Irish singer Sinead O'Connor has announced she has converted to Islam and said she has changed her name to Shuhada' Davitt. The 51-year-old has been posting selfies of herself wearing hijabs on Twitter in recent days, as well as a video in which she sang the Azan, or call to prayer.

She tweeted on Oct. 19: "This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian's journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant."

In January 2018, a surprising clothing item popped up on the South Korean fashion scene: boxy oversize T-shirts with the logo of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 US presidential campaign. As the weather got warmer, the shirt became a staple for trendy women across the country. Some of the shirts read “JESSE JACKSON ’88 — FOR PRESIDENT,” while others said “JESSE JACKSON ’88 — BLESS YOU.” There was even a misspelled “JESS JACKSON ’88” line of tank tops for men.

The shirt was popular with celebrities and college students alike: Rapper Moonbyul, for example, wore the shirt in the music video for her May release, “In My Room.” After the Jackson shirts’ initial appearance in South Korea, they quickly spread to stylish women across Asia, sold in cheap shopping markets and on e-tailers from provincial China to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Is the popularity of this shirt a sign of a broader Korean interest in Jesse Jackson’s historic run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1988? No, says Seoul-based social media influencer and beauty blogger Han Yoo Ra: “I think it’s just about the design. People may be aware of the English but they don’t know the deeper meaning or that it’s meant to be political. The word ‘Jesse’ is just cute. It’s nothing more serious than that.”

The stereotype is that poor people eat more fast food than rich people, who virtuously eat only organic salads and cows with names.

One problem with this assumption: It isn’t true. According to a new report about American fast food consumption from the Centers for Disease Control, people actually eat more fast food as their income levels go up.

BARTOW, Fla. — Two middle school girls in central Florida brought knives to school in a foiled plot to kill classmates, cut them up and drink their blood before killing themselves, police officials said Wednesday.

The two girls, ages 11 and 12, were armed with knives Tuesday at Bartow Middle School before they were caught, according to according to arrest affidavits released by the Bartow Police Department. No one was hurt.

According to NewsChannel5, someone sent identical flyers to Stirrup and at least four other Nashville-area gay bars last week. The only text on each flyer were the letters LGBT, and each letter corresponded to one of the four red, white, and blue pictures printed above them. Instead of ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender,’ this LGBT was an acronym for the Statue of Liberty, a Gun, a bottle of Beer, and President Donald Trump.

Each envelope had a red MAGA stamp in the upper left corner, and the return address corresponded with an empty lot in downtown Nashville. As of this writing, no individual or group has taken responsibility for sending the letters.

The inevitable has happened. Microplastics have already been found in birds and fish and whales, so it should have come as no surprise that they have now been discovered in humans. To be specific but indelicate, tiny plastic particles and fibers have been found in the stool of eight people who provided samples as part of a pilot study.

...

“I’d say microplastics in poop are not surprising,” says Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, who studies the effects of microplastics on fish. “For me, it shows we are eating our waste—mismanagement has come back to us on our dinner plates. And yes, we need to study how it may affect humans.”

I made this two days after Trump was EC-elected.

Now that we're supposed to be terrified of a bunch of poor refugees trying to find a better life, and that Trump is about to go full Pink, it seems like a good time to watch again.

Still.

Just saw a personalized license plate that read "CNTYBLLX".

Took me a while to figure it out, because it isn't a common American English phrase. If it was, the DMV would have never allowed that plate to be made.

You Brits might know it, though.

Someday, we'll learn that most bacteria communicate with other bacteria. And then we'll learn how to move these communications through whatever the internet is called at the time. And then we'll have to create a .bacteria top level domain so they can chat with each other.