The way things have been going lately, I wager I’m not the only person wh— if asked what theme music they’d choose for themselves were personal theme music a theme — would reply with “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” This song, sung by wicked-witch character Evillene in the musical “The Wiz” should dang-near be a national anthem in our “new normal.”
Tell you what: How about we take a break from all the bad/tragic/worrying news by gathering up some headlines that don’t fit into these categories and continue that old feature by a former fellow columnist:
ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO RAZZ
Car prices and car payments have soared to “a record level,” according to a recent NBC report that revealed that some car buyers are paying a grand a month — “rivaling the cost to put a roof over your head.”
So in other words, cars need to start appreciating in value. And car salespeople should be referred to as rolling-real-estate agents.
A 68-year-old Spanish TV actress, Ana Obregón, has caused controversy by using sperm samples from her late son to get a surrogate mother pregnant. The surrogate gave birth to a baby girl, making Obregón a grandmother, according to a cnn.com story titled “Mother and grandmother to the same baby: Spanish actress sparks surrogacy debate.” Surrogacy is illegal in Spain but the baby was born in Miami and will have a U.S. passport. “The actress says she has documents proving that she is legally recognized as the baby’s mother in the United States, and adopting a child born abroad is legal in Spain,” according to the story.
Oooookaaaaay. Since Obregón will be the child’s mother/grandmother combination, does this mean she’ll be hard on the child and spoil her at the same time?
A sick man recently found out that the person who gave him his new kidney was … his daughter. “Delayne Ivanowski of Kirkwood, Mo., … donated her kidney to her dad John Ivanowski, who told his daughter for months that he did not want her to be his donor,” according to an ABC News story. The story quoted the dad, John Ivanowski: “I told her, ‘I’m not taking your kidney,’ I told her that flat out.” So Delayne kept her donation a secret until it was too late for Dad to demand she take it back.
Now kids, please don’t go disobeying your parents and, when caught, say, “but that lady in Missouri didn’t do what her dad said and look how that turned out.”
Singer Lizzo has a cameo in an episode of the Star Wars-y series “The Mandalorian” as a noblewoman, a duchess, who takes to Baby Yoda, aka Grogu. The “Duchess of the Outer Rim planet Plazir-15” and Baby Yoda get close fast when he comes to her planet on a visit.
I don’t suppose she told him that he needed to do a hair toss. Check his nails. Kick off his shoes. Take a deep breath and focus on himself. Get out and get loose and blame it on the Goose and blame it on his juice … OK, I’ll quit.
So not only do we have artificial-intelligence bots to chat with, we’re now being offered gizmos to help us chat with the bots. “For those of us who are unsure how best to communicate with the new generation of AI-powered apps, you can purchase queries or inputs that effectively bridge the gap,” according to a CBS News story that adds, “Online marketplace PromptBase lets users of so-called generative text and image tools … buy and sell ‘prompts’ that are are aimed at getting AI to perform a highly specific task, such as improving one’s writing by correcting grammatical errors or writing catchy song lyrics.”
Oh good grief. Look, we’ve seen the shows and movies. Just cut these “middlemen,” cut to the chase, and give us Johnny 5 from the movie “Short Circuit”; “Star Trek’s” Data; “Star Wars”‘ R2D2 and C-3PO; Sonny from “I, Robot.” (We’ll pass on Terminators, Yul Brynner’s “Westworld” gunslinger and any bad, lit-up-red “I, Robot.”)
A recent headline was all about a calf who, apparently saying to itself, “Forget this,” escaped a Brooklyn slaughterhouse and was chased through the city streets before finally being rounded up … and spared, being sent to a New Jersey sanctuary. And a recent online video shows drivers slowing down for, and respectfully following behind, a young moose wandering a Massachusetts roadway.
Ah. We should take some cues from the animal kingdom. More of us need to take a stand, flee from the slaughterhouses of mediocrity, aimless existences and, well, herd mentalities … fling off the chains of inferiority complex-ism and people-pleasing, strut our stuff and command some respect doing it! (But, now, if you get eaten or run over anyway, you didn’t read this … )
Um, it appears an Australian company decided to make a “mammoth”-sized meatball made from “lab-grown cultured meat using the genetic sequence from the long-extinct” … woolly mammoth, according to Huffpost.com’s Weird News archive. Vow — the somewhat ironic name of the startup company from Down Under — wanted to stir up public debate about cultivated meat, made from animal cells and negating the need for any animal to die to feed us.
What’s more likely to be stirred up by just the thought of a woolly mammoth meatball: the desire to give up food, period.
“See?” that calf from Brooklyn will say. “You don’t need me!”
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