Laughing

During my childhood, my family lived for most of a year in the US, and, one night, sneaking out to watch TV past my bedtime, I saw, live, for the only time in my life, Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, who, by an odd coincidence, was telling a story about my favourite British comedy show. Now, thanks to this tviit, I finally have credible evidence (at Wikipedia) that the story was true (although I falsely remember it as being about an American who was watching the show on PBS).

On 24 March 1975, Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn, literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing whilst watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a black pudding-wielding Bill Oddie (master of the ancient Lancastrian martial art "Ecky-Thump") in a demonstration of the Scottish martial art of "Hoots-Toot-ochaye." After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the settee and died from heart failure. His widow later sent the Goodies a letter thanking them for making Mitchell's final moments so pleasant.

Numerous

The Wikipedia entry on John Cusack (I just watched him as the villain in Never Grow Old, one of those modern Westerns that are grimy underlit horror-tragedy from start to finish) was apparently written by an experimental AI.

Gilbert Gottfried 1955-2022

I believe I first became aware of the above-mentioned, sadly departed king in his role as Art de Salvo on Duckman. Enjoy.

Construct

The mediated 'reality' of the campaign in legacy media is exposed as a construct. The 'story' is decided on day one and the facts are arranged to fit that narrative...

Meanwhile, the party spinners, many of whom are former journos, seek to reimpose a different narrative by micro-managing the coverage. This turns into a theatrical arms race as each side seeks to out-manoeuvre the other with no regard to the voters' interests

A brief tviit-strem from Mr Denmore.

Statues Attacking People

Every one a gem. Sad and Useless via Design You Trust.

This is where it starts

Hordes of bot accounts using clever dodging tactics are causing burnout among human censors, police investigative paper finds.

Authorities may respond by raising a counter-army of automated accounts or even an AI-driven public opinion leader.

Angry Line

No explanation of the La Linea reference here. Where's the attention to detail?

Physics

Nothing has changed in the basic physics that makes space travel, beyond the minimal scale achieved in the 1960s, essentially impossible. On the contrary, advances in physics have shut off every theoretical loophole that might have permitted us to exceed the limit imposed by the speed of light. Nor has there been any reduction in the massive amount of energy needed to propel even a single person into space.

Moreover, everything we have learned about our own biology has emphasised the lesson that we evolved to live here on Earth and nowhere else. Six-month missions to the Space Station produce a loss of bone density that takes three to four years to repair itself. On average, crew members lost as much bone mass in one month in orbit as an elderly woman loses in an entire year. Life in space, were we to attempt it on a serious scale, would be, in Thomas Hobbes’ words, ‘nasty, poor, brutish and short’.

John Quiggin at Independent Australia, stating the blindingly obvious.

Planning

Speaking of obituaries, here's one for a man (Donald Rumsfeld) written by someone (Harold Jackson) who died two months before his subject did. This makes The Guardian's obituary-writing office better at planning than Rumsfeld ever was.

George Segal 1934 - 2021

Brood X

Periodical cicadas will emerge in 15 states and the District of Columbia. This means that billions of cicadas will intersect with tens of millions of people in major metropolitan centers.

This is the only thing I'm looking forward to this year, and I'm not even on the right side of the Pacific.

Yaphet Kotto 1939 - 2021

Mr Kotto was great in everything, but here he is being funny.