It Could Have Been a Party

But it wasn't:

A power outage and a social media post led to a 250-person fight over “free food” in a grocery store dumpster, Texas authorities said.

An H-E-B grocery store on the southeast side of Austin experienced a “sustained power outage” and had to throw out a large amount of perishable food on Thursday, Feb. 2, the company told CBS Austin in a statement.

Someone noticed the food in the grocery store dumpster and posted about the “free food” on social media, Travis County Constable George Morales III said in a Facebook post. 

Over 250 people arrived at the grocery store and began fighting in the dumpster over the discarded food, Morales said. Videos of the scene showed people in the dumpster grabbing food and tossing it into waiting carts.

High, High Natural Gas Prices in California

The first decent explanation I've heard regarding the astonishingly-high, bankruptcy-worthy natural gas prices in California these last two winters:

But why? We've had cold winters before, and the price of gas has increased only modestly. The answer is related to a seeming mystery: December prices were also well above average in 2021 even though winter was fairly warm that year. That doesn't make sense. 

The problem was a pipeline from Texas that exploded in Coolidge, Arizona, earlier in the year and killed a person. The pipeline is operated by Kinder Morgan, and another one of their pipelines had exploded in Tucson in 2003. For this reason, the town of Coolidge was none too eager for the pipeline to reopen, and the NTSB was cautious too because they couldn't figure what caused the explosion. This cut off one of California's sources of natural gas, which made it difficult to get enough supply during winter months.

Feeling the Junkie Energy

I was walking Jasper down the sidewalk towards Broadway in Sacramento this morning, smartly carrying my pooper scooper with me like a good citizen should, when I felt a sudden push from behind on the business end of the scooper. A man in a hoodie hurriedly pushed past both of us. Vibrating with intensity, he aimed for the convenience store. I could feel junkie energy radiating from him. I felt a bit embarrassed too, since I'm sure he must have gotten doggie doo on his hoodie. 

As Jasper and I approached the convenience store, the hoodie guy suddenly emerged from the store and approached us. He had strings of snot caught in his mustache and beard. He held up a cigarette lighter. "Do you have a cigarette?" he asked. I replied I didn't smoke. "Can you buy me a cigarette?" he asked. I replied I had no money on me. "Do you have ten dollars?" he asked. I shook my head. He seemed to be put off by my negative responses, and scurried away. 

Just then, a woman standing near the homeless encampment across the street started screaming at her legs. She quickly removed her pants. Fortunately she had a second layer of tights underneath - a necessity when sleeping outside in the cold these days. Still, she rolled her tights up, bent over, and continued screaming at her bare legs. It was quite unclear what the trouble was. 

Then Jasper started barking at imaginary squirrels under the nearby hedges. The screaming and barking continued. No one seemed fully in touch with reality. Maybe this is what comes from drinking coffee. Too much frenetic morning energy.

The DART Mission to Dimorphos

I didn't blog about this at the time - too busy - but the DART mission to Dimorphos was the most interesting space event of 2022. The second half of this video is great!

 

The Downside of Being a Forest-Green Rotary Telephone from the 30s

I dreamt that I was attending some kind of Comicon, and was walking around a many-seated auditorium when the lights suddenly went out for a big musical performance about railroad porters in the 1930s. I fumbled my way through the darkness into a seat that had been kept empty for a quick costume change, and had a costume dropped on me. So, dressed as a forest-green rotary telephone from the 30s, I was ushered into an office where Vince Gilligan was working on a script, and where an alt-journalist from Hungary was already waiting. An assistant asked Gilligan if he would like to talk to us, but he said no. I couldn’t blame him - who wants to talk on the telephone when you’re busy? So, I started talking to the journalist, and recommended that he explore the mesa west of Belen, NM, because it had just been rechristened with a Danish name, and you never know what you might find way out in the desert.

A Saturday Evening at Sky Zone Sacramento

A Paradise for kids and teens.  Getting a bit rowdy on a Saturday evening, though. 12-year-old Queen Bees and their cliques ruling the roost.  Kids disappearing high above, and reappearing.  Hyperactive kids and wannabe gymnasts.

