“Marry one of our Californian incels.”
The Texas school district of Lamar banned Virginia’s state flag from classrooms due to its illustration of the Roman goddess Virtus’s exposed breast.
A weekly dispatch taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.
On Holy Saturday, Russia’s president announced that its forces invading Ukraine would respect a temporary Easter ceasefire; and on Easter Sunday, Ukraine’s president accused him of violating that ceasefire by launching at least 67 separate assaults on Ukrainian troops.1 2 In the United States, three of the world’s six largest companies sponsored the White House Easter Egg Roll; and it was reported that the record-high average egg price of $6.23 per dozen had caused many Americans to celebrate Easter by painting potatoes and rocks.3 4 The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Americans it was their “patriotic duty” to save on medical costs by not getting sick, the health and human services secretary said children diagnosed with autism cannot write poems, the Food and Drug Administration was reported to have declined to publicize an outbreak last year of lettuce-borne E. coli in 15 states, and bottles of holy water collected by tourists in Ethiopia were found to contain cholera.5 6 7 8 9 10 The pope skipped a meeting with the U.S. vice president and in his place sent a cardinal to speak about the importance of compassion; the following day the pope met the vice president at the Vatican’s hotel and gave him three chocolate eggs; and the next morning the pope died.11 12 13 The U.S. vice president said the countries of Europe should have done more in 2003 to “stand up” to the Bush Administration to oppose the American invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. Naval Academy canceled a philosopher’s lecture about wisdom after he refused to refrain from discussing the 381 books the school banned from their library.14 15
In Iowa, a state senator proposed requiring all high school students to pass an equivalent of the U.S. citizenship test to graduate; and in Mississippi, the Commission on School Accreditation voted to remove a requirement that graduating students pass a United States history test.16 17 The artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced that it would no longer test whether its AI models could be used to manipulate people, and the CEO of OpenAI said that users saying “please” and “thank you” to chatbots costs the company “tens of millions” of dollars in electricity costs for computer processing.18 19 A man driving in Indonesia followed Google Maps directions off an unfinished bridge; a man in Newcastle, England, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving after crashing his BMW during a police high speed chase while driving a woman home after their first date; and a bride in Florida was stopped for driving 105 mph in a 45 mph zone on the way to her own wedding.20 21 22 A California gubernatorial candidate proposed deporting all undocumented men and allowing undocumented women to remain in the country on the condition that they “marry one of our Californian incels,” and it was reported that entrepreneurs in Los Angeles raised more than $1 million to race human sperm along a 20-centimeter-long course.23 24 A German man was fined 4,500 euros for hugging the country’s chancellor in Frankfurt Airport, a former British prime minister announced that she would start an “uncensored” social media network to “talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about,” and two women in Florida were arrested for selling human remains on Facebook.25 26 27
Twenty humanoid robots were defeated by 12,000 human runners in a Beijing half marathon; video surfaced of the Lancaster, California, mayor telling the city council he wanted to end homelessness by forcing all unhoused residents into a single encampment and “giving them all the fentanyl they want”; the Seattle Police Department put out a call for volunteers to consume marijuana so that officers could practice conducting sobriety tests; and a 70-year-old nursing home resident in Pennsylvania was arrested for selling meth to his neighbors.28 29 30 31 32 33 The island nation of Tuvalu partnered with a Fijian company to install its first five ATMs, and a former Deutsche Bank derivatives trader and a Tasmanian professional gambler spent $25.8 million to buy 99 percent of all Texas lottery tickets and won the $95 million jackpot.34 35 The Texas school district of Lamar banned Virginia’s state flag from classrooms due to its illustration of the Roman goddess Virtus’s exposed breast, and a state senator in Pennsylvania apologized for asking a sixth grader whether it was acceptable to give a kindergartner a pornographic magazine.36 37 A 19-year-old in Russia was sent to prison for three years after printing a verse from a 19th-century poem on a poster that opposed the war in Ukraine, and a 19-year-old in Michigan was sentenced to eight months in prison for emailing a bomb threat to his girlfriend’s cruise line to protest looking after her family’s pets while they were away.38 39 Two Belgian teenagers in Nairobi were charged with wildlife piracy for attempting to traffic 5,000 protected ants, and a Swedish teenager in Australia was arrested for “facilitating plans for overseas contract killings on behalf of a transnational criminal syndicate.”40 41 A wild turkey that roamed the streets of Queens, New York, last year was spotted on the streets of Manhattan; multiple Staten Island homes ignited after a man lit sex toys on fire in his backyard; and a bolide exploded in the predawn sky above Mexico City.42 43 44 —Joe Kloc