During takeoff in Denver a Southwest Airlines 737-800 lost an engine cowling (the part that covers the engine) and had to return to the airport and apparently passengers made phone videos of the incident instead of doing what they should have been doing during a Life-Threatening Emergency: making false promises to God to quit (fill-in-the-blank with the sinful activity of your choice) if He And/Or She got them back on the ground safely.
Where they would immediately resume participating in the sinful activity of their choice to celebrate the fact that God fell for it and saved them.
A United Press International story said the Runaway Engine Cowling was the latest in a series of incidents involving Boeing airliners; a series of incidents resulting in the cartoon you just looked at.
But here’s the deal on that:
The media gets excited about certain news events and then decides those events need to be over-reported and when Jaws came out in 1975 and scared the living crap out of everybody who had ever taken a bath, news organizations started reporting Shark Attacks or even Shark-Acting-Like-A-Jerk-And-Refusing-To-Return-Overdue-Library-Book Incidents from all over the world and after a while it seemed like Great White Sharks were everywhere, just waiting to take major chunks out of innocent humans.
Pretty soon we were all afraid to sit on a toilet because after being bombarded with shark stories, we were under the impression a Great White Shark could negotiate a sewer system and bite us in the ass and the only warning we would get would be the Great White Shark theme song:
Dada…
Dada…
Dadadadadadadadadadadada…
Now here’s the really scary part:
According to Newsweek there have been 29 Boeing plane incidents between January 1 and April 7 which seems like a lot, but that’s actually fewer than last year when there were 34 incidents during the same time span.
https://www.newsweek.com/list-2024-boeing-plane-incidents-after-southwest-engine-part-falls-off-188
It only seems like more incidents this year because now the media is telling you about each and every one of them, which is misleading journalism and by the way, recently dozens of sharks were spotted off an oil rig in a part of the world you’ll never go to, but it seemed like something you ought to start worrying about anyway.
And speaking of Not-So-Great White Sharks, I’ve attached an article from CNN that says Donald Trump has changed his position on abortion 15 times – depending on who he was trying to suck up to – and having read the article, March 30th, 2016 stands out because Trump managed to change his position three times that day.
When he thought it was popular Trump tried to take credit for banning Roe v. Wade, but when women voted against Republican candidates, Trump tried to blame the Hardline Right-To-Lifers because they wouldn’t allow exceptions to their anti-abortion stance.
I get the feeling Donald Trump would support The Mass Execution of Cute Puppies if he thought it would make him popular, but he’s had a really hard time reading the room on the abortion issue because the room is filled to the brim with Hatfields and McCoys.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/politics/trump-abortion-stances-timeline/index.html
That being the case, Trump recently said the abortion issue should be decided at the state level and it was now up to the states to “do the right thing” and in this case I’m pretty sure “the right thing” in Trump’s mind is for the states to catch the hot potato he just threw them.
But as the Supreme Court of Arizona just demonstrated, that might not be the Best Idea Ever and Arizona isn’t alone when it comes to bad laws because according to the internet:
In the Great State of Missouri it’s illegal to sit on a curb and drink beer from a bucket, provide beer or other intoxicants to an elephant, drive with an uncaged bear in the vehicle, have more than two bear cubs in your possession, have gay sex, shoot a gun from a moving vehicle unless the target is an elephant, drive with an uncaged chicken or have oral sex.
And oral sex with an uncaged chicken is really frowned upon.
(I’m gonna plead guilty to breaking one of the above Missouri laws as many times as possible and let you guess which one and here’s a hint: it didn’t involve a chicken.)
And while we’re wildly speculating, I always wonder what incident led state legislators to think they needed some weird law and right now I’m guessing someone sat on a curb drinking beer from a bucket, shared it with a passing circus elephant, who then went on a rampage along with his accomplices (Goldilocks and the Three Uncaged Bears) and then to celebrate, the bears and elephant had sex with each other and the only way to break up this multi-species, drunken, gay, oral sex orgy was to shoot the elephant from a moving car.
I’m pretty sure I covered all the legislative bases with that explanation, even though first base was in St. Louis and second base was in the outskirts of Des Moines and third base was somewhere in the Twilight Zone.
Anyway…
Donald Trump thinks the same legislative bodies that come up with laws like these should decide whether women should have access to abortion and don’t be surprised if they prohibit it, especially if there’s an uncaged chicken involved.
https://strawpoll.com/most-ridiculous-law-missouri
As you may have noticed it got kinda dark last Monday, mostly because the moon passed between the sun and the Earth and created an eclipse in North America.
And unlike what you might have heard on social media, the Sun God wasn’t angry and a dragon didn’t eat the sun – the Aztecs thought it was a jaguar and the Vikings thought it was a wolf – which are silly and ignorant explanations for a naturally occurring event.
