Category: Knowledge

“6 People Whose Lives Were Destroyed By Social Media”

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This list is not especially good

… but I’m posting it for two reasons:

(1) I object to the use of the passive voice in the headline.

These are six people who destroyed their own lives.

  • The first five made the posts that disrupted their lives.
  • The last guy did not. He was destroyed by a post made by somebody else, but it was a post of him throwing a public tantrum, so he had only himself to blame. Let’s face it, there are phone cameras and/or security cameras everywhere, so one must assume that all public interactions will be recorded (and many private ones as well).

(2) Carlos Danger!

I haven’t thought about Carlos Danger in years, but now he’s appeared on my radar twice in two days. Today I saw the above list. Yesterday I read that the ex-con and registered sex offender, now 60 years old, is attempting a comeback on New York’s city council.

The Atlantic had a cynical take on this. They suggested semi-facetiously that it doesn’t matter any more because he is already single-handedly responsible for the fall of Western civilization. His sexting scandal re-opened an investigation into Hilary Clinton, which in turn propelled Donald Trump into the White House.

“10 of the most secure places on earth”

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I was not familiar with this fascinating item from the list:

This bunker 200 feet beneath Iron Mountain houses 1.7 square feet of vaults which contain the charred remains of Flight 93, Edison’s patent for the light bulb, and Princess Diana’s Last Will and Testament. The US government is the biggest tenant, and the identities of 95% of vault owners are confidential. Sony Music, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corbis all have vaults there. Thousands of historic master recordings, photo negatives, and original film reels live here. Iron Mountain is also home to Room 48, a data center backing up some of America’s biggest companies.

Most of the above paragraph is accurate (obviously the 1.7 sq ft is a typo), but I researched this a bit and found that Iron Mountain is not an actual mountain, but the name of a storage company. One of their many storage facilities is a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, and that’s what is pictured in the original link. The company also has many above-ground storage facilities.

The underground facility houses such cultural treasures as the entire Getty photographic collection (25 million historical images), the Universal Music collection, cans full of film, old books, old costumes, etc.

Elon Musk recently spread misinformation about this place.

And then the speed—the limiting factor is the speed—at which the mine-shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government and the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire — doesn’t that sound crazy?

It sounds crazy because it is – so crazy that nobody can figure out where he got this idea. The inefficient processing of government retirements has nothing to do with elevators. The facility does not have an elevator!

The video below is a tour of the facility, as conducted by the company that runs it. It’s a fascinating place!



Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Grandson of the 10th President, Is Dead at 96

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This fact seems incredible:

In just three generations, his family spanned the terms of every U.S. president. When his grandfather was born, George Washington had just become president.

His father was born in 1853 (34 years before my oldest grandparent).

Most of us knew or know our grandparents. When Harrison Tyler was born, his grandfather had been dead for 66 years!

The trick? President John Tyler, as in “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” was 63 when Lyon Tyler was born to his second wife. In turn, Lyon Tyler was 75 when Harrison Tyler was born to his second wife.

The 10 Most Desolate Places on Earth

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A paragraph about #6 on the list:

Officially the most remote place on earth is Chang Tang, Tibet. In 2009, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre named the Tibetan Plateau as the world’s most remote place. It would take three weeks to get to any city with a detectable population – Lhasa or Korla. You could drive one day, and then would have to walk the other 20 days. Rough terrain, freezing temperatures, and the utter desolation lend a definite air of “do not disturb”.

It has been reported that Kim Kardashian got her law school degree.

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She got her degree from the prestigious Close Cover Before Striking Institute by drawing the picture of the lawyer. If she had drawn the pirate instead, she could now be looting off the Somali coast.

“So, I am, like, totally dee Captain now.”

OK, I’ll stop fuckin’ around for a sec. This has been widely misreported, so let’s cover what she did and didn’t do. It’s not as impressive as some headlines would have you believe, but it is a genuine accomplishment.

First, she never went to law school, and she received no degree at all. Indeed she has no college degree of any type, and I’m not sure she ever graduated from high school. Her Wikipedia page just says that she “attended” high school.

