Ninety-three, then?

Hey, no need to make a new banner every year. This banner could last for a long, long time.

But maybe not forever.

What would we do if an asteroid slammed Earth on July 12, 2038?

[Don't panic. It's just a hypothetical. But…]

This is a good idea…

Social Security to drop obsolete jobs used to deny disability benefits

For decades, Social Security has used obsolete jobs like pneumatic tube operator and nut sorter to deny disabled claimants.

…and long overdue but let us pause for a moment to regret the loss of pneumatic tubes to our increasingly automated world. They were magnificent devices.

I remember them from big department stores where one's payment (in cash!) would be placed in a carrier capsule and thence in a tube behind the counter to disappear with a lot pop and then, after a short wait, whoosh back containing the correct change. 

But that's not all they did. Paris had a system of pneumatic tubes that distributed mail citywide until it was finally shut down in 1984. And as this story in Smithsonian describes, New York had a pneumatic mail system until 1953,

“The carriers were not only a complete success for the transportation of first-class matter, such as letters, but equally satisfactory for the carriage of packages of every description, including a full suit of clothes, a package of books, a live cat in a cotton sack and [a] dozen … eggs, etc.,” wrote Second Assistant Postmaster General W.S. Shallenberger in a report.

Pneumatic tubes also delivered mail in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis.

When things just don't work out

US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris, undercutting environmental plan

According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europehas air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that. The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million.

Germany, Australia, Italy, Canada and Britain will bring air conditioners as well.

U.S. bans on gasoline-powered leaf blowers grow, as does blowback from landscaping industry

“We’re not California, we’re not Florida. We have leaves. The average house in New Jersey, you take away 30 to 50 cubic feet of leaves each fall. That’s a lot of leaves.”

Didn't have zombie cicadas on your bingo card?

Collecting sex-crazed zombie cicadas on speed: Scientists track a bug-controlling super-sized fungus

West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kasson, his 9-year-old son Oliver, and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus, called Massospora cicadina. It is the only one on Earth that makes amphetamine — the drug called speed — in a critter when it takes over. And yes, the fungus takes control over the cicada, makes them hypersexual, looking to spread the parasite as a sexually transmitted disease.

“They’re zombies, completely at the mercy of the fungus,” said University of Connecticut cicada researcher John Cooley.

And all this time you were worried about bird flu. 

The pitch

Biden settles on a message against Trump: He’s even worse than before

“The number one priority is to make sure that voters understand that Trump was a bad president and he will be even worse if he has a second term,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Biden who helped build the case against Mitt Romney in 2012. “The hinge is Trump’s response to losing the 2020 election — ‘snapping,’ as President Biden says — and becoming unhinged.”

And we'll be hearing it a lot, says the Washington Post (link above). Beginning, presumably, with the presidential debate scheduled for Thursday this week.

Presidential debates have never been debates, of course. They're more like quiz shows gone berserk. And this one will be conducted with several new and untested features, the most amusing of which is neither of the participants will have been nominated to run for office. Any office at all. 

The Republican convention doesn't happen until next month and the Democrats convene in August. Maybe Thursday's confrontation was scheduled in the hope everyone will forget it happened before it comes time to vote.

Which, given the American attention span is now measured in internet time, seems likely.

"Trump is worse," however, will fit nicely on a bumper sticker. So there's that.