November 3, 2019
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“As a matter of urgency, we need to move approximately 1000 hens,”
$1.50 for 1000 hens. “A man is desperate to re-home 1000 hens after he accidently bought them in an online auction for $1.50. Steve Morrow from Hamilton said he saw the "urgent sale" on Trade Me and thought he was bidding for only one bird. But when he won the auction at 11am on Sunday, he was told by the seller, Matthew Blomfield, that he had in fact bought 1000 of them. The ad read that a small free-range egg farm based in Massey, West Auckland, was closing down and needed to be vacated by Monday. [...] He said he put in an auto bid for $20, thinking he could at least get two hens. "When the auction closed, I thought 'this is great', I could take as many birds as I wanted," Morrow said. "But when I spoke to the man and he said it was for 1000 hens ... holy moly, I was stunned, I can tell you that." He said he had read the ad more than three times and admitted the "wording was confusing".”
Dave’s scandal was ahead of the curve
Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk. By Nell Scovell, former writer for the Late Night with David Letterman show, for Vanity Fair
Imagine your Labrador’s smile on a lion
We've already seen how AI image-processing algorithms can be dumb and smart at the same time, and that's on full display with NVIDIA's latest interactive demo. "GANimal" lets you take a picture of your favorite pet and transfer its expression to any random animal or breed including pugs, hyenas, bears and lions. That creature will then "smile" or pose just like your Fluffy or Fido.
Bound For Nowhere
MAK and Owen have been on the road for a little over three years. Overlanding has overtaken Vanlife, and it seems to be a thing that doesn't require so much sell-out. Not that there aren't setbacks.
These are the Stories of the Starship Raptor
From the maker of Blades in the Dark comes Lasers and Feelings: a one-page RPG based on the songs of the Doubleclicks. Play as a member of the Starship Raptor, whose Captain Darcy has been overcome by the strange psychic entity called Something Else.
Should this tree have the same rights as you?
Around the world, a movement is gaining momentum that grants legal rights to natural phenomena, including rivers, lakes and mountains. On 26 February 2019, a lake became human. For years, Lake Erie – the southernmost of the Great Lakes – has been in ecological crisis. Invasive species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing. Each summer, blue-green algae blooms in volumes visible from space, creating toxic “dead zones”; the algae is nourished by fertiliser and slurry pollution from surrounding farms. In August 2014, phosphorus run-off so fouled Erie that the city of Toledo, at the lake’s western tip in Ohio, lost drinking water for three days in the hottest part of the year. [more inside]
Shakedown Smackdown
Last week, WWE presented its second Crown Jewel event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was the fourth of 20 planned biannual events in the Kingdom, for which the House of Saud was allegedly ponying up as much as $2 billion. The deal is part of Saudi Vision 2030, a program by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin-Salman to modernize the Saudi economy and improve the repressive regime's public image. That PR effort probably wasn't helped when flight delays held most of the wrestlers on the ground for more than 24 hours... or possibly the wrestlers were hostages in a disagreement between WWE owner Vince McMahon and the Crown Prince over payment. [more inside]
The Kim Foxx Effect: How prosecutions have changed in Cook County
Dirty Money Farming
How EU farm subsidies support oligarchs and populists, destroy the environment, and disrupt foreign markets.
Disco Elysium - No Truce With The Furies
Disco Elysium [Launch Trailer] "is a detective RPG of improbable depth. It's part Planescape: Torment, part police procedural, part psychodrama. Your fatally hungover detective peels himself off the carpet, naked except for a pair of soiled underpants, and begins the laborious process of piecing his broken mind back together, while simultaneously attempting to solve a gruesome murder on the wrong side of the tracks. (PC Gamer)" — GOG - Steam, PS4 and Xbox ports announced for next year [more inside]
"The End of Friendly Generational Relations"
"Now it’s war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality." [more inside]
RIP Grandpa of ‘Grandpa Kitchen’, 73
While the world was busy lighting diyas and relishing sweets on October 27, the internet’s favourite chef Narayana Reddy, aka Grandpa of ‘Grandpa Kitchen’, took his last breath on Diwali. The 73-year-old grandpa shot to fame because of his unique and interactive style of cooking and noble idea behind running the YouTube channel that he started in 2017 and within two years managed to have over 6 million subscribers in India and abroad. He used to cook meals for orphans and helped fill the hungry stomachs of children who didn’t have money to eat food.
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