"A passenger was removed from a Breeze Airways flight that traveled from New York to Florida after allegedly taking snacks from the beverage cart without paying, airline officials said...
Breeze sells a variety of snacks on board, including $5 options such as gummies, potato chips and popcorn, as well as $10 premium items including ramen noodles and cheese trays.
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. . . All they do is show you’ve been to college. "(Kurt Vonnegut)"I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript" (Edward Abbey) [In reference to The Monkey Wrench Gang and preserved in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast]"With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a useful little chap." (Abraham Lincoln)"I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”" (Ursula LeGuin) [from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination]
"Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and older.The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X...“Warfighters” aged 30 and above will undergo annual tests as part of their health assessments, while those under 30 can choose to opt in, Hegseth said. Treatment, including testosterone replacement therapy, is voluntary and aimed at “restoring and optimizing” natural capabilities...Hegseth is not the first member of the Trump administration to address the so-called “crisis” of low testosterone, or “low T”. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the 72-year-old health secretary, has spoken about injecting testosterone as part of his personal “anti-ageing regimen”. In October, he warned, without evidence, that today’s American teenagers have “50% of the testosterone of a 65-year-old man”.Testosterone, and concerns about a shortage thereof, has become a political fixation on the right. Alternative media commentators such as Tucker Carlson have decried a crisis of masculinity in films such as The End of Men, while influencers promote “T-maxxing” and direct-to-consumer testosterone injections...According to research published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, young men are being aggressively targeted online by influencers and wellness companies promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man”, despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most people in this age group.
Sima* is 18, but has already given birth four times. Her youngest is a newborn, the eldest is four. Sitting with her children in their mud-brick room in Badghis province, Sima says: “After the Taliban entered the country, I had just finished the sixth grade and was supposed to start the seventh. But two months later, my father pressured me immensely to marry my cousin. After being beaten by my father several times, I was forced to accept.”...Interviews with workers at one public hospital in northern Afghanistan revealed that 42 underage girls gave birth in the first five months of this year. Six were in their second pregnancy. Five had ectopic pregnancies – a leading cause of maternal deaths – and 18 had caesarean sections. Two died, though their babies survived...They are victims of a growing trend toward child marriage, driven by Taliban policies legalising the practice and forcing girls out of school, combined with a deepening humanitarian crisis in which families are forced to sell their daughters to pay debts or buy food...Some families falsely believe the younger the mother, the healthier and smarter the child. Mothers who are still children themselves often haven’t completed their physical or psychological growth and face higher risk of severe bleeding, anaemia, miscarriage, obstructed labour and premature birth, along with a greater likelihood of a low-weight or unhealthy infant...Shabnam says families often resist caesarean section, believing they limit future pregnancies. Two young mothers in her care recently died in childbirth because their husbands refused to permit one...The other three families interviewed for this report, all in western Afghanistan, say their daughters had been used to settle debts – money paid in advance, the daughters to be handed over later. Three of the girls are still under 10, unaware of the future that has been planned for them...“When she turns eight, they will take her from us,” says Golnar. “They gave 100,000 afghani upfront, and they will give another 100,000 after they take the girl from me. We gave it directly to the creditors for the debts.” She worries about her granddaughter’s future, remembering girls sold years ago in her neighbourhood: “They have no future. Whether they leave us to burn in a fire or face anything else, we will not know.”
Until the 1960s, popular belief held that most mammals outside of primates were monochromats. In the last half-century, however, a focus on behavioral and genetic testing of mammals has accumulated extensive evidence of dichromatic color vision in a number of mammalian orders. Mammals are now usually assumed to be dichromats (possessing S- and L-cones), with monochromats viewed as the exceptions.The common vertebrate ancestor, extant during the Cambrian, was tetrachromatic, possessing 4 distinct opsins classes. Early mammalian evolution would see the loss of two of these four opsins, due to the nocturnal bottleneck, as dichromacy may improve an animal's ability to distinguish colors in dim light. Placental mammals are therefore – as a rule – dichromatic.The exceptions to this rule of dichromatic vision in placental mammals are old world monkeys and apes, which re-evolved trichromacy, and marine mammals (both pinnipeds and cetaceans) which are cone monochromats. New World Monkeys are a partial exception: in most species, males are dichromats, and about 60% of females are trichromats, but the owl monkeys are cone monochromats, and both sexes of howler monkeys are trichromats.Trichromacy has been retained or re-evolved in marsupials, where trichromatic vision is widespread. Recent genetic and behavioral evidence suggests the South American marsupial Didelphis albiventris is dichromatic, with only two classes of cone opsins having been found within the genus Didelphis.
