We'll be quick — we know you have ugly sweater shopping to do. (Procrastinate much?)
What if there was a way for Duke Energy to become even more unpopular with the customers unhappy with its notoriously bad customer service, but forced to use the utility because it's basically a monopoly? If you said, "just use a payment processor that allows up to 375,000 customers' banking information to be potentially exposed in a security hack," well, you don't win anything, sorry, because somehow a lot of big companies are still stupid about cybersecurity and of course they did.
Another day, another security threat at a local school. This time around, it was Largo High School, which was placed on lockout yesterday morning after a message about an impending shooting written on a bathroom wall hit social media. One thing they're still not teaching in school yet: "The Difference Between A Joke And Some Stupid, Costly, Dangerous Bullshit For Which You Can Be Arrested." They really should; apparently some kids still don't know that already.
An impossibly cute baby pygmy hippo born on December 1 made its Lowry Park debut, swimming around and generally being impossibly cute. Animals: They don't make fake school shooting "jokes." (h/t Amanda Hersem)
And finally, lest the appearance of an impossibly cute baby pygmy hippo give you the misguided idea that somehow everything's gonna be OK without us doing anything at all, here's another headline: "Teen found kidnapped, battered in Polk Co. after pimp calls police worried she didn’t come home." Animals don't do that shit either. We've still got a lot of work to do. Start by being kind.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 7, 2017.