A total eclipse of newsletter timing // What's good: Apr. 5, 2024
Tuesday, a heist, and food grade glycine.
Hello, good evening, happy Wednesday. Is this the latest I’ve ever released a newsletter from the previous week? Yes. Do you get some extra juicy tidbits because of it? Also yes. For example, Last week and last night I got to hang out with Gregory Royal Pratt. You might recognize that name because he is the author of The City Is Up for Grabs, his new book about Lori Lightfoot’s time as the Mayor of Chicago. It is, by all accounts, an incredible book that is full of incredible stories. He’s posted many excerpts on Twitter - I think my favorite so far is this one. You should definitely grab a copy from your local bookstore.
A dutiful soldier
This is extremely based:
Marley Price’s boyfriend likes to play video games in his spare time. She prefers to find potentially illegal short-term rentals and report them to code enforcement.
Price, 27, has made a hobby out of reporting potential violators to St. Petersburg Code Compliance. She has filed at least 108 complaints since starting this work two months ago. According to the city, 88 of those properties reported by Price have received violation notices.
I think video games are a perfectly good hobby, honestly. But you have to respect the hustle, here. Ms. Price is tangibly improving society, one code violation report at a time. Want to help out your local housing market? Join the fight! Actually, very amusingly, this creates a hilarious incentive for anyone who is having a hard time finding a reasonably-priced home in the area where they’re looking.
Click through on this one - the screenshots are awesome.
In the weeds
You’re going to have to forgive me for just directly linking to a deposition transcript rather than a summary of it, but this one is awesome.
The short version is that Musk admits every material allegation of the complaint and more or less sets up a slam dunk for the plaintiff. I can understand why he (wrongly) wanted to keep it from being public!
Horrors beyond comprehension
What do you even do in this position:
Nobody believed William Woods.
They didn’t believe someone had used his Social Security number to run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. They didn’t believe the Social Security card he himself carried was real.
Above all, no one believed he really was William Woods.
Food grade glycine
Only one place to get it:
One of these manufacturers is a company called Donghua Jinlong, which is headquartered in Hebei province about 200 miles from Beijing. It sells “high quality industrial grade glycine,” a type of nutritional additive that evidently sounds silly and abstract to people who never need to think about how processed food is made. Donghua Jinglong and its glycine have become a relatively big meme on TikTok, Instagram, and X over the last few days, and some of the company’s videos are getting over 100,000 views (even though its official account only has roughly 4,400 followers).
HEIST HEIST HEIST
Listen, I know it’s not nearly as cool when it happens in real life, and yet:
In one of the largest cash heists in Los Angeles history, thieves made off with as much as $30 million in an Easter Sunday burglary at a San Fernando Valley money storage facility, an L.A. police official said.
The burglary occurred Sunday night at a facility in Sylmar where cash from businesses across the region is handled and stored, said L.A. Police Department Cmdr. Elaine Morales.
What! How!
That checks out
I know this is on the military’s radar, but really what are we doing here:
A former Navy submarine technician was arrested after law enforcement says he drove an SUV into the FBI headquarters near Atlanta on Monday afternoon. It is still unclear why the suspect, Ervin Lee Bolling, attempted to force entry into the headquarters, but research conducted by the nonpartisan public-interest nonprofit Advance Democracy and shared exclusively with WIRED has found that accounts believed to be associated with Bolling shared numerous conspiracy theories on social media platforms, including X and Facebook.
There has to be a point at which the whole right wing conspiracy thing becomes untenable, right? Like obviously you can’t police people’s views, but maybe we as a country could take a long sober look at the brain poison problem?
Chotiner, again
The man doesn’t miss:
For months, the White House has criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, with President Biden himself calling the offensive “over the top” and the bombing “indiscriminate.” But the President has continued to insure that Israel is supplied with weapons and aid. This mixture of rebuke and support has led to increasing confusion about what exactly his Administration is trying to accomplish. Just last week, the U.S. declined to block a United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. (In response, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, postponed a planned visit of an Israeli delegation to Washington.) The resolution expressed “deep concern about the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip,” and yet, within days, the Biden Administration declared that Israel has not been found to have violated international law in its use of American weapons. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that, despite the government’s public warnings about Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinian refugees have sought shelter, the U.S. has authorized the transfer of billions of dollars’ worth of more military equipment to Israel.
What’s up, brother?
The celebrations are rippling through the sports world: Athletes point their index finger in the air while saying the words “What’s up, brother?” In other cases, they clink their fists together before waving their arms in a flapping motion, often adding “Tuesday, Tuesday.”
Houston Astros, Tennessee Titans and Philadelphia Phillies players have performed the celebrations. ESPN’s Randy Scott recently welcomed viewers to an episode of “SportsCenter” with the hand gestures and catchphrase.
But the rituals didn’t originate with an athlete, a coach or anyone else in the traditional sporting world — they were coined by a popular video game streamer, TheSketchReal, who also goes by Sketch.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/SanAntonioZoo/status/1777495062357708863
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1778207047387111889
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1778207035810619683
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1778173632218300554
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1778162549013328000
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1778154255985127482
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1778128332749451683
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1778071148841869554
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1778035121519476886
Have a good week.
Addendums
Super Cute Please Like. NPR Editor’s Critical Op-Ed Ignites Debate Over Political Bias in Journalism: ‘This Essay Has It Backwards.’ Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' is a portrait of the artist getting joyously weird. The Dumbphone Boom Is Real. Mother who pushed kids from moving car, killed partner was astrology influencer disturbed by eclipse. Wife Sentences. Election Workers Are Drowning in Records Requests. AI Chatbots Could Make It Worse. How a Case Against Fox News Tore Apart a Media-Fighting Law Firm.