Listed under "Unusual Sports"…

 …from our very own Work Avoidance Hall of Fame.

Beer Mile

We never were very good with those I words

US starts retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran-linked targets

We're mad at Iran so we bomb Iraq. Oops, did it again. And Syria, of course. We bomb Syria a lot. They just have it coming.

[OK, shouldn't be flip about such a serious subject. Maybe the Syrians don't have it coming. Maybe they have it going.]

Speaking of going, we are…

Baghdad and Washington, meanwhile, have agreed to set up a committee to start talks on the future of the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq, with the aim of setting a timetable for a phased withdrawal of troops and the end of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State.

…going. But not right now. Don't want to rush into these things. It's not Afghanistan.

Things are getting so bad I have to look up "Middle East" in Wikipedia just to remember what's going on there. 

[White House national security spokesman John] Kirby said the Iraqi government was notified about Friday's strikes ahead of time.

 At least somebody knew.

Maybe we're not mad at Iraq, really. Maybe we're just…mad.

I'll take any percent I can get

Punxsutawney Phil says spring is near

The cold weather and snowfall may soon come to an end, at least according to the region’s fluffiest weather predictor.…

Still, don’t get out the bathing suits just yet — Phil has only been accurate about 40% of the time over the past 100 years.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Miracle cures: Online conspiracy theories are creating a new age of unproven medical treatments

Part motel, part new-age clinic, the facility offers nightly rentals in rooms that come equipped with “BioHealers” –- canisters that the company claims exude “life force energy,” or biophotons. Testimonials from the company’s patients speak to the devices’ power to treat cancer, dementia, chronic pain and a long list of other ailments.

Deja vu.

Almost exactly a century ago (some kind of cosmic pattern?) one Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (yes, that Kellogg) established a health care enterprise in Battle Creek, Michigan — a "national holistic wellness destination" — attracting celebrities from around the world (and giving us, in the end, corn flakes).

As described by the History Channel…

[Kellogg] seemed willing to try anything to cure his patients’ ills, experimenting with countless treatments and inventing dozens of his own. Some of his ideas, particularly on nutrition and exercise, have proved remarkably prescient; others now seem goofy or even barbaric. Here are some of the latter. (Warning: This is going to get pretty gross.)

The Road to Wellville, a 1993 novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, mentioned in the History Channel article, is a hilarious (and also gross) take on the whole affair, and worth a read. (It was also made into a movie currently showing on freevee.)

A Presidential election year…

…and the New York Times' quadrennial whingeing about third-party candidates has begun.

From Gail Collins, "Running for President Is Not a Hobby," 1/31/24:

The third-party threat is always worrisome when it comes to messing things up, especially when elections are close. We’re still haunted by the saga of 2000, when Al Gore was pitted against George W. Bush. Ralph Nader made one of those principled third-party runs. Remember? Everything came down to Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes while Nader got nearly 100,000 — most of which would undoubtedly have gone to Gore otherwise.

One suspects, grumpily, if Tucker Carlson should run as a third party candidate this year the Times would change it's tune.  But never mind. Either way it wasn't, isn't, and won't be true.

According to USAFacts.org, here, in the last Presidential election, in 2020, only 66.8% of Americans eligible by age to vote did. Thirty-two percent did not. Vote. At all.

And the turnout in 2020 was the highest in a Presidential election since 1992. And that was the year Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush and a strong third party candidate, Ross Perot.

Which is to say there are plenty of people who could vote for a third party candidate without taking a single vote from either of the uninspiring choices already on the board. 

And that would at least be a start.

Here's looking at you

Facebook’s Extensive Surveillance Network

This isn’t data about your use of Facebook. This data about your interactions with other companies, all of which is correlated and analyzed by Facebook.

 

But does the rodent count the extra day?

Year’s shortest month touts the ‘snow’ moon and winter’s brightest stars

Almost everyone* knows that Feb. 2 is Groundhog Day, in which, at various locations around the world, people gather to see if a large indigenous rodent sees its shadow at sunrise. This quaint ritual then indicates whether there will be an early spring. This tradition started among German-speaking people in northern Europe, who developed folklore about badgers emerging from their dens to forage. If the badger saw its shadow, it portended an extended winter. This tradition came to North America with the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, who replaced the badger with the common woodchuck, or groundhog.

*Includes you, right? 

"Ramaswamy wildly speculates" is the signature of this forlorn year (so far)

Vivek Ramaswamy wildly speculates Super Bowl will be rigged for Chiefs to set the stage for Taylor Swift’s Biden endorsement

"Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months," he confidently asserts.

We are reliably informed, meanwhile, by the Twitteratti (now Xeratti) that Swift's current love interest, Travis Kelce (not Biden), is a Pfizer shill for having appeared in a TV commercial for vaccines. He famously took two shots (jabs, in Twitspeak) at once, which is why footballs keep sticking to his hands (just some wild speculation over here, too).

More will be revealed as the year (it's a Leap Year, too, so an extra day) plods inexorably on.

Asked on Twitter, answered right here

 

What's Life?

A magazine.

What does it cost?

Five cents.

Ain't got five cents.

That's tough.

What's tough?

Life.

[You hadda be there.]