Profit

According to Jasper, the entire point of taking long walks is to harass small animals. Last night, I had to restrain him when we returned to the back gate, and found a skunk had taken advantage of Jasper’s temporary absence to poke around for food. 

This morning, Jasper pursued a small animal underneath a hedge. Looking at the shrubbery, I discovered a twenty-dollar bill squirreled in the foliage, which I pocketed. 

We profit from walks in our own ways.

A Do-Over?

Never went to the prom? Needs a better group of friends? Bored?:

A 29-year-old woman was arrested after police said she posed as a teenager and attended a New Jersey high school, according to local news outlets.

The woman, a resident of New Brunswick, is said to have given a fake birth certificate to the New Brunswick Board of Education “with the intent to enroll as a juvenile high-school student,” according to a Jan. 25 police news release. 

...After gaining admittance, the woman attended New Brunswick High School for four days before anyone noticed something was awry, according to 6ABC News.

If It Walks Like a Russian Stooge

Russian stooges are everywhere these days:

Gabbard, who went on to run for president in 2020, was extremely conspicuous for repeating Vladimir Putin’s talking points accusing the opposition to the Assad regime of being jihadists, including in editorials published in her home state Honolulu Star-Advertiser. It was behavior like this that led Hillary Clinton to say in 2019 “I’m not making any predictions, but I think [the Kremlin has] got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”

To prove the point, Gabbard repeatedly appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to oppose NATO membership for Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard tweeted, “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.” 

Then there is Matt Taibbi who has extensive experience in Russia, having lived there for most of the 1990s. He has long made excuses for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and separatist activity in the Donbas, including during his stint at Rolling Stone. He’s even made excuses for Russia’s meddling in American elections. And he was insistent that Putin would not launch a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a position he later acknowledged was a colossal mistake: “My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough.” He quickly pivoted to doing podcasts with Katie Halper (of “Joe Biden is a rapist” fame) with titles like “How the US Caused the Ukraine Crisis.”

Pretty Pictures by Mars Probes

We live in wonderful times.

Just a Normal, Ordinary Guy

An underground shelter for each of his kids?:

The man who was discovered living in an Austrian cellar with his six British-born children is a "Doomsday prepper" who previously worked in IT in London, according to local officials.

Tom Landon, 54, is reported to be a conspiracy theorist who wrote several self-published books denouncing Austria's government.

He is believed to have been living in a network of cellars underneath a building guarded by security cameras in the small village of Orbitz, near the Czech border, for around nine months.

...Locals say they knew of Landon, who had been trying to buy cellars in the village for a while, and had been concerned by his erratic behaviour.

...He had bought up to five cellars in the village, according to Greil, apparently wanting one for each of his six children.

Books published in his name online include Dirty Justice, The Judas Principle and The Destructive Effect of Information Technology on Human Intellectual Development.

According to media reports he has also written a musical about the Austrian rock star Falco – known for his 1985 hit Rock Me Amadeus – who died in a car crash in the Dominican Republic in 1998. Landon, who was living on the island at the time, claims to have found the body and that there was a cover-up about the true cause of death.

On Being Hunted by Solomon Peña

Disturbing article about failed Republican candidate Solomon Peña (who has still be denounced by the Republican party despite today's indictment) and his shooting spree in Albuquerque:

Q.: One of the strange things to me is that right after he was allegedly involved with the shooting at your home, Solomon Peña was elected to a leadership position in the county Republican Party—a county ward chairman. 

A: Yeah. Our county is broken up into wards. And in the particular ward for the Republican Party, he was elected, which is so ludicrous. I am hoping that the Republican Party of Bernalillo County will remove him at this point in time. But the response from the Republican Party for the state—it’s interesting. They’re waiting until he’s proven guilty. The decision that was made by the judge in district court is that he’s going to stay in jail until the trial begins, which I’m grateful for. But, this should be an automatic removal as ward chair. So TBD. Let’s see what they really are going to do.

Heavy Rain in New Zealand's North

They are really getting slammed in Auckland and northern parts of the North Island!