Random News: June 16, 2024

DISCLAIMER: Zak's Random News is very random and doesn't cover many things, and not everything may be accurate, because I'm just some guy. Go find a real news source.

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Good morning. It’s June 16, 2024, and it’s a Sunday. Here in the USA, it’s also Father’s Day. I am a father; I have a son who is well into adulthood. I guess we can talk about this holiday a bit to get things started.

• Like a lot of holidays, Father’s Day has kind of a morbid origin story.
• In 1908, Grace Golden Clayton proposed the day to honor some men who had died in a mining accident.
• Well, that sounds like fun.
• A year or two later, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, WA heard a sermon about Anna Jarvis's Mother's Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church. She thought a similar day honoring fathers would be appropriate.
• Her father was a Civil War veteran, a single parent who raised six children. Despite her efforts, the day faded into obscurity.
• What saved Father’s Day? Greed. Because of course it did.
• In the 1930s, Dodd enlisted the help of those trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday… the manufacturers of ties, tobacco pipes, and any other traditional presents to fathers.
• So like most holidays in a capitalist society, Father’s Day quickly became commercialized. That’s fine; we genuinely wouldn’t have many celebrations at all if not for money being involved.
• It wasn’t until 1966 that President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day.
• And six years later — during my own actual-ass lifetime — the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law on April 24, 1972.
• People tend to have complicated relationships with fathers. That’s a nice way of saying that a lot of men are assholes and not very good at child rearing.
• I was very fortunate. My dad a great guy. He was very involved in the lives of me and my sister, and super supportive of the things we wanted to accomplish.
• Did he have his flaws? Oh, most definitely. But we all do, in varying degrees.
• I became a father in 1999. I became fatherless in 2017. But I don’t have any negative feelings about fatherhood.
• And in fact, while I spend a lot of time wearing many hats — a musician, a businessman, a half-assed activist, and all the rest — none of them are close to the importance of my being someone’s dad for nearly 25 years.
• I’d also say that I can attribute a good amount of my success to the fact that I was responsible for the well being of a small human who relied on me.
• So any time I had the option to blow something off and walk away, I had a driving force inside me with the awareness that it wasn’t just my own life to fuck up. So my role as a father made me more effective as a responsible person as well.
• Anyway, happy Father's Day to all you dads, and your dads, and basically any dad (stepdads, grandads, or any other human filling the important male role models that young people need to grow up successfully).
• Let’s do some news.
• Israel’s military announced today that it would pause fighting during daytime hours along a route in southern Gaza to free up a backlog of desperately needed humanitarian aid deliveries.
• Nice of them, I suppose.
• Make no mistake… this “tactical pause” applies only to a seven mile stretch of road in the Rafah area, and falls far short of a complete cease-fire in the territory that has been sought by the international community.
• Anyway, it’s better than nothing. The daily pause happens from 8AM to 7PM and will continue until further notice.
• Some of the ultranationalists in Netanyahu’s government are mad about pausing their genocidal efforts against Palestine. They made it clear that fighting is not being paused in the rest of southern Gaza, and there is no change regarding the entry of aid in general.
• Assholes.
• Let’s move on.
• Continuing our celebration of Pride, today’s Gay of the Day is Marsha P. Johnson.
• A gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen, Johnson was an outspoken advocate for gay rights. She was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
• She famously would say that the “P” in her initial stood for “Pay It No Mind.” 
• Johnson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and co-founded the radical activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), alongside close friend Sylvia Rivera.
• Johnson was also active in New York City's art scene in the ‘60s, modeling for Andy Warhol and appearing onstage with the drag performance troupe Hot Peaches.
• Johnson marched in the first Gay Pride rally, then called the Christopher Street Liberation Day. In August 1970, she staged a sit-in protest at New York University after administrators canceled a dance when they found out that it was sponsored by gay organizations.
• In 2020 on the 75th anniversary of Johnson's birth, the Marsha P. Johnson State Park was renamed in Johnson's honor, becoming the first New York state park named after an openly LGBT person.
• Moving on.
• I really don’t give two shits about how much money various politicians and their parties rake in. To me, it’s just another reminder about everything wrong with our current political system.
• That being said, last night was a big one for ol’ Joe. His fundraiser, held not very far from here in LA last night, took in $30 million-plus, a record for a Democratic candidate.
• The event was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, and appearances included Barack Obama, George Clooney, Jack Black, Julia Roberts, Barbra Streisand and others.
• One thing that Biden mentioned during the hour-long live interview did resonate, as well it should.
• “The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees. Two more. He’s already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of rights of individuals,” Biden said.
• He’s right. I’d actually say all three of the Dump SCOTUS appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett — are pretty fucking awful, and they follow the lead of the worst of the far-right supervillains, Alito and Thomas.
• In related news, how did it go for the other guy last night?
