Good morning and welcome to the shortest day of the calendar year. Don’t worry, it’ll still seem like several pointless lifetimes. Is it a coincidence that it’s also National Selfie Day? Probably not. It’s probably to cut down on the murders.
Around 20 Pinellas high-school students will reportedly be paid $500 each for successfully completing a program designed to, among other things, raise their reading comprehension levels by at least a grade. So they’ll be able to blow right through all the self-help books later in life, looking for reasons why they’re so unfulfilled after having been institutionally conditioned to value money above all else.
A Bradenton mail carrier injured her hand when she reached into a mailbox and triggered a mousetrap the resident had set, apparently for someone who’d been stealing his mail. Sometimes retro tech is just the thing; other times, come on, man, anybody could’ve seen this coming, and also everything in the world is also a camera now. (Except mousetraps.)
Allegiant Airlines is adding service to Norfolk, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Ogdensburg, New York to its routes out of St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport. Oh, good; four more places to kind of hope you might actually get to before the plane turns around because something fell off of it.
And finally. Mattel, the makers of Barbie, announced 15 new Ken dolls of wildly varying skin tone, slightly varying body type, and irritatingly varying hairstyle, including one with a man-bun. There’s no official word, but we’re assuming Ken’s oft-discussed creepily smooth bathing suit area will remain nightmarishly bereft of anatomical detail across this pantheon of trendy diversity. It’s a tradition!
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2017.
