Yesterday, I saw the following news summary:

DOJ recovers most of Colonial Pipeline ransom
The Justice Department announced Monday that it had recovered about $2.3 million of the $4.4 million in bitcoin

Now, my first thought when I read this was “That is not most!”. However, by the barest margin of the dictionary definition of “most”, it is.

$2.3 million is indeed a razor-thin majority of $4.4 million. Of course, that’s not really what we think of when we hear “most”. If I borrow $100 from you and then pay you back just $51, you would not tell people “Oh, it’s fine, Paul paid me back most of my money”. “Never loan Paul money”, that is what you’d say.

Upon reading more about this story, I realized that headline was actually correct, though the sub-head was quite misleading. By way of explanation, here’s a brief timeline:

May 7, 2021: The DarkSide ransomware gang attacked Colonial Pipeline, taking pipeline management systems down.

May 8, 2021: Colonial Pipeline paid DarkSide a ransom of 75 bitcoins to undo the attack. Amusingly, while DarkSide did provide Colonial with a tool to restore their network, it was so slow that Colonial ultimately restored operations using their own backups.

Around this time, that ransom was widely reported as nearly “$5 million”. This shorthand made sense, as the average reader is not likely to be familiar with the current price of bitcoin.

June 7, 2021: The Department of Justice announced they’ve recovered “$2.3 million” in cryptocurrency paid to DarkSide. The how of that is interesting from a technical perspective, but most reports focused on that “$2.3 million”, a number which is very misleading.

In point of fact, of the 75 bitcoins Colonial paid, 63.7 were recovered. That’s about 85%, a much more satisfying definition of “most”. The problem comes when reporters again convert that into US currency, because Bitcoin’s value has tanked in the month since the ransom was paid.

[Chart via CoinDesk]

On May 7, 1 bitcoin cost around $58,000, and 75 bitcoins cost around $4.4 million. On June 7, the value had fallen to around $35,000, making 63.7 bitcoins worth about $2.3 million. As a result, though Colonial Pipeline got back most of the actual asset they gave away, they’re currently still out a whole lot of money. They likely paid somewhere between $4 and $5 million back in May, and have now recovered an asset currently worth a bit over $2 million.

Given this wild price drop, Colonial may wish to keep that Bitcoin for now, in the hopes that its value will shoot back up in the future. In other words? HODL.

Back in 1998, advice columnist Abigail Van Buren took a letter from a woman who was deeply upset about her husband urinating in their front yard. Her response was, frankly, not terribly helpful.

This is not a subject that’s often discussed, but I suspect the practice is not unusual. Dogs and cats urinate to mark their territory. Your husband may be doing it for the same reason. For pets, the problem can be resolved by neutering; however, I wouldn’t recommend that for your husband.

That’s some advice, Abby. “Don’t have your husband neutered”. Got it. That really was about all she offered, except that according to the Los Angeles Police Department¹, it’s “not illegal as long as it is not in public view.”

A few weeks later, the column printed a response from Charlton Heston. More than two decades later, I still think about it.

DEAR ABBY: Though a frequent reader (after my wife), I’ve only now found reason to write to you, in response to the lady who feared her husband’s habit of urinating on their lawn was inappropriate.

So it may be, but the fact remains that all men pee outdoors.

My best to you and continued good luck with your column.
— CHARLTON HESTON, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Once I get past the obvious joke about prying Heston’s outdoor-micturating penis from his cold, dead hands, I really just have to wonder what compelled him to write this letter. How could a world-famous actor feel so strongly about peeing outside that he’d take the time to mail a letter in support of the practice? Did no one suggest he might be better off passing up the opportunity to assert his allegiance to this particular cause?

Unfortunately for me, from Heston to his wife to (the original) Dear Abby, all the major players in this drama are now dead. As such, I don’t think I’ll ever get answers to my questions. At least now we can enjoy this bizarre occurrence together.

