Hasan Minhaj’s “Emotional Truths” - In his standup specials, the former “Patriot Act” host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him? - link
The Rage of the Toddler Caucus on Capitol Hill - Not even a Biden impeachment can soothe them out of a government shutdown. - link
A.I. and the Next Generation of Drone Warfare - The Pentagon’s Replicator initiative envisions swarms of low-cost autonomous machines that could remake the American arsenal. - link
The Futility of the Never Trump Billionaires - Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about the difficulties facing Republican Party factions that hope to put forth a nominee who can stand as a strong alternative to Donald Trump. - link
Lessons in Conquering Child Poverty - In the past few years, we’ve found out how to greatly reduce economic deprivation among the young, and how to greatly increase it. - link
You don’t need to be a tourist to appreciate where you live.
Despite having lived in Paris for nearly 15 years, Vanessa Grall gets a thrill when she encounters a new street. The city, Grall says, is like an “open-air museum,” full of unique buildings and historical markers that send her down Google rabbit holes, leading her from one location to the next. The author of the travel books Don’t Be a Tourist in Paris and Don’t Be a Tourist in New York, Grall is practiced in the art of discovering the undiscovered in popular destinations, including her own city. For Grall, the key is remaining curious about her surroundings, even as the sheen of a new location fades. “It’s a combination of keeping yourself motivated,” she says, “and keeping yourself curious.”
Tourists often get a bad rap, but, in a broad sense, they have the right idea when it comes to venturing into new places. Given the limited nature of vacations, tourists often are urgent in their exploration. Armed with lists and tagged locations on Google Maps, travelers usually have some semblance of a plan. When it comes to our own cities and towns, we have our preferences and go-tos; we’re always on the go without room for spontaneity. Moving through our hometowns with a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity can be just as restorative as traveling to another destination — that is, if we’re able to detach for a moment from our routines.
With a shift in perspective, you can take a visitor’s approach to the place you live, embracing both new-to-you locales and, yes, even tourist destinations.
Recontextualizing limited free time can help you maximize your days off. A 2020 study found that when people treated their weekends like a vacation — prioritizing things like enjoying good food and staying present in the moment instead of spending the entire weekend doing housework — they were happier.
This shift in mindset requires intentionality: purposefully seeking out unique and novel experiences means straying from routine. “So much of appreciating the city you’re in,” says freelance writer Christine Speer Lejeune, “is literally remembering to open your eyes to it.” In her quest to explore like a tourist in Philadelphia, where she lives, Lejeune reminds herself to look around at the architecture and historical locations she passes on her commute. “You’re walking past the building where Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence, and you grow very numb to it because you see it every day,” she says. “Looking at these places that you see every day can spark that reminder to appreciate what’s before us.”
An easy way to take a vacationer’s approach to the area where you live is to think about what you like to do while traveling and to seek out those experiences at home, says Princess Francois Estevez, an executive director of a nonprofit and travel blogger. If your past trips have included wine tastings, dinner reservations at top-tier restaurants, or excursions to national parks, see if any of these adventures are replicable nearby. Are there local wineries or tasting rooms you’ve never been to? What restaurants are on your bucket list? Is there a species of bird only found in a wilderness area near you?
To help you home in on the type of adventure to prioritize, Grall suggests mining your psyche to curate an experience based on your mood. Feeling like a character in a movie? Try a DIY tour of locations in your city that have been featured in TV and film. (Websites like Movie-Locations.com and FindThatLocation.com list popular locations by state and city.) Mending a broken heart? Maybe seek out a comedy show or an extremely decadent restaurant.
Just like for other travel experiences, make a budget for your tourist excursions. If a blowout meal isn’t in the cards, opt for a park picnic with snacks that are unique to your city. Or you could create a staycation fund to cover future minor extravagances. In the 2020 study on treating weekends like vacations, people did not spend more money on their staycation days. Being a tourist in your own town is more about the mindset rather than what you choose to do.
Rather than roaming aimlessly, experts suggest having a loose itinerary with at least one location or activity you’d like to pursue, then leaving the rest up to chance. Start with identifying a neighborhood you’d like to explore — rather than the town as a whole — that you’re relatively unfamiliar with. Do a quick Google search for the area based on the type of activity or mood you’re looking to achieve — a day of shopping, a children’s museum — to create a short list of potential sites. Then see where the wind takes you. Maybe there’s a public garden on the other side of the city you’ve always wanted to check out; prioritize a visit there, then stroll around the surrounding neighborhood, popping into boutiques or cafes that interest you. “The perfect balance is a mix of one thing locked in with a little bit of cushion around it to explore,” Lejeune says.
