WTF-Beta

Move over pumpkin spice. There's a new flavor trend elbowing its way onto menus, grocery aisles, cocktail bars, snack shelves and social media feeds — pickle everything.

From dill pickle popcorn and pickle margaritas to pickle-flavored chips, ranch dressing, nuts, vodka, smoothies and even frozen treats, the briny, tangy flavor profile is now becoming a full-fledged food identity.

Once relegated to burger baskets and deli counters, pickles have evolved into a full-blown cultural obsession. National brands are rolling out pickle-inspired products at a dizzying pace, restaurants are building menu items around bold dill flavor, and social media is fueling the craze with viral reviews, taste tests and over-the-top mashups.

Pickles even have their own festivals now, with events held all over the country, including this weekend's Canton Pickle Fest.

https://www.aol.com/news/big-dill-pickle-everything-pumpkin-100722991.html

I'll just have pickles, straight up. None of the funky pickle-flavored stuff for me.

The Canton Pickle Fest was Memorial Day weekend, so you Ohioans will have to wait till next year.

Are you interested in learning from human experts about how AI could impact the future of work and the customer experience? If so, it turns out that you could have unknowingly been getting some of your responses from AI.

KPMG, one of the largest consulting firms in the world, is accused of publishing a report on the future of AI with 40 of 45 citations that appeared to be at least partially AI hallucinations. In one instance, uncovered by the AI safety firm GPTZero, the report claims that the Japanese East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is using agentic AI for customer service, linking to a 2019 press release, years before agentic AI became mainstream.

In another instance, the report falsely claimed that Austrian electricity provider Verbund is using AI agents in households to conduct real-time analytics as part of its “energy-as-a-service ecosystem.” Although Verbund invested in a start-up using agents for grid optimization, there was no evidence to support the claim of real-time analytics in households.

Many citations linked to existing studies, but the titles, authors, or dates were incorrect. Researchers were unable to match many citations to existing studies due to insufficient information.

The report, which has now been taken down, has been referenced by multiple customer service publications and a major newspaper in the Czech Republic. In addition, researchers noted that the paper is now being referenced as a resource on customer experience by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. GPTZero alleges that an LLM research tool was asked to find appropriate case studies of companies using agentic AI worldwide.

The problem is already being felt by the average worker. More than 40% of US desk workers reported receiving "workslop"—low-quality AI-generated content—in the past month, according to a September survey from the Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/kpmg-allegedly-published-ai-report-filled-with-hallucinations

Am getting back into making my own bread. Tried this Breadtopia recipe for the first time this morning. Thumbs up!

https://breadtopia.com/light-wheat-oatmeal-bread/?utm_content

The dough is quite soft and moist and has some whole wheat in it, so a bit messy to work with. I used some sourdough starter that the sourdough zealot would have deemed discard (I had sort of neglected to feed my starter for the last several weeks), but it worked perfectly well.

Nice chew to the crust. Definitely a keeper.

A community initiative.

My home in Washington, D.C., seems perfectly designed to be a mosquito breeding ground.

Between the high humidity and my water-trapping, shady garden, in warmer months we spend about five buggy minutes outside before we inevitably give up and pack it in, covered in bites.

I didn’t want to spray insecticide because it can also harm mosquitoes’ natural predators like dragonflies, spiders and birds, but none of the natural repellents I tried worked. I began to think mosquitoes were simply an unpleasant but inevitable part of life, like waiting in line at the DMV or paying taxes.

Then a few months ago, I found out about a group in my neighborhood called the Itty Bitty Mosquito Population Committee, which is trying to use the same techniques to fight the swarming hordes that scientists have used to all but eradicate mosquitoes on an island in the Philippines.

I had to find out who was behind this effort, what they were doing and how I could take steps to prevent my family from being eaten alive.

https://archive.is/jgYbO

The Itty Bitty Mosquito Population Committee:

https://www.ittybittymosquitocommittee.org/

An 88-Year-Old Woman Was Brought To My ER. When Her Family Told Me Why, I Was Stunned.

"I cleared my throat. 'So, I was wondering, why did you bring Maria to the hospital today?' Instantly all three sets of eyes filled with tears."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/emergency-room-doctor-visit-death-grief-heart-attack-stroke-fear_n_6a2efa7ce4b04478a060a860

Robert MacNeil interviews Rubenstein.

Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "create evidential material in a number of cases".

The Derbyshire Police officer has been removed from frontline duties, pending the outcome of the investigation, said the force.

The officer is alleged to have perverted the course of justice, but no arrests have been made, said police.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said they were working with police, adding: "We are engaging with defence teams and the courts in appropriate cases."

They added: "As police inquiries continue, it would not be appropriate to comment further."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8wppwdxl6o

@Bernard said:

they'll kiss anybody's ass for it

Trump wins inaugural Fifa Peace Prize

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cy5gw0wv5zqo

I love this time of year, too!

I love berry season, which has started here. Been grazing on serviceberries for the last week. Bumper crop. Also looks like I'll have good raspberry and black currant crops. There was severe dieback on one of my two red gooseberry bushes, so that crop will be much smaller than usual.

Here are some tomato recipes. We need to get ready for those pups! I have tons on the vine.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/photos/tomato-salad-recipes

Corn and tomato salad:

Here's a recap of the damage. Several EF-3 tornados.

https://abc7chicago.com/post/chicago-illinois-weather-tornadoes-leave-damage-area-streator-nw-indiana/19280623/

So they didn't have tarps up to hide what the workers were doing when they put Trump's name up there, but they did last night when they took his name down.

Waste of (more) taxpayer money.

edited to add (I missed that they used cherry pickers to put the name up back in December):

Workers spent hours Friday slowly putting up scaffolding in front of the Kennedy Center to reach the letters. Several commentators noted that when the letters were installed back in December, cherry pickers were used to do the job much quicker, leading to speculation the scaffolding was ordered to create additional delays and give Trump’s appeals more time.

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/tarp-put-up-to-block-onlookers-from-watching-trumps-name-removed-from-kennedy-center/

A US district court judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate any history or science materials it removed from the nation’s public monuments, finding that the White House’s actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization”.

In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, calling upon the secretary of interior to examine monuments, memorials and statues to see if they had been altered after January 2020 to represent a “false construction of American history”.

“Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at national parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths,” Kelley wrote in her decision.

Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the NPCA, said in a statement after the ruling: “Americans count on national parks to help us understand our full, rich history. Stories of triumph and tragedy alike deserve to be told out loud at parks.”

Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a fellow plaintiff in the suit, echoed the sentiment. National parks “exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling will help ensure that remains the case,” she said in a statement.

The Trump administration has 21 days to comply with the order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-national-park-trump-displays

Man, they don't miss a beat, do they?

In a last-ditch effort to halt the judge’s order, the Kennedy Center sought to block it late Thursday. The judge denied that request Friday, hours before the deadline for removing Trump’s name.

In a filing to a federal appeals court seeking to block the judge’s order, the center argued for the first time that taking Trump’s name off the building would result in having to return hundreds of millions of dollars that the center has raised for renovations due to a previously unannounced change to the center’s bylaws.

“All of this money, hundreds of millions of dollars, will have to be immediately returned, or not received by the Center,” the filing said.

The filing said the “reason for this clause is that people and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the Building.”

It does not say how, when or where the change was made to the center’s bylaws. The Kennedy Center did not respond to inquiries about when the changes were made and exactly how much money might be at risk.

The appeals court on Friday night denied the Kennedy Center’s request for a pause.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/construction-workers-begin-removing-trump-name-kennedy-center-rcna349870

The New Deal project that preserved Kentucky’s recipes

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-132-spring-2026/librarians-on-horseback?ff_exp_var=sep%3Futm_source%3Djoin1440

The natives are not happy.

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years — cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI.

Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt.

The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh*t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.

That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it/

Or, there is a fungus among us.

Earth's underground fungal network is so massive, it would span 10% of the Milky Way, map reveals

The first global map of subterranean fungi networks reveals how massive its reach is worldwide.

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/earths-underground-fungal-network-is-so-massive-it-would-span-10-percent-of-the-milky-way-map-reveals

He was 100.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/g-s1-128022/gene-shalit-movie-critic-dies

American politics is deeply divided along partisan lines – and for many Americans, the choice between the two parties feels stark, even existential.

But beneath that familiar red-blue partisan divide is a much more nuanced picture: Many Americans hold a complex mix of values and beliefs that don’t always fit neatly into either major party.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/