Footnotes:

1. I haven’t a clue why she chose the LAPD to answer this question. I don’t believe she lived in LA, nor does it appear the letter writer did, and her column was nationally syndicated. ↩︎

Recently, I came across the following sign:

I actually saw several versions of this sign, all within a few blocks of one another, and each one was similarly modified. Though I don’t have any information about this missing pet, I still kind of want to dial these people up.

• Yes, I’m calling about your lost dog sign…no, no, I’m afraid I haven’t seen the dog. I just want to know why on earth you edited your sign…Hello? HELLO?!

After discussing this with multiple people, there are two theories, both of which I quite like. The first theory is that these people have multiple small dogs, and they are very bad at keeping track of them. In this scenario, they previously lost a small dog of a different color. When it was found (or they just gave up on ever seeing it again), they collected the signs¹ and stored them. Now that a second dog is lost, they are again using these signs, slightly modified.

The second theory is that one member of the family made the signs on their own. When a second member of the family saw them, an argument began about the color of their shared dog.

“What do you mean “tan”? The dog is white.”

“White?! She’s TAN!”

“IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, SHE IS WHITE!”

It seems like these signs could be greatly improved, and the possible argument avoided, by simply including a picture of the dog. But maybe they lost this dog so quickly that they didn’t even have a photograph yet.

Footnotes:

1. As one should always do when seeking a lost pet, holding a garage sale, or anything of a similar nature. ↩︎

Update (May 22, 2021): An anonymous reader purports to have texted the number on the sign, and received this reply:

So apparently, the answer is actually that this sign was placed by a volunteer who isn’t directly associated with the dog, and who re-uses signs. Maybe we can design some sort of sign that features swappable adjectives, like SMALL/MEDIUM/BIG and WHITE/TAN/YELLOW/BROWN/BLACK. Perhaps something with a rotating wheel design…

Here’s something I spotted recently on a box from Zappos.com:

The sentiment here is essentially “We’ll get you your shoes fast, because they’ll be out of style soon!”. That doesn’t make me want to buy shoes!

Still, let us pretend that we buy into what Zappos is pitching. Specifically, they’re saying that a person should keep up with all the very latest trends, that what’s in fashion can change in the matter of a single day, and that one should never wear clothing that’s gone out of style. If all that is so, wouldn’t a package arriving tomorrow be too late?

If Zappo’s offered same day shipping, this would at least make a small amount of sense. You could get one day of use out of your new shoes before they became so passé that you wouldn’t be caught dead in them. As it stands, however, I’m going to order today, the trend is going to change overnight, and I’m going to have to place the package directly in the garbage. What a waste.

While biking to a platelet donation this morning, I spotted a large mass in a tree.

Right near the Harvard Bridge a.k.a. the MIT Bridge a.k.a. the Mass Ave Bridge a.k.a. the Smoot bridge, on Boston’s Charles River Esplanade

As followers of my Instagram account know, I am an extremely amateur birdwatcher. Despite my fairly shallow knowledge, I had a suspicion I was seeing that symbol of America, the bald eagle. I’ve previously spotted bald eagles soaring high above New England while visiting Maine and northern Vermont. However, I’ve never chanced upon one in Massachusetts, let alone within Boston city limits. And yet, there it was.

Taken from just outside the “drop zone” directly under the bird.

If the white head and piercing eyes weren’t enough of a tip-off, the hooked yellow beak and feet really sealed it. The quality of the picture above probably tells you that I was armed only with an iPhone. While I would have loved to have a zoom lens or some binoculars with me, the sighting itself was a true treat. At only 8:15 AM, my morning was already made.

I paused to snap some more pictures and another cyclist noticed me looking up. He stopped as well, and pretty soon, there was a small crowd of impromptu birders. Rewarding us for the attention, the eagle took flight and swooped briefly over the river. It alit upon a lower branch a few trees down, allowing for slightly better photographs.

