Journos

12 Days of JOURNOS, Day Two: The Great Rooster Virility Crisis

On the Second Day of JOURNOS, Stephen sinks his teeth into a juicy story: What happened to the chicken tenders? Is there really a shortage, or is it just a case of price fluctuations leading to crispy, clickable headlines? 
Stephen watches with cool amusement as a poorly sourced TODAY story inspires a sampling of imitators, and the occasional sales pitch. It's a game of Southern-fried telephone that leaves out essential ingredients like drought and climate change.
Meanwhile, Brandon recalls the flurry of stories in which chicken shortages were blamed on roosters not being cock enough to perform, which is maybe a cross-species kind of anti-male bias? Anyway it all ends up, as it must, in that hot feathery internet coop dedicated to all things prepper, where shortages today mean martial law tomorrow and, oh yeah, buy some gold. 

12 Days of JOURNOS, Day One: Oh a Sarcasm Detector I’m So Sure

We kick off "The 12 Days of JOURNOS," a collection of weird stories we loved but didn't get to, and follow-ups to those stories we did. It's short tales told through a phone call or two.
On the First Day of JOURNOS, Brandon interrupts Stephen's "Irish Goodnight" with the story of a sarcasm detector funded by the US government's DARPA. The goal? To scientifically determine if that dude on Twitter *really* thinks we're "so f*ckin funny" or if it's all a put-on.
We discuss the puzzles and pitfalls of one of humanity's greatest inventions — language itself, a technology so mysterious we have to invent another technology to explain it to us.
Along the way we sort out what sentiment analysis means to both aspiring politicians and aspiring burritos, and figure out if a sarcasm detector might've saved some time in the court case where Judge Roy Moore sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for using a "pedophile detector" on him.
It's all good fun until DARPA figures out how to aim drone strikes at satire. Merry Christmas!

”Don’t Look Up” Reviewed + Asteroid Mining and a Great End-of-the-World Chicken Recipe

Brandon and Stephen dig into Adam McKay's new climate-change-apocalypse parable Don't Look Up and spin out on the state of journalism, satire, and whether American comedy can handle existential threats (or even the quietly sad).
Brandon goes in search of answers about how big a business asteroid mining might really be, and Stephen shares a favorite chicken recipe for when it all falls apart.
Find a spot at the table, grab the wine, and remember that the future is somewhere else.
 
Notes
All kinds of people are getting into the heavenly-body business (or trying to), like rapper Lil Uzi Vert. Even clickbait news coverage of "impending" asteroid impacts are now slapping a price on the things. Know your rights!
Start with the Outer Space Treaty and read up on some of the other rules — including why claims to asteroids, planets, or anything else floating around up there are legally dicey.
Here's more on the World Space Mining Claim Registry, and if you want to find your own potential future asteroid fortune, check out Asterank.

It‘s the JOURNOS Holiday Spectacular, Charlie Brown! Stories of Oil Scandal, Helium Shortage, and American Consumer Theater

A few weeks ago, we performed an experiment: a live report on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with deep dives into which beloved balloon has ties to Mussolini's fascists, why Snoopy is a hero of existentialism, and what we'll do when we run out of helium. In this episode, we revisit the parade and how it embodies the best and worst of the holidays.
We at JOURNOS wish you a Happy Red Snapper Season and hope a giant runaway balloon lands at your doorstep this year. (It's worth a hundred bucks!)
Special appearance by Janet Varney.
 
The lovely piano piece accompanying Brandon's Ode to Snoopy is "A Simple Life" by Marcos H. Bolanos.

Audio Short: Let the Music Save You! AI Will Build You the Secret Playlist of Your Soul

Brandon tells a story about how companies like Spotify are using artificial intelligence to learn all kinds of things about us from the music we listen to — and how one company is using AI to (maybe) turn our own playlists into a kind of stress-reducing medicine.
But this is also a story about how tech journalists tell tech stories, particularly the one about how "AI knows you better than you know yourself." It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit wishful thinking, and a little bit of a guess about our uncertain future. Listen and hum along; it might just save your life.

