I had this idea for a sci-fi short story that involved a long-lived alien that has been watching the earth since the solar system formed. It finally decides to speak to humanity and starts telling the story about how the earth formed from the collision of two bodies, and the humans are all "yeah yeah we know. Here's a movie we made of it" and the alien is all "WTF? How do they know that?"

Mozart also invented a system that used dice to randomly generate music. My unverifiable theory is that he continued refining the system and it got so good that he used it to compose all his greatest hits and stopped telling anybody about his random music generator.

Nobody posted this yet?

Jeopardy just depresses me now. I used to think I could have at least competed on the show, but for the last 20 years or so I've been completely disconnected from pop culture and I could never hope to answer that type of question. I also miss Trebek, god damn it. Ken Jennings is alright but it's not just the same.

The "traditional values" of heavy drinking and autocracy?

The evil truth of sourdough is that it takes about the same amount of time and effort to make four loaves as it does to make one.

I worked at/with Northrup Grumman for a few years, not directly but for a company that did contract consulting for them at their shipyards on the gulf coast. That place was basically staggering levels of corruption combined with staggering levels of incompetence. The actual NG employees did not see much of that money, though, although what they did make was pretty good for that part of the country.

That place was universally conservative, no doubt about it.

It's hilarious that people blame boomers and nepotism for the problems of the world without seeing the contradiction.

The programming is pretty fucking bleak, too. My elderly parents have cable TV and I try to watch it sometimes to entertain myself while I'm taking care of them, and I can't find a fucking thing worth watching despite them having 500 channels or so. I always end up watching Beat Bobby Flay on the Food Channel and I can't stand that fucking show.

That's a great way to make your deck cost as much as a boat.

We had a meeting with my mom's broker and my brother and I brought up the AI bubble. The broker responded with the most ridiculous nonsense. He basically said that corporate CEOs are smart people with a legal responsibility to keep their companies financially healthy and so they wouldn't be using AI if it weren't viable. It sounded like something handed down to him from Raymond James HQ which I'm sure it was, and it was surely written by AI in the first place.

I've lost count of the number of times he's ended the Iran war that he started.