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I suspect an Asian student in WifeGeeding’s class is getting picked on. For no reason that she or her fellow teachers can think of, they received an email from the mother of the child explaining that no one in her family has been ill, that they haven’t visited China anywhere near the time of the coronavirus outbreak, and have not interacted with anyone who has recently traveled from China.

This Italian volunteer fire station, which is actually carved into the mountain, looks like an evil lair. Since the town is in the Alps and farmland is scarce, they thought this was the best option.

Elon Musk promotes Texas ‘career day’ as SpaceX files paperwork for Starship flight as early as March

Musk tweeted early Tuesday morning that SpaceX would be hosting a “Starship career day” at the company’s Stargate building in Boca Chica, Texas, where it’s currently working on producing the next Starship testing prototype.

Musk added that the purpose of the hiring fair would be specifically to bring on new people to staff four full production shifts to allow production around the clock for “24/7 operations” at the Texas facility. He did add that SpaceX would also be looking for “engineers, supervisors & support personnel,” but it’s clear the call is primarily to build out the production crews that assemble the Starship prototypes, which likely includes welders and others with experience in fabrication.

This idea isn’t as great as combining Fiber One and Fireball whiskey to make Fiberball, but this modified Jenga game, in which 15 of the 54 blocks have indentations for one-ounce jello shots has potential.

Smithsonian Magazine – A New Book About George Washington Breaks All the Rules on How to Write About George Washington

Starting with its cover illustration, a playful Washington grinning at the reader, You Never Forget Your First is a wink of sorts, at Washington biography and at the ways that Americans have very consistently misremembered the first president.

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49%, his highest in Gallup polling since he took office in 2017.

I’m guessing the president prefers American’s like Rush Limbaugh than John McCain. But I’ll give him this, he knows what makes good television. I expect some sort of tweet this morning about how the ratings were through the roof.  Stephen Miller’s fingerprints were all over that speech last night.

That Rush Limbaugh and President Trump moment at the State of the Union is the pre-written foreward to the paperback edition of @brianros1 ‘s Talk Radio’s America. https://t.co/I9h3YCPRUx

— John Dickerson (@jdickerson) February 5, 2020

Buttigieg supporter asks to take back vote after learning he’s gay

The Mandalorian season 2 arrives this October

Tiny Fate, Texas Wants to Solve All Our Infrastructure Woes – The tiny suburb is trying to show its larger neighbors that highways aren’t the answer. Will it work?

I didn’t know Wendy’s sold breakfast, but about 300 of them do. Come this March, all of them will.

Wendy’s is serving a mix of new items and twists on its customer favorites, including the Breakfast Baconater and a Frosty-ccino. The full menu consists of nine sandwiches. Three are on croissants, including two options with eggs (sausage, egg and Swiss cheese or a bacon, egg and Swiss cheese) and a maple bacon chicken croissant. Similar egg sandwiches will also be sold on biscuits and classic buns. It’s also selling new side dishes, like potato wedges and replacing its coffee blend.

It’s been around a while, but I had no idea there was such a thing as inflatable concrete. You basically just roll it out and add water. I actually disagree with their descriptor of “inflatable” as structures are inflated and wrapped in the concrete canvas, no concrete is inflated.

https://twitter.com/PeccaryNotPig/status/1224515892282740737?s=09

WifeGeeding had a more than typical case of the Mondays yesterday. After dinner, she asked if I’d grab a Sprite out of the refrigerator and I replied with a wryly “How about some Fireball (cinnamon whiskey)”.  She gave me a strange look so I repeated myself and then she burst into laughter stating, “I thought you asked me if I wanted some Fiberball.” I also started to crack up because I immediately had the mental image of an SNL parody commercial along the likes of Colon Blow. It would play off the idea of combining Fiber One with Fireball to make FiberBall – the cinnamon-flavored whiskey – a shot of mouth-burning whiskey and half your daily fiber regiment.

Speaking of whiskey, have you ever heard of Whisky Rebellion? It was the first and only time a sitting American president ever led troops into battle. Whatever you do, don’t let President Trump know about this, upon doing so, he’s going to tell his chief of staff, “Mick, hold my beer.”

Note: Yes, I know the president doesn’t drink. He doesn’t because his older brother died from alcoholism.

There’s a very grainy video, maybe even worse than the Zapruder film, making the rounds yesterday of President Trump at a Super Bowl party acting disrespectful while the national anthem was being played. It had all the markings of a deep fake and I tweeted as much. Some person running for another state’s congressional seat liked my tweet, but minutes later I saw the same account retweet the video and commenting how disrespectful the president was. It appears two interns managing the Twitter account weren’t on the same page or someone is an idiot.

