Dumb & Dumber Pt. 2: Lemons and Lemonade

“Judge not, lest ye be judged.” — Matthew 7:1

Well, I’m screwed.

Yesterday we hunted for Easter eggs. Today… we roast.

DUMB — The Royal Family’s PR Department

I struggled with including this.

It’s scary what Kate Middleton is going through. Her silence over the last few months left an information void that even I got sucked into.

Kate finally told the world in an emotional video that she and William delayed announcing her cancer diagnosis so they could have some time to process the painful news and let her children know. Also, it’s her health, and she’s allowed some privacy. True.

But…

This could’ve been handled better. Informing the public was understandably a low priority for a 42-year-old mother dealing with a potentially life-threatening crisis. But I’m assuming it was not a low priority for her and Prince William’s communications secretary, Lee Thompson, who used to work at NBC News.

As the public clamored for proof of life, someone in their circle decided to release a strangely photoshopped-for-no-apparent-reason Mother’s Day (UK) picture, which only added to the oddity of it all. The couple’s staged(?) and fuzzy video walking nonchalantly from a local farmer’s market — as bystanders barely noticed them — was another head scratcher.

Either the Waleses got bad advice, or they ignored good advice.

Regardless, I pray for a speedy and complete recovery.

DUMBER — Sour Lemon

Elon Musk says he supports free speech, but he’s not going to pay you to continually ask him if he’s an antisemite who abuses ketamine.

Fired CNN host Don Lemon was supposed to launch a show on X — which Elon owns — and he was going to kick it off by interviewing the boss. I guess Elon was envisioning a chat akin to Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin. It was not. (To be honest, I haven’t watched the interview because I DON’T CARE).

After the interview, X dumped Lemon, who went ahead and posted the video on YouTube.

Lemon may sue for breach of contract, though it’s not clear a contract was ever signed.

Again, don’t care.

But this got my attention. Someone leaked Lemon’s alleged list of demands when negotiating with X. The New York Post says the demands included a new Cybertruck, an $8 million annual salary — with $5 million upfront — plus a private jet to Las Vegas where Lemon wanted free massages. He also allegedly insisted on guarantees that he’d host the first podcast from space. (Lemon’s reps deny he made these demands, but he danced around it in an interview.)

Here’s what I wanna know: Why can’t I be more like Don Lemon? Why can’t I have the cojones to ask for the moon with a straight face? Why can’t I be completely blotto on live television on New Year’s Eve and get away with it? If only I had more confidence!

DUMBERER — Government’s Misdirected Priorities

A couple of highlights from March:

— A couple in Compton, California, who earn money as couriers, got tired of the city’s infamous pothole problem. So when their tire blew out after hitting a particularly nasty one, they started filling the potholes themselves with materials bought at Home Depot. The city noticed, but rather than rewarding them, or being shamed into filling potholes as taxpayers expect, Compton officials sent the couple a cease and desist letter.

— Minnesota is considering a law to ban anyone from being hired to paint a home unless they have a new state license. You wouldn’t even be able to buy paint in anything larger than one-gallon containers unless you had a license. So if the law passes, and you want to paint your home yourself (which I think you still could), you’d either have to buy a bunch of individual gallons or pay a licensed painter to buy larger quantities for you.

DUMBERERER — Private Parts Pics

An app called Calmara encourages women to submit photos of their male partners’ private parts. Once the pictures are uploaded, Calmara quickly scans them for signs of 10 diseases or conditions, like herpes or syphilis.

Of course you need the guy’s consent. But all you have to do to prove consent is press “Yes, I have their consent.” What could go wrong?

From Calmara.ai

There’s some pushback.

“I don’t think a solution is taking photos of someone else's genitals and sharing them with an app that's not even a medical provider and isn't subject to same standards a doctor’s office would be,” Sara Geoghegan of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told Forbes.

Forbes questioned Calmara management regarding privacy concerns — like how long the images are stored, what happens to the data after it’s “deleted,” and whether the AI really screens for 10 diseases, because there’s some debate about that.

We live in upside down world where we’ve gone from men sending pics of their privates to women who never, ever consented to see them, to an era where men could have their genitals photographed and scrutinized without their knowledge. Can you imagine the uproar if there was an app where men could send photos of their female partners’ genitals for, um, scanning? (Other than Hustler.)