After a few more shots, I used the tremendous Audubon bird guide app to play some eagle calls. The bird seemed to notice, cocking its head and looking about, but it didn’t react beyond that. That’s probably for the best, as there’s a limit to how close one really wants to get to a wild bird of prey.

I needed to get to my appointment, but in the hope that other locals might have a chance to enjoy the rare sight, I quickly posted a picture to Instagram.

I think it’s a solid shot, and the subject matter certainly elevates things. Still, there’s noise caused by digitally zooming in, and the overcast day didn’t do me any favors. As such, I was surprised when I saw these requests pop up a bit later:

I have long had a rule that you want to be on national news or no news, but never local news. Local news stories are almost uniformly terrible, along the lines of “Neighbors squawk and squabble over noise from backyard chickens”. I was momentarily hesitant, but I eventually acquiesced. Ultimately, I think something like this doesn’t count as actually being on local news, though it’s a bit close for comfort.

While perusing an assortment of out-of-town baseball games on the MLB app earlier this month, I found myself quite confused. In multiple markets, games were being broadcast by regional sports channels I’d never heard of before, all with “Bally Sports” in their name. A bit of research led me to the Bally Sports wikipedia page, which included this information.

The Bally Sports Regional Networks are a group of regional sports networks in the United States owned by Diamond Sports Group, a joint-venture company of the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Entertainment Studios.…The networks were formerly known as Fox Sports Networks and operated by News Corporation for most of their existence. They were acquired by Diamond Sports from The Walt Disney Company in 2019, as Disney was required to divest them by the U.S. Department of Justice as a condition of their own acquisition of 21st Century Fox.

My confusion was a result of the fact that Bally Sports is a brand-new entity, one which came into existence less than a month ago, on March 31, 2021. In years past, these games had all been broadcast on Fox Sports channels, but that much more established name was now gone. In its place were channels like “Bally Spots West” and “Bally Sports Sun”.

More recently, I noticed an even more confusing change on iOS. Specifically, a new app was appearing in my updates:

I’ve never downloaded a Bally Sports app, and yet I was being offered an update to one. If I had auto-updates turned on, things would’ve been even worse, as my phone would have suddenly sported a new app I’d never consciously downloaded.

That icon is what really caught my eye though. It’s attempting to do a whole lot of work, and none of it successfully. Here’s a closer look:

Eagle-eyed viewers might recognize the Fox logo underneath there. Still, even knowing that Fox Sports is now Bally Sports, it’s not really clear what’s happening here. It almost seems like Bally Sports is becoming Fox Sports, rather than the reverse. This was a clever idea for some designer to try, but the execution fails utterly. It’s either unrecognizable, or it’s conveying the wrong message.

Meanwhile, there’s no text explanation of the change whatsoever. The app’s update text could easily include a simple line like “Fox Sports Go is now Bally Sports”, but as you can see above, it doesn’t. The app’s description also fails to mention Fox Sports Go. Finally, the first run of the application makes no reference to the change either. Explanations in any of these places (or all of them) would be far easier to understand than a too clever by half modified icon, and yet the app’s developers somehow failed to include them.

Amusingly, the App Store screenshots do provide a tiny hint about the change, as they still show the “Fox Sports Go” logo. However, this is undoubtedly an oversight, rather than an effort to inform users.

Ultimately, I’m betting a whole lot of people will wind up wondering how the hell the “Bally Sports” app got on their phone. They’ll worry that their phone has been hacked, and they’re likely to delete the app entirely, all for want of a few simple words of explanation.

The capper on this is it’s probably going to happen again in the future. When I first read about the new “Bally Sports”, I assumed Bally’s owned a stake in the eponymous sports networks. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Instead, their involvement appears to be limited to the $85 million they forked over for naming rights. That deal with Sinclair runs for a decade, so perhaps we can look forward to similar confusion in 2031, when Sinclair sells the naming rights to some other entity entirely.