Before War of the Worlds, George Pal produced a movie that’s almost as good. It’s about a planetary threat that’s completely free of evil intent, yet as deadly as a Martian invasion. Watching When Worlds Collide embedded here should prevent commercial interruption.
And here’s War of the Worlds. Unfortunately, this copy has been zoomed and cropped.
This is of extreme interest to me:
On the morning of July 17, a redditor who normally pays Amazon Web Services about five cents a month opened their inbox to a wall of billing alerts and a running tab of $2.5 billion. Their whole setup was a single S3 storage bucket, untouched since 2023 and not even public.
I pay AWS about fifteen cents a month. (At first it was $5/month. To Amazon’s credit, they weren’t kidding when they said costs would be greatly reduced.) Like that redditor person, all I use are S3 storage buckets, but some of mine are public.
AWS has greatly increased its security protocol, which I have completed. The fact that an internal problem at Amazon can cause such a billing mess is disquieting. I don’t need this sort of a hassle.
For a while, I’ve been contemplating cancelling my AWS account that I’ve held since almost the inception of the service. This event has given me the sense of urgency to do that.
I may have next to no interest in professional team sports, but as a former marathon runner of very average ability*, I appreciate this accomplishment.
* There’s a formula that says to take your half-marathon (13.1 miles) time, double it, and add ten minutes for a marathon. Or is it fifteen minutes? Doesn’t matter, it never worked for me.
Thanks to training with a running club, at 5’10” and weighing 162 lbs. (BMI 23.2), I was averaging 7 minutes/mile. That led to my personal best half-marathon time of 93 minutes. Which implied that I should have been able to complete a full 26.2 miles in 3h:16m. Uh, no. I was never able to manage that.
On Blu-ray I’m watching one of the TCM recorded movies I lost when Verizon yanked my “outdated” DVR last year — W.C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, from 1941. It’s as close to being a cartoon as a live action movie can be. It even opens with cartoon credits.
A follow-up to yesterday’s post about the breakout of Cyclospora illnesses. It seems that Taco Bell was, in fact, a primary source of infection, albeit not at all their fault.
The blame apparently is with an outfit called Taylor Farms. With such a strong, verifiable link, it shouldn’t have taken so long to figure this out.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/16/health/cyclospora-outbreak-shredded-lettuce
Jon Stewart continues his Daily Show side gig as a podcast host. Note that the show is sponsored, as is the norm. You’ll need a full workday worth of hours to watch all three of these very worthwhile installments.
Ben McKenzie on Crypto
Jack Smith on American Justice
Austan Goolsbee on the Federal Reserve
