He was stuck in my opinion
MAN STUCK IN TENNIS RACKET CLAIMS HE WAS NEVER STUCK
For about a week, the internet's most urgent unsolved case was an 11-second clip of a man jammed torso and leg deep into a tennis racket with the strings removed, surrounded by people doing absolutely nothing. It passed 23 million views on X after a repost on Oct. 31, and the dominant reply was strangers demanding a welfare check. Good news: he's fine. Better news: he was never stuck. The clip comes from Odigie Efe Alex, a 35-year-old emcee in Benin City, Nigeria, who filmed it at the restaurant where he works and posted it to Instagram back on Sept. 28, where it did a quiet 1.5 million views before the West tripped over it. The man in the racket is a contortionist the restaurant hired. Squeezing through a racket frame is a standard trick in that job. The bit worked too well. He slapped the floor like he was going out right there, the waiters panicked, and voices in the background begged somebody to help. Then the room figured out the con, and one guy offered to mash his head. Alex stopped recording once things got tense, which is why nobody got an ending. The performer just stood up. Alex doesn't even know his name and has been trying to get his number to shoot another video.
MINNESOTA VIKINGS CALL UP THEIR EX, KIRKO CHAINZ
Carson Wentz went 8-for-25 for 81 yards with two interceptions Monday night, finishing with a passer rating of 8.9, and Buffalo won 23-6. ESPN Research had his off-target rate at 38%, the highest by any quarterback in a game this season. Vikings fans booed him after nearly every throw, which was the gentlest thing that happened to him all night. He also lost a fumble on a backward pass that sailed over Justin Jefferson's head, a throw that required real effort to miss that badly. So the Vikings did the deadline-day equivalent of drunk-dialing. Minnesota sent a 2027 third-round pick to the Raiders for Kirk Cousins, the 38-year-old who played there from 2018 to 2023 and already knows Kevin O'Connell's offense. Raiders GM John Spytek said he never shopped Cousins and didn't make a single call before Minnesota rang him Tuesday morning, and he called it a hard decision. That is how you get talked out of your quarterback before lunch. The backdrop is that this team is good everywhere else. Kyler Murray was hurt and struggling before Wentz got the job, Max Brosmer finished Monday's game, and the defense held the Bills to a season low in points and still lost by 17. Green Bay is up Sunday at noon.
Quick trivia
What is Africa's largest country by landsize
WHITE HOUSE TELEPROMPTER CLEARED $107,000 BETTING ON KALSHI
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley sent a letter to White House counsel Will Scharf asking what the administration has done in the four months since its teleprompter operator got caught running the easiest trade in America. Their answer, as they tell it, is that the only publicly known step was circulating a warning memo, which the senators argue will not fix what they call a culture of corruption and greed. The case: Gabriel Perez, Trump's teleprompter guy since 2016, bet on Kalshi's "Mentions" markets, where you wager on whether a word shows up in a speech. He had the speech. He was holding it. Investigators found bets across more than a dozen speeches over three months, including the State of the Union and Davos, and more than $107,000 in profit. The best detail is that he bailed on positions mid-speech when Trump skipped a chunk of script. He wasn't just reading the future, he was watching it get edited live. Kalshi's own surveillance flagged him and referred it to the CFTC, which hit him with a $65,000 penalty, took the profits back, and banned him from trading for three years. Fair warning on the framing: this is a Democratic press release, and the White House hasn't publicly laid out its side. The senators want to know if other staff placed similar bets, whether anyone got training, and whether anybody called the CFTC or DOJ.
Sources (3)
- coindesk.com - Warren: What is White House doing to prevent a repeat of teleprompter's Trump bets?
- fortune.com - Democrats press White House on prediction market betting by staff
- warren.senate.gov - Warren, Merkley Press White House for Answers on Insider Trading Scandal Involving Trump Teleprompter Aide
VOYAGER 1 REACHES ONE LIGHT-DAY FROM EARTH
At 5:16:07 a.m. EST on Nov. 18, Voyager 1 hits about 16.09 billion miles from Earth, one full light-day. Send it a command that morning and it lands tomorrow. Wait for the answer and you are two days deep. That is the best long distance humanity has ever managed, after 49 years, two months and 11 days of coasting at roughly 38,000 mph. NASA is throwing a party for it. The night before, Nov. 17, the agency wants people to point a flashlight, phone, glow stick or whatever else at the sky and flash V-G-R in Morse code, and there is an automated flasher online for anyone who cannot be trusted with dots and dashes. Voyager sees none of this. It has two working instruments left, the plasma wave subsystem and the magnetometer, and in April NASA will switch off another one to save power. Then on Nov. 19 at noon Eastern, JPL puts mission staff on camera to talk about Voyager's status and the problem of running a 1977 spacecraft at that range, plus a preview of a Voyager documentary due in 2027 for the 50th anniversary. The old thing is still filing reports. Deputy project scientist Jamie Rankin says every day it is "in places nobody's ever explored before."
HOUSE SAVES HEGSETH BY SEVEN VOTES, 11 DEMOCRATS SKIP
Thomas Massie spent his last weeks in Congress writing a 34-page resolution with eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, built mostly around waging the Iran war without congressional authorization. On Tuesday the House voted 211-204 to refer it to the Judiciary Committee, which in Washington means sliding it into a drawer and forgetting the drawer exists. Massie was the only Republican to vote to keep it alive. He also isn't coming back in January, which tends to do wonders for a man's spine. This was attempt two. Massie filed the same articles in September, and Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home early for the midterms rather than hold the vote. Republicans then lost those midterms. Hegseth spent Tuesday morning calling the effort a farce and a political spectacle, and JD Vance posted that the idea Hegseth committed impeachable crimes is absurd. Everyone read the same scoreboard differently. Trump called the result an EXONERATION and labeled Massie a major LOSER. Hakeem Jeffries said it's just the beginning. Left-leaning coverage framed the whole thing as the GOP closing ranks a week after voters torched them over Iran and the cost of living. The one number nobody is putting on a hat: 18 members missed the vote entirely, 11 of them Democrats, which is a strange way to start a beginning.
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