10/21/25
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, October 21st.
Everyone Writes Day.
Oh sure, everyone writes. But does everyone write good. Shoot, well. Ugh.
And now, the news.
The Internet, She’s Down
-via CNN
Starting with the internet! Have you heard of it? It’s a series of pipes.
On Monday, the internet was… bad.
Like – most of it.
So, here’s what happened. Amazon, which used to only sell books, that’s all this thing was built for. Just books. Hey, I want to read more about whales. Great there’s a website for that. And now, that same person, just a few years later, is building rockets that go to high sky and crash most of the internet.
Neat!
And I bet he doesn’t know as much about whales as I do!
Do you know whales have accents?
I bet Jeff Bezos doesn’t.
Okay, so here’s what happened. Starting just after 1 AM, eastern, Amazon Web Services, or AWS, issues a statement confirming “significant error rates for requests.”
Now, note that I said AWS and not just Amazon. Because this wasn’t just, you know, whale books. AWS accounted for 37% of the global cloud market last year.
So now we’re talking about mobile banking and airline booking sites, in addition to PlayStation and social media sites. And, worst of all… when my alarm goes off, my lights are supposed to come on slowly for 30 minutes. Instead, they BLASTED on at 100% - so I’m the real victim here.
This does not appear to have been a cyberattack, but instead a technical error. So no one worry! A bunch of the internet crashed because of an internal error. That’s… better. Somehow.
The total cost of the outage is not yet known but expected to reach the hundreds of billions of dollars range.
Shoulda stuck to books about whales, my guy.
Russia v Ukraine
-via The Guardian and Washington Post
Moving to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, Ukraine’s President Zelensky will visit Londontown for a “coalition of the willing” before heading to Hungary to meet with Trump, for a meeting of the oh no, not not this guy again.
Expect the Trump/Zelensky conversation to not be super comfortable and here’s why.
When we last left Trump and Ukraine, he suddenly was like Hey, I cracked open a book. Not on purpose! Not on purpose, I promise. I was walking to get more Diet Coke, and it just fell open, and I happened to notice that I had this Russia/Ukraine thing all wrong. Suddenly, he was saying he thought Ukraine could win the invasion.
But after a call last week with Putin, Trump returned to his Putin-agreein ways and refused the Tomahawks that Zelensky requested and, in a meeting, Trump apparently urged Zelensky to end the war by accepting Putin’s terms and just handing over the land that Putin stole.
So all of that to say, getting everyone on the same page in the London meeting is vital ahead of Zelensky’s next meeting with Trump.
Atlanta Tragedy Avoided
-via NBC News
We almost had to start this episode like we start here in America, but thanks to family members of the suspect, tragedy was avoided.
The family of 49-year-old Billy Cagle called the police to tell them that Cagle was headed to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, with an AR-15 and 27 rounds. His plan was to shoot up the airport indiscriminately.
Investigators are looking for a motive.
He was unarmed when he was arrested, and had been at the airport for about eleven minutes, but the gun and rounds were found in his truck.
He has been arrested on suspicion of making terroristic threats, criminal attempt to commit aggravated assault, and firearms charges.
Guns + Pot
-via AP News
Speaking of guns, the Supreme Court will consider whether people who regularly smoke pot can own guns.
Wait… hang on… so you can regulate guns?
It centers around a Texas man who had a gun in his home and was a regular marijuana smoker. The Department of Justice appealed a lower court’s decision to strike down a law barring people who use illegal drugs from owning a gun.
I…
What do you want me to say? What am I supposed to say here?
19 kids died in the Uvalde school shooting. 20 died in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Every year, there are more mass shootings than days of the year. But pot? Pot is going to be the thing that you regulate?
Whatever. The case will be argued early next year.
Hostile Government Takeover
-via The Guardian
Moving over to our hostile government takeover…
On Monday, a three-judge panel ruled that Trump can deploy the National Guard into Portland, despite the governor and mayor never asking for it. Nor having any need for them to be there.
In response, Oregon’s Governor Kotek has asked a federal appeals court to review and overturn the decision.
The lone decenting judge wrote this: “No legal or factual justification supported the order to federalize and deploy the Oregon National Guard. Given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd. But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions.”
While the state’s AG, Dan Rayfield summed the entire thing up with this: “We are on a dangerous path in America.”
Yeah, Dan.
Government Shutdown
-via CBS News
And an update on the government shutdown… it’s still shut down.
The Senate failed to pass another budget vote on Monday.
Welcome to day 21!
The Louvre Heist
-via BBC
And finally, in aw nuts, they caught us! News…
On Sunday, around 9:30 in the morning, four suspects robbed the Lourve!
In the middle of the morning!
They threatened some guards, cut some glass, and then rode off on scooters!
Scoot scoots!
A member of the French Senate’s finance committee is calling it a “very painful” episode for France. Yeah, I bet! They rode off on scooters! The whole thing happened in eight minutes.
They may have stopped for a pastry on their way home! Oui oui!
The items stolen were: Two tiaras, two brooches, an emerald necklace, a pair of emerald earrings, a sapphire necklace, a single sapphire earring; and, not listed but likely still stolen… Julia Roberts’ heart.
Because this is basically Oceans 14.
You know what was pretty good, actually? Oceans 8. I liked it! When Sandra Bullock gets into the hotel room for free? That was cool.
(Full disclosure, I thought it was Anne Hathaway that did that. Shoutout to first-time listener, and I assume last-time listener, but full-time person forced to share an office with me, person Nicole for telling me something I could have Googled and yet…)
One of the crowns was found because apparently it was dropped while they were on their little scooters.
Here’s a fun fact – the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 by an Italian museum employee who just took it off the wall and put it under his coat and walked out with it.
You know… I’m starting to think doing a heist at the Lourve isn’t that hard.
Stealing Julia Roberts’ heart though… baby, that’s something we’re all still working on.
And that’s it. That’s the news.
I’m proud of Julia Roberts. I’m sorry, she’s charming as hell. You watch that woman and tell me she’s not winning you over.
I’m equally proud of writers.
But more than writers, but you know the best words and put them in my favorite order… I’m proud of you.