What are the chances?
People.com tell us about Mormon missionary Mason Wells, who was caught up in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, last year’s Paris attack… and the recent airport attack in Belgium.
Opinions are divided as to whether he’s extremely unlucky to have been so close to all three tragedies in the first place, or extremely lucky to have survived them all.
Fortunately, there are ways of avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time — especially if your idea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is staying at the same hotel as Donald Trump on any given night.
According to HNGN.com, UK travel booking site LastMinute.com have introduced a new program to their USA service and named it “Trump the Trump.” Should a tourist have the misfortune to find themselves in the midst of Trump-related hotel chaos, LastMinute will immediately look for more peaceful alternative accommodation.
Said a company spokesperson “Our primary goal is to ensure that our customers have the option of a quick exit to more tranquil Trump-free surroundings if they wish so.”
At least that would reduce the chance of hearing the kind of geographical howler reported in Rawstory.
Someone in Trumpdom ought to gently but firmly take the man who was quoted as saying “Belgium is not the Belgium that you and I knew, Matt, from 20 years ago, which was one of the most beautiful cities and one of the safest cities in the world” to one side.
And then remind the person aiming to be the most powerful man on the planet that Belgium is the country, and Brussels is — despite recent occurrences — still the beautiful city it used to be.
Wrong place, Donald. And definitely the wrong time to make that kind of mistake.
That little episode is on a par with the kind of lack of intellectual capacity currently being suffered by the remains of one W. Shakespeare, writer.
OK, then — ex-writer.
Apparently, four hundred years after his burial archaeologists from Staffordshire University scanned Shakespeare’s grave with ground-penetrating radar — only to find his head was missing.
It’s been — wherever it is — in the wrong place for centuries. So says Reuters, and they should know.
But then again, there’s now a way to increase the sadly lacking intellectual capacity illustrated by someone who doesn’t know the difference between a country and a city, even after twenty years. Or, on an equally intellectual level, the genius that is Shakespeare.
Who’s been dead for centuries.
According to the UK’s Daily Express, Researchers at California’s HRL Laboratories have developed a way of uploading new skills and knowledge directly into the brain.
They tested their theories by analysing the electrical signals in the brain of a pilot, and then fed that data to people who didn’t know how to fly an aircraft via electrodes, stimulating the appropriate areas of their brain.
And although those non-pilots should never be placed at the controls of the average Boeing making its final manual approach into a windswept JFK (definitely the wrong place at the wrong time), it seems they had more of a flair for controlling an aircraft after having that piloting information implanted.
Anyone else in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Well…
Microsoft should have taken note before launching their new chatbot Tay, designed among other things to hang out on popular social sites and “engage users with witty, playful conversation” and improve the company’s “understanding of conversational language among young people online”.
Well, that was the theory, anyway.
Unfortunately, Tay was on Twitter. And Tay shouldn’t have been there just then. Wrong place again. And wrong time.
Because, says USAToday, Twitter was Tay’s downfall. It only took a single day before Twitter users’ “repeat after me” taught Tay all sorts of interesting phrases which were then first spread out all over the internet, and then hunted down and — for the most part — deleted.
But it wasn’t just Microsoft having ever-so-slightly-being-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time problems this week.
Consider the patent-related, reverse-engineering possibilities of, say, a top-secret new, unpatented version of Google’s Glass. Consider finding such an item in a Redwood City pawnshop. Consider bidding more than twenty grand for that item in an eBay bidding war.
And yes, the Santa Cruz Sentinel informs us, there really was a top-secret new version of Glass sitting in that pawnshop this past weekend. And yes the eBay bids really did go up to $20.000 before Google stepped in and retrieved their errant headset.
Once more with feeling then: wrong place. Wrong time.
