samhexum

Mom runs over 7-year-old son with car after forcing him to walk from school as punishment The walking home part? MAYBE acceptable punishment. Running him over? DEFINITELY excessive!

The unluck of the draw. A Powerball player claims he was denied a life-changing jackpot worth $340 million despite his numbers matching the lottery’s website last year, which the company claims was a “mistake.” Now, he’s suing Powerball and the DC Lottery John Cheeks bought a Powerball ticket on Jan. 6, 2023, when the jackpot rose to the $340 million prize, according to a complaint filed last November. Cheeks, who told NBC 4 he purchased the ticket using his family birthdates, missed the live drawing on Jan. 7, but wasn’t in a rush to check his numbers since the odds of winning a Powerball jackpot is about 1 in 292.2 million. He claimed he checked the DC Lottery’s website the following day and saw his winning numbers, believing he had become the year’s first multimillionaire. “I just politely called a friend. I took a picture as he recommended, and that was it. I went to sleep,” Cheeks told the outlet. For three days, the DC Lottery website showed his ticket numbers, according to the complaint. The numbers posted on the website, however, differed from those pulled during the live Powerball broadcast. He tried to redeem the ticket at a licensed retailer on Jan. 10 and discovered none of his numbers matched up to what was drawn live. Cheeks claimed he then went to the DC Office of Lottery and Gaming prize center to check with them, but again, he was told he was not the winner. “’Hey, this ticket is no good. Just throw it in the trash can,’” Cheeks recalled to the outlet. “And I gave him a stern look. I said, ‘In the trash can?’ ‘Oh yeah, just throw it away. You’re not gonna get paid. There’s a trash can right there.’” Cheeks has since placed the ticket in a safety deposit box. Cheek’s attorney, Richard Evans, said his client was eventually informed by a lottery contractor that Taoti Enterprises — a DC-based digital advertising agency that manages the DC Lottery’s website — made a “mistake” and posted the wrong numbers. “They have said that one of their contractors made a mistake,” Evans told NBC 4. “I haven’t seen the evidence to support that yet.” Despite Cheeks not having the correct numbers of the live drawing, Evan feels that something needs to be done for his client. “Even if a mistake was made, the question becomes: What do you do about that?” The jackpot eventually grew to $754.6 million before a ticketholder in Washington claimed the prize on Feb. 6. In Nov. 2023, Iowa lottery officials blamed “human reporting error” for posting the incorrect numbers, which remained on its website for over six hours. Those who were up and cashed their tickets were able to claim their prize, which ranged from $4 to $200, according to Fox 9. He'd have a better claim if he'd quit his job or spent extravagantly in those 3 days.

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Women's league proves it has chance at success In Toronto on Friday, 19,285 fans set all-time attendance record for women’s hockey.

Ah those folksy stories they told as they played chess on balmy summer nights...

2 Queens College School of Music faculty members bring home Grammy awards New interactive street art “Lights Up” downtown Jamaica The Downtown Jamaica Partnership launched three free new interactive street art installations in the heart of downtown Jamaica. The temporary installment dubbed the ‘‘Light Lane ” features colorful lights and music that emits from the three stationary bikes that make up the installments. Interested in taking a ride? The installations can be found at the 165th street mall on Jamaica Avenue and Union Hall street outside of the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and also at the Parsons Boulevard Plaza located between Jamaica and Archer Avenues. The exhibit runs until Mid-March.

@WilliamM's reaction to this was 'so... what?'

A COMICS HOMAGE TO JESSICA SIMPSON:

then I hope you've led a virtuous life...

I haven't watched this series for a while, but tonight I watched the Glenn Close episode (S6, E3). She was delightful in it.

Man who murdered Jackson Heights woman in SoHo hotel fled wearing her clothes I'd say that's an interesting wrinkle, but he probably ironed them first.

and just a hop, skip, and a jump away... Regal Atlas Park movie theater applies for beer and wine license

He's been suspended 2 games for PEDs.

