WPCode auto-tweet wiring test #2 (deleting shortly)
Second throwaway test post, this time with featured_media/categories/tags/author set exactly like a real daily post, to isolate why the real post did not tweet.
$23.7 Billion in Earmarks. One of Them Was a Door for a Museum Worth $5.8 Billion.
Congress released this year’s Congressional Pig Book in May, and the top line is $23.7 billion spread across 8,392 earmarks, the fourth-highest total since anyone started keeping score in 1991. That’s already a lot of money. But the number that actually made me stop scrolling wasn’t the total. It was the door. Senator Chuck Schumer …
The Royals Won Eight Straight. They’re Still 16 Games Under .500.
Eight straight wins, capped off by an 11-7 sweep-clincher over Detroit this weekend. For a few days, Kauffman Stadium felt like 2024 again, back before this team apparently forgot how to win a baseball game for four straight months. Here’s the number that doesn’t make the highlight package: 58-74. That’s the record after the streak, …
Bunting’s Back in Style. The Royals Still Don’t Get Why.
Bunting is having a real moment in Major League Baseball this year, and I hate that I have to admit some of it is actually working. As a lifelong Royals fan, I’ve spent years watching a perfectly good rally get strangled because someone in the dugout decided a free out was a good trade. So …
He Stole a Book in 1983. It Took Him 40 Years to Say Sorry.
Somewhere in Eureka, California, a bookstore owner opened a package last week and found a first-edition Edward Gorey book tucked in with a hundred dollars in cash and a full written confession from a man she’d never met. The book went missing back in the early 1980s. Nobody reported it. Nobody chased it. It just …
The US Open Champion Will Take Home $5.5 Million. For Two Weeks.
The US Open kicked off this week, and buried in the schedule is a number that stopped me mid-scroll: the singles champion walks away with $5.5 million. Not for a season. Not for a career. For two weeks of tennis. The total prize pool this year is $108 million, up 20% from last year and …
Being Right Isn’t the Point Anymore. Being the One Who Says So Is.
Post the actual date on social media and watch what happens. Within twenty minutes, somebody’s in the replies explaining why you’re wrong, usually with a tone that suggests you personally wronged their family. It’s rarely a gentle “hey, small correction.” It’s mean, like you committed a crime by being slightly off, or even completely right …
Somebody in Florida Is Fighting Protected Owls With Cardboard Cats
Six flat cats showed up in a vacant lot in Cape Coral, Florida, and I have not been able to stop thinking about them since. They’re cutouts. Two-dimensional cat effigies staked into the dirt of an empty lot on Southwest 25th Place, facing outward like the world’s least convincing neighborhood watch. A second batch turned …
Your Plane Ticket Price Isn’t Random. It’s Personal.
Book a flight from an iPhone, in a hotel lobby, at midnight, after refreshing the same search four times because the price keeps changing, and Delta might quietly decide you look desperate enough to pay more. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. It isn’t anymore. It’s the subject of a congressional inquiry with an actual deadline. …
A Minnesota Man Booby-Trapped His Lawn With Screws. Now He’s the One in Court.
Kyle Steffen had a problem. Kids in his Wyoming, Minnesota neighborhood kept cutting across his lawn on their bikes on the way to Goodview Park, and years of yelling out the window hadn’t changed a thing, so he tried something new. A trap. Specifically: a plastic sheet studded with roughly 40 three-inch screws, points up, …
NASA Had to Publicly Confirm That Gravity Still Works
On August 12th, a good chunk of the internet got convinced Earth’s gravity was going to switch off for exactly seven seconds, like someone was about to unplug the planet and plug it back in. The theory even had a name, “Project Anchor,” and a suspiciously specific budget line of $89 billion, sourced from a …
Your AI “Friend” Isn’t Making You Less Lonely. It’s Making You More.
Stanford researchers just spent months studying how people actually talk to AI chatbots, and the takeaway is blunt: the lonelier you already are, the worse an AI companion tends to make you feel. Not better. Worse. Researchers in Stanford’s Diyi Yang lab surveyed more than a thousand people who use Character.AI and dug through 244 …