Week in Review
Last week saw quite a fair share of action. Melania and Barron Trump have officially moved into the White House. Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot in another mass shooting when a gunman opened fire at a GOP baseball practice. At least 30 people have died in the massive fire that raged on at The Grenfell Tower in London. And Bill Cosby walks free; his sexual assault case ended in a mistrial after the jury declared itself deadlocked.
Microsoft unveiled its new, more powerful Xbox One X at the E3 convention in the hopes of bridging the massive gap in sales between the PS4 and the Xbox One.
Talking about movies, Fox is once again looking to fix an X-Men character previously bastardised in a god-awful film, with its upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix, with Jessica Chastain attached to co-star as the film’s antagonist.
While the above events would be familiar to most, this article looks to round up some of last week’s more obscure happenings.
Uber CEO steps down indefinitely
After a slew of complaints of sexual harassment, gender and race discrimination, and an aggressive culture, Uber, the company that introduced car transportation mobile app services, announced that CEO Travis Kalanick will take an indefinite leave of absence. Quite ironically, during a meeting that was intended to fix these apparent issues of sexism, a woman was interrupted by director David Bonderman so that he could deliver a sexist joke. This led to the second major resignation of the week for Uber.
The iCar
The increasingly lucrative self-driving car market has brought another major tech company into its fold. Breaking their usual tight-lipped policy, Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed that Apple is working on prototypes for an autonomous car. He expressed disappointment in the fact that Apple didn’t receive enough recognition for its advances in artificial intelligence and labelled the initiative, “the mother of all AI projects.”
The Emotionless Fund Manager
In order to nullify the infamously hazardous effects of emotionally driven investment decisions, a South-African financial services group, Sanlam Global Investment Solutions, has launched an actively managed fund entirely run by artificial intelligence. The AI would help to process the vast amounts of data and interpret it more efficiently. The fund previously used a fixed algorithm, which would use past information to decide how much to invest in an asset. The AI system, however, predicts what it thinks will happen, rather than looking back.
Flight of the Pigs
While it’s not uncommon to see animals strutting along on roads in India, it is an extremely unusual affair in a place like Osaka, Western Japan, where 19 pigs caused a five kilometre-long traffic jam after making a daring getaway en route to the slaughterhouse. The truck that was transporting the pigs to a local market, collided with another vehicle, resulting in damage to the cage and thus liberating its porky inmates. It took the local police nearly five hours to round up the pigs as they merrily frolicked all over the highway, blissfully unaware of the menace that was being caused.
Eating Words
People consuming books might not be the most typical development that one would expect to arise, nevertheless last week saw not one, but two separate incidents of people publicly ingesting books. Mathew Goodwin, Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, made good on his promise to eat his book should Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win 38 percent of the vote in the 2017 general election. He quite literally ate his own words when during an appearance on Sky News, he stuffed pages of his book, ‘Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union’, into his mouth.
Things were no less strange across the pond where amateur comedian Jamie Loftus uploaded a video on Twitter of her eating a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, page by page, over the course of a year.
-Anantha Venkataram
About the Author:
Basic cinephile who spends too much time preaching about the cinematic excellence of Steven Spielberg. Occasionally watches tv shows and thinks that parks and rec is the best sitcom of all time.