"Shimmering on Deb Marino's finger are diamonds set in an eye-catching gold ring. "Of course it's a middle finger ring, because, why not?" the Florida-based blogger says on her Tiktok feed.Getting rid of her engagement ring would have suggested a regret the 34-year-old doesn't feel - after all, her marriage brought her daughter. Even just not wearing it would have felt like a waste. "I didn't want it locked away in a box," she says. "Diamonds are precious."..Deb is part of a rising trend promoted by jewellers around the world of women marking a new chapter in their life with a new statement piece: the divorce ring.Deb had the diamond from her engagement ring set at one end of an open circle and added a new sapphire to represent her daughter to the other end. It cost $3,000 (£2,245). It's a sizeable sum to part with when divorces can be expensive. Ring resale values tend to be only around 30% of the original price so for many the trend of giving their old jewellery a new life feels a better investment."
Yana Hrynko, senior researcher of The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, shows bird’s nests made partially with fragments of fiber-optic lines that were found by a Ukrainian serviceman on the front line and then passed to the museum, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 23, 2026. Both Ukrainian and Russian troops use drones controlled via long lines of optic fiber to bypass electronic warfare jamming, leaving miles of ultra-thin lines tangled in trees and scattered across the land in Ukraine’s frontline regions. (Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters)
The common name originally may have been spelled "chitmunk", from the native Odawa (Ottawa) word jidmoonh, meaning "red squirrel" (cf. Ojibwe ajidamoo). The earliest form cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is "chipmonk", from 1842. Other early forms include "chipmuck" and "chipminck", and in the 1830s they were also referred to as "chip squirrels", probably in reference to the sound they make. In the mid-19th century, John James Audubon and his sons included a lithograph of the chipmunk in their Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, calling it the "chipping squirrel [or] hackee". Chipmunks have also been referred to as ground squirrels, (although the name "ground squirrel" may refer to other squirrels, such as those of the genus Spermophilus).Eastern chipmunks, the largest of the chipmunks, mate in early spring and again in early summer, producing litters of four or five young twice each year... Chipmunks construct extensive burrows which can be more than 3.5 m (11 ft) in length with several well-concealed entrances. The burrows are complex and include plugged entryways, nseparate compartments for nesting, multiple food chambers, side pockets and escape routes. The sleeping quarters are kept clear of shells, and feces are stored in refuse tunnels.
"President Donald Trump has posted what appears to be a doctored image of a large, golden eagle attached to the White House's Truman Balcony on social media—the latest in a series of altered or AI-generated images the president has shared in recent months...According to CNN, the image has details in its metadata that indicate it was created with Google AI.The outlet also noted that the image did not appear to be real because of differences between the railings in the picture and the real-life Truman Balcony.The shield in the image also has 11 stars, whereas the traditional version has 13 to reflect the 13 states at the time the United States was founded."
The original digital artist may have used 11 stars to represent the 11 states in the Confederacy.
I've seen a lot of brilliantly made craft cocktails dedicated to the Reflecting Pool this past weekend, and I thought, something was missing. Something wasn't right.They didn't quite capture the level of class and sophistication that our Reflecting Pool currently has, so here's my version.To start, line your glass with a blue fruit roll up. Then you're going to need:2 oz rum4 oz juice that is kinda yellow (pineapple, mango, orange, lemonade, whatever you like)1 oz blue curacao (you can adjust for color)Garnish with lime zestThe yellow and blue liquids make a lovely shade of algae and the rum eventually melts the blue fruit roll up, which is, IMHO, the best part.
