Month: May 2020

I’ve been expecting a package from Amazon that UPS was supposed to deliver on Wednesday. It didn’t arrive on the appointed date, and when I checked the order status, the first lie appeared:

Wednesday, May 27 – 9:14 p.m.
Delivery attempted – Signature is required or unable to find secure location

Thursday, May 28 – 9:34 p.m.
Delivery attempted

For starters, we were home both evenings. It is, after all, still in the middle of a pandemic. Also, the house has a screened-in front porch with a door that does an excellent job of obscuring packages left at the front door:

And finally, we’ve got two Ring cameras that have the front porch in its field of view, and review of the footage shows that nobody — and especially not a UPS delivery person — showed up at our front door on either night:

A screenshot from my Ring app’s display of last night’s front door footage. No UPS delivery truck or person all evening. Tap the image to see it at full size.

Hence this tweet…

My tweet to UPS last night. Tap the image to see it at full size.

…which led to this reply:

I’ve DM’d them the details they ask for, and now it’s time to wait and see.

Here’s another image I meant to post — waaaay back around mid-March, when we’d all moved to our home offices, and about three weeks before the layoff.

In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s an homage to this Clash album’s cover…

…which in turn is an homage to this Elvis Presley album’s cover:

While I’m at it, here’s a classic track from London Calling:

Thanks to Ted Brunt for the find!

In case you’re not familiar with this classic, here’s a synopsis.

I was working on a quick post about that snake oil-peddling ghoul “Dr. Oz,” but then had better things to do. Still, I thought that this image shouldn’t go to waste. Enjoy!

This is just a reminder that all these stories took place just this week:

• In case you were wondering, this is how white people who don’t have their own army call in a drone strike: When called out by a black man for letting her dog off-leash in an on-leash area of Central Park, white woman Amy Cooper called the police and claimed that she was being threatened by “an African-American man.”
• When have we heard “I can’t breathe” before? In an attempted arrest, a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck as he lay motionless and moaning. Floyd died in the ordeal.
• The Root: Florida Woman Arrested for Drowning Her Autistic Son After Telling Police Two Black Men Abducted Him. There’s local coverage here, here, here, and here, but the bit about the racism gets buried.
• The Gaily Grind: Youth Pastor Claims He Was Kidnapped By Black Men To Avoid Admitting He Hired Male Prostitute. More coverage here and here.

And only last week, did we begin to hear about the corruption behind the case of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. And the number of times I’ve been told by well-meaning wypipo that anti-Asian racism from the coronavirus supposedly doesn’t exist — despite having had that moment myself — is ridiculous.

Want more evidence? I’ll borrow this straight from Tony Pierce:

What have we learned this month about protesting in the Midwest?

If these guys weren’t white, they’d have been called by their rightful label: terrorists. They were armed, and went home without a single tear gas canister fired at them by police, despite their attempt to intimidate the assembly.

It seems to me the lesson is, if you go to a protest with guns and a confederate flag the police will allow you to march right up into the state house and treat you with respect.

These people protesting the murderous treatment of George Floyd were unarmed, but suppressed by police using riot tactics.

But if you arrive unarmed you’ll be teargassed.

Am I missing something?

It’s been a pretty racist week.

If you took early undergrad-level physics, you probably remember that many of these problems included necessary simplifications, including massless, frictionless pulleys and massless ropes that didn’t stretch. I now present to you a real-world version of one of those simplifications: The spherical cat!

For more, see the Wikipedia entry for Spherical Cow, which includes this animation demonstrating that topologically speaking, a cow is a sphere: