High Anxiety - part two

Vivol and Luga

Game-Changer

This is Muffin. Today she received a belly rub from a butterfly. 13/10 absolutely magical pic.twitter.com/er9tu4Srzk

— WeRateDogs® (@dog_rates) April 28, 2020

When 9-month-old Muffin was at the park the other week with her hooman Ashley Schoon, Muffin was not her usual self. What usually was a calm bulldog was really hyper on this day. Suddenly, a butterfly decided to land itself on Muffin’s face, and Muffin became really confused and did not know what to do.

Muffin immediately calmed down and let the butterfly perch on her stomach. “I was scared she was going to try to eat it,” Schoon said. “But she decided to lay all the way flat on her back and just let the butterfly stay on her tummy.”

The little pup wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but she knew she had to be gentle with her delicate friend. Muffin sprawled in the grass, paws out, and completely vulnerable as she let the butterfly wander up her stomach and onto her chest.

Wholesome.

(Image Credit: @dog_rates/ Twitter)

なかなかアートなメッセージ
読めますか？ pic.twitter.com/swywHlwd3N

— 和田 賢治 @ TSUBAKI LAB.代表：木を科学していく (@simplife_plus) May 5, 2020

What seems to be just a page full of bubbles turns out to be a heartwarming message when viewed from a distance. This newspaper from Gifu Shimbun was issued on May 6.

Utilizing a form of bubbly negative space to render the text, the newspaper spelled out a message to its readers about social distancing. The magic is you have to maintain an appropriate social distance to read the letters.

The message reads, 離れていても　心はひとつ, which means even though we’re apart, our hearts are one.

Thanks, Japan!

(Image Credit: @simplife_plus/ Twitter)

There’s nothing stopping Jimmy Donaldson aka Mr. Beast from giving away money, this time doing it via video calls. Watch as he and his friends pretend to be a news reporter, school professor, and many others as they interview people, and then surprise them by giving them thousands of dollars. Some recognize him and his team, however.

“A lot of people are going through a ruff time right now so I tried my best to do some good,” he said in the video description. He also posted this on his birthday, and said that liking or subscribing would be “a dope present.”

Very wholesome.

(Video Credit: MrBeast/ YouTube)

Movie star Robert Mitchum is best known for his many roles that combined allure and menace, in movies such as Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter. Oh yeah, and for his rowdiness that included being fired from at least one movie and that memorable arrest for marijuana possession. But his life before Hollywood would make a good movie in itself. When Mitchum was only 14 years old, he was sent to live with his sister, but he didn't stay there long.

Mitchum (1917-97) left his sister’s home in New York. He hopped a freight to who knows where. Life was an adventure to be gained and this was how it would start. He rode flatbeds, freight cars, refrigerated trains, teeth-chattering, knees-kocking, met old timers who knew no other life and gave him advice on what to do, and who to avoid, how to steal food and clothes, hunt squirrel, panhandle, and keep clear of the law.

This was an education. This was the hobo life Mitchum had read about and long-wanted to follow. He felt at home among these outsiders, though some of them thought him no more than a tourist, a “scenery-bum”, just along for the ride. Near train stops and train yards, he’d find hobo hideouts and sit by fire light listening to stories told by world-worn travellers.

It didn't take much time before the young teen was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia. He was put on a chain gang doing hard labor, and soon knew that his life was in danger if he didn't escape. Read the exciting story of Robert Mitchum's jailbreak at Flashbak. -via Strange Company

Brian May was admitted to a hospital earlier this week  ...for a torn butt. The guitarist/astrophysicist injured himself while gardening, which is a bit reminiscent of the line from the movie This Is Spinal Tap in which one drummer's death is attributed to a "bizarre gardening accident." May is expected to recover, but it may take some time.  

Writing on Instagram, the Queen guitarist said: “I managed to rip my gluteus maximus to shreds in a moment of overenthusiastic gardening. So suddenly I find myself in a hospital getting scanned to find out exactly how much I’ve actually damaged myself. Turns out I did a thorough job – this is a couple of days ago – and I won’t be able to walk for a while … or sleep, without a lot of assistance, because the pain is relentless.”

May is 72, and had been at his home after Queen was forced to cancel a tour due to the pandemic. Now he is recovering at home, and requests peace and quiet. -via reddit

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another

Microsoft has patched a worm-like vulnerability in its Teams workplace video chat and collaboration platform that could have allowed attackers to take over an organization's entire roster of Teams accounts just by sending participants a malicious link to an innocent-looking image. The flaw, impacting both desktop and web versions of the app, was discovered by cybersecurity researchers at

Researchers have uncovered a potential means to profile and track online users using a novel approach that combines device identifiers with their biometric information. The details come from a newly published research titled "Nowhere to Hide: Cross-modal Identity Leakage between Biometrics and Devices" by a group of academics from the University of Liverpool, New York University, The Chinese

It's not 'Patch Tuesday,' but software giant Adobe today released emergency updates for three of its widely used products that patch dozens of newly discovered critical vulnerabilities. The list of affected software includes Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Bridge, and Magento e-commerce platform, containing a total of 35 vulnerabilities where each one of them is affected with multiple critical

The Scouts acknowledged the necessity to "Be Prepared" over 100 years (!) ago; the industry should have, as well. Yet COVID-19 took businesses – more like the entire world – by surprise. Very few were prepared for the explosion of remote access, and the challenge of instantly shifting an entire organization to work from anywhere. Cato Networks shared its increase in remote access usage post

