Happy Friday!
FOUR BLACK BEARS THREW A POOL PARTY IN THE ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST
A guy with about twenty motion cameras hidden in the Angeles National Forest pointed one at a pool of water, and the footage came back as a full bear rager. Robert Martinez, who posts as Parliament of Owls, caught three black bear cubs splashing and wrestling each other in the water while the adult tried to relax in the cool water. The adult did not get to relax. Anyone who has ever tried to sit in a pool at a family barbecue while children use your spine as a diving platform knows exactly what that bear was going through. The timing is the part that stings. Martinez says he ran into the bears himself less than an hour before their swim on September 18. So he hiked past four bears, walked out, and the camera stayed behind and got invited to the party. He has been doing this out of Glendora since 2012, which is how his greatest hits already include mountain lions, bobcats, ringtails, and one enormous black bear that knocked a toy Santa face-first into the dirt back in 2014. Fourteen years of hauling batteries into the brush for footage nobody can get any other way, and the reward is proof that the best pool party in Los Angeles County has no cover charge and no DJ.
TENNESSEE GAVE A WOMAN TWO LETHAL DOSES IN ONE NIGHT AND SAYS IT DID EVERYTHING RIGHT
Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday night at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Her attorney Randy Spivey says the team worked for over an hour trying to establish an IV line, and that he counted at least seven needles in her left arm alone, one of which came out bent. Then came both doses of pentobarbital, the primary set and the backup set. She still had a heartbeat, had not lost consciousness, and witnesses heard her snoring loudly after the curtain was closed. The Department of Correction emailed its statement after 11 p.m. It said the department followed every step of the state's lawful, established protocol, that the chemical in that protocol has consistently been effective, and that the protocol does not allow for anything beyond what was already done. That statement went out while she was alive in a hospital bed, where her lawyers say she is in critical condition receiving lifesaving medical care. So that's the fight. Pike's lawyers point to difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital and a protocol they say stays hidden. The state says nothing went wrong procedurally, which is a hell of a position to hold about an execution that executed nobody. Governor Bill Lee said Tennesseans expect the job done in a way that is legal, constitutional and effective, then ordered a comprehensive third-party review and called off the only other execution the state had scheduled this year. It was Tennessee's second failed execution of 2026. In May, the team spent over an hour failing to set a line on Tony Carruthers before calling that one off too.
TAYLOR SWIFT'S CLEVELAND LOVE SONG IS NOW THE WORST-RATED TRACK OF HER CAREER
On September 25 Swift dropped four bonus tracks on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, and one of them is "Cleveland!", a love song about Travis Kelce and the Ohio suburb that raised him. A week later it sits as the lowest-rated song in her entire catalog on Album of the Year. She tried to do Cleveland a favor and accidentally made it a crime scene. The structure of the song is Swift listing every insult she has absorbed about her clothes, her dancing and her face, then announcing that her husband likes her anyway. Critics did not receive this as romance. Paste called it "a hollow, materialistic power move" and said her branding is eating her artistry. Pitchfork said her music has been "almost entirely drained of depth and meaning." Sports Illustrated published a review calling it the worst thing she has ever written, so the backlash has now leaked out of music media and into the football section. One guy's tweet calling it the worst song he had ever heard pulled nearly 10,000 likes. Kelce's counter-review, delivered on the September 30 episode of New Heights: Cleveland is rocking right now, shout out to Tay Tay. He also called it a banger. Jason Kelce said he and Kylie have had it on repeat. Variety's read is that Paul McCartney caught the same beating in the seventies for writing happy songs about being married, which is great news for Taylor and rough news for everyone currently typing.
TRUMP IS RAFFLING OFF DINNER TO THE 185 BIGGEST HOLDERS OF A COIN DOWN 97%
The team behind $TRUMP is running it back. On Nov. 22, the top 185 registered holders get into Trump National in Washington, D.C., with VIP status locked on Nov. 12. The top 29 get a VIP reception and the top four get 18-karat gold Trump watches, which is one way to recover a fraction of your money. The leaderboard is time-weighted, scoring you on how many tokens you hold and how long you sit on them. The coin hit an all-time high of $73.43 and traded around $2.04 on Oct. 1, roughly 97% below the peak. It jumped about 9% right after the dinner was announced, so the contest is already doing its job. Trump is advertised alongside three unnamed guests billed as "legends." The April event at Mar-a-Lago produced Mike Tyson. The site also says no attendee gets a private meet and greet with the president, so pack a camera and shrink your expectations. The coverage splits clean. Trade press ran the mechanics and the tiers. ABC and the watchdogs ran the word corruption. Public Citizen's August report put Trump crypto investors at least $4.7 billion underwater while the ventures generated about $1.4 billion for him in 2025, and its co-president called the dinner "unethical and unconscionable profiteering off the presidency" at best. Senate Democrats wanted the crypto market structure bill to limit officials' digital asset ties. The bill failed to advance.
FEDS INDICTED A 67-YEAR-OLD CANOEIST OVER A POOL THEIR OWN CONTRACTOR WRECKED
A D.C. Superior Court judge just put the dumbest case of the year in the ground. Judge Todd Edelman dismissed the Reflecting Pool vandalism charge against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with prejudice, meaning prosecutors can never refile it. Quick recap for anyone who tuned out. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a new blue coating this year, and it almost immediately started peeling and growing algae. Trump said vandals. The Justice Department indicted Hearn, 67, for allegedly ripping out a chunk of sealant, a felony that requires proving more than $1,000 in damage. Then U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro read the Interior Department's own evidence and concluded the problem was a "botched installation." In September the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, admitted "human oversight" and a plan that layered two incompatible chemicals. Trump handled this gracefully. He said Pirro "folded like an umbrella" and that she "choked," and he brought up Hearn's past ActBlue donations, which is a vibe, not a charge. DOJ still asked to keep the case technically alive so it could recharge him within six years. Edelman wrote 26 pages saying no, citing "exceptional circumstances" and political pressure from the President on his own subordinates, and noting the government's own filings made a new indictment "fanciful." Three other people charged over the pool already had their cases quietly dropped. Hearn was the only one a grand jury ever indicted.
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