Not that I’m into weather prognostication (you can get that at another regional blog), but it looks like it’s going to be cold and wet with below freezing temperature Wednesday evening, so I’m guessing there’s gonna be icy roads on Thursday morning, which means there’s a chance for school closing, which means there’s a chance for the fake Michael Irving to make an appearance on The TICKET to close down some schools.

One thing I really wanted to do in high school was to go to Texas Boys State, but I wasn’t selected and majorly bummed. I thought about that disappointment yesterday when I saw this headline – Apple, A24 Nab Hot Doc ‘Boys State’ for Record-Breaking $12M

Apple and A24 have acquired worldwide rights to the documentaryBoys State, a political coming-of-age story which examines the health of American democracy. A source pegged the deal at $12 million, which marks the largest sale for a documentary ever at a festival. A24 will release the film theatrically.

The previous record for the largest documentary sale at Sundance was 2019’s Knock Down the House, which sold for $10 million. Sources say Netflix and Hulu were also bidding at $12 million.

Variety already has a review and I can see why Apple thinks it will get some traction.

‘Boys State’: Film Review – This deep dive into the mock-government conference for Texas teens offers an alternately encouraging and terrifying look at tomorrow’s politicians.

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas State Capitol to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up. In 2017, the program attracted attention for all the wrong reasons (the attendees voted for Texas to secede from the United States), which gave filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss an idea: What would it take to orchestrate a deep dive into the subsequent next session? Is there a right way to cover the testosterone- and Ritalin-fueled event?

China Pledged to Build a New Hospital in 10 Days. It’s Close. – State news outlets reported that the 1,000-bed facility would accept patients from Monday even as construction workers raced to complete it.

In a ceremony on Sunday, Zhou Xianwang, the mayor of Wuhan, officially handed the new hospital over to the military, which will be in charge of operations. Boxes containing ventilators and medical equipment lay piled on a sidewalk on Monday. Trees sat in large trucks, ready to be unloaded.

By Monday evening, Chinese state media were reporting that ambulances had begun transporting patients to the new hospital.

Xue Ying, a resident of Wuhan, had driven to the new hospital hoping to find help for his increasingly unwell cousin. But city officials and signs on checkpoints have said the hospital would not accept walk-ins. Admission was only for patients with officially confirmed coronavirus infections who were transferred from other facilities.

So much for bipartisanship – Virginia GOP delegate tries to kill own bill to remove Democratic segregationist statue

A guy carted 99 phones around to create traffic jams on Google Maps

For his experiment, Weckert loaded 99 smartphones running Google Maps into a cart. He then had someone wheel that cart around various streets in Berlin, including outside the Google office.

The phones apparently fooled Google Maps into thinking that there was a high concentration of users on those streets. Because the phones were in a cart, Maps was further tricked into believing that the traffic was slow-moving.

As a result, the navigation app started showing virtual traffic jams by turning green streets to red.

I’m Upset: Give me back my Sundays – The Oscars, the Grammys, and the Super Bowl all happen this year on consecutive Sundays. It’s too much.

Two years ago, DaughterGeeding’s teacher assigned her to do a research project, paper, and presentation on a family member who immigrated to the United States. She chose to do it over my mother. This year, it was BoyGeeding’s turn and he followed in his sister’s footsteps.

Students were asked to dress in the native attire of their homeland. For Vietnamese women, they traditionally wear an áo dài, but DaughterGeeding decided to wear her grandmother’s clothes since she used to sew or make her own clothing. There’s a male version of the áo dài, but they are harder to find, so we had to be imaginative and were lucky to find this shirt.

“Just A Little Vietnamese”, y’all get it? He’s a quarter-Vietnamese, so he’s just “a little Vietnamese.” It was the best we could do on short notice. Thank you, Amazon Prime. I had some reservation because the shirt has the current communist flag of Vietnam, a lot of us folks are sensitive towards that kind of stuff, but at least his project displayed the South Vietnamese flag. He hat came from a local Vietnamese grocery store.

