James Earl Jones is fine. He’s not dead, he’s not even sick, the article is about his role in the Disney+ series Obi Wan Kenobi. For everyone that saw the most recent episode on Wednesday, this information was hardly news on Thursday. He has been the voice of Darth Vader since 1977, most recently on the big screen in Rogue One and in the animated Rebels series. But when the link above appeared in people’s Facebook news feed, people stopped scrolling because they thought it was going to say Jones had died. The vast majority of the comments were from people complaining about a few seconds of panic before reading the headline.

I have seen these images popup this week on two or three different groups I follow. Based on the watermark (and I have seen people crop out watermarks and add their own – YIKR?) the original source seems to be Matt Mitchell, @alostrich on Instagram. He can be found on multiple social media platforms, like all of them, and has a podcast. I don’t know him or anything about him but a quick glance of his Insta page told me everything I need to know to like him:

Yep, he is one of our kind.

“You are not always going to have a calculator with you.” If you are my age, give or take 10 years in either direction, you probably heard a teacher say that at some point. In the 1950’s, chewing gum was the #1 problem/issue teachers had in the classroom. Gum doesn’t even make the top ten on that same list today. As a student and teacher of history, I have the opposite concern of the principal quoted above. Today so much information is stored electronically, whether locally or on the cloud (which is just someone else’s computer), that it worries me a little bit. When the library at Alexandria was destroyed, the clay tablets written in cuneiform and sanskrit were buried under the rubble and glazed by the heat of the burning city. Those documents, some of which translated ancient languages, were uncovered thousands of years later and are well preserved to this day. If you were to pull out a 3.5″ disk drive that you saved papers to back in high school, we would have trouble finding a suitable drive and program that could retrieve that data today. And we’re talking about technology still in common use just 20 years ago. Flash memory is not suitable for archival storage and we know that right now. So if future historians uncover a box full of thumb drives, those will reveal nothing. We still have some newspapers and magazines in print but for how long? Schools hand out Chromebooks now instead of textbooks. Somebody somewhere needs to keep writing things down.

The reason this image is here and not in a Happy Monday post is that it could be a little upsetting. That H note might be a little more than some people can take on a Monday morning. Then it takes a minute to figure out the other letters are in the wrong places as well. This requires more brain power than a Happy Monday post should.

Then one day my daughter asks me to look at some sheet music and hands me this. I’ve been Rick rolled not just by sheet music but by a 12-year-old. Well played kid, well played.

Amazon suggests I buy on of these. I used a Black & Decker trimmer like that for years before switching to Ryobi. We bought a Ryobi blower a couple of years ago because I’ve had a pair of Ryobi drills for six or seven years. Now I have two drills, a blower and a line trimmer that all share the Ryobi One system of 18 volt batteries. But back to the monstrosity above; you clip your line trimmer in a flimsy frame with wheels and turn it into a push mower of sorts. But I’m telling you, that B&D trimmer will run about 30 minutes with a brand new battery. In my experience those batteries lose charge load after just a couple of seasons.

Look how much fun that whole family is having! This doesn’t require a lot of thought it just might make some people angry. Again, not what you want on Monday morning.

Zebra + horse = zorse. That’s a male zebra mated with a mare horse. The other combination, a hebra, is more rare but possible. Both of those hybrids have several other names they may go by. A general term for any type of zebra hybrid is zebroid. And yes, that’s a real photograph.