News Digest

In-Tents Non-Sense

Well, music isn’t filling the air at this school. When in-person learning recently resumed in parts of Washington state, Wenatchee High School made sure its band practice wouldn’t go viral. As in covid-19. Not only are band musicians spaced six feet apart, but each student is also ensconced in a green pop-up tent, the kind used for camping toilets.

Talk about sour notes. The Post Millennial reports that most of the student musicians have a bit of elbow room in the tents, but nobody pulled strings for Juan Cruz, who plays the sousaphone. He and his tuba are jammed in with little air to spare — no doubt taking the oomph out of his oompah.

Side effects of practicing in personal isolation tents may include: reduced oxygen levels, muscle cramps, claustrophobia, and paranoia. Which are also, coincidentally, symptoms of leftism. Lance Noell, principal of nearby Eastmont High in East Wenatchee, said of the students, “The stories I hear from them are dark. It’s disturbing and scary.” But enough about Dr. Fauci. It’s past time for some upbeat and up-tempo news for these kids. Let the musicians get out and play.

Scots on the Rocks

Not-so-Great Scott. According to Breitbart, the Hunterian Museum, Scotland’s oldest, has now hired a “Curator of Discomfort,” in order to confront that country’s supposed white supremacy. The mission: to ensure that the Scottish population (96 percent white) feels guilty, all the time.

When professional leftist Zandra Yeaman saw the Glasgow job advertised, she knew she’d be the perfect Curator of Discomfort. “For several years now I have been [pressuring museums] to reshape curatorial thinking as well agitating for Scotland’s role in empire, colonialism, and slavery to be represented,” she told Museums Galleries Scotland. When hired, she decided what to attack first: the museum itself. “I immediately thought the ‘discomfort’ should be felt inside the institution.” Clearly, they’re getting what they paid for.

Breitbart reports that other British museums have succumbed to cancel culture in recent years, removing exhibits. London’s Natural History Museum is currently purging “offensive” pieces, including some stuffed birds collected by Charles Darwin. Ms. Yeaman should be warned: if the Father of Evolution can be canceled, no one is safe from the woke mob, including herself.

WOKE “FUN”

Occupy Doll Street

Department stores in California need heavier regulation, according to state Assemblyman Evan Low. How have the stores offended this politician, you ask? Their eeevil toy and kids clothing departments have girl sections and boy sections. Gasp! The Daily Wire reports that Low’s new bill would require stores’ children’s clothing and toy sections to be “gender neutral.” If the bill passes, stores will have to rearrange all displays to avoid any gender labeling.

Low says he was inspired by one of his staffers, who said her daughter wanted something in the boys section but believed it was only for boys. Low’s bill claims: “Keeping similar items that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys separated makes it more difficult for the consumer to compare the products and incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate.”

Either girls or boys? Low has swerved into the truth. Yes, there are only two genders!

Boardwalk Bummer

Book burning? That’s so last century. If you believe The Atlantic magazine, today’s woke social justice warrior should be burning board games. Prime kindling: Monopoly. In “The Prices on Your Monopoly Board Hold a Dark Secret: The Property Values of the Popular Game Reflect a Legacy of Racism and Inequality,” Mary Pilon details how the high-priced streets in the game were named after upper-crust locales in segregated Atlantic City, NJ. The low-priced game properties reflect real low-rent neighborhoods, inhabited mainly by blacks, she says. Pilon claims the original game was designed in 1904 as a “teaching tool … to illustrate the evils of economic inequalities and the consequences of capitalism unhinged.” So we’ve been playing it wrong all these years.

Pilon is the author of the 2015 book The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game. For years, she has turned her Monopoly angst into a bitter cottage industry. A monopoly, even.

Do not pass go, Ms. Pilon. Do not collect two hundred dollars. You lose.

Leaf a Message

You’ve been told all your life to eat your greens, but wait. Turns out those veggies may have something to tell you. According to the UK news site unilad, “Scientists Have Taught Spinach Plants to Send Emails.” Because we sorely needed a vegetable-human communication platform, apparently.

To facilitate spinach-sending emails, scientists use “plant nanobionics,” which combine botany with nanotechnology. Vegetation can thus relay information about groundwater to a smartphone or computer. Says lead scientist Michael Strano, “Plants are very good analytical chemists. They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.” And thanks to science, they can email us all about it.

As this study germinated, researchers anticipated using spinach to detect explosives. But now they say the plants could “warn us about climate change and environmental issues.” (Clearly, someone is pining for perennial research grants.) Do we want environmentalist-wacko spam from the garden? No, we do not.

FULL OF HOLES

Stupendous Holes

There just wasn’t a word big enough. According to ScienceAlert, scientists have categorized big cosmic black holes as “supermassive” or “ultramassive,” measuring between 10 and 100 billion times the size of our sun. But now, astronomer Bernard Carr at Queen Mary University London has posited that there could be, hypothetically, black holes even larger than that: measuring one quintillion (that’s 18 zeroes) suns. So what to call them? Per Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they’re “slabs” — Stupendously LArge Black holeS.

Dr. Carr admits there isn’t any evidence for the existence of slabs, but that doesn’t stop science. He says, “It’s conceivable that they could exist and they might also reside outside galaxies in intergalactic space.” Carr and his collaborators say the point of their research is to consider how stupendously large black holes might affect the space around them. Such as this scenario: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles — wimps — could accumulate around a slab “in such concentrations that they would collide with and annihilate each other.” Call it psi: problem solves itself.

Alien Holes

Remember when cnn’s Don Lemon asked whether missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 could have been swallowed by black hole? Well, that kind of speculation has spread to astrophysics. Scientists Luca Comisso of Columbia University and Felipe Asenjo of Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile postulate that “Aliens Could Be Sucking Energy from Black Holes,” as reported at livescience.com.

Earthbound scientists think harvesting energy out of a rotating black hole isn’t farfetched. So if it’s possible, they figure, ET might be doing it. Comisso proposes that adding a small piece of matter with negative energy would do the trick. “Aliens could effectively tap the black hole’s energy by capturing the part of the particle that has escaped the black hole’s intense gravity.” And if extraterrestrials are harvesting energy from spinning black holes, he says, alien technology would leave traces for us to find.

The closest black hole is 1,000 light-years away. Send Don Lemon to investigate.

Amazonazi

Among the latest cancel-culture cancelations, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, Pepe Le Pew, Dumbo, and so on, came the story: the new Amazon logo is Hitler. The bbc had the lowdown on Amazon’s shopping-app logo, launched in January. The design evoked an Amazon box with a blue strip of ripped tape hovering above the Amazon “smile” arrow. It’s a mustache, declared social media.

“Looks like a happy little cardboard Adolf Hitler to me,” said one Amazon customer. “When they ask where Amazon’s gone, I’ll tell them to look for the cardboard Hitler,” tweeted another. Amazon defended itself: “We designed the new icon to spark anticipation, excitement, and joy when customers start their shopping journey on their phone, just as they do when they see our boxes on their doorstep.” Still, the minute shoppers started making Third Reich comments, Amazon modified the logo to depict a folded piece of tape. No more blue mustache.

But by purging books the left doesn’t approve of, and refusing to host conservative platforms on its servers, Amazon could be said to be test-marketing totalitarianism. Maybe the fascist dictator logo was a Freudian slip.