just when you thought celebrity fights couldn’t get any dumber, we could be approaching the stupidest fight in the history of humanity: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg in a cage.
Over the weekend Musk was engaging in his favorite hobby, tweeting at randos, when he floated the idea of fighting Zuckerberg in a cage.
The idea surfaced as part of a conversation about Meta releasing its own version of Twitter called “Threads.” Obviously this annoyed Musk, especially as his $44B investment in a “free speech town square” has become full of Nazis and is worth a fraction of what he paid for it.
Musk, who’s used to making promises and never delivering on them, probably thought this would get to sit on his timeline and garner some likes without Zuck ever noticing. One problem: Zuck has been training to fight, and he’s DYING to get public revenge.
https://www.sbnation.com/2023/6/22/23769701/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-andrew-tate-cage-fight-mma
I would watch it! A couple of billionaires having a slap fight….put it on pay-per-view.
Vegans not welcome!
If you don’t want to eat meat or other animal products, celebrity chef John Mountain doesn’t want to feed you. The British chef, who owns the Fyre restaurant in Perth, Australia, announced Sunday that he had banned all vegans from the establishment following a barrage of negative reviews. On Wednesday, he told PerthNow that the move had been great for business. “The bookings have gone ridiculous; they have gone through the roof,” he said. “The support from people is overwhelming.” Mountain claimed that “99% of chefs” hate vegans “because they’re a pain in the ass, you can never please them. We’ve always hated vegans, all chefs have.”
Mountain said the ban is the result of a dispute with a vegan customer who gave the restaurant a negative review after she was served a $21 plate of vegetables instead of the gnocchi she had been promised, 7News reports. He said he accepted the customer’s criticism but not the personal attacks that followed. He said he became worried about the future of his business after numerous vegans who had never been to the restaurant left negative reviews. But the campaign against him turned out to be “the best marketing that’s ever happened to me,” he said. Vegan activists called the ban discrimination.
Mountain said that his restaurant isn’t a vegan one and that vegans should go elsewhere. “I once wrote and sold a book called Pig which had pork recipes. People know what they’re getting from me,” he said, per 7News. “I understand where vegans are coming from but my job is to make food taste as good as I can and I can’t always cater to everybody’s dietary requirements.” But the chef hasn’t always been stridently anti-vegan: He has created a vegan version of fish and chips and he once toyed with the idea of opening a vegan companion restaurant to Fyre, which would have been named Urth.
I admit it….I have no time for vegans….I can understand vegetarians but not those vegan Nazis….
I live in the Deep South and a yearly event is the Summer mosquito….in Mississippi’s case it is our state bird (that is a joke)….but climate is playing a part on the rise of mosquitoes.
A new report by Climate Central has alarming news for anyone who has ever found themselves on the receiving end of a flurry of mosquito bites: Warming temps are giving the pests more time throughout the year to find new sources of blood to feed on. As Georgia Public Broadcasting notes, Climate Central found in a survey of 242 US regions between 1979 and 2022 that most areas (173) have seen increased “mosquito days,” sometimes more than two weeks’ worth. The Southeast has it the worst, now coping with mosquitos for 218 days, or 60% of the year, but there were notable jumps in the Northeast and the Ohio Valley as well.
Malaria has been almost eliminated in the South…that is until now….
The United States has seen five cases of malaria spread by mosquitos in the last two months—the first time there’s been local spread in 20 years, the AP reports. There were four cases detected in Florida and one in Texas, according to a health alert issued Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Malaria is caused by a parasite that spreads through mosquito bites. Infected people can suffer fever, chills and flu-like illness. If it goes untreated, infected people can develop severe complications and die. The largest death toll in recent years has been seen in children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Health officials are warning doctors, especially those in southern states where the weather is more friendly to the tropical mosquito that spreads malaria, to be aware of the possibility of infection. They also should think about how to access the IV drug that is the first-line treatment for severe malaria in the United States, the CDC said. The agency said that the people who were diagnosed received treatment and “are improving.” About 2,000 US cases of malaria are diagnosed each year—the vast majority in travelers coming from countries where malaria commonly spreads. Since 1992, there’ve been 11 outbreaks involving malaria from mosquitoes in the US. The last one occurred in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where eight cases were reported
The climate just keeps giving us bad news.
Every health crisis has sent the people into an orgy of TP buying….whether it is needed or not……now the UK seems to be having a TP problem as well….
Hoarding during the Covid-19 pandemic underlined just how important loo roll is to the British public. But working from home had another unexpected effect: less waste paper from offices, which means less recycled material to make toilet roll.
New research by Ethical Consumermagazine shows that the three main toilet brands have cut the amount of recycled paper in their tissues. It said the use of virgin wood pulp was fuelling deforestation, although paper-industry advocates dispute this.
The consumer organisation recommended that people avoid buying Andrex, Velvet, Cushelle, Regina and Nicky because more material used to make them is taken from felled trees.
It found that Kimberly-Clark, which makes Andrex, cut the amount of recycled fibre it uses for tissue and personalcare products to 19.3% in 2021, down from 29.7% in 2011
There you go….this Saturday’s list of forgotten news bits.
Enjoy your weekend.
Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 