The Ghost in Your Spam Folder
It's National Candy Corn Day, honoring the one candy that gets manufactured, shipped, and thrown out without ever passing through a mouth. It's also National Publicist Day, and if you're wondering who came up with that one, congratulations, you cracked it. Candy corn has a publicist too. How else do you explain a hundred and forty years of press for a wax triangle nobody eats?
Right. The news, such as it is.
"User funds are safe!" is what Changpeng Zhao, pardoned by Trump last year, posted while Binance had withdrawals locked, so the funds are safe the way a car is safe at the impound lot. The crew analysts pinned it on is still sitting on $2.4 billion nobody can freeze, which makes a North Korean hacker the only person who can make a withdrawal. 🦆
Trump said in August the oil companies were "making too much money," and congressional Democrats found his own oil and gas holdings rose to as much as $81.6 million. He's mad at them like a guy mad at a slot machine that won't stop paying. 🦆
Jakarta counted its firefighters and cloud-seeders, more than 72,000, and when a monitor said 1.9 million hectares burned, the government that owns the hectares neither confirmed nor rejected it. The dead got counted in Helsinki, because the fire was easier to see from Finland than from the presidential palace. 🦆
"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."— Kurt Vonnegut
In the 13-month gap, the VA's rescues raised the payment 63% of the time, against 2% at Fannie Mae, so congratulations to the VA on finally beating Fannie Mae at something. Any veteran behind on a VA-backed mortgage should ask the servicer for the new Partial Claim Program, since the VA gave servicers until Nov. 28 to offer it and most still haven't. 🦆
Trump's Medicaid agency read a law exempting the "medically frail" and decided the frailty also had to "significantly impair" them. Twenty-five states had to sue to get an adverb out of a rule. Anyone on expansion Medicaid with a disability, serious illness or substance use disorder should get a current diagnosis on file and ask their state Medicaid office how to claim the exemption before January. 🦆
The Justice Department's own status update on the warrant is "partially executed," which means they searched the house, questioned her sister, and are now waiting on the crime. The judge kept it sealed from 14 news outlets, so the public can't see what they were looking for, and apparently neither can they. 🦆
NASA has spent years and a fortune working out how to bring one rock back from Mars, and Mars just lobbed one into Mali for free. The team has it narrowed to 13 possible sites, which for a package postmarked 4.1 billion years ago beats UPS. 🦆
Reddit's whole product is strangers answering each other's questions for free, and the growth plan is to card the strangers. Every "has anyone's dishwasher made this noise" thread from 2014 will live behind a password. 🦆
Shearwaters head home up to 15 degrees off, like a man striding out of Heathrow convinced it's 6 a.m. The mistake costs them a few kilometers, and the birds get home anyway without once telling anyone how tired they are. 🦆
That's the firehose. Keep your savings somewhere Pyongyang hasn't checked yet, and understand that's a short list. Log in to read the comments, and then don't read the comments. Pack a compass for the redeye and don't trust it either. Tomorrow is Halloween, which shares the date with World Cities Day and National Caramel Apple Day, so the United Nations and the dentists both get a float. Halloween is the one night a year adults admit the costume was the real personality all along.
Until next time —
Ya roasted!
— Roastie