Last April I ordered some non-stick aluminum foil from Walmart.  They delivered a roll of normal foil. Not what I needed, not what I ordered.  So I returned it at the store for a refund.  Yesterday I got a text that I had a FedEx delivery that would need a signature.  Weird.  I wasn’t expecting anything.

I tried to track it and it was a duplicate tracking number.  The number was another delivery to me from April.  But I couldn’t get any more information from the FedEx site.  I figured it was a mistake, or possibly some scam that I couldn’t figure out.

FedEx just delivered — a roll of aluminum foil.  No box, no bag.  All covered with stickers with various scan codes.  I’m pretty sure it’s the same roll they delivered here in April.  It certainly seems worse for wear. I wonder where it has been the last few months.

Anybody need a roll of aluminum foil?  I’m thinking to trying to bring it back to Walmart, just to see what happens.

From Giffords.org, a site run by Gabby Giffords, a former US Congresswoman who was shot in an attempted assassination in 2011.  The link below is to a long page filled with charts and graphs on guns in America.  It’s very well done, but very grim.  I got halfway through it a few weeks back, intending to finish it later.  Worth your time.

Two things that struck me.  More than half of gun deaths are suicides. 85% are male.  Most are white (although other races are over-represented).  So the most common gun death in America is a white male suicide.  Not what most people probably think of first, if at all.

GUN VIOLENCE STATISTICS

Google owned self-driving taxi company is buying Chinese cars, even though you can’t.  BTW, I would never trust the self driving on my Tesla but have enjoyed using Waymo.  From The Cool Down.

Waymo imported 3,200 Zeekr vans despite a 127.5% tariff on Chinese EVs

More squander.  From Jalopnik.

Strategic Oil Reserves So Low, The U.S. Risks Damaging The Salt Caverns Where We Stash Our Emergency Oil

In the late 1970s, probably 1979, I was taking a high school chemistry class.  One day the whole class, and classes across the region took a standardized chemistry test.  My teacher, Mr Serpas, showed us a t-shirt that would go to the person who scored the highest in the class.  It was a brown shirt (this was the 70s) with a big picture of a guy from perhaps the 1700s or 1800s with a big head of curly hair.  Maybe a bit like Bach or Isaac Newton.

I scored the highest in the class and got the t-shirt. I wore it a lot.  The picture on the front was (by my recollection all these years later) Jean Claude Emile Baptiste Litre, the person the litre is named after.

This morning I looked it up on a whim.  I was a bit off on the name.  It also seems there was never any such person.  It was all an elaborate prank.  I guess someone who made the t-shirts from the River Parishes high school chemistry survey that year fell for it.  And I guess I did too, at least until today.

Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre

And it has been retracted. But not after being picked up by the press and quoted in congressional testimony.  The things wrong with this paper are too numerous to summarize here. But read it yourself.  It’s got lots of numbers but it is pretty layman-friendly.  Upshot: covid mRNA vaccines are very effective and very safe (but nearly everyone knows this already).

Guest post: A terrible academic paper has fueled renewed anti-vax journalism – it must be retracted

I always assumed that if you already had a gas car, the best thing to do environmentally, was to just keep it.  After all it takes lots of energy to make a car.  A new study says: nope.  It’s better for the climate if old gas cars are just scrapped and swapped for EVs.  When you factor in the costs (and death tolls) of droughts, floods and heatwaves accumulate these sorts of solutions would seem to be attractive.  Perhaps they always were.  From Inside EV.

The Results Are In: Scrapping Your Gas Car For An EV Is Better For The Climate

I saw this documentary a few months ago and I keep thinking about it.  It’s only 40 minutes long and very well done.  If you think you know what happened in the Watergate Scandal, you need to watch this.

The Martha Mitchell Effect

On a somewhat personal note, during a recent surge in rotavirus cases, I became sick.  It quickly spiralled and I ended up spending a week in the ICU.  According to the docs I’m very lucky to still be here.

This week the Trump FDA decided to remove rotavirus vaccines from its list of recommended childhood vaccines, along with COVID and others.  People need to understand that our government is (literally) trying to kill us.  I wish I was joking.  From WSJ via Raw Story.

‘Thanks, Dr. Trump’: Wall Street Journal editors bash Trump’s anti-vaccine crusade

Was at the self checkout at a local supermarket.  It was only for 15 items or less and we had maybe 18 items.  But the full service checkout lines were jammed up with people with carts full of stuff.  I wondered if the system would let us scan more than 15 items.  If not I figured I would just pay in two batches.

We also bought two sandwiches and a pint of coleslaw at the deli.  The guy making the sandwichs stuck labels on the polystyrene clamshell containers and told us we could take two bags of chips that came with the sandwiches, a lunch special.  So we did.

Halfway through checking out an alarm goes off.  I noticed there is an overhead video of us scanning and bagging groceries.  Two green boxes on the screen highlight me putting the two small bags of chips directly in our shopping bags.

A woman who worked at the store came over and asked: why didn’t you scan those chips? (but in a nice, even tired, way).  They came with the sandwiches. Well, you still have to scan them.  Ok, doesn’t really make sense, but whatever.  The woman used her badge, overriding the AI shoplifting detector, and let us finish bagging. I never did scan the chips.