For all my fearful fellow creatures who see black holes wherever they look, this from Harper’s Weekly Report:
A star 1,300 light-years away swallowed a planet in its orbit and may soon devour another celestial object with 22 times Jupiter’s mass.
From the latest edition of Harper’s Weekly Report:
A man from Mexico City was killed when a crocodile attacked him at a beach near a luxury resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and dragged him out to sea; and a man from North Fort Myers, Florida, survived an alligator attack after jabbing the reptile in the eye with his fishing pole.
Wait, so the croc grabbed him off the beach? Oh my, this might cause travel reviewers to remove a couple of the deluxe resort’s stars. Or maybe this could be offered as a perk, like, automatic entry into an episode of “Survivor.”
And the alligator story doesn’t make clear whether the alligator grabbed the guy because the guy stuck his pole into the gator’s eye — that’d make the gator mad, I’d think, or the other way around: the guy escaped the alligator attack by sticking his pole into the alligator’s eye. (Am I spending too much time on this?)
[A]n animal-rights collective completed its twenty-third week of anti–foie gras protests outside of a restaurant in Chicago. “I want to be very clear here,” said one of the protest’s organizers, whose chants of “You’ve got blood on your hands!” have been confused for pro-Palestine slogans, “this has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. This has to do with foie gras.”
No, Organizer. Everything has to do with the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
[I]n Oban, Scotland, a man was arrested after assaulting someone with a seagull.
Was the seagull a willing accomplice or a hostage?
Scientists unveiled an underwater diving suit designed for cyborg cockroaches; a swarm of millions of Mormon crickets descended across the state of Idaho.
Are these insect events related? More relevant: what is a cyborg cockroach and why does it need an underwater diving suit?* Does the cricket swarm mean the price of potatoes is about to go through the roof?
[A] British Premier League soccer team donated more than 40 pairs of game-worn socks to a group of horses and donkeys who would wear them as protection from the bites of flies.
Have you ever watched flies biting horses? The feet are not the target. Oh, maybe the socks will be pulled over the horses’s and donkeys’ ears.
In Tasmania, local officials urged the public to respect the privacy of an over-one-ton elephant seal named Neil that is known for a history of property damage. “Neil’s fame is a bit of a double-edged sword,” said a spokesperson for Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment. “There is a risk here of essentially loving him to death.”
*I addressed my cockroach question to Perplexity. The answer is so weird I won’t repeat it, lest you come to believe I’m a lunatic. However, given the answer, let me throw out another question: what is the purpose of creating cyborg cockroaches and sending them underwater in tiny diving suits? That one, I’m not asking Perplexity; I’m asking you.
Maybe I shouldn’t extract paragraphs from a novel I am only a quarter of the way through. And I certainly should double check facts, especially the ones I’m staring directly at and thinking, “Wait, is this right?”
So my mea culpa is, by 1691 the Restoration was well past its silk-clad legs. Both restored Stuart kings, Charles II and his brother, James II*, were no longer around. Charles had died and James had been booted out of the country in 1688, when the so-called Glorious Revolution put The Oranges — Dutch William of Orange and his wife, Mary II, daughter of James II — on the throne of England.
OK, that was my egregious historical error.
As to Thackeray, his creation I lauded previously –the wonderfully evolved Rachel, Lady Castlewood — went on rollercoaster drop in her evolutionary progress, in a later chapter after her husband was killed in a duel (hope I’m not reuining the suspense for youse who haven’t yet read Henry Esmond). She wrongfully blamed Henry, our eponymous good guy, for everything, turned against him totally and thoroughly wrecked him emotionally, never mind turning me, the reader, against her. Furiously. I was so mad and disappointed, I wanted to smack her.
Maybe she’ll pull herself together in the near fictional future. I am not optimistic.
*James II, a/k/a the Duke of York, was the reason my homeland, New Netherlands, became the English colony of New York, in 1664. So there’s a certain historical satisfaction in knowing the Dutch tossed the English out of England, a few decades after the English pushed the Dutch out of New Amsterdam.
On this July 4, I note that we Americans began the process of tossing the English out of America.
