I never went to a Fry’s during their ‘good’ era. We had a work trip to the Phoenix location a few years ago and it was a pretty sad store. The attempts to look ‘hip’ like fake grass just looked kind of sad when the shelves were mostly empty. The minimal merch they had was mostly garbage or locked up it appeared.
I think the doom is set for most brick and mortar stores.
They will have to adapt to online shopping, or they’ll die out like the dinosaurs of old.
Cookie, 16.75yrs. The OG. The best dog ever.
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My condolences, @MSUAlexis… 
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Ouch, that sucks. I’m sorry you are going through that.
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Thanks guys. I’m still just numb. I have very little compassion left from the sheet number of sick and dying things at work I have to help other people process, and losing three family members in a month is just a black cloud. It’s been and up and down year so far that for sure. I really need a vacation to decompress but I won’t get one until the end of may I think. Might try and sneak a day off before then though. Just need to clear my head.
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You have a job that must take an emotional toll that I can’t fathom handling myself. You certainly deserve to take some time off to decompress.
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One of my best friends since childhood said goodbye to his Alsatian, Bracken, today. She had been poorly for some time, and passed one month after her 14th birthday.
My best wishes to @MSUAlexis and family
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Last year, a social media hate campaign began after a girl made claims that a teacher in France named Samuel Paty asked Muslims to leave the class at the point in a debate on free speech and blasphemy where he showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in the Charlie Hebdo magazine. The campaign started after her father filed a legal complaint about the teacher and posted his allegations online. This lead to an 18-year-old Chechen refugee tracking the teacher down and beheading him.
The girl that started this now admits to lying and spreading false claims about Samuel Paty. Her lawyer confirms she wasn’t in the class at the time. She was out sick. “She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates had asked her to be a spokesperson,” her lawyer said.
She’s been charged with slander, and her father and another man that is an Islamist preacher and campaigner have been charged with “complicity in murder”. A draft of a security law currently in discussion in French parliament involves prison sentences when circulating information online about a state employee is done and it knowingly causes them harm.
The article from The Telegraph (viewable through Yahoo News without needing an account) says she has a history of disciplinary problems. I don’t know what sort of responsibilities come with being a spokesperson for her class or whether being a spokesperson came with some kind of peer pressure she couldn’t handle.
Regardless, one person died because of what she said. How many of the students that were in the class during the time period she lied about didn’t speak up about what actually happened? How many of them could have spoken up but didn’t because they were afraid they would be attacked, too? And for all of those who took part in the hate campaign, do any of them feel remorse or shame for being part of what led to the death of a person because of a lie?
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“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”
Exodus 20:16 KJV
How much difference a simple law could have made…
Roger Mudd at 93 due to complications related to kidney failure.
I think a lot of us are of an age where this was Big Deal tech:
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Yesterday, Norton Juster passed away at age 91. Author of one of my favorite books: The Phantom Tollbooth. The article says the book was a kind of accidental collaboration between Norton and his neighbor, a cartoonist named Jules Feiffer. And the book is also the inspiration for Milo Bloom of Bloom County and the namesake of Berkeley Breathed’s son.
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It was… I used it for data storage (48k zx spectrum)
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At risk of derailing this topic, I would wager that most of the people who endorse this sort of thing don’t feel remorse at this. At best they will justify it as a warning to others, and at worst they will assume he must have done something to do it since Allah allowed it. He wasn’t Muslim so according to the interpretation people like this have of their religion he was somewhat less than fully human anyway.
You sure it wasn’t just one of his many clones?
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You might be able to find out on the “Dial the Gate” podcast on Sunday. They will have a segment remembering him.
Marvelous Marvin Haggler at age 66 on Saturday.
Sabine Schmitz. Died of cancer at 51.
She was known as the queen of the Nurburgring, and the only woman to win the Nurburgring 24 hour race. She was also a sometime Top Gear presenter. In her appearances on Top Gear she was bubbly and a joy to watch, and apparently that was what she was like in real life too. If you haven’t already seen it, her attempt to get a Transit van around the Nurburgring inside 10 minutes is well worth watching.