Culturally rife areas for exploring include historic districts, says Carolina Florez, a freelancer and professional tour guide in Miami. That’s where you’ll find many museums and historical markers.
If you can, try to walk, since you’ll be better able to observe and discover businesses in your travels, Francois Estevez says. “I sometimes pick an avenue and just walk down 20 blocks,” she says.
If you live in a less walkable area, try biking to a new neighborhood (see if your town has a bike share program if you don’t have a set of wheels), or take public transportation or drive to your preferred part of town. Again, choosing a specific destination for your explorations gives you a purpose for traveling to the neighborhood and a starting point.
Some locals may be averse to the typical tourist destinations in their areas, but, according to Florez, “there’s a reason that they are so popular and that they’re so busy and that tourists want to go there.” Florez hosts monthly locals-only tours specifically for Miami residents. Although the locations she highlights are the same as tours geared toward visitors, guests are often surprised by how much they didn’t know about the city where they live.
Your local tourism board will have online guides to popular tourist destinations, like major museums, historic sites, and landmarks. Local organizations, such as the Miami Center for Architecture & Design and the Los Angeles Conservancy, host low-cost or free walking tours. Florez also recommends hopping on a tour so you can learn the history behind the locations, too. You could even book a local tour guide for a small-group tour that can be personalized to your interests.
Florez suggests following your favorite museums or cultural institutions on social media or subscribing to their newsletters so you can stay up to date on events they’re hosting that might allow you to see one of your go-to locations in a new light.
Even the most experienced locals can find off-the-beaten-path adventures. Grall likes to scour bookstores for vintage guidebooks to see what locations still exist or what replaced certain businesses. “Go on a treasure hunt to find what’s still open,” she says. She also finds cemeteries exciting and untraditional tourist locations. Between the architecture and the names on the headstones, cemeteries can inspire curiosity. “If you take a name on a gravestone, it could really take you down the rabbit hole and you can play detective,” Grall says.
While geared toward travelers, Francois Estevez suggests Airbnb Experiences, which can include boat tours and even photo shoots. “Booking a fun professional photo shoot is a cute way to explore from a unique angle and also walk out with amazing photos that you can have of your hometown,” she says.
Don’t forget to strike up a conversation with other locals — a barista, a museum employee, the person next to you on the bus. When traveling, it’s common to seek out recommendations from locals. At home, however, we’re less inclined. Whether for reasons having to do with routine, time, or lack of curiosity about where we live, it’s worth engaging with the people who populate our cities. You never know what you might learn.
“Always stay curious,” Florez says. “You don’t know it all.”
Study: When Facebook removes vaccine misinformation, anti-vaxxers quickly regroup.
The work of trying to minimize the influence of harmful misinformation is both exhausting and essential. Big pushes, like the one Meta undertook in late 2020 to begin removing more misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines while promoting content from authoritative public health and scientific sources, always seem too late and undertaken in response to public or institutional pressure. And they require a sustained effort that platforms don’t always seem willing to maintain. A question has always lingered in the background of these big public moments where major platforms get tough on online harms: Did these efforts actually work?
A new study, published this week in Science Advances, argues that Meta’s Covid-19 policies may not have been effective. Though Meta’s decision to remove more content did result in the overall volume of anti-vaccine content on Facebook decreasing, the study found that engagement may have “shifted, rather than decreased” outright.
Using data from CrowdTangle, researchers tracked content from a number of public pages and groups that posted content focused on vaccines, sorted into “pro” and “anti” vaccine sources. Their data, they said, indicates that anti-vaccine influencers know how to dodge enforcement at every level of Facebook’s infrastructure, allowing followers to continue to access their content by taking advantage of Facebook’s built-in amplification of content users might want to engage with and of the vast, inter-platform networks of communities, influencers, and tactics that the anti-vaccine movement has built online over time.
Health misinformation on social media needs to keep moving to stay alive, dodging platform enforcement by changing keywords and adapting euphemisms, or funneling the believers and the curious into newer groups or platforms where their posts are less likely to be removed. Anti-vaccine influencers are skilled at this because they’ve had a lot of practice. By the time Meta began rolling out more robust policies in 2021 that were designed to minimize the influence of misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, anti-vaccine communities had been building their strategies to remain visible there for years.
