Walter Wednesdays - October 11, 2023
Walter Fact: The end is nigh
Speaking of Tweaking - Tweaker of the Week
Speaking of Tweaking, an Iowa woman was stopped by customs agents on her return from a trip to Kenya after she declared a small box of giraffe feces after her belongings were selected for inspection. Yes, she was trying to bring in giraffe poop. Why? She stated she was going to make a necklace with it as she had done in the past with moose poop.
“There is a real danger with bringing fecal matter into the U.S.,” Customs and Border Protection’s Chicago field Director LaFonda D. Sutton-Burke said in a statement. “If this person had entered the U.S. and had not declared these items, there is high possibility a person could have contracted a disease from this jewelry and developed serious health issues.”
Some diseases/ailments Customs cited were African swine fever, classical swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and swine vesicular disease.
Another Reason To Avoid France
Other than the bad attitudes and the odor (jokes, of course) why wouldn’t you want to go to France? Well, Paris is infested with bedbugs. They are everywhere from hotels to trains, the bloodsuckers are everywhere looking for their next victim to catch a ride on. This comes amid fashion week and the Rugby World Cup which brought hundreds of thousands of people to the city, there are fears that it might spread beyond Paris. Beyond France. Pest control companies in France and the UK have seen massive spikes in customers with the companies in Paris being overwhelmed and backed up.
London, which receives 15 Eurostar trains from Paris every day, has ramped up cleaning of its trains with Eurostar stating trains would be cleaned as soon as there is the slightest doubt or even just on request.
So maybe halt your vacation plans, not that any of us could afford to go anyway.
Art Piece - Emberlynn Coltrane
What’s Walter Thinking About?
I hate how the news will be like, “…a surprise attack that no one saw coming.” No one? Are you telling me a random act of violence in the area that’s been dealing with random attacks and wars for literal decades (mostly because of the U.S. and her allies’ interference) occurred? Gasp. Whatever will we do? What? No one saw it coming? Not a single person could tell that war was coming in the area that’s been at war for decades. The area that ends up in headlines weekly because of another new attack. But no, this one, out of hundreds, was a surprise.
Oh? We’re sending the world’s largest aircraft carrier there to help. To help a country with an already substantial military- oh right, that military was already paid for by us, including $38 billion since 2016. But that’s okay, right? It’s not like 12.5% of the country is on food stamps. All the while we’ve been fighting a proxy war in Europe that is nearing day 600, but you all forgot about that, right?
Where does all of this sound familiar? Right, we gave leased weapons and supplies to countries before we entered WWII with the Lend/Lease Act. So let’s see, we’re funding two conflicts, in two parts of the world historically known for not being able to place nice with each other (not that the U.S. has ever played nice, but it’s easy to convince everyone you’re the good guys when you can just crush anyone who disagrees) the same way we’ve funded other major conflicts we ended up being pulled into. Just the issue this time is that everyone has nukes. “But Israel has a policy of nuclear opacity and has never confirmed having nukes-” wah wah wah. Shut it. We know they do. Any country that refuses to say that they do not have nukes, has nukes. They also have nuclear power plants and if you can enrich uranium for power plants, you can enrich it to make a bomb. The process is so simple we were able to do it 20 years before we landed on the moon, it literally is not rocket science. Until we decided we needed to strap them to missiles. Whatever, it’s not like anyone else is at war- what? Serbia and Kosovo have become increasingly hostile recently? They could “easily slip into war” per CNBC. Oy. For another time.
Today in History
1614 - The New Netherland Company applied to the States General of the Netherlands for trading rights in what is now the northeastern United States.
1776 - A fleet of American boats was defeated by the Royal Navy but delayed the British advance until 1777.
1811 - The first steam-powered ferry in the New York harbor, the Juliana, began operation.
1852 - Australia’s oldest university, the University of Sydney, was inaugurated.
1906 - San Francisco sparked a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Japan after ordering segregated schools for Japanese students.
1944 - The Soviet Union annexed the Tuvan People’s Republic.
1950 - CBS’s field-sequential color system for TV became the first to be licensed for broadcast in the U.S.
1954 - French Troops completed their withdrawal from Vietnam.
1958 - NASA launched its first space probe, Pioneer 1, which failed to achieve a stable orbit.
1968 - NASA launched Apollo 7, the first successful crewed Apollo mission.
1984 - Aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle (friendly reminder the space shuttles were reused so yes, it is that Challenger) Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to perform a space walk.
2000 - NASA launched STS-92, the 100th Space Shuttle mission.
2001 - Polaroid filed for bankruptcy protection.
2018 - Soyuz MS-10, launching a crew for the ISS, had to abort mid-flight. All crew members landed safely.
Word Search
“Singin’ in the rain, just singin’ in the rain. What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again.” - Arthur Freed