A wizard did this.

All kinds of things can cause these lapses in memory, from chronic dementia to a temporary head injury. So, some patients are alert, conversant, and are otherwise “with it” enough to understand the gravity of the news I end up breaking to them. It’s actually a fascinating moment, and I have become deeply curious as to what each patient’s reaction will be. Each time now, I stop, take a big breath, look them squarely in the eyes, and then I reveal to them the full, undeniable truth of the situation: The president of these United States is Donald J. Trump. I pause. I do not break eye contact.

For the most part, it isn’t pretty.

One elderly woman let out a startling moan, the kind of sound I would have expected if someone had told her that her cat had died. Another blinked twice when I told him. “Really?” he said, in disbelief. “Come on, doc, you’re shaking my leg.” One patient accused me of playing a trick, although I have not yet been accused of bringing fake news.

...when the nation's highest law enforcement official is a blatant perjurer?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had two contacts with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak during the presidential campaign, Justice Department officials confirmed. The Washington Post first reported the meetings Wednesday.

When he was asked in his confirmation hearing what he would do if there was evidence anyone associated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had communicated with the Russians, Sessions replied that he wasn’t aware of any such “activities,” and added, “I did not have communications with the Russians.” A questionnaire he filled out for the committee also asked whether he had had contact with the Russians, to which Sessions, according to the Post, wrote, “No.”

I'm sure the GOP will get right on this.

Beer's solid cousin, bread, is based on four basic ingredients: flour, water, yeast and salt. And yeast you can get from the flour itself, if you're patient. Salt is there entirely for flavor - it doesn't help the yeast grow; in fact it retards the yeast. And for flavor you don't need much, but you'll miss it if it's not there.

But imagine if, one dark day, some asshole baker somewhere decided to cover up the taste of his shitty flour with a ton of salt. At first, people were like "Eww. So salty!". but eventually, the idea caught on because some people started treating really salty bread as a challenge. "Woah, so salty! How unusual! This bakery is Pushing The Limits!" Not too long after that, hip bakers everywhere wanted to make the saltiest bread they could. They started using different kinds of salt: rock salt! fine salt! sea salt! salt scraped from the ball sacks of sweaty football players! And that's all anyone made for years and years.

But people finally figured out that salt is not the point of bread, it's a component.

That's how I feel about IPAs (and all their over-hopped relatives), which currently take up a good 75% of all the beer shelf space in my local supermarkets.

/rant

It may not be a common word, but shushu gets major points for being one of those words with such a nuanced definition that you feel like a language master when you finally use it, like “zeitgeist” or “vis-à-vis” in English.

The kanji for this word are shu (“guard/protect”) and shu (“tree stump”). What does guarding a stump have to do with keeping outdated traditions? Here’s the story:

There was a Chinese farmer during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) who was lazy and not very bright.

One day he saw a rabbit run head first into a tree stump, break its neck, and die, which got him an easy meal for that day. Then, the farmer thought, if I just wait by this stump, then another rabbit will come along and do the same thing!

So the farmer quit his work and spent the rest of his days guarding and watching the stump, waiting for another rabbit to come. Of course that did not happen, and the man became the laughing stock of the village.

So if you need to poke fun at someone for sticking to something long after they should’ve let it go, feel free to shushu them and tell them the story about “guarding the tree stump.”

Celestine Omin tweeted:

I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK's airport immigration. Welcome to America.

BoingBoing explains:

Celestine Omin is a Nigerian software engineer who works for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's company Andela, founded to give talented African coders an entree into the leading American tech firms; this week, he flew to the USA on a B1/B2 visa to meet with the company, but he found himself detained at the border.

The CBP guards who detained Omin after his 24-hour flight were skeptical that he was a real software engineer. They apparently googled "quizzes to give to software engineers" and told him to answer ten questions (e.g. "Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced" and "What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?") to gain entry into the country.

OMG

Is your love of a good gin and tonic a sign of something deeply disturbing?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's favorite spirit (the author loved it in a Rickey cocktail) has been linked to psychopathic tendencies when consumed in gin-and-tonic form, according to a study by researchers at Austria's University of Innsbruck. The results of the 2015 study demonstrate that bitter taste preferences—like those associated with a gin and tonic—"are positively associated with malevolent personality traits."

The late Bill Paxton made the video for this song:

Interesting article about the alt-right.

I don’t believe that Yiannopoulos endorses pedophilia. I do believe that he exploits vulnerable young men. Not in a sexual way. Not in an illegal way. Yiannopoulos exploits vulnerable young men in the same way that every wing-nut right-wing shock-jock from the president down has been exploiting them for years: by whipping up the fear and frustration of angry young men and boys who would rather burn down the world than learn to live in it like adults, by directing that affectless rage in service to their own fame and power. This is the sort of exploitation the entire conservative sphere is entirely comfortable with. What happens to these kids now that the game has changed?

Whether or not these kids deserve a second chance matters far less than whether the rest of us can afford not to give them one. There are millions of them, after all, and not all of them have the strength of character to recognize their wrongdoing and make amends. They are, however, coming to see their mistake. Some part of them believed that this was a game that would end when Trump became president. That was the big boss, the ultimate defeat of liberal social justice snowflakery. But guess what? You don’t get to check out at this level and quit the game and go back and cuddle your cat. Politics is a whole different kind of game, and the stakes are real, and there are no non-player characters.

The reason the Lost Boys allow themselves to be stolen away to Neverland is that they want to live somewhere they will never have to grow up. By coincidence, that’s also the reason that a great many people voted to place a spray-tanned authoritarian in the Oval Office. Remember, though, that only Peter rules Neverland. What happens to the Lost Boys in that story if they ever start to build memories and change, if they ever started to become adults?

They skipped this bit in the Disney movie, but, in the books, Peter kills them.

For more on perpetual adolescence, NRO:

The inability to move on from adolescent resentments is a strangely prominent condition among American men, as indeed is the inability to move on from adolescence in general. That is one of the unhappy consequences of the low-stakes character of American middle-class life, by which I mean the fact that the difference between being in the 50th percentile and being in the 55th percentile of whatever index of socioeconomic status you think most relevant is not that consequential in terms of one’s real standard of living. The price of being a little bit of a slacker is not very high in the United States, though the rewards for success can be staggering. Life is pretty comfortable, and you can take six years to finish your bachelor’s degree in art history while working at Starbucks, and it isn’t miserable.

SpellTower, Sage Solitaire and Halcyon developer Zach Gage has announced his next game, Really Bad Chess.It's so bad!

Like Sage Solitaire before it, Gage is repurposing a classic title for a new era; this time by making it really bad.

But also good! The premise of Really Bad Chess is ingenious: it's chess, but with completely random pieces.