#1The Monologue
The United States and Iran have paused airstrikes for the second consecutive day, as diplomats push toward a ceasefire agreement. Analysts are calling the pause a promising sign...and also the first time in recent memory that the phrase "let's circle back on the bombing" has been used as a diplomatic strategy.
Re: NPR
Spain's World Cup heroes Fabian Ruiz and Gavi were honored this week by their hometown in the province of Seville, which has a tradition of gifting local champions their body weight in fresh tomatoes. The players weighed in at a combined three hundred and thirty-eight pounds. The tomatoes weighed three hundred and thirty-eight pounds. In a related development...no one in Seville appears to have any tomatoes left.
Re: UPI
The National Weather Service has issued an Extreme Heat Warning for eastern Kansas, with heat index values expected to reach one hundred and fourteen degrees today. Officials urge residents to stay cool and hydrated. They have not addressed why residents are in Kansas. That question remains open.
Re: Kansas Public Radio
Residents of Gold Hill, Colorado awoke to find that the all-night horn honking in their neighborhood was coming from a black bear that had wandered into an unlocked SUV, somehow shut the door behind itself, and spent the night leaning on the steering wheel. A wildlife officer eventually freed it using a rope from a safe distance. The bear fled into the woods. The side panel and airbag did not survive.
A worker in Wilmington, Illinois spent five hours stranded inside a one hundred and thirty foot tall gas station sign after his lift malfunctioned. The nearest rescue lift tall enough to reach him was in Joliet, seventeen miles away, and had to be escorted by State Police. The worker spent the afternoon giving a thumbs up from inside the sign while crews figured it out.
Traffic cameras in Jonesboro, Arkansas caught twenty-year-old Christopher Hellenthal helping a man in a wheelchair cross a busy intersection — while dressed head to toe in a Spider-Man costume. Hellenthal had worn the suit to his job at a trampoline park that morning for superhero day. He clocked out, kept the costume on, and apparently just went about his day.
The Florida Department of Motor Vehicles mailed seventy-seven-year-old Nancy Dello Stritto of Pompano Beach a randomly generated license plate whose alphanumeric sequence, when read phonetically, spells a two-word phrase that became the talk of her senior community. Nancy went, in her words, "ballistic." She then kept the plate. The Florida DMV blocked more than five hundred deliberately offensive plate requests in 2023 alone. This one came in under the radar — using math.
#7The Groaner
I'm reading a book about anti-gravity... It's impossible to put down.