She did, however, complete her legal studies through an alternative to traditional law school. In California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, you can become a lawyer without attending law school if you complete a structured apprenticeship or law office study program. This program allowed her to apprentice with a law firm and study the law while working under the supervision of a licensed lawyer.

If you were a boy scout, you may remember how you moved up in rank or got a merit badge. There was a checklist of things you had to accomplish, and your mentor had to sign off when you met each requirement. The law office program works the same way. The mentor has to review your work and certify that you have accomplished every one of the things you’d have to do in law school.

Kim has completed her legal education, passed the “Baby Bar” (First-Year Law Student’s Examination) on her fourth try, and recently passed the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE), which is required to practice law in California. She still needs to pass the California Bar Exam to become a licensed attorney in California. She’ll have to grind hard to do that, because the exam has a 44% failure rate, despite the fact that all of the testees did go to law school and most of them study their asses off to pass.

You may remember that Kim’s dad was a lawyer. He became famous, at least briefly, for defending his close friend OJ Simpson, “Uncle Juice,” as he was called by the Kardashian character in American Crime Story. (David Schwimmer played Kardashian. Cuba Gooding played Uncle Juice.)



Harvard bought a Magna Carta copy for $27. It turned out to be an original.

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Harvard Law School bought a copy of the Magna Carta from legal book dealer Sweet & Maxwell for $27.50 in 1946. Nearly eight decades later, two researchers have discovered it’s actually an original version.

One clarification. This is not the original Magna Carta, as implied by my headline. That was “signed” in 1215, and then parchment copies were distributed throughout the kingdom. Four of those 1215 copies are still around today, but that’s not what Harvard has. The Harvard library has a confirmation issued by Edward I in 1300. (That’s still a big deal. It’s an official 700-year-old version of the Magna Fucking Carta!)

I placed “signed” in quotations because scholars believe that the first version of the document was not signed ceremonially by King John, as represented in lore, but rather stamped with the royal seal.

What’s the buzz from Cannes 2025?

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From the comment area:

The Cannes festival is happening now (as you may know) and many films so far seem to have had good doses of nudity and sex that seem to have been quite good and there are still more films that have not yet been released in Cannes and have potential. The most notorious so far was Jennifer Lawrence in the film Die My Love, it was confirmed that she has scenes of full frontal nudity and some wild sex scenes.

MUBI has acquired the rights to “Die My Love” in the U.S. and multiple other territories in a deal totaling $24 million. MUBI became a major player in our annual nude scene poll last year by distributing both The Substance and Motel Destino, thus giving them three of the top seven slots!

The Spot reported:

Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence gives herself to the character with every fiber of her being, is lavish in her revealingness, and certainly goes further in her performance and what she is willing to show of her body than one would expect from a star of her stature.

Accion Cine reported:

At the heart of this harrowing nightmare is Jennifer Lawrence, who has experience as a devastated mother thanks to Aronofsky’s Mother , who is completely devoted (à la Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin ) and completely dedicated to a project she believes in.

IndieWire reported:

Seeing “Die My Love” at Cannes, European critics will be unfazed by Lawrence’s unvarnished and very naked turn, though in the U.S., she will be commended for her “bravery.”

The Times reported:

Grace suffers from a very specific movie-borne malady, the symptoms of which include throwing herself through plate-glass doors, masturbating incessantly, crawling through the woods like a tiger, masturbating some more, smashing mirrors with her forehead and ultimately becoming so sexually frustrated that she manifests a sexy hunk on a motorbike who repeatedly rides through her garden (not a metaphor) and entices her to come over to his house and to take a spin on his mean machine (metaphor).

Party like it’s 1999, because …

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The universe is expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought

The bad news: I misheard the lyrics to that song and partied like it was 1929.

The good news: I live in the basement, so I easily survived the jump out of my window.

Why facts are boring:

Contrary to popular belief, there was no widespread wave of suicides, let alone people jumping from buildings, immediately following the 1929 crash.