Please keep your distance!
Please keep your distance! Fokusiert / GETTY

Stay in your goddamn lane and stop fucking with whales: Just because you got a new kayak at the REI Anniversary Sale and your favorite movie growing up was Free Willy doesn’t give you the right to get up close and personal with whales. That just makes you a dick; you’re a dick because Free Willy is a shitty movie made by shitty people who captured an (arguably brilliant and talented actor) Orca whale. Kayakers are a fast-growing and unregulated part of the nearly $50 million whale-watch industry in the Northwest. There is no enforcement surrounding kayaks interfering with whale pods. That’s reserved for motorized boats. However, kayakers can be just as disruptive to whales, especially the critically endangered southern residents pod of Orcas in the Puget Sound. Think before you kayak, you entitled self-professed environmentalists.

Breaking news: It turns out democracy is flawed: And the Republicans in North Carolina gave themselves an unfair advantage in elections when they gerrymandered the fuck out of their voting map. A lawsuit filed by election advocacy groups and Democrats said that the election maps (which were redrawn in 2016 because they included two majority black congressional districts) contained unlawful partisan gerrymandering. A three-judge panel ruled that the election maps must be redrawn and found that the current “invidious partisanship” in the plans violated the Constitution because it inhibited people from choosing their own representatives. This is the first time a congressional plan has been struck down on partisan claims. Hopefully it's not the last since gerrymandering is prevalent and often times racist.

More earthquakes in what feels like a lot of earthquakes recently: As Honduras’ coast is struck with a 7.6 magnitude quake. Golly, it really does seem like a lot of earthquakes, right? Like, more than normal. And a quick Google search yields that yes, the answer is yes. It turns out 2018 is a big year for earthquakes because of a slight change in motion in the liquid iron and nickel in the earth’s innards. So the stuff we’ve already seen — a 7.1 in Mexico City, a 7.3 on the Iran-Iraq border, and a 7.0 off New Caledonia— aren’t isolated events and more are bound to happen. Look out for the hottest style of 2018: a fully stocked earthquake kit.

Is Elon Musk secretly bad at science? Because his highly classified satellite over at SpaceX launched today and then immediately plummeted into the Indian Ocean. Really reassuring for Falcon Heavy, the program he plans to launch later this year that hopes to bring humans into space. He should fix the name as well as the tech on that one, in my humble opinion. Falcon Heavy? Come on.

Today on why do people keep paying Mark Wahlberg: When he’s famous for literally playing the same underdog hero from Boston in every movie he’s in. Turns out he got $1.5 million for doing reshoots on that Kevin Spacey movie after it was leaked that Spacey was a creep. “All the Money in the World” gained a ton of notoriety for the reshoot decision. A last minute casting upheaval was bound to be expensive. But, Director Ridley Scott said many of the actors redid their scenes for next to nothing. Everyone except fucking Mark Wahlberg. His $1.5 million fee trumped his female costar’s $80 per diem (under $1,000 total). She was being paid literally less than 1 percent of her male co star. I’ve never seen Michelle Williams (his co star) act in anything but I’d bet my life she’s better than Marky Mark. Turns out that all this time the real Funky Bunch was systemic misogyny.

Fish farmers facing consequences for their actions are sad: As hearings about the future of fish farming are on-going in Olympia. If you forgot the most Seattle catastrophe ever, last summer, more than 160,000 farmed Atlantic salmon escaped from a Cooke Aquaculture net-pen off of Cypress Island. Oh, also they lied about it and said it was caused by weird tides from the solar eclipse. Which, no. It was the shoddy infrastructure! It was a huge deal because it exposed all the flaws in farming fish. Aside from “fish spills” that fuck with native salmon species, fish farms release waste, toxins, and chemicals into the Puget Sound. The nitty gritty of it is pretty gross if you want to dive into that cesspool. Cooke Aquaculture is fighting tooth and nail for their right to farm. “We spend more time with these fish than we do our families; we love them and care for them,” Tom Glaspie, vice president of PR from Cooke Aquaculture told the Seattle Times. Depressing.

Watch out rapists: A House bill to remove the statute of limitations for sex felony crimes is getting some big attention. The bill, House Bill 1155, first was a thing last year but it failed to get any traction. Now, as you can probably imagine, it’s making waves. The bill would do away with the current statute of limitations that says rape victims currently have three years to come forward and pursue charges. Changing this would destigmatize the already vastly underreported state of sexual assault cases, where two out of three rapes go unreported. Advocates and prosecutors are unsure whether passing the bill would lead to more prosecutions but it will allow more people to be heard and validated.

People are stockpiling drugs that will save them from nuclear fallout: But, spoiler alert, they won’t. Still, potassium iodide sales are stockpiling with the recent twitter-nuclear-war-debacle-and-pissing-contest and the CDC doing nuclear war aftermath tests. Troy Jones’ site — this shit is literally called www.nukepills.com — got a crazy amount of hits and he sold out of potassium iodide, or KI, a drug that blocks the thyroid from absorbing nuclear radiation and prevents cancer. Another potassium iodide retailer, Anbex Inc., had a bunch of traffic in the last week. "We are a wonderful barometer of the level of anxiety in the country," the company told NPR. Unfortunately, KI is pretty much pointless since it literally only protects your thyroid, not any of your other, most-likely more vital, organs. In fact, if taken when there isn’t radiation, it could cause harm. The moral of the story is there is no protecting yourself if our fearless leader president incites nuclear war, which, could very well happen. We all die. Might as well accept it and move on.

The public hearing about affordable housing at Fort Lawton: Went… well? The hearing was packed with pro-housing advocates with some pearl-clutching wealthy homeowners sprinkled in there. Find a livestream from the event here.


Look out! It's going to rain in Seattle: Thursday's weather forecast is predicting, wait for it, rain. But, apparently this is going to be a lot of rain. More than an inch is expected on just Thursday and it'll be paired nicely with some gusts of winds that can get up to 35 mph. Sounds cozy.

An actual strange weather event did occur, though: When it snowed in the Sahara desert. It's rare but not unheard of (don't panic) and it looks like some shit out of the Martian.

Trump gets stuffed on DACA: As a San Francisco federal judge blocks his administration’s attempt to shut-down the program that gives legal status and work permits to undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children. The ruling by U.S. District Court judge William Alsup said Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that DACA was illegal was "based on a flawed legal premise,” a phrase that should be applied to everything Sessions has ever done. He should put it on his resume. Alsup ordered the administration to allow renewal applications from DACA recipients who didn’t get their paperwork in by the October 5th deadline and to allow all soon-expiring applications to be renewed. This ruling, if it stands, could be a major blow for Trump and a win for DACA recipients, as well as anyone else in the country who still has a soul.