I don’t know why I didn’t write about the following story back when it first appeared. I was aware of it, and it seems a perfect fit for OFT, yet somehow it never made it onto the site. Today, I rectify that mistake.

In July of 2020, we were still near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse, we didn’t yet have any vaccines to stem the spread of the virus. Unlike many businesses at that time, the Fuji-Q Highland amusement park in Japan was open, and they wanted to encourage safe practices when going on roller coasters.

“Please scream inside your heart,” and not out loud, the park is asking. The unusual ask is meant to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

“Please scream inside your heart”! It’s good advice for a pandemic, sure. But in our era of modern horrors, I find it can apply at almost any time.

The company also put together a video clip demonstrating the technique, featuring two well-dressed men in masks stoically riding an entire circuit of a roller coaster. From start to finish, it is a work of art:

Just out for a little ride

Almost three years later, I still think about this story. I think it’s timeless enough to be worth posting even now.

In February 2021, a gibbon by the name of Momo gave birth, despite living alone in her enclosure in a Japanese zoo. Two years later, the mystery of her seemingly miraculous pregnancy has been solved. It seems her enclosure wasn’t quite as isolated as zookeepers thought.

According to Wikipedia, multiple health agencies suggested sex along these lines during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Good on these gibbons for listening to guidelines and practicing healthy sex.

During the height of COVID-19 in America, companies like Netflix, Zoom, and Peloton saw the values of their stocks soar. It was a bit grotesque for investors to reap profits resulting from a pandemic, but that was nothing compared to the increase recently seen in the stock price of China’s largest funeral services company.

COVID-19 is still with us, and it’s still killing people. In 2021, however, the people it killed were not evenly distributed when it came to their political affiliation.

The study, titled Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic, used voter registration and death records to answer a question: is there a link between political affiliation and rates of COVID related death in the U.S.?

The short answer is yes…in the summer of 2021—after vaccines were widely available—the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021.”

We have tools to greatly diminish the lethality of COVID-19, but one group of people has been much more reluctant to take common-sense precautions like getting vaccinated (and boosted) and wearing masks. Instead, they’ve fixated on a noxious belief that their “freedoms” are more important than the health of others. That group has been led astray by their political leaders and news outlets, and now it’s literally killing them. This loss of lives is horrible, but it’s difficult to feel sorrow for people who refuse to even care about themselves, let alone others.

Delivery food is seldom particularly good, but it’s grown enormously popular in recent years, in no small part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, pools of workers bustle around cities for companies like Grubhub and Uber Eats, delivering food from dozens of different restaurants. This army was already strange, but Los Angeles has one-upped it., with multiple companies using robots to carry out these deliveries:

Over the last two years, a handful of delivery robot companies have popped up in Los Angeles, which are essentially remotely piloted (or autonomous, in some cases) cooler-shaped chests on wheels. The issues associated with these robots vary: In Santa Monica, a company called Coco has basically turned food delivery into a video game. Delivery “drivers” pilot the robots remotely, using an Xbox controller and using a series of cameras to help guide them. Serve Robotics explains that its robots operate with “Level 4 autonomy,” meaning they are fully autonomous in certain areas.

The linked article is actually about one of these robots driving through an active crime scene, which is not great! But really, the idea of sidewalks crowded with delivery robots moving autonomously or piloted by unseen humans seems terrible all on its own.

Trained dogs can detect COVID as well or better than other tests. Maybe one day in the future, instead of having a swab jabbed up my nose to get tested, I’ll just be able to pet a cool dog.

Right up front, I’m going to say that I’m sorry. Please note that for your benefit, I did not include any photographs of the following story.

Nevertheless, if I have to know that Malcolm MacDonald’s penis fell off as a result of a blood infection, and then he had a new one grown on his arm, then so do you. That’s just the way it works.

Don’t you just hate it when you buy a marble portrait bust for $34.99 at Goodwill and it turns out to be a 2,000-year-old relic that was probably looted from Germany as a trophy at the end of World War II and then you’re stuck with it because of an inability to find any original owner to whom you can return it so you have to hire an attorney who specializes in international art law to help handle the matter and because of slowdowns caused by a global pandemic it all takes years to resolve? That’s just the worst.