This month, Kelly Clarkson was Pretty Woman’d at a Brooklyn magic shop. She wasn’t allowed to pay $15,000 for a mechanical bird, and she asked us to feel sorry for her. Many of you did. For shame. For shame.
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You should have been sparing your tears for the new Meta chatbot, Muse, that people have already been using for cybersex.
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Even though the robots don’t have feelings, they are probably jealous of our unions. This month, the workers at the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), a place where you can learn about the Capitol’s oppression of labor in the logging, longshoreman, and scuba diving industries, all sponsored by Florida man Jeff Bezos, announced a labor win. They won recognition of their union, charting a worker-friendly course for the future. The Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders, who have at times earned less than minimum wage, announced their union, too. And the Cowboys have recognized it, clearing the way for a collective bargaining agreement. The Wizards are also unionizing! The in-house team that handles Wizards of the Coast’s online version of Magic: The Gathering voted to unionize last July, and now even larger divisions of the company want to join them. The rest of the MTG team is now looking to unionize, as is the Dungeons & Dragons team. Roll for persuasion?
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There’s a new furry store opening on Capitol Hill called Furesh.Shop. The operators are a hyena and a wolf. This is big news for the Seattle tech community.
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In other big news for the tech community, Vice President JD Vance gleefully announced that the Trump administration is banning Microsoft from a Green Card program to recruit immigrant workers. Meanwhile, Microsoft is actually laying off employees as it shifts to AI, and thousands of jobs have been eliminated, but are Vance and Trump getting mad about AI and introducing any legislation to protect American workers from being replaced with AI? Of course not! To them, AI is a white Christian American man and can do no wrong.
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But shout out to our corrupt oligarchs! Amazon, Microsoft, and T-Mobile donated a collective $20 million to fund President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project. This should be all the fuel Rep. Shaun Scott needs to revive his dream of a statewide big business payroll tax.
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The Americans dying from measles may not live long enough to see the furry shop open on Capitol Hill. The US Centers for Disease Control reported nearly 4,600 cases in the country as of late October. Yet, the CDC has denied a request from Washington and California to validate a new “rapid, high-volume measles test in preparation for major outbreaks.” It denied the request due to “competing priorities.” This is the most measles cases reported in the country in over 30 years.
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And they won’t even get to sip an overly priced and overly sugared Starbucks drink on their deathbed because Starbucks keeps closing stores. Five more stores in Washington are on the chopping block and will close in mid-November.
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Philadelphia’s city council backed Starbucks Workers United’s call to boycott the coffee chain. Why hasn’t the Seattle City Council? The fast food company is moving its headquarters anyway, so the council and the mayor might as well get their licks in. Mayor Katie Wilson called on consumers to boycott Starbucks in November of last year, shortly after her election, due to union busting, and in May she broke her own boycott by ordering a disgusting blueberry muffin latte. In September, Starbucks Workers United actually called for a nationwide boycott campaign until workers get a fair contract. But now that the chips are down, it’s been crickets from Seattle’s political class, even as Starbucks closes more local union stores.
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Just over a week after Tennessee botched the execution of Christa Pike, who is alive and recovering after receiving two doses of pentobarbital, Defense Secretary and testosterone lover Pete Hegseth announced the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan would be public. The Pentagon later clarified that that means it will be livestreamed. The UN says this would amount to torture. Less than a week later, Trump canceled the public execution plan.
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In a stunning loss for the right-wing, Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores won the Queropalca mayoral election in Peru running for the center-left Ahora Nación party. Hitler Mussolini was not endorsed by the Stranger Election Control Board (he’s too inexperienced).
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And now a statement from the Prime Minister of Samoa on the “Heil Hitler” issue. He confirmed he said “Heil Hitler” and Nazi saluted at a private event, and he’s sorry.
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Trump introduced and then fired a new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, in a matter of days. Her first press conference was pitiful. Nothing can only be reflected by nothing, like a vampire looking into a mirror. But those nocturnal and aristocratic bloodsuckers are vastly better than this standard issued from the void of Trump’s political nothingness. Until this year, Zacharia sat on the advisory board for the White Rose Resistance, an extremist anti-abortion organization that advocates for executions “in the public square” for anyone who has an abortion and for pro-choice Americans to lose their right to hold office.
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You might be thinking, “Wow, a lawyer believes those things?” And you’d be wrong. Because despite Trump referring to her as a “distinguished attorney,” and despite Zacharia describing herself as a lawyer and having “lawyer” in her Instagram bio, Zacharia never passed the bar exam.
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A bull moose got stuck in the bowl at Montana’s Hellroaring Skate Park. He couldn’t climb the cement walls to get out. It took multiple agencies and multiple hours to free the moose from the skate park.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar’s DC home was raided by Homeland Security Investigations agents, aka ICE’s detectives. This is not normal. This is not right. So close to the election, this is election interference. The agents didn’t say what they were looking for, just that the search was “part of an ongoing criminal investigation.” They took “multiple cellphones, notebooks, and her husband’s camera from the 1960s.” At a rally after the raid, Trump, who has repeatedly suggested Rep. Omar “go back to Somalia,” said he had nothing to do with the raid. Meanwhile, the crowd in Ohio chanted “deport.”
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A 16-year-old boy allegedly entered Bend, Oregon’s Silver Rail Elementary School with a long gun, opened fire, and killed three children ages 5, 8, and 11, and a teacher, aged 25. Another child and another teacher were injured. A bystander whose daughter attended the school saw the boy “blasting his way into the school,” followed him inside, and shot and killed him.
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A 42-year-old man who died after being ejected from a Six Flags Over Georgia roller coaster called Goliath had, according to his daughter, defeated cancer, won “a tough battle with COVID-19,” and “survived a car fire.” But the chances of Kariem beating a mean and faulty theme park machine with a 200-foot drop and a top speed of 70 mph were close to, if not exactly, zero.
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Elon Musk unveiled what he’s calling the world’s first flying car. Flying? Buddy, that looks more like falling with style.
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Though falling-not-flying cars may be a more viable mass transit in the near future for Ballardites, as Sound Transit announced it will take $10 billion to fund light rail to our sleepy fishing hamlet. That will open, God willing, in 2042.
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None of us may see that or the new furry store. The end of the world is really right around the corner. New research shows that Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is going to collapse sooner than initially thought. And this is the “widest glacier in the world.” It’s “roughly the size of Great Britain or the state of Florida.” So when it goes down, much of our world will go down with it. This is why it’s called the Doomsday Glacier. We have reached the point of no return.
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