Science has advanced to the point where we now know Monday’s eclipse was actually a warning sign from an angry God. Apparently we need to repent and build a border wall, vote Republican and shoot down every last Jewish Space Laser and if you don’t believe me, just ask National Dimwit and Trailer Park Beauty Queen, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Friday before Monday’s eclipse MTG posted a tweet on Twitter (I refuse to call it “X” just because a rich nerd thinks it sounds cool) saying the eclipse and an East Coast earthquake were warnings from God, which seems entirely possible.
But unlike Marge, I think God is actually warning us to stop electing dumbbells who think science is evil and we should go back to human sacrifices to appease the Gods, which I wouldn’t be totally against as long as you let me pick the humans.
Also…
According to CBS News, depending on what part of the Earth you’re standing on, eclipses happen fairly often and according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory there are 20,000 earthquakes a year, which seems like a lot probably because we only pay attention and give a shit about the ones that happen where we live and we’re pretty busy worrying about sharks.
Quick question: did you hear more about the 7.8 earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed more than 3,700 people in February or the 4.8 earthquake that recently rattled coffee cups in New York?
Being the son of an impressively-demented Pentecostal Christian, I’ve grown up with intermittent “The End is Near” warnings based on wars in the Middle East, unusual weather events and our family dog “acting funny” although if God were going to give any species a heads-up, you’d think He And/Or She would pick a species that doesn’t drink water out of a toilet bowl.
Although…
Now that I think about it, dogs – and their Arch-Nemesis, cats – can lick their own crotches so they actually are favored species and I’m guessing God didn’t give humans the same physical abilities because if we could do that we’d never do much of anything else and we’d still be living in caves with black and white TVs, rotary phones and listening to some blockhead explain the latest solar eclipse.
So all things considered, good call, God.
In February and March of 1945 the Americans and British bombed Dresden, Germany and, according to the internet, dropped 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices, which caused a firestorm and killed (depending on which source you believe and there are a lot of sources and numbers) up to 25,000 people, many of them civilians.
The Allies said the Dresden bombing was justified because it had 110 factories and 50,000 workers that were supporting the Nazis and if go down that road – it’s OK to kill civilians who support your enemies – you can justify a lot of civilian casualties.
Like the kind that happen when you fly airplanes into buildings.
Critics of the Dresden bombings said Dresden was mainly a cultural landmark with little strategic significance and firebombing the place ought to be a war crime so that’s why I included Dresden in my Hall of U.S. History.
The firebombing of Tokyo took place in March of 1945 and killed at least 80,000 people and maybe more like 100,000 and once again a bunch of those people were civilians.
Which might have seemed justified during WW2 because the Germans were randomly shooting V-2 rockets into London and killing as many civilians as possible. The Japanese killed 68 civilians when they attacked Pearl Harbor and, as the Rape of Nanjing demonstrated, didn’t mind killing and/or raping thousands of civilians when they got the chance.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Bombing-of-Tokyo
Also according to the Britannica website? As many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides died during the Vietnam War.
And according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (which sounds like it was founded by Sherlock Holmes, but probably wasn’t) our semi-recent adventures in the Middle East killed over 430,000 civilians, although pretty much every estimate of civilian casualties is disputed, so feel free to choose your own number.
But even we killed half that many, we still qualify as Self-Centered Dicks who think civilian casualties are acceptable as long as we get what we want, like the right dictator in power or cheap gasoline.
The point of all this being, that while pretty much everybody agrees that civilian casualties should be avoided (and I said pretty much everybody because it seems Hamas wants as many as possible) the USA does not exactly hold the moral high ground on this issue and with our history it takes some balls to lecture Israel about causing civilian casualties.
P.S.
Just in case you’re interested, here’s a BBC story about Hamas targeting civilians:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67321241
And another from the Washington Post which concludes Israel bears some responsibility for civilian casualties, but Hamas also bears some responsibility for trying to make that civilian casualty number high as possible because it makes Israel look bad, but we don’t hear much about that, do we?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/hamas-human-shields-tactic/
In Conclusion
Today we’ve talked about airliners falling apart in mid-air, civilian war casualties and rampaging circus elephants, so maybe it seems inevitable that something really bad is going to happen to you and here’s what I have to say about that:
Dada…
Dada…
Dadadadadadadadadadadada…
Actually, up here in the northern tip of Virginia several elephants did escape from a local amusement park during a thunderstorm in 1906. A couple of them did a fair amount of wandering around before they were rounded up by a traveling Wild West Show that was passing through. There's no evidence of their drinking habits, but locals did joke that a number of local heavy drinkers went on the wagon when they woke up one morning and saw an elephant in their garden.
Enjoyed all the topics in this one.
Do you have thoughts on the Shohei Ohtani translator situation?