Microfiction:

Note to self: When a guy in a white lab coat screams “Don’t touch that button!”, don’t touch that button.

The guy in the lab coat was Dr. Hirofumi Watanabe, I was the idiot who touched the button. One moment, it’s 2053 and my first day on the job as a technician at the GoogleMitsubishi Research Center near Kansas City. The next moment, it’s 1953 and I’m standing in a stubbled cornfield.

Depending how you look at it, that happened two years ago, or will happen in 98. But now it’s 1955 and I’ve come to accept that I’m here for good. And I’ve given up worrying about time paradoxes. I’ve already muddled with this timeline; I’ve got a daughter who never would have been born and another kid on the way. I haven’t told Jane when I’m from, she’d never believe it anyway. Made up a story about being an orphan and having bounced around the foster care system. It wasn’t hard establishing a new identity, record-keeping is still so primitive, I just assumed the identity of a kid who died in 1932. I breezed through an undergraduate degree; that my DNA had been altered in-vitro to increase intelligence really helped. Working on a PhD at CalTech right now. I’ll “invent” the MOSFET transistor in a few months and the microprocessor in a year or two. Might as well get rich.

So, yeah, I’m probably one of the smartest people alive. Even if I was dumb enough to have touched that button.

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

’The most unusual day’: How March 11, 2020, marked the start of the COVID era

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:

Soaring home prices are starting to alarm policymakers

The last time the U.S. saw such skyrocketing home prices, the ensuing crash brought down the global economy.

Why Are We Still Surprised by Large Blackouts?

Banksy art burned, destroyed and sold as token in ‘money-making stunt'’

BP to tell 25,000 office staff to work from home two days a week

In Carbon County, the future is wind

Venezuela Issues Million-Bolivar-Bill Worth 50 Cents As Hyperinflation Rages

Politics:

Gosar Tweets White Nationalist’s Motto After Speaking At Same White Nationalist’s Event

White evangelicals are wary of the vaccine. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, evangelicals developed a strained relationship with modern science. Geology revealed ancient fossils and an old Earth. Biology traced the course of human evolution. Cosmology attributed the beginnings of an expanding universe to a Big Bang.
For many evangelical believers, the scientific description of reality did not look like the universe of their imagination. The scientific profession became an object of suspicion. And this distrust was only exacerbated by a resurgence of fundamentalism in the late 20th century.

Arkansas pretends Roe v. Wade doesn’t exist, enacts doomed legislation.

“The president’s name will not appear in the memo line” of the stimulus checks, @PressSec says.

— Anne Rumsey Gearan (@agearan) March 9, 2021

A Washington insider has an interesting theory about Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham’s relationship

Serendipity:

Charlie Chaplain’s The Kid was released 100 years ago in 1921. For much of the film, “the kid” was played by the six-year-old vaudevillian Jackie Coogan (much later, Uncle Fester on The Addams Family). But in backstory scenes, the kid as an infant was portrayed by Silas Hathaway who turned 102 yesterday and is one of the few still alive who appeared onscreen in the silent film era.

^{Badge thanks to @arcange}

^{Meme credit: HelderMagalhes (source)}