A new type of mobile banking malware has been discovered abusing Android's accessibility features to exfiltrate sensitive data from financial applications, read user SMS messages, and hijack SMS-based two-factor authentication codes. Called "EventBot" by Cybereason researchers, the malware is capable of targeting over 200 different financial apps, including banking, money transfer services,

In the last few months, multiple groups of attackers successfully compromised corporate email accounts of at least 156 high-ranking officers at various firms based in Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Dubbed 'PerSwaysion,' the newly spotted cyberattack campaign leveraged Microsoft file-sharing services—including Sway, SharePoint, and OneNote—to launch highly targeted

Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2)

If you own a Xiaomi smartphone or have installed the Mi browser app on any of your other brand Android device, you should enable a newly introduced privacy setting immediately to prevent the company from spying on your online activities. The smartphone maker has begun rolling out an update to its Mi Browser/Mi Browser Pro (v12.1.4) and Mint Browser (v3.4.3) after concerns were raised over its

The Coronavirus crisis introduces critical operational challenges to business continuity, placing high stress on organizations' management. As a result, CIOs and CISOs face a double challenge on the cyber risk front – apart from the new risks that the mass transfer of employees working remotely brings, capturing the management mindshare for further investments in security becomes harder than

DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties. Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email. According to the breach notification

The post The Wayfinder: YA Fantasy appeared first on Fiction Notes.

READ A FREE HEARTLAND TALES SHORT STORY: CLICK HERE The Wayfinder was my first published novel, 2000 Greenwillow/Harpercollins. I remember where I was when I heard the news that someone wanted to publish this manuscript. I was with my oldest daughter, Sara, at a local mall. I had to use a pay phone to call Continue Reading

The post The Wayfinder: YA Fantasy appeared first on Fiction Notes.

The post Indie Means Indie appeared first on Fiction Notes.

Smashwords’ Mark Coker is sounding the alarm about indie publishers (those who write and publish their own works—let’s get the terminology right–it’s INDIE publishers, not the deprecating “self-published”) relying too much on Amazon. I agree with Coker. Two and half years ago, I started advertising on Amazon’s AMS platform. It doubled my sales. But then, Continue Reading

The post Indie Means Indie appeared first on Fiction Notes.

Up till now, the best part of our cafoutche was the view. More about a few sweet and savory projects in today's missive. Thank you for reading and sharing this post with a friend! Today's Word: cafoutche : storage room, cupboard AUDIO FILE: click here to listen to the following quote in French Cafoutche: De l’occitan cafoucho synonyme de cahute. A Marseille il désigne un petit placard où l’on met de tout et de rien. Peut désigner la cave, aussi bien qu’une petite pièce fermée ou un débarras. Cafoutche: from Occitan cafoucho synonymous with hut. In Marseille this designates a small closet where you put everything and nothing. May refer to the cellar, as well as a small closed room or storage room. --www.lasardineduport.fr A DAY IN A FRENCH LIFE by Kristi Espinasse Not only is our guest on the mend, she is mending! Helping, that is, to fix everything from a punctual petit creux to our unruly store room--insisting all the while, ça fait du bien de travailler. What a positive way to look at work--as something that makes us feel better! I know this is true with my writing which I often put off to a later date,...

Dramatic action is needed now to blunt the immediate pain of vulnerable workers.

As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ― or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling […]

Republican senators on Wednesday teamed up to kill an amendment introduced by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray that would have expanded paid sick leave to millions of U.S. workers left out of a bipartisan coronavirus relief package. Every Republican present for the vote, 51 in total, voted against the amendment while every Senate Democrat voted in favor. […]

On Tuesday, I cast a joyless vote for the very much politically doomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Illinois primary, in an elementary school where hushed whispers and fearful glances had replaced the normal din of an election day. There was no one standing just outside the perimeter hustling me to vote for this […]

The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of […]

Following the criticism that he has mismanaged the nation’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, Trump has declared himself a “wartime president.”  If martial law is next, what will happen to the November election?

At The Nation, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has a provocative piece that imagines how future historians may come to write the story of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speculative history takes the form of a “best-case” scenario that serves as both a challenge and a salve, an inspirational fantasy to help balance out the more easily imagined […]

Well, depending when and where you saw him, it might have been…me. When this whole thing started, we were told that people wearing bandannas and even N95 masks in public were fools: “Don’t you idiots know that just cloth won’t … Read more

“…and while we’re at it, would you like to super-size your order? We can give you a five-hundred or thousand-round case instead of just that fifty-round box…” Yes, brothers and sisters, the Covid-19 crisis has led us to…drive-through gun sales. … Read more

Trapped at home. Many if not most ranges closed, depending where you are. How can shooter folk get some trigger time for skill maintenance, recreation, and the all-important boredom prevention? Airgun fun is quiet…don’t forget eye protection. Well, for one … Read more

Some things change: I never thought I’d see the day when I would walk into a gun shop wearing a mask and not be taken at gunpoint. Some things remain the same: The Land O’ Lakes people eradicated the Native … Read more

Our Canadian friends knew it was coming even before the spree killing in Nova Scotia. That atrocity just gave the Prohibitionists more blood in which to dance.  The RCMP has not yet made public exactly what firearms were involved in … Read more

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