Bitchin Dave's Newsletter - April 22nd


Happy Earth Day!  Today is a day to celebrate mother Earth and all its bounty, richness, and beauty.  

Surely, things are difficult, and there are many factors working against the betterment of our planet. 

There have been a great number of calamities (often, in places where we haven't seen a lot of this before) - from fires, to tornadoes, to floods.  People have been left homeless and somewhat helpless. These disasters are happening with an alarming frequency. And what our government is doing to ignore (or make things worse!) is shameful and upsetting.  




But we shouldn't feel completely helpless.  We can still act in the best interests of our planet, and fight for it in our own ways.  On this Earth Day, here are some suggested activities that certainly couldn't hurt:

By the way, here's a picture I took 5 years ago (just before the pandemic ramped up) and another from a few weeks ago in front of the same tree.  It's a reminder that the Earth just keeps doing what it does.


----


Hope for paralysis


A Chinese research team has developed a way to help people who have been paralyzed. In summary:

The Chinese team's advance was made possible by implanting electrode chips in the brain and spinal cord to create a bridge or "neural bypass" – thus reconnecting the body's own pathways.

Which is a hopeful finding. 

But also not to be missed is the fact that they take some not-so-subtle jabs at Elon in the article. Which goes to show how much of a Dr Evil he's become. 


NASA astronauts got a $5 per diem each day


This is a fun, quirky story about how the two astronauts who were unable to get home for a year. They were given their government allotted per diem. 

"While in space, NASA astronauts are on official travel orders as federal employees.

"This means that in addition to their annual salary — about $152,258, according to NASA — Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams received around $1,430 for their 286 days in space."

Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore did not exactly see their extended stay as a hardship. "This is my happy place," Ms. Williams told reporters in September. "I love being up here in space. It's just fun, you know?"


Astronaut Clayton Anderson who also had an extended stay in the early 2000s added "it IS a government job with government pay. I would have done WAY better with mileage!"



What manner of silliness is this?


Blue Origin has been running a space tourism program for several years now. While it's not, precisely, necessary, Jeff Bezos saw an opportunity to sort of crowd fund his test launches, bring attention to himself, and offer some celebrities a chance to have a few minutes of weightlessness. 

In almost every sense, it's the same as SpaceX offering space tourism to people as a lark (and one of these tourists is now the head of nasa, go figure!) 

For the most part, these "missions" have attracted some attention, but mostly flown under the radar. Sure, there are people who call it wasteful and stupid, but generally no one cared. 

And then Bezos decided to make history and create an all female crew. 

And that's when the outrage started. It came from everywhere. Everyone had a take. Every angle was covered. 

And I just have to ask… why?

Previous missions had similarly unqualified people who said similar silly things upon returning. 

Why did this one garner so much negative attention?

And by the way, one of these astronauts was Amanda Nguyen, who was in the nasa space flight program, and was going to be an astronaut at some point. But she gave up the dream to instead focus on her story and be an advocate for rape victims and work on civil rights. A short synopsis can be found here:


But that doesn't even register among all the noise we're hearing. 

IMHO that should be the lead. It shouldn't be about how dumb this flight was - they are all dumb. Some attention should go to her doing something great, and then fulfilling her dream. 

Man are we just idiots. 


The underwater turbine


Can we create green energy from the ocean? Maybe.  A team has deployed some turbines to test this out. 

Conceptually, I like it. I do wonder what impacts it will have on the local ecology and what maintenance will be like (salt water is notoriously corrosive). 


Disney and customer service done right

A month or so ago, I took a trip to Disney World, and I apparently dropped my hat.  Once I noticed it was missing, I talked to a castmember.  The person went above and beyond to make it right, which was pretty amazing.  

And I did get my hat back in the mail a few weeks later.

If there is one thing that Disney does very well is to provide outstanding customer service.

I made a short about the experience: https://youtube.com/shorts/8zC9ABBBD9Q?feature=share



Help this make sense


Five or so years ago we were talking about T-rump, and his fitness to serve. There was some (mostly idle) talk about removing him using the 25th amendment because there was a sense that maybe he didn't have the mental acumen to be president.

And here we are today .. and it's all this talk about how crazy his policies are and how much harm he's doing.

But where did we lose the focus on his mental abilities? He's 5 years older. It's not like there's some magical cure. And that he somehow "got better" and whatever mental issues he had went away.

And then, as if on cue, he has his first annual physical of this term.  Of course, there are many, many reports that noted "how fit he is," except when you look at it objectively, it's all just puffery (hey, great, he wins at golf!).  He, himself, told us he aced a cognitive test, or something like that.  He tends to expand his lies to the point they stop making sense.

It's clear he has cognitive decline.  So can we just focus once again on that and put aside the rhetoric?   



Bonus: I took some "see how smart you are on general knowledge" quiz and this appeared.  I hate it when words are mis-used.

It's STATUTE.  A statue is an inanimate object created by an artist.



Bitchin' Dave's newsletter is published weekly.  Please feel free to forward it around. If you want to subscribe or unsubscribe, send an email to geezergamer92@gmail.com

Comments

Post a Comment