What Could Go Wrong? The Big Business of Exploiting Space, Sea, and Tortoises

From deadly space sprinkles to undersea Faberge eggs to the risks posed by flying tortoise shells, we're talking about unintended consequences in distant places.
The recent lunar eclipse has us looking to the sky, where we see ... a ton of debris. A Russian anti-satellite test gifted Earth's orbit with a lot of shrapnel. Astronauts on the International Space Station had to hide out in "lifeboats" probably trying not to imagine that scene from Gravity. 
The whole affair got us thinking about how our orbit is getting crowded by more & more government and commercial satellites, raising the specter of "Kessler syndrome" — an unfortunate outbreak of space junk with long-term effects including not being able to go to space anymore.
Then it's down to the depths of the ocean, where little potato rocks called "polymetallic nodules" may offer a source of metals necessary for all our EV needs, without all the mining. The news media is certainly in favor! We look at how San Diego's NBC and ABC news go gaga for nodules and the adventurous band of explorers going to collect 'em. (The nodules, not the news shows.) But these lovely lumps may not be so environmentally swell after all, say environmentalists. (Also, did you know there's an international group just dealing with the seabed, AKA Earth's basement?)
Finally our trip ends up in the Mojave, where we talk desert tortoises and solar farms and ask if we can go anywhere in nature without screwing it up.
All this and a case of mistaken identity and Mars Attacks! Keep your eyes to the skies ... and seas ... and probably everywhere else, too.

Audio Short: What Fixing Your iPhone Means for !!FREEDOM!!

Apple just announced a huge change: The company is finally going to stop big-timing us and let us fix our own i-Things. This is a significant piece of business for the Right-to-Repair movement, which we talked about in our Nov. 12 episode, "An Inside Look at the Yogurt Cup Mafia and The McFlurry Racket."
In this Audio Short, Brandon gives us an update on what Apple's move means for the Right to Repair and what it means for Big Concepts like "ownership," "freedom," and God's own feelings on corporate desserts. 
Music by Nathan "Sticky Blizzard Fingers" Readey.

A Trip to Toronto — the Nexus of Identity, Baseball, and Sexual Exhibitionism

Brandon reports in from a hotel in Toronto that hides an amazing mystery, which gets our heroes thinking about the nature of pilgrimage, memory, and why people apparently can't stop themselves from boning whenever a TV camera is around.
 
Plus, Stephen tells the story of searching for his father's childhood home in Honolulu and a wild story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
 
So open your curtains wide and go on a journey with us.
 
Notes
 
- All about the Rogers Centre, aka the SkyDome
 
- People really like to have sex during Blue Jays games.
 
- Like, really like to have sex.
 
- If Toronto's not your thing, here are some other sports pilgrimages

Future Cities and the Inevitable Doomsday Yacht (with a Good Wine Selection)

We dive into some utopian city concepts. Brandon walks us through Saudi Arabia's NEOM, Marc Lore's Telosa, and a big ole boat for billionaires to escape pandemics and poverty, plus some failed utopian projects of yore.
Meanwhile, Stephen obsesses over slime molds, finds out his dream home is actually an 18th-century prison, and frets over the duo's job prospects after the apocalypse.

An Inside Look at the Yogurt Cup Mafia and the McFlurry Racket

Today, we're talking about stuff — the stuff we don't want that we can't get rid of, and the stuff we do want that we can't quite keep.
Two big stories clutter our minds: one is about a new report on how organized crime controls the lucrative, and corrupt, recycling market; the other is about the "Right to Repair" movement, a struggle to give consumers the ability to fix our own damn smartphones, dishwashers, and million-dollar agricultural equipment.
What we learn is that there are powerful forces not only in control of all our stuff, but therefore in control of us as well. It's McFlurry Savings Time, y'all!