It turns out the new student in the class who just started a few weeks ago was Vietnamese-American, his grandparents were two of the Vietnamese boat people. His mother was on hand for her son’s presentation and he was wearing a boys version of the áo dài which they had brought her from Vietnam. She highly completed me on getting a South Vietnamese flag for BoyGeeding’s project and stated it was heartbreaking for her to help her son draw and color the current flag for her son’s project. She also joked with me when she first saw BoyGeeding and his shirt, she highly doubted he had any Vietnamese in him. I showed her a picture of DaughterGeeding, who has darker skin, and she thought she looked slightly more Asian. We were both happily surprised to find out her older child was in DaughterGeeding’s class.

After BoyGeeding’s presentation, his teacher asked a few questions. BoyGeeding’s posterboard displayed his grandmother’s actual marriage certificate (in both English and Vietnamese), her Vietnamese ID card, her marriage certificate, South Vietnamese currency, and a few other things. His teacher asked where did he get all those items, and he answered, “Uhhhhh, my sister’s project.” She had a good laugh and told Walter she will give him an extra point for his honesty. Just to be clear, BoyGeeding wrote his own paper and made his own project, but plucked those unique items from DaughterGeeding’s project from two years ago.

Oh, BoyGeeding was also required to bring traditional food, so he brought dragon fruit, which displayed an “Imported from Vietnam” sticker and served bitter melon tea. My mother used to grow bitter melons in the backyard. It would grow as a vine and covered our chain-linked fence plentily.

To my surprise, four of his classmates did their project over a Greek immigrant family member. One of them ended his presentation with, “Fun fact! The Germans invaded Greece in 1942, those horrible people!”

I liked seeing kids running onto the field and presenting the Super Bowl game ball to the referee. It reminds me of how soccer pregame with players walking onto the field accompanied by a child.

When it comes to Super Bowl halftime performances, I only have one benchmark. I simply ask myself, was it better than Coldplay’s? If yes, it was a success. Also, if it doesn’t involve a shirtless Adam Devine or whatever his name is, that’s also a success.

DaughterGeeding asked if she could watch the Super Bowl with me. I said, “Sure” and said, “Good, because I need to watch it so I can write an article for my class newspaper.”

WifeGeeding was surprised there wasn’t Budweiser Clydesdales commercial. If there was one, we didn’t notice it.

It’s hard to root for a team when their head coach wears a flat-brimmed cap.

Norma Hunt, widow of Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt, has been to every Super Bowl ever played.

West Virginia will allow people with disabilities to vote by smartphone – It’ll be the first state to offer this for 2020, but security issues loom.

While the details have yet to be established, Secretary of State Mac Warner said it would most likely offer the mobile app Voatz, just like it did when it allowed online voting for overseas troops.

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This guy should be put in prison. pic.twitter.com/iTz5z18lhw

— Eric Rosenthal (@ericsports) February 3, 2020

He was the same guy who thought San Antonio was a border city.

I often use the YouTube app on my Amazon Fire TV device. Most of the time, I will simply press the “Skip Ad” button, but I started a video as I walked to the refrigerator. To my surprise, the ad was about 44-minutes long, it was the premiere episode of NBC’s new show, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. I had no idea YouTube ads were so long or were complete episodes of a show on network television.

A win for capitalism – Iranian factory makes U.S. and Israeli flags to burn

KHOMEIN, Iran (Reuters) – Business is booming at Iran’s largest flag factory which makes U.S., British and Israeli flags for Iranian protesters to burn.

At the factory in the town of Khomein, southwest of the capital Tehran, young men and women print the flags by hand then hang them up to dry. The factory produces about 2,000 U.S. and Israeli flags a month in its busiest periods, and more than 1.5 million square feet of flags a year.

GMC is going to bring back the HUMMER but it’s going to be electric and have some intriguing specs according to a press release. It will have 1,000 horsepower, 11,500 lb-ft of torque and will be able to do zero to 60 mph in three seconds. GM has created a website for it but it’s all teaser stuff for a Super Bowl commercial with the reveal coming on May 20, 2020.

Watch the first episode of Picard for free on YouTube – The pilot episode of the new series from CBS All Access is available without a subscription for a limited time

Most Texans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, new poll shows

The Texas Lyceum poll found that 59% of Texans surveyed say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, with 41% saying the country is on the right track.

In addition, 11% of Texans say health care is the most important issue facing the country, followed by 10% who say immigration and 9% who say President Donald Trump is.

Meanwhile, a plurality of respondents, 19%, say immigration is the most important issue facing Texas today.

When it comes to President Trump, 36% of those polled say he is doing a “very poor job.”

I see the prettiest girl … pic.twitter.com/CkbEZn4YeQ

— B@$$ (@24onlinee) January 30, 2020