Anti-vaccine content had the agility to outpace policy shifts on multiple levels, the paper argues. Public anti-vaccine pages can build connections with each other, and are sometimes run by the same influencers. When one disappears, other connected groups can simply step in and continue to post. That structure can also help members of banned groups find the next, newer version of that space, or link outward to platforms that are more accepting of conspiracy theory-laden content. And finally, individual members of these communities have an awareness of the importance of engagement. Anti-vaccine influencers ask for likes and shares in order to maximize their visibility on Facebook, and the believers seem to respond accordingly.
“There’s a broader ecosystem and there’s demand for this content,” said David Broniatowski, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of engineering at George Washington University. “You can remove specific articles or posts or instances of the content. But the fact that you didn’t see a change in the engagement for the content that remained [on Facebook] goes to show the fact that people are out there and they want this stuff.”
When people do start to seek out anti-vaccine content in the wake of a moderation takedown, the study argues, they might also find themselves being pulled into more extreme spaces. As Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began taking down more anti-vaccine content, researchers saw an increase in links to alternative social media platforms like BitChute, Rumble, and Gab, which are popular with far-right and white supremacist users who might face account bands on mainstream social media sites.
Some of the research here echoes key points that trackers of anti-vaccine and conspiracy theory spaces have raised in the past: Networked misinformation, including misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s interconnected with and fed by different conspiracy theories, omni-conspiracy theories like QAnon, and political movements. Addressing it will take more than takedowns and account bans. Speaking about QAnon a couple of years ago, Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an expert in online disinformation, told me that meaningfully addressing the webs of conspiracy-laden misinformation across social media would require “rethinking the entire information ecosystem.”
Although Broniatowski said he did not advocate for any specific policy recommendations to more effectively combat misinformation, he suggested that one possible avenue of addressing Meta’s infrastructure would be to treat Facebook’s architecture more like a building, governed by science and safety-informed codes, as opposed to an open mic night with a code of conduct for performers. “We think about [misinformation] as the content, but we don’t necessarily think about it as the infrastructure or the system as a whole,” he said.
“I do think that you can get together people from the platforms, people from these civil society organizations, people from the various different government entities that are involved in some way with these sorts of harms, with observing these sorts of harms, and have a consensus-building civil discussion regarding what is it that we’re gonna do in order to make this a safe and enjoyable experience,” Broniatowski said.
The researchers noted that their data provides a limited snapshot of this ecosystem, capturing only public spaces on Facebook that have strong affiliations with a set of vaccine-related keywords. Excluded are the many private and hidden groups that form a core gathering space on Facebook for anti-vaccine and alternative medicine followers, along with public-facing pages that have adapted coded language for discussing these topics in order to avoid being flagged by Meta’s moderating systems. And while the study does track links out to other platforms, it does not capture what users are finding once they end up outside of Facebook.
The study covered the 16 months from November 2020 through February 2022, and the fight against misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines has continued to evolve since then. Facebook remains an important gathering space for the believers and promoters of health misinformation, but other platforms like TikTok have become more popular for reaching new audiences. Facebook discarded some of its rules prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation in June in some regions, including the US. And Meta may be trying a new approach on its latest platform: Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Meta-owned Threads was intentionally blocking some pandemic-related search terms entirely on the microblogging platform, including “covid-19,” “long covid,” “vaccines,” and “vaccination.”
California’s new Right to Repair Act can’t magically make Apple’s popular earbuds good for the environment.
On September 12, California’s State Assembly approved the Right to Repair Act. Once it’s signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, makers of consumer electronics will be required to provide independent shops in the state with tools, spare parts, and manuals needed to fix the gadgets that they sell.
Advocates of Right to Repair, which included dozens of repair stores across the state, local officials, and environmental groups, hailed the move as a victory, the culmination of a years-long battle to force tech companies to allow regular people to easily repair their own devices. Even Apple, which had opposed the legislation for years, had a change of heart and officially supported Right to Repair in California at the end of August. The world’s richest maker of consumer electronics would finally be forced to make repair materials available for every shiny phone, tablet, laptop, and smartwatch it sells.
But some activists had a question: What does this mean for AirPods?
“If products have batteries, they should be easy to swap or easy to remove so that consumers and recyclers can separate them,” said Kyle Wiens, the CEO of product repair blog and parts retailer iFixit. “You just don’t see that with AirPod design.”
