La La Land Wins Best Picture!

You can't make this stuff up. Or maybe you can. Fake news!

And poor Warren Beatty, his karma ran over his dogma.

"Our goal in politics is the same as our goal in art, and that's to get to the truth."
Warren Beatty

Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley

Fake news!

Barry Blitt ~ The New Yorker

Buckle Up, and Don't Speed, Drink, Toke, or Text

Car accidents, and related deaths and injuries, are way up, according to the latest data from the National Safety Council, who estimates 40,000 Americans were killed in vehicle crashes in 2016. This is a 6% increase over 2015, and a 14% increase over 2014; what they called "the most dramatic two-year escalation since 1964," before seat belts became standard equipment in 1968. Further estimates said 4.6 million people were injured seriously enough to require medical attention, and total costs were $432 billion.

The National Safety Council says texting while driving is among the causes:

• Leads to 1.6 million crashes each year.
• Causes nearly 330,000 injuries each year.
• Causes one out of every four accidents.
• Is six times more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.
• Takes a driver's attention away for about five seconds, the time it takes to travel the length of a football field.

Be safe. Don't endanger others. Your text, reply or post can wait.

Chicxulub and Politics

Vineyard Haven, MA ~ September 6, 2016

During last year's U.S. presidential election campaign, I spotted a bumper sticker about a giant meteor on the rear bumper of a pickup truck. It carried an apocalyptic message: "Just end it already."

This nihilistic sarcasm about an "extinction level event" being a better option than Trump or Clinton was also on Twitter where it boasted its candidate was the only one "with a plan that's guaranteed to defeat ISIS."

Giant Meteor 2016 from jonah oskow on Vimeo.

For those interested in the real thing, the ongoing research into the 110-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico, formed 66 million years ago, is a good place to start. See The New York Times: Drilling into the Chicxulub Crater, Ground Zero of the Dinosaur Extinction.

Detlev van Ravenswaay ~ Science Source

I'm not ready to "Make America a Crater Again," but do appreciate the doomsday humor, including this cartoon from this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Will McPhail ~ The New Yorker