DUMBERERERER — Stanford

One of America’s finest universities continues to draw the wrong kind of headlines.

I’m not just talking about Theranos founder and Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes (serving nine years for fraud), or FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried — sentenced to 25 years this week — whose parents teach at Stanford Law.

I’m not even going to get into the anti-Israeli protestor in the school’s computer science department who reportedly told other students that Joe Biden should be taken out, because… yawn. That’s just another Tuesday.

It’s hard to find another university this spring whose teachers or alums are currently getting so much bad press.

Here are three who caught my eye in March.

— Jo Boaler is a controversial professor of math education who helped craft a new California education plan that, among other things, recommends holding off teaching algebra until high school, because it’s not fair to let smart kids start tracking away from others in the 8th grade. This was a policy she helped convince San Francisco to adopt about a decade ago, and which it’s now suspending… because it didn’t work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Boaler is accused (again) of questionable research practices. An anonymous (hmmm) 100-page document sent to Stanford alleges a bunch of bad stuff, including claims that some of the research she used to bolster her arguments actually undermines them.

She’s also accused of sending her kids to private school, where algebra *is* taught to middle schoolers. Because she’s not an idiot.

— Andy Bechtolsheim is a billionaire Stanford PhD who co-founded Sun Microsystems and is the current chairman of cloud computing company Arista Networks. This week he settled charges with the SEC that he traded on insider information ahead of Cisco buying Acacia Communications. The complaint says Bechtolsheim bought options in the accounts of two other people after learning of the impending Cisco purchase.

Bechtolsheim made $416,000 on the trade. The guy is worth $16 billion. Why would you (allegedly) break the law for lunch money? YOU ALREADY HAVE 16… BILLION… DOLLARS.

The tech titan did not admit guilt in settling with the SEC, so maybe he’s innocent. Maybe he figured paying the $1 million fine to the feds is cheaper than hiring lawyers to clear his name. Because who can afford attorneys?

— Then there’s the case of Andrew Huberman, a Stanford associate professor in neurology and ophthalmology. He’s famous for talking about things outside his field of expertise (I do that, too), like the importance of therapy, nutrition, sleep, and not drinking alcohol. Huberman is very muscle-y, and he has a huge social media following.

New York Magazine did an unflattering profile this month that questions parts of his story. Mostly, we’re told that he’s a really bad boyfriend. Huberman is accused of juggling several women who thought they were in monogamous relationships with him, including one living with him. Many of the women say they had unprotected sex with him while he was allegedly sleeping around. He’d disappear on them, and he could be mean.

A famous boyfriend who’s a lying narcissist. Who’da thunk?

What gets me more than the lying and the hypocrisy is the way Huberman speaks in the texts and voicemails cited in the article. He has a type of Silicon Valley Podcast Bro Stanford way of trying to sound smart by not being clear.

Example 1 from the article:

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

“Defaulted to self safety” sounds like code for masturbation. Speak English!

And here’s one more:

“I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.”

Ladies, if you’re dating someone who talks like this, don’t “mesh.” RUN.

DUMBEST — Boeing + Airlines = Yikes

We haven’t had a commercial airline crash in the United States in 15 years, since a commuter plane went down in western New York in 2009. That’s an astonishing record of safety. Yet flying seems to be terrifying these days. Ever since a door plug flew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX in January, we are left wondering what’s going on.

(Fun aside: at a U.S. Senate hearing this month on safety, Delta pilot Laura Haynor testified about her concerns. Minnesota Sen. Gene Dornink asked her, “Can you tell me what a typical work week looks like for you as a stewardess?” She reminded him that she was a first officer, and he apologized profusely. I would argue that her typical week is just that — being mistaken for a flight attendant. Also, who still says “stewardess?”)

Boeing is back as “Dumbest” for the second month in a row, but I’m also throwing in a few airlines. Manufacturing errors have been matched by maintenance and management shortfalls.

A brief list of lowlights:

— People on the Alaska flight where the door plug blew off have been told by the FBI that they could be crime victims. Maybe that’s because Boeing says it no longer has security footage of the door being worked on.

— Months before that flight, Boeing workers knew the bolts were bad but apparently forgot to fix them.

