🐱 Tubz Unfiltered - Volume 133
Hello Kitty; Top Pro Athletes of 2000s; IT Outage
Happy Tuesday Wednesday, y’all!
If you send more than two (2) exclamation points in a work email, check yourself before you wreck yourself.
🛁 EXTRA BUBBLES 🛁
HELLO KITTY IS NOT A CAT?
I guess the whole gotdamn globe has been fed lies for way too long — since 1974, in fact, the year Hello Kitty was created. According to Jill Cook, Director of Retail Business Development at Hello Kitty’s flagship company, Sanrio:
Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s actually a little girl, born and raised in the suburbs of London.
She has a mom and dad and twin sister, Mimmy, who’s also her best friend.
Narrator: She has her own pet cat, Charmmy Kitty.
Hello Kitty has whiskers, and her name is Kitty FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. YOU’RE TRYING TO TELL ME SHE’S NOT A CAT? LOOK AT HER. OH, AND THE CREATOR’S DESIGN FOR HELLO KITTY WAS LITERALLY "A WHITE CAT WITH A RED BOW IN ITS HAIR.”
But yeah, OK, everyone who has eyes and a brain is supposed to believe she’s not a cat. Is Ms. Cook and her company also trying to sell you and me on the fact that there is a bridge in Brooklyn for sale?
"Her core message is friendship, kindness, and inclusivity and part of what has helped her transcend borders, languages, cultures is that that's understandable to everyone," Cook said.
Huh. Notice how honesty was not included? Interesting. Very interesting.
At the end of the day, words matter — yesterday, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of time — and the below description sure as hell doesn’t sound like a little girl to me!
Hello Kitty is a gijinka, an anthropomorphism or personification of a Japanese Bobtail cat.
🏆 SPORTZ 🏆
ESPN: TOP 100 PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES SINCE 2000
Voters were instructed to consider only an athlete's performance since 2000.
It’s hard to argue, as a pure-blooded American, with Michael Phelps at No. 1. He’s the greatest Olympian of all time. But I have plenty of thoughts on some other rankings.
(2) Serena Williams
She’s the greatest women’s tennis player of all time, but did she really have that much competition during her run? She deserves to be in the top ten, undoubtedly, but No. 2 is a bit high.
(3) Messi
I think we can put to bed the G.O.A.T. debate when comparing Messi and Ronaldo, who was No. 13. I don’t enough about soccer to pound my fist on the table as to this ranking, but it seems high because of my next thought.
(5) Tom Brady
He is the most accomplished football player in the sport’s history, winning seven Super Bowls while playing the most difficult and important position in all of sports. He’s a three-time MVP and five-time Super Bowl MVP and also holds the NFL record for career passing yards and touchdowns. He played for a bajillion seasons in an ultra-violent sport. Ranking him No. 5 is malpractice. Credentials must be removed.
(6) Roger Federer
Couldn’t agree more that Federer ranks above Djokovic (No. 11) and Nadal (No. 12). I love Federer. He is my G.O.A.T., and you can take your “WeLl, DjOkOvIc HaS mOrE tItLeS” argument and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Respectfully.
But No. 6? Not so sure about that.
(8) Tiger Woods
Injuries, horniness, and perhaps a drug problem derailed his career, but the man revolutionized the game of golf. Not to mention, as you will read below, he won more than one major championship in the same season four times. He won 11 majors as the world No. 1, “nine more than any other player all time.”
(9) Usain Bolt
This ranking leaves me discombobulated and dumbfounded. He won eight Olympic gold medals and was the “only sprinter to win Olympic 100m and 200m titles at three consecutive Olympics.” There will never be another Usain Bolt.
(23) Kevin Garnett
Look, he was a helluva player, but ranking him above Peyton Manning (No. 26), Randy Moss (No. 27), Nikola Jokic (No. 28), Dirk Nowitzki (No. 41), and Giannis (No. 42)?? Make it make sense.
BRITISH OPEN RECAP
I always love seeing an American win the British Open. Just another kick to the gonads for the British lads as we continue running up the score since 1776.
Xander Schauffel (-9) won the second major of his career, and his second this year, after outdueling Justin Rose (-7) and Billy Horschel (-7) in the final round, including a six-under-par round on Sunday.
Schauffel became the seventh golfer since 1990, and first since 2018, to win more than one major championship in the same season. The others:
Mark O’Meara (1998)
Tiger Woods (2000, 2002, 2005, 2006)
Padraig Harrington (2008)
Rory McIlroy (2014)
Jordan Spieth (2015)
Brooks Koepka (2018)
🤓 BATH TIME READING 🤓
MASSIVE IT OUTAGE
It is very likely you never heard of CrowdStrike before Friday, but the company found itself front and center after crapping and pissing the bed by way of “a botched software update … affecting millions of Windows systems around the world,” according to Tech Target.
I was off work Friday, but I did get an email mid-Friday morning acknowledging that all systems were go at my employer. That would be an awful buzzkill, like waking up on Sunday and remembering that Chick-Fil-A is closed while you are craving a chicken sandwich/biscuit. If I was working that day, I would simply email the powers that be, “Huh, looks like I still don’t have access. I’ll reboot and check back in a couple of hours.”
All told, while millions of workers were able to kick their feet up and say, “my hands are tied here, Jimbo,” it was the largest IT outage in history, and it has been estimated that the whoopsadaisy “will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses.”
Numerous Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software to detect and block hacking threats. But when CrowdStrike issued an update last week to its signature cybersecurity software, known as Falcon, millions of computers around the world running Microsoft Windows crashed because of the way that the update interacted with Windows.
The health care and banking sectors were the hardest hit by CrowdStrike’s mishap, with estimated losses of $1.94 billion and $1.15 billion, respectively, said Parametrix, the cloud monitoring and insurance firm behind Wednesday’s analysis.
Fortune 500 airlines such as American and United were the next most affected, losing a collective $860 million, Parametrix said.
So what did Crowdstrike do? They offered A TEN DOLLAR UBER EATS GIFT CARD to its partners and an apology, according to TechCrunch. Crowdstrike read the room as well as Ray Charles.
If you chuckled and/or enjoyed it, make sure to forward it to others and/or share it on social. Any corrections, omissions, suggestions, etc., send 'em my way. Much love. -Tubz