For years, Apple has made its commitment to the environment part of its powerful marketing machine. It has shown off robots capable of disassembling over a million iPhones in a year, and increasingly uses recycled materials to build most of its flagship devices. It claims that its spaceship-like Cupertino headquarters, whose gigantic circular roof is covered with hundreds of solar panels, is powered by renewable energy, and is spending millions to save mangroves and savannas in India and Kenya. At its September 12 event, where it launched a $1,200 titanium phone and a watch that isn’t too different from last year’s model beyond a brand-new “carbon neutral” logo on its plastic-free packaging, Apple reiterated its plans to go entirely carbon neutral by 2030 in a deeply polarizing skit starring Octavia Spencer as “Mother Nature.”
And yet, Apple sells tens of millions of AirPods each year, a product that critics have long pointed out is harmful for the environment.
Every single sleek earbud is a dense bundle of rare earth metals glued together in a hard plastic shell. Each one also contains a tiny lithium-ion battery that degrades over time like all batteries do, which means that eventually, all AirPods stop holding enough charge to be usable, sometimes in as little as 18 months.
That’s where the problem lies: Unlike iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and MacBooks, which can be opened up and have failing batteries swapped relatively easily, AirPods aren’t really designed up be cracked apart by you, repair shops, or recycling companies without destroying their shells in the process, or shedding blood trying to cut them open.
“It’s in the ‘insanely difficult’ category,” Wiens told Vox, “which is why you don’t have too many repair shops in the US trying to do this.”
This lack of repairability of AirPods raises an important issue: What does the Right to Repair law mean for a product that isn’t designed to be repaired?
“AirPods are too difficult to fix — that is clear,” said Jenn Engstrom, state director at CALPIRG, a California consumer rights nonprofit that has been pushing the state to implement Right to Repair legislation for years. “Right to Repair reforms ensure that you can’t make repairs proprietary. But for some devices, the design gets in the way even if you can access parts and manuals. We believe Right to Repair sets a basic expectation that a product should be fixable. But yeah, we can only repair what is repairable.”
Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In 2022, Apple launched its own Self Service Repair program. For a chunk of change and a whole lot of trouble, the company provides manuals, sells parts, and rents out official equipment to let people repair iPhones, Macs, and Apple displays. But when Right to Repair becomes law in California, the company will be required to provide it for all products it sells. The problem is that AirPods aren’t designed to be repaired at all.
“AirPods are an environmental catastrophe,” Wiens said. “They’re a product that I don’t think should exist in their current state. They’re almost impossible to recycle economically.”
Apple released AirPods in 2016, the same year it removed the headphone jack on iPhones, spawning an entire industry of truly wireless earbuds with tiny charging cases. At first, AirPods were the butt of jokes. Some people thought wearing a pair in public was a flex. The Guardian said that AirPods were “like a tampon without a string.” Then, they were everywhere.
As a feat of engineering, AirPods are, indeed, impressive. Each one packs in a sophisticated processor, microphones, drivers, optical sensors, and a motion accelerometer to detect when it’s in or out of your ear in a space less than 2 inches long. All these tiny components are jammed together and sealed inside sleek plastic casing designed to look smooth and seamless, making AirPods damn near impossible to open.
But a key reason that makes AirPods disposable is what powers them. Thanks to chemical reactions that take place when you charge and discharge them, the lithium-ion batteries that power AirPods and other modern electronics hold less and less charge over time. The ones in AirPods are also tiny, which means that while a new one might run for up to six hours on a single charge when new, they might last for less than 60 minutes after a couple of years of heavy use.
Apple didn’t provide a way to recycle a pair of AirPods when they were first released. Eventually, the company let people swap out a dying AirPod for a new one — for $49 a piece — if they were out of warranty, and then sent the old AirPods to one of the handful of recyclers it partners with. Apple also lets you mail in a pair of AirPods to recycle responsibly instead of tossing them into the trash.
In 2019, however, after a viral, 4,000-word Vice essay called the wireless earbuds a “tragedy,” the notoriously secretive Apple pulled back the curtain on the AirPods recycling process. Wistron GreenTech, a Texas-based subsidiary of Taiwanese manufacturing giant Wistron that Apple hired to recycle AirPods, later told tech publication OneZero that AirPods couldn’t be opened by any kind of automated system. Instead, each device had to be manually pried apart by a worker with pliers and jigs. And because it cost more to open up a pair of AirPods than the value of the material extracted from it, Apple paid Wistron — and, presumably, its other recycling partners — a fee to cover the difference.
