Jack Manassas and Company

Disclaimer:  This is a story, not a true account of anything. The name have been changed to protect the guilty, and the innocent.  Any similarity between the names mentioned here and similar names of real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  Except for Abraham Lincoln. ---- They had been at it, hammer and tongs, for over a week.  Jamieson Snere, negotiating for the Americans, wheedled for concessions one minute, and made forceful arguments the next, promising sweet deals whose details remained fuzzy, and threatening the ruin of the Canadian economy, sometimes in the same breath.  Janet Curette, lead negotiator for the Canadians, was more reserved.  She listened carefully to her counterpart's arguments, but seemed not to be offended or enthusiastic, no matter what was said to her.   Tariffs on one side, proposals for free trade on the other.  Cars, oil, minerals, metals rose and fell without agreements.  They came close several time...

  Large corporations have been buying old books. They cut the bindings and covers off, and then feed the stacked pages into high-speed scanners to digitize the books. At the end of the process, the old books have been destroyed. This would not be an enormous tragedy if the scans were used to reprint the old books, and make their digital images available to the public. However, the scans are being used to train AI large language models. Whether from indifference or to keep competing AI products from using the same data, the scans are not being made available for use by anyone. Many of the books being scanned are rare, and since no record has been kept of what books are being scanned, we do not know what has been lost thus far. Fortunately, it is possible to digitize old books at home without destroying them. At the end of the process, you can make them available on websites like The Internet Archive; Reprint them on archival paper with an inkjet printer; Email them to oth...

 How Solomon Donkey Saved the World Bob Livingston sat at his breakfast table, sipping coffee and watching the video feed from a security camera on the West Road out of the Donkey Hotel.  Nothing much was happening, at least so far.  Livingston glanced again at his newspaper, but his gaze soon returned to the video screen. Solomon Donkey looked in on his friend and guardian through the open kitchen window for some time, not without curiosity.  It had been two weeks since Solomon’s return from Washington, DC.   At the request of the American Secret Service, Solomon had traveled to the United States.  The US President had lost the ability to understand human speech, but mysteriously could understand Donkeys.   After they confirmed that Solomon could converse with the President, the kindly donkey thought that he would be able to help pass along instructions from the President’s advisors.  At the last minute, the Vice President called it off...

  Shells on a beach arranged to form a Prime Number that annoys lots of people:   Shells on a beach arranged to form a different Prime Number that annoys dyslexic people: Shells arranged on a beach that used to form a prime number that annoyed people until someone else sorted them in descending order  (Prime Factors 2 x 2 x 7 x 313): Shells arranged on a beach that used to form a prime number that annoyed people until someone else sorted them in ascending order because they feel that descending order is depressing (Prime Factors 2 x 2339): Shells arranged on a beach to form a number which would have annoyed people in 2016 if anyone had been paying attention  (Prime factors 5 x 7 x 13 x 19): Shells arranged on a beach by someone who wanted Maxwell Smart to be the 47th President: This has nothing to do with Donald Trump, Mark Comey, Don Adams, or you.  Anyone who thinks it's about them is just being shellfish....

 Unexpected Visitor  1.  The Oval Office “The price is up?  Good.  Sell 100,000 Trump coins....I don’t care if it drives the price down...Yes, follow the usual procedure.  If it goes to 50% or less, buy the 100,000 back at discount....  If it goes up high enough, do it again.  Pump and dump, my friend.  Pump and dump.” Donald hung up the phone, then straightened up.  The oval office was empty, but Donald felt that someone was staring at his back.   He whirled his chair around, and stared out the window.  It was an overcast day, though whether through the accumulation of storm clouds or wisps of smoke from Canadian wildfires, he could not say, and did not care.  His gaze wandered from the trees near the White House, across the South lawn, past the fountain.  On the other side of the iron fence, he could make out the figure of a tall, thin man, dressed in black, that appeared to be staring intently through the fenc...