— The day before the door plug blew off, maintenance crews at Alaska “were so concerned about the mounting evidence of a problem that they wanted the plane to come out of service the next evening and undergo maintenance,” reports the New York Times. But the airline kept the flight in service “with a few restrictions” until it could land in Portland three flights later. Then the door plug blew out. Maybe the “restrictions” are one reason no one was sitting next to it.

— A Boeing whistleblower apparently committed suicide the day he was supposed to continue testimony in a lawsuit against the manufacturer.

— A United Boeing 777 lost a tire departing San Francisco.

— Another United 777 had to make an emergency landing in Sydney as hydraulic fluid leaked out on takeoff.

— And another United plane, a 737 MAX, apparently suffered a gear collapse and ran off a runway in Houston.

Even with the amplification of everything these days because of social media, the aviation biz seems sloppy.

The story goes that Boeing used to be run by engineers. Then the bean counters took over, finance folks who were more concerned about Wall Street expectations than building quality aircraft. The company moved its headquarters to Chicago — far from its assembly lines — and that destroyed the culture of excellence.

CEO Dave Calhoun was brought in to replace Dennis Muilenburg in 2020, after two 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people.

Calhoun has a degree in accounting, not engineering.

He’s now announced his own resignation, “by the end of the year.”

That’s nine months away. Why not go now? Is there no one at Boeing who can do the job at least as poorly? I recommend promoting someone from the engineering department.

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Ok. Deep breath. Not everything this month was ridiculous. Some things were smart, wonderful and hilarious.

Smart and Smarter

— Elon Musk dreams big, but his investment in creating a small company called Neuralink may help humanity long before we ever get to Mars. Neuralink creates wireless computer chips which can be implanted in brains.

This month the first human to have a Neuralink chip implanted, a 29-year-old quadriplegic named Noland Arbaugh, showed off how it’s already changing his life. Now he can play chess on his computer just by thinking about his next move.

One small step for him, one giant leap toward people like Noland taking actual steps. If this is the Borg, I’m in.

— Squatters have taken over America. A homeowner in Seattle can’t get the city to remove a “serial squatter” living in his $2 million house. There’s the woman arrested in New York — where squatters gain certain rights after 30 days — when she tried to change the locks. Another woman was found murdered in her late mother’s apartment, and police suspect she was killed by the squatters holed up there.

Flash Shelton has turned the situation to his advantage. You can hire this so-called “Squatter Hunter” to outsquat the squatters. “If they can take a house, I can take a house.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that Flash charges a minimum of $5,000 to remove squatters. (He says he does not get involved in tenant disputes, only illegal trespassers.) Often the homeowner leases the property to Flash, who moves in with the squatter and makes life so miserable, “They’re typically out by the end of the day.”

I dream of a world where Flash’s services are no longer needed.

— Selena Gomez is wonderfully talented, and she may soon be wonderfully wealthy. Her cosmetics company, Rare Beauty, is considered “one of the hottest M&A targets of 2024,” valued at $2 billion. Bloomberg reports that Gomez has hired advisors to explore selling the company.

#OnlyBillionairesInTheBuilding

— The world wonders how it’ll feed itself. Scientists say farmers in Asia have hit upon a solution: pythons. “In terms of food and protein conversion ratios,” says a report in Nature, “pythons outperform all mainstream agricultural species studied to date.” It’s a killer industry. Get in now!

Something Wonderful (and Hilarious)

Let’s hear it for school bands!

A cash-strapped school program in Los Angeles that repairs band instruments, featured in the documentary short, “The Last Repair Shop,” has been inundated with donations after the film won an Oscar.

Also, Yale wasn’t able to send its band to March Madness as the Bulldogs played Auburn in Spokane, Washington. So the University of Idaho’s pep band stepped in. The band learned Yale’s fight song, donned Yale T-shirts, and became actual screaming fans as the underdog Bulldogs won. Yale men’s basketball coach James Jones credits some of his team’s success to the presence of a band. “Having that atmosphere, and the people coming out [to] support us, there's nothing better than that.”

University of Idaho/X

Finally, for something hilarious, I leave you with this. A woman in England came across a sickly baby hedgehog and gingerly scooped it up, kept it warm in a box overnight with some cat food, and went to the vet the next day. She was in for a surprise. The hedgehog was a pom-pom hat.

Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve & Wildlife Hospital on Facebook

True story. April Fools isn’t ’til tomorrow.

Happy Easter!