"They appear after midnight, slowly crossing Myanmar’s skies. The motorised paragliders are improvised aircraft, suspending small metal frames from brightly coloured sails. They drift over a patchwork of villages, farmland, forests and winding rivers.Each “paramotor” has two or three soldiers strapped in – one piloting, the others holding the bombs. Their craft are powered through the sky by small, rattling engine propellers, heading towards the lowland villages. Finally, switching their engines off to glide low and near silently through the dark, the men throw their explosives.The destruction is immediate and devastating. Attacks can last several minutes, with bombs weighing up to 16kg (35lb) each dropped in quick succession. Homes are torn apart, schools and religious buildings destroyed – and civilians killed or injured as they sleep. The villages descend into panic and confusion, with families fleeing into the darkness and emergency workers digging through debris for the wounded.“People try to run to the bomb shelters. But there is usually not enough time,” says Lwan Thu, an activist in the Sagaing region, which has been heavily bombed by the paramotors. “There are scores of dead and injured after the strikes.”...“We’re facing constant strikes by these new aircraft,” says Lwan Thu. “They are using them to attack everything – civilians, hospitals, religious ceremonies, residential homes.”...Unlike military jets, these lightweight aircraft require little infrastructure, use small amounts of fuel, are cheap to buy and are hard to track, evading detection from early-warning systems. Soldiers can be trained to operate them in a matter of days, rather than the years needed to fly conventional aircraft.Buying paragliders, which are widely available commercially, also allows the junta to evade international sanctions targeting the military’s access to arms...One attack on a Buddhist festival at a primary school in October killed at least 24 people, including three children, and wounded 61. A witness told Fortify Rights, a human rights organisation: “[The paramotors] had no lights … I didn’t hear any engine sounds at all.“We later found out that the paramotors turned off their engines when they approached the school compound and glided over with their parachutes.”One woman told Agence France-Presse in the aftermath: “Children were completely torn apart.” The next day, she said, they were still “collecting body parts”.
Almost the thing or quality expressed by the root, as peneplain (almost a plain), peninsula (almost an island), penultimate (almost the last), penumbra (almost in shadow).
"... in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport. "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said. The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby...Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang. "So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'." Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."..It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer". "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."
Beatrix Potter, despite the efforts of Graham Greene and many others, is still tarred with a certain National Trust tweeness, even though her tales of murder and separation are among the darkest if funniest books ever written. Those books would be nothing without their illustrations, and in her masterpiece, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, she should have firmly established herself in a direct line of gothic illustrators stretching from Fuseli and Blake to Mervyn Peake. This picture, of Tom Kitten being turned into a roly-poly pudding, is among the funniest yet also most terrifying illustrations of the 20th century.[Martin Rowson]Text and image from a gallery of writers' favourite classic book illustrations posted at The Guardian. I was unaware of this supposed "dark side," but found two relevant commentaries, the first in a Guardian column in 2006:
The Tale of Tom Kitten does not teach adventurous disobedience; rather it tells us that disobedience is punished with violence. Or this, at least, is what I thought when I flung the book across the room in disgust (only, intrigued, to pick it up again soon after).
Tom Kitten and his siblings are smacked and sent to bed for their notional disgrace. Worse yet, when they continue romping in the bedroom, they disturb what Potter calls the "dignity and repose of the tea party". Can the reader who finishes the book rest easy that subversive Tom has triumphed? No: the fact is Tabitha Twitchit thrashes her children for losing their clothes. Imagine what grisly fate will befall them when she stomps upstairs from her ruined tea party! To her credit, Potter leaves the sadism of this neurotic to the imagination.
So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase (or rather nut-kin) and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined. As an adult reader, I must say, I'm beginning to like her.And this at Wig and Pen:
Use discretion when reading Beatrix Potter to your children. In almost every Potter tale, her main characters—everyone from Peter Rabbit to Jemima Puddle Duck—flirt with mortal danger...I have no personal insights to offer, not having read any of the canon. Knowledgeable readers should feel free to offer comments.
The Silence of the Lambs has nothing on Potter’s description of the house and yard [in The Tale of Mr. Tod]:
The house was something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pigsty. There was a strong door, which was shut and locked. [In the yard] there were many unpleasant things lying about that had much better have been buried: rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.Peeking through a window, Benjamin and Peter discovered that Tommy Brock had retired for the night after stashing the brood—still alive and kicking--in an oven for safekeeping and for his next meal.
The cloche hat is a fitted, bell-shaped hat that was popular during the 1920s. (Cloche is the French word for bell.) Caroline Reboux is the creator of the cloche hat.Photo via the wonderfully-named My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning. Too bad it has now gone inactive (but still browseable).
Cloche hats were usually made of felt so that they conformed to the head. The hat was typically designed to be worn low on the forehead, with the wearer's eyes only slightly below the brim. By 1928-1929, it became fashionable to turn the brims on cloche hats upwards. This style remained prevalent throughout the early 1930s until the cloche hat became obsolete around 1933-1934.
Often, different styles of ribbons affixed to the hats indicated different messages about the wearer. Several popular messages included: An arrow-like ribbon which indicated a girl was single but had already given her heart to someone, a firm knot which signaled marriage or a flamboyant bow which indicated the wearer was single and interested in mingling...
