We had dinner this week with a bunch of Kaldi teammates. We chose the venue, Cyrano’s, which considering our party was probably not the best choice. Cyrano’s in its current incantation is very loud. Considering that our party comprised sexagenarians, septuagenarians and even one octogenarian, being hard of hearing was endemic to the group. Conversation across the table was difficult. Going forward, this monthly gathering will shift to a late lunch schedule and one of our savvier West County compatriots will pick the next location.

Now that the midterms are supposedly over, except for the continuing steady drip, drip of ballot tabulation and the obligatory runoff elections and recounts, life is settling into a new normal. Trump and the GOP are now in incrimination mode, fighting among themselves and I am loving it. Putin judging that the Republicans would not be coming to his rescue after all, figuratively pulled the plug on his occupation of Kherson. Let us hope that he does not then go on to literally pull the plug on that city’s upstream dam and flood the place. Although, I suspect that he will not lose this opportunity to wash away his many sins there. And then there is the question of what the heck is Elon Musk doing to Twitter?

He has just introduced his new Blue Twitter feature, where for the low, low price of $8 a month anyone can punk anyone else. Just today, “verified” blue checkmark twitter accounts posted the following, while purporting to be:

• Pepsi: Coke is better
• Nestlé: We steal your water and sell it back to you lol
• Lockheed Martin: We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States until further investigation into their record of human rights abuse. #WeAreLM
• American Girl: Felicity owned slaves
• BP: Just cause we killed the planet doesn’t mean we can’t miss it :'(
• Eli Lilly: wait a second… is profit motivated medicine… bad? sh!t
• Chiquita: “We’ve just overthrown the government of Brazil.” The real Chiquita tried to do damage control from one of these fake verified accounts, “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Chiquita account. We have not overthrown a government since 1954.”
• Tesla: BREAKING: A second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center.

Since, all of these posts have now been subsequently deleted and their originating accounts disabled, these eight offending posts cost their authors a total of $64 and will likely cost Elon and Twitter $15M in lost ad revenue. UPDATE: Twitter now has “paused” issuing any more paid verifications.