“It is not easy to fully repair broken AirPods, but we are able to reuse components for other units,” Rob Greening, a spokesperson for Decluttr, an online platform that lets people trade in old devices for cash or gift cards, told Vox.
When AirPods launched, iFixit gave them a repairability score of zero out of 10, noting that accessing any component was impossible without destroying the AirPods’ outer casing. At iFixit, Wiens said he bans employees from using AirPods at work. The company also has a workplace perk, he said, where it buys employees any headphones they want as long as they meet iFixit’s repairability criteria — which AirPods don’t.
Because Apple claims to “replace your AirPods battery for a service fee,” Wiens thinks that AirPods should be subject to California’s Right to Repair law, too. But because the earphones are not designed to be opened up, it’s unclear how.
“I’d sure like to see Apple’s recommended process for doing it,” Wiens said. “There is some possibility that Apple is smarter than everyone and has some secret way to do it, but we haven’t figured it out yet.”
AirPods are likely just a fraction of the 6.9 million tons of e-waste that the US generates each year. But they are symbolic of the larger environmental problems that products of their category cause.
In a 2022 paper called “AirPods and the Earth,” Sy Taffel, a lecturer at New Zealand’s Massey University whose research focuses on digital technology and the environment, argued that any right to repair legislation should prohibit the production of irreparable digital devices such as AirPods, as the right to repair an irreparable device is effectively meaningless.
“You can’t pop in a new battery in an old AirPod the same way you can pop in a new battery into an old iPhone,” Taffel told Vox. “So even getting a replacement from Apple doesn’t really ameliorate any of the environmental harms these things cause. It just means that as a consumer, you end up paying a bit less money than if you were going to buy a completely new set.”
Earlier this year, the European Parliament approved new rules that mandate consumer devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras to have batteries that users must be able to remove and replace easily. Taffel said that he would like lawmakers to lay down similar rules for wireless earphones including AirPods.
“There’s a reason the sustainability mantra is repair, reuse, reduce, recycle,” he said. “Recycling always comes last because recycling stuff takes a lot of energy. It’s not always feasible.”
Just over a decade ago, the primary battery-powered devices most people had were smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Today, we have smart watches, wireless headphones, smart speakers, e-readers, and VR headsets. Next year, Apple will release its own pair of high-end VR glasses called the Vision Pro.
“The market capitalization of tech companies is partly based on the idea that they will continue to create new categories of digital devices that will be considered popular and will be widely sold,” Taffel said.
Unlike a pair of wired headphones that you could potentially use for decades, the pair of AirPods you buy today will run out of steam sometime in the next couple of years. At that rate, you will have bought half a dozen pairs of AirPods, tossing your old ones in the drawer, or in the trash. Or maybe you’ll have sent them in for recycling, forcing recycling companies to expend even more energy in the process.
“From an environmental perspective, we need to be doing less and less and less,” Taffel said. “But tech’s model is one of constant growth. There’s always more and more and more. Both these things are completely incompatible.”
All of this is the opposite of Apple’s increased emphasis on being environmentally responsible. Hanging on to your existing devices for as long as possible is one of the most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint. But it’s also bad for Apple’s bottom line. Already, the company’s latest iPhones, which went on sale today, are backordered.
In Apple’s controversial skit, CEO Tim Cook promises “Mother Nature” that all Apple devices will have “a net zero climate impact” by 2030.
“All of them?” she asks.
“All of them,” Cook says.
“They better.”
“They will.”
The two stare at each other for a long moment. And when the tension reaches a crescendo, Mother Nature breaks it with a cheerful “Okay! Good! See you next year.”
Not once does anyone mention AirPods.
Wrestler Abhimanyu upsets higher-ranked Ukrainian in opening round of World Championships - Abhimanyu, the bronze-medal winner at the U23 World Championships in June and ranked 26th in the world, defeated the Ukrainian 19-9, effecting a victory by fall
Royal Nobility, Supreme Grandeur, Aurora Borealis and Great Spirit please -
Cricket should be controlled by the ICC, not by a country or an individual: Former SL captain Arjuna Ranatunga - Ranatunga refers to the ICC as a toothless body that doesn’t protect the interest of international cricket and cricketers
Emperor Roderic and Alpha Domino catch the eye -
Eridani, Acaster, Pharazon, Synthesis, Neziah, Katana and Aralina excel -
Literacy Mission exams in Kerala’s Ernakulam district throw up many inspiring tales - Examinations for the 16th batch of the tenth equivalent course are being held across 16 centres in Ernakulam district
Congress to launch ‘Jan Aakrosh’ Yatra against ‘failures’ of Madhya Pradesh govt from Sep 19 - He alleged Madhya Pradesh is witnessing “severe anarchy, crime, fear, atrocities and looting”.
