Despite the confirmed demise of all aboard the ill-fated Titan submersible, the story itself won’t die, because the media won’t let it. And so it is that we get a headline like this:

• Titan submersible implosion updates: OceanGate says it has suspended operations

Right, I mean, of course. This is not news, it is surely the expected outcome when a company kills both its customers and its CEO. When the submersible first went missing, the world watched the rescue efforts and collectively thought “Like hell would I ever go on that thing”. Still, if a miraculous rescue had occurred, it’s probable a few additional rich outlier idiots would’ve signed up for future journeys. You know what they say: A fool and his money are soon imploded at the bottom of the ocean.

But once it was eventually determined that the sub had been lost, that was surely it for OceanGate. This was perhaps the most-widely covered story about people traveling in an unusual vessel since the balloon boy, and there was just no way the final result was going to be good for business.

And yet, the aforelinked story includes this:

The company had two more expeditions to the Titanic scheduled for June 2024, the website said.

Ah, yes, no. No. No, no, no. No.

Out in San Francisco, driverless cars from Waymo and Cruise have been providing taxi services for some time. Now, ahead of a meeting where the companies may be authorized to start charging for the service, a group of activists have started fighting back with a delightful orange weapon: traffic cones.

The group got the idea for the conings by chance. The person claims a few of them walking together one night saw a cone on the hood of an AV, which appeared disabled…[T]hey found that a cone on a hood renders the vehicles little more than a multi-ton hunk of useless metal. The group suspects the cone partially blocks the LIDAR detectors on the roof of the car, in much the same way that a human driver wouldn’t be able to safely drive with a cone on the hood. But there is no human inside to get out and simply remove the cone, so the car is stuck.

[Link]

While I’m hopeful about a possible future where driverless technology allows us to have far fewer private cars and far safer streets for everyone, forcing the general public to take part in testing without any consent is definitely not ideal. Mostly, though, I’m just tickled by the fact that a simple traffic cone can disable these things so effectively.

OK, if Yevgeny Prigozhin really took a post-mutiny meeting with Putin, then my understanding of the recent events in Russia has hit a new low.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin after the failed Wagner group mutiny last month, the Kremlin says.

Prigozhin, who heads the mercenary group, was among 35 Wagner commanders invited to the meeting in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added.

This is extremely difficult to believe.

I’ve been fascinated by Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s brief-and-aborted uprising in Russia, because it is nearly incomprehensible to me. I keep trying to map it onto American politics, but it just does not line up well at all. What if the CEO of Blackwater (now called “Constellis”, but come on, “Blackwater” is perfect in its ominousness) announced he and his mercenaries were marching on Washington, D.C. with the intention of removing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin? I think they’d be stopped and/or obliterated. It would most certainly not end with exile in Canada due to the interceding of Justin Trudeau.

After a decent amount of reading, the best I can figure is Prigozhin believed he had enough support to, at a minimum, take out the military leaders who were planning to disband and subsume the Wagner Group. He thus headed for Moscow, but when that support failed to materialize, he reversed course and took the least bad option available to him. That seems to make a certain kind of sense, even if it sounds foolhardy.

But if all that is true, why on earth did he come back to Russia to collect confiscated items?

“It’s not the end of Prigozhin,” the businessman said, speaking Wednesday on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They returned all his money to him. More than this, today they even gave back to him his honorary pistol, the Glock, and another weapon. He came to take it himself.”

That is a perplexing move, to say the least, not to mention seemingly extremely dangerous!

If both Prigozhin and Putin are alive and well when we ring in 2024, I will be very surprised but also exactly as confused by the whole thing as I am at present.

Someday, we might be able to use suffocating humidity to cool (and dehumidify) our homes.

It’s Independence Day here in America, but also in one small area of Denmark, where the locals celebrate July 4th too. Learn all about Rebildfesten.

Update (July 4, 2023): As friend-of-the-site Adam E. notes, the following paragraph betrays the fact that the linked article dates back to 2014:

Still, he says, political matters are rarely at issue now, partially because the Danes admired President Bill Clinton and supported the NATO force in Afghanistan. Nowadays, almost all attendees are happy to simply enjoy the festivities, soak in the scenery, and be merry.

Prior to posting, I did search for a more recent article on Rebildfesten, but came up dry. We’ll just have to enjoy the incongruity of the above text here in the future.