Some enterprising horse bettors are selling their tickets on eBay, where such tickets are selling for $20 to $30. Other sellers bought up many of the cheapest Belmont Stakes gambling tickets. One seller is selling a lot of 500 such tickets. Another is selling 150 tickets in a lot.Tickets for the Triple Crown wins of Secretariat (1973) and Seattle Slew (1977) sold for big money on the collectors market.Rovell said that the tickets are simply worth more to collectors than the cash-in price. He said, “Whether you want to keep it for your memory or resell it, it’s worth ten times more than if you cash it in. So people are making good bets.”
Reposted again in 2026 because I found it while looking for other stuff. I don't follow or even enjoy watching horse racing, although I did see some dressage events during my years in Kentucky, but this race is so iconic that it's worth preserving here in the blog.
"By Friday, however, the macro narratives were entirely overshadowed by the excitement of the SpaceX IPO. It’s an IPO that will go down in history for a remarkable combination of reasons—from its sheer scale ($75 billion, almost three times the previous largest IPO) and the $1.8 trillion valuation (which places it immediately, on day one, as the seventh-most-valuable US company), to challenging the traditional playbook on investor allocation, price discovery, and fast-tracked index inclusion. It has also triggered an unprecedented wave of wealth creation, from Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status to some 4,400 millionaires minted among the firm’s current and former employees. All this for a company that generates no profits, is highly valued, and carries enormous key-person risk."
This hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph was the favourite of the jury in the section "Best Scientific Image". The image shows the surface of a mosquito egg (from Culex pipiens), which generates a water repellent network by connecting microscopically small structures to trap a thin layer of air. The vitally important structures avoid immersion and enable the egg to float and aggregate with neighbouring eggs.The website of photographer Martin Oeggerli. Reposted from 2013 because I had my first encounter with mosquitoes this week in the woods behind our house.
"A space in Mankato that promotes reflection and healing for families who have lost a child has been vandalized, according to the nonprofit in charge of the memorial.The nonprofit behind the One Bright Star memorial at Victory Drive and E. Main Street said on June 5 that someone in recent days broke off a large landscape rock, damaged a plaque and threw both of them into the memorial’s pond...One Bright Star was founded in 1998 by four mothers who each experienced the death of a child, and the memorial was completed in 2003. It includes a shallow pond centered by a large star sculpture and a wall with paver bricks in remembrance of children who have died."
"The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole... cash from a bright pink lockbox...Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken...Ms. Byrne said her nephew, David, 12, and niece, Juliette, 11, “were pretty shaken up” but otherwise unharmed. She said she believed the robbers were wearing masks and were around middle-school age."
"Haptic researchers discovered a difference of two orders of magnitude in the elasticity of the thousand whiskers of an Asian elephant's trunk as they progress from the base to the tip."
Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. These distinct functions arise from variations in the underlying properties and microscale arrangement of this natural polymer. One well-studied example is mammalian whiskers, elongated keratin rods attached to tactile skin structures that extend the animal’s sensory volume. Here, we investigate the non-actuated whiskers that cover Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) trunks and find they are geometrically and mechanically tailored to facilitate tactile perception by encoding contact location in vibrotactile signal amplitude and frequency. Elephant whiskers emerge from armored trunk skin and shift from a thick, circular, porous, stiff root to a thin, ovular, dense, soft point. This smooth transition enables interaction with widely varying substrates, reduces wear, and increases the vibrotactile signal information generated during contact. The functionally graded geometry, porosity, and stiffness of elephant whiskers tune the neuromechanics of trunk touch, facilitating highly dexterous manipulation.
Biological functionally graded material composites like elephant whiskers can inspire engineered devices that use functional gradients to achieve specific capabilities ranging from fatigue reduction to signal power increases. One of the first animal stiffness gradients discovered was the beak of the Humboldt squid, but mimicry of this stiffness gradient in soft materials posed a considerable manufacturing challenge at the time of this discovery. Recent advances in multi-material 3D printing enable unprecedented control over the deposition of materials with widely varying mechanical properties; cutting-edge inkjet systems create monolithic parts from materials with elastic moduli that span three orders of magnitude. Recent characterization of composites built from these materials enables inverse design, whereby one achieves desired system properties such as stiffness, toughness, and frequency response by prescribing both geometry and constituent materials at the microscale. Fields ranging from material science and neuroscience to haptics and bio-inspired robotics rely on signal processing through material interfaces, and functional gradients have significant potential to enable programmable signal shifts tuned to specific use cases.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
To be fair, the quote is based on a quote from Shakespeare:Prospero:...Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 156–158Also "The stuff that dreams are made of" did not appear in Dashiell Hammett novel. Humphrey Bogart reportedly suggested the line to John Huston, and they went with it. Bogart was a stage actor on Broadway before turning to film, so I presumably he was familiar with The Tempest.