Vehicle loaded with 29 kg of ganja impounded in Kozhikode - Two persons taken into custody
People will never accept INDIA bloc: Union Minister Anurag Thakur - Thakur said the leaders of the INDIA bloc have only changed their attire, but their behaviour and character remain the same
Congress prods SEBI to act against Adani firms, demands probe by JPC - Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh wondered whether SEBI will act now that the Mauritius financial regulator has revoked the licences of two such entities.
Ukraine’s Crimea attacks seen as key to counter-offensive against Russia - This week’s attacks against Russian targets are part of increased efforts to cut supply lines.
Luis Rubiales given Spanish restraining order over World Cup kiss - Prosecutors asked the court to bar Spain’s ex-football president from approaching player Jenni Hermoso.
Rubiales’s day in court over World Cup kiss… in 86 seconds - Spain’s Women’s World Cup success has been overshadowed by the actions of Luis Rubiales during celebrations.
Poland: Government under pressure over escalating cash for visas scandal - Media reports say migrants paid up to $5,000 (£4,000) each to speed up work visa applications.
Historic Ukrainian sites in Kyiv and Lviv added to UN danger list - St Sophia’s Cathedral in Lviv is among the buildings the UN warns is at risk of destruction.
NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens - NASA attempts to make conversations about aerial phenomena more scientific. - link
Toddler poisoned after eating deadly plant mislabeled as diet supplement - Nine out of 10 Tejocote Root products tested were actually deadly yellow oleander. - link
Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media - “This was the point where AI-generated art passed the Turing Test for me.” - link
“Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers [Updated] - Previous efforts to unmask the people behind Libgen have failed. - link
Musk’s X revokes paid blue check from United Auto Workers after strike called - After a report called out Musk’s union-busting, UAW’s blue check got reinstated. - link
An old man calls his son and says, “Listen, your mother and I are getting divorced. Forty-five years of misery is enough.” -
“Dad, what are you talking about?” the son screams.
“We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” he says. “I’m sick of her face, and I’m sick of talking about this, so call your sister and tell her,” and he hangs up.
Now, the son is worried. He calls his sister. She says, “Like hell they’re getting divorced!” She calls their father immediately. “You’re not getting divorced! Don’t do another thing. The two of us are flying home tomorrow to talk about this. Until then, don’t call a lawyer, don’t file a paper. DO YOU HEAR ME?” She hangs up the phone.
The old man turns to his wife and says, "Okay, they’re both coming for Christmas and paying their own airfares.
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A firefighter was working on the engine outside the Station, when he noticed a little girl nearby in a little red wagon with little ladders hung off the sides and a garden hose tightly coiled in the middle. The girl was wearing a firefighter’s helmet. -
The wagon was being pulled by her dog and her cat. The firefighter walked over to take a closer look. “That sure is a nice fire truck,” the firefighter said with admiration. “Thanks,” the girl replied. The firefighter looked a little closer. The girl had tied the wagon to her dog’s collar and to the cat’s testicles. “Little partner,” the firefighter said, “I don’t want to tell you how to run your rig, but if you were to tie that rope around the cat’s collar, I think you could go faster.” The little girl replied thoughtfully, “You’re probably right, but then I wouldn’t have a siren.”
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Little Johnny -
Little Johnny is sitting in class, the teacher is going over vocabulary words. She asks the class to use a word in a sentence. The teacher says the word is “contagious”. Little Johnny is waving his arm up and down, no other students have their arm up. The teacher figures there is no way Johnny can come up with something rude for this word, and she calls his name to use the word in a sentence. Johnny says the other day, my dad and I were driving down the freeway and woman was painting a billboard, she was using a very small brush. The teacher says “what does this have to do the word contagious?” Johnny says “my dad turned to me and said: ‘Son it is going to take that “cunt-ages” to paint that billboard with that little brush!’”
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Who can drink 5 gallons of petrol without getting sick? -
Jerry can.
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What is the worst thing you can say when someone points a gun at you? -
Oh, Shoot!
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