Saturday and Sunday 4/15/ & 16/23
Celebrate:
Saturday
Anime Day
ASL Day (American Sign Language)
Husband Appreciation Day
Jackie Robinson Day
McDonald's Day
Microvolunteering Day
National Glazed Spiral Ham Day
National Griper's Day
National Laundry Day
National Rubber Eraser Day
National That Sucks Day
Take a Wild Guess Day
Titanic Remembrance Day
World Art Day
World Circus Day
Sunday
Day of the Mushroom
Foursquare Day - yes the app which kind of became Swarm eventually
Go Fly a Kite Day
Good Deeds Day
National Bean Counters' Day
National Eggs Benedict Day
National Healthcare Decisions Day
National Librarian Day
National Orchid Day
National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day
Save the Elephant Day
Teach Your Daughter to Volunteer Day
World Semicolon Day
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Tax Day is usually April 15th, yesterday,. but only if it falls on a weekday. Since the 15th is a Saturday, that means Monday would be the deadline. But we actually get one EXTRA day this time.
Tax Day is not until Tuesday the 18th this year, because Monday is a holiday in D.C. It's Emancipation Day, the anniversary of when slavery ended in the District of Columbia.
It happened April 16th, 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation. Since it falls on a Sunday this year, it's celebrated on Monday. And all Americans get one more day to file their taxes, or ask for an extension.
A poll for tax season found about half of us are doing our own taxes this year. 48% said just thinking about them can be headache-inducing.
If you file electronically with no red flags . . . and choose direct deposit . . . the IRS says you should get your refund within three weeks.
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Police in Philadelphia are looking for thieves who broke into an unmarked truck that was parked in a Walmart parking lot early yesterday morning.
It was carrying 7.5 MILLION DIMES, which would be worth $750,000.
The thieves were able to get away with around two million dimes, which would be worth $200,000. But some reports say they could've taken even more.
The dimes were headed from the Philadelphia Mint to Florida. The driver parked the truck in the lot to sleep somewhere . . . and the theft happened while it was there unattended overnight.
It's unclear if the thieves knew what was inside.
According to the U.S. Mint, one dime weighs 2.3 grams . . . meaning the thieves stole more than 10,000 pounds of dimes.
This begs an interesting question: If the thieves DIDN'T know what was inside, would 7.5 million dimes be a GOOD surprise or a BAD one?
On one hand, even though the coins are heavy, it's pure cash, so it conveniently skips the step of having to sell whatever you're stealing.
That said, what are you going to do with a million dimes without attracting attention to yourself?
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The airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was scheduled to reopen this morning after more than a day of cleaning up from a historic deluge that saw more than two feet of rain fall within six hours Wednesday, leading to flash flooding across the city. A National Weather Service meteorologist said that much rain falling that quickly has "about a 1 in 1,000 chance of happening within a given year."
24-hour total of 25.9 inches set a record for the rainiest 24 hours in the state's recorded history.
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The music industry does not appear to be fans of artificial intelligence technology. Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, is pushing streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block AI apps from accessing its extensive catalog. The record label said it doesn't want those businesses to train the tech to mirror the voices and styles of actual artists.
"We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists or other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists," a UMG spokesperson told Financial Times.
The news comes after several videos of AI systems mimicking existing artists have gone viral on social media, including [producer and rapper Hit-Boy recently posting an AI-generated song that sounds identical to Ye West.
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From the conversation.com
A linguistic arms race is raging online – and it isn’t clear who’s winning.
On one side are social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. These sites have become better and better at identifying and removing language and content that violates their community standards.
Social media users are on the other side, and they’ve come up with coded terminology designed to evade algorithmic detection. These expressions are collectively referred to as “algospeak.”
New terms like these are just the latest development in the history of linguistic concealment. Typically, such codes have been employed by small groups. Given the reach of social media, however, algospeak has the potential to more broadly influence everyday language.
To get past content filters, social media users are making use of coded language instead of the banned terms.
References to sex, for example, might be replaced by an innocuous word like “mascara.” “Unalive” has become an agreed-upon way to refer to death or suicide. “Accountant” takes the place of sex worker. “Corn” stands in for porn. “Leg booty” is LGBTQ.
This by the way is not a new idea. One of the examples is Leetspeak evolved in the 1980s, as intrepid internet pioneers ventured online to use bulletin board systems. Some of the workarounds they created to evade moderation are still being used today on sites like TikTok.
This form of linguistic subterfuge typically involves using numbers and symbols as stand-ins for letters. “3” resembles a backwards capital E, “1” looks like a lowercase l, “$” can take the place of the letter s, and so on. The term “leet” itself is often written as “1337.”
https://theconversation.com/what-is-algospeak-inside-the-newest-version-of-linguistic-subterfuge-203460?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter
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Headline - Engineer builds custom bike with square wheels using discarded bicycle parts.
I'll just say...think tank..the wheels don't go around, it's a chain wrapped in tire rubber that goes around the square.
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OOPS!!
Arnold Schwarzenegger filmed himself filling in a pothole near his Los Angeles home, captioning the video “Today, after the whole neighborhood has been upset about this giant pothole that’s been screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks, I went out with my team and fixed it. I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it. Here you go.” Los Angeles city officials responded, saying it’s actually “a service trench that relates to active, permitted work being performed at the location by SoCal Gas,” which now has to be re-dug (is that a word?).
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"Time" magazine released its list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2023.
As usual, they divided them into several categories. Here are the most famous names:
Artists: Michael B. Jordan . . . Drew Barrymore . . . Ali Wong . . . Austin Butler . . . Aubrey Plaza . . . Salma Hayek . . . Zoe Saldana . . . Judy Blume . . . Colin Farrell . . . Lea Michele . . . Neil Gaiman.
Icons: Jennifer Coolidge . . . Ke Huy Quan . . . Pedro Pascal . . . Brittney Griner . . . King Charles . . . Salman Rushdie.
Pioneers: Doja Cat . . . skier Mikaela Shiffrin . . . Bella Hadid . . . YouTuber and philanthropist MrBeast.
Leaders: Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska . . . Senator Mitch McConnell . . . President Biden . . . Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito . . . Cindy McCain.
Titans: Angela Bassett . . . soccer star Lionel Messi . . . Padma Lakshmi . . . Beyoncé . . . Patrick Mahomes . . . Elon Musk.
Innovators: Disney boss Bob Iger . . . Natasha Lyonne . . . comedian Jerrod Carmichael.
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"Cocaine Bear" may have been BASED on a true story, but it's far from an actual true story.
But you can learn that true story NOW, as long as you have Peacock. Because the documentary "Cocaine Bear: The True Story" just dropped today.
Sadly, the bear is hardly even a part of the true story. Basically, it ate the cocaine and DIED. And that's it.
It's more about Andrew C. Thornton the Second, a paratrooper and police officer who got involved in international drug smuggling, bailed from an airplane in Georgia with millions of dollars in coke, and died when his parachute failed.
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