• The clown known as El Dumpo held a rally event in Detroit and tried to say that President Joe Biden should have to take a cognitive test, and then forgot his own doctor’s name in the next sentence.
• “Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately.”
• That’s nice.
• His name is Ronny Jackson, not Johnson, you blithering ball of bilious barf.
• Let’s move on.
• It’s Sunday Gunday, the shittiest thing I write all week, where we take a look at just some of the incidents of gun violence in the USA for the past 48 hours.
• Two dead and six wounded in a shooting at a Juneteenth Celebration in Round Rock, TX. Two teenagers dead and a third wounded in a shooting in Milwaukee, WI. Two dead in a shooting in the Little Village neighborhood on Chicago, IL. One dead, four wounded in a drive-by shooting in Fort Lauderdale, FL. One dead, two wounded in a shooting on the South Side of Chicago, IL. One dead and a 5-year-old wounded in a shooting at a youth football game at a high school in Prince George, MD. One dead, one wounded in a shooting in the midtown area of Kansas City, MO. One dead, one wounded in a shooting in Fort Wayne, IN. A 15-year-old shot dead in Florida City, FL. A 17-year-old shot dead in Sacramento, CA. One shot dead in southeast Albuquerque, NM. One shot dead at a supermarket in Lynn, MA. One shot dead at Church's Texas Chicken in Aurora, CO. Nine wounded including children, some critically, in a mass shooting at a water park in Rochester Hills, MI. Seven wounded, two critically, at a party in a commercial area of Methuen, MA. Five wounded in a shooting in a park in the Madisonville area of Cincinnati, OH. Two women and a man shot while in a backyard in the South Austin neighborhood of Chicago, IL. Two shot at a park in Brooklyn, NY. Two shot in San Antonio, TX. Two shot outside a bar in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. One shot near a memorial for another murder in Costa Mesa, CA. One shot in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx, NY.
• So, a fairly light weekend, relatively speaking.
• Reminder: gun violence in the top killer of children in the USA, and if you really gave a shit, you’d prioritize voting for candidates who support common sense gun control measures.
• And believe it or not, you can do that without relinquishing your Second Amendment rights to bear arms. We only want to make it harder for proven assholes to get guns.
• Don’t be a proven asshole.
• And now, The Weather: “Nightvisions” by liana flores
• Two words: heat dome. From the South to the Midwest to the Plains states, temps on this day — still over a week before the start of summer — are sizzling.
• Who cares about a little heat? Maybe you should. Heat is the deadliest form of weather in the US, killing more than twice as many people each year on average as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.
• Stay safe, my people.
• Random Note: the average height for a man worldwide is 5’ 7-1/2”. The average height for a man in the United States is 5’ 9”.
• For women, it’s 5’ 3” worldwide, with US women coming in about 5’ 4” on average.
• Want to be taller? Easy. Visit Guatemala, where the average male height is 5’ 3”, and average female height is 4’ 10-1/2”.
• You’ll be huge.
• For all genders, the tallest country in the world is indisputably The Netherlands. Other super tall countries are Montenegro, Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, and Denmark. Those people might be giants.
• I am exactly 5’ 11”, which makes me either a somewhat tall guy in a room of smalls, or a somewhat small guy in a room of talls.
• And no matter where I am, it’s always one or the other. Weird, huh?
• From the Sports Desk… this is sorta amazing.
• Yesterday, I mentioned that in the NBA finals, Dallas came back with a blowout win in game 5 to avoid elimination.
• Last night, the identical thing happened in the NHL Stanley Cup finals. Down 3-0 in the series and on the brink of elimination, the Edmonton Oilers unleashed hell on the the Florida Panthers, winning 8-1.
• It’s cool, but it’s pretty much too late. The 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs are the only team to erase a 3-0 deficit at this stage of the playoffs, and only four teams have ever done it at any stage of the playoffs.
• Game 5 is in Florida on Tuesday.
• Today in history… Spain declares war on the Kingdom of Great Britain (1779). A meeting in London leads to the formation of what is now the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824). A treaty annexing the Republic of Hawaii to the United States is signed (1897). The Ford Motor Company is incorporated (1903). IBM founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, NY (1911). George Junius Stinney Jr., age 14, becomes the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century after being unfairly convicted in a two-hour trial for the rape and murder of two teenage white girls (1944). While on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Paris, Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Soviet Union (1961). Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space (1963). A non-violent march by 15,000 students in Soweto, South Africa, turns into days of rioting when police open fire on the crowd (1976). Oracle Corporation is incorporated in Redwood Shores, CA, as Software Development Laboratories by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates (1977). Upwards of 2,000,000 people participate in the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, the largest in Hong Kong's history (2019).
• June 16 is the birthday of economist Adam Smith (1723), actor Stan Laurel (1890), geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902), actor Jack Albertson (1907), Mexico president José López Portillo (1920), songwriter Lamont Dozier (1941), singer-songwriter Eddie Levert (1942), NFL player Al Cowlings (1947), boxer Roberto Durán (1951), singer Gino Vanelli (1952), actress Laurie Metcalf (1955), soccer player/manager Jürgen Klopp (1967), golfer Phil Mickelson (1970), rapper Tupac Shakur (1971), actor John Cho (1972), and NFL player Justin Jefferson (1999).

Time to do various things and enjoy this day. Again, Happy Father’s Day to all you father-like beings. Enjoy your day.