He was my perfect match. Then he swindled me out of $71,640 — my life savings. Now I’m suing him for fraud. When I matched on Hinge with Rob Harris, a blonde haired, blue-eyed 30-year-old real estate agent who worked at Real Brokerage last April, he love bombed me. SMALL FEET? He was a real estate agent from New Jersey, like me. He was very funny, witty. We cracked jokes. He was light hearted. A family guy who loved dogs. Charming. Entrepreneurial. His prompt that got me to message him on Hinge was: “I’ll fall in love with you if you make me laugh.” I responded, “That won’t be a problem.” I sent him my number and we continued the conversation. The chemistry was instant and eventually, we talked about moving to Miami and putting an offer on a condo. We were talking all day non-stop. About our jobs in real estate, about silly nostalgic things like “Sponge Bob.” I looked him up to make sure he was a real estate agent. That checked out. He told me personal things about his life, he said, “A few girls I was talking to were taken aback by this, but I need to tell you, about a year ago, I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a thickened heart wall. “Just so you know, some days I’m able to get up and go and other days I’m so exhausted because I could be sitting still and my heart is pumping at 150 beats per minute.” My grandmother had something similar. I wasn’t going to write him off because of a heart issue. He was helping pay his mom’s mortgage and taking care of things for his family because his stepdad was having a serious back surgery, he told me. I thought, “that’s really honorable, he stepped up to the plate as the other man in the family.” We set a time to meet — he was going to drive into the city. Then at 7 p.m. that night I got an audio message saying: “Christina, I’m really sorry. Something is going on at the hospital I need to make sure my stepdad is okay. I’m really sorry. I do see a future here, please don’t be mad.” I can’t be the a–hole and get mad at that. I also had compassion for him and his situation because my mother had breast cancer, kidney cancer and a form of bone marrow cancer in the span of three years. I had to make a lot of concessions in my life. It was easy for us to connect on that level. He was sending me NYU Langone sites about the surgery — everything he was saying was checking out. In May, we finally went out on our first date. When we met, he opened the car door of his Tesla Model 3 for me. I thought, “What a gentleman.” We went to Catch Steak in Chelsea. He was a very nice dresser, wearing a black T-shirt and gray jeans with a designer watch. He came off as a very sweet, nurturing guy. When I met him in person I was like, “He’s not just good on the phone, over text, he’s handsome and we have good conversation.” On the date he said to me that he planned to move to Florida in October, and if this goes anywhere, is that something you’re open to? I said it’s funny, because I have family down there, my best friend is down there, I go back and forth as it is. I was in the process of getting a Florida real estate license. I was like, “yeah, this is synchronicity.” Our first kiss was electric. We talked until 3 a.m. that night. He sent me an audio message that said, “I think I met the love of my life.” The next month, he invited me to his friend’s birthday dinner. We were approaching the place and he said, “I don’t want to go. I just want to spend time with you, I haven’t seen you.” We were right in front of the restaurant. I thought it was a little weird, but we went out for dinner blocks from the place. He didn’t want any pictures on social media because he said he wanted to keep our life private because when too many people know your business, it ruins a good thing. On August 10, he asked me to Venmo him $501 to test if his Venmo works and promised to repay me. Shortly after, we went to Miami where we stayed at the W Hotel in Brickell. We were both applying for our Florida real estate licenses. He told me we’re going to have a future together. He was putting in an offer on a condo in Aventura, Florida and told me he stayed in Miami to work on building his real estate network. On August, 21 he asked me for $1,310 to pay for a yacht charter and a restaurant, to help him build a real estate network in Miami, which isn’t out of the ordinary to spend on marketing. He told me he didn’t want to show the lender how much he was spending while we were making the offer on the Miami condo — which added up. Then, he asked me for $5,000 for an Airbnb and said he would pay me back – he even sent me his bank statement showing $720,000. He promised to give me $10,000 in cash the next time we saw each other. I was getting nervous because my savings started to dwindle. Then he drops a bombshell on me, saying he owned a house with an ex-girl friend. When they broke up things got really hairy and at one point the police were called, he said, and she was going to press charges. Then, an hour before I was supposed to leave to fly down to Florida I get a text from him saying, ‘Houston we have a problem.’ He doesn’t answer the phone. I’m texting him non-stop. He sends me this long text saying apparently this thing with an ex was never cleared up, and they arrested me. I said, “Why do you still have your phone? What do I do?” He said he needed bail. He asked me for $12,000. I wired him the money. It turns out he was never arrested and the money went to the Airbnb. I went to the police department in October, they said basically what you have is credit card fraud. When I tried to serve him the court docs, I found out he had been living with another girl in New Jersey the whole time. She said he moved to Miami! LOVE IS A MANY $PLENDORED THING https://nypost.com/2024/02/16/lifestyle/real-life-tinder-swindler-charmed-me-out-of-my-life-savings/

Dozens of ‘rogue’ cows run free along South Carolina highway after 18-wheeler crashes in fiery blaze Talk about free-range cattle. A swarm of cows ran free across a South Carolina highway Tuesday after the tractor-trailer carrying them ran off the road in a fiery wreck. Wild photographs showed real-life cowboys lassoing the runaway cows as they bolted down the interstate and waded in nearby waters. “In an unusual [sight], riders on horseback used lassos to catch some of the cows and place them in cattle trailers,” Colleton County Fire-Rescue said in a release. More than 35 cattle were inside an 18-wheeler when it crashed into a bridge, burst into flames and split in half, with its cattle car plunging into a river near Walterboro, a city 50 miles west of Charleston. Rescue teams responded just past 1 a.m. to find the mangled truck completely engulfed in flames and hanging over the side of the bridge, leaking diesel fuel across the roadway and into the water below. Miraculously, the driver and his herd escaped from the inferno, officials said. The driver was rushed to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. “Firefighters and law enforcement discovered several cows in the river and on the banks. Some were injured,” fire officials said. The rest of the herd had run loose into the woods and along the highway, setting off a wild day-long chase involving rescue teams and local veterinarians and ranchers, some of whom arrived on horseback. Out of an abundance of caution, investigators shut down both the northbound and southbound sides of the roadway as they hunted down the roaming cattle, want of which were dark-colored and not visible during nighttime along the rural highway. “The effort ran into hours as the cattle ran in multiple directions,” the fire department said. Officials re-opened the highway after 10 exhilarating hours, but the chase wasn’t over — it took the remainder of the day to round up rogue cows that had escaped to neighborhoods along the highway. OY! HOW DO I HITCHHIKE WITHOUT THUMBS?

I see you got over your reluctance to take the 7. How was the food?

WHO GOT SUCKED OFF? 13 MINUTES UNTIL WE FIND OUT!

In a recent interview with Deadline, Craig Erwich, who oversees ABC, Freeform and Hulu, confirmed that the New York City-based comedy will relocate to California for at least part of Season 4. And now, TVLine can confirm that Molly Shannon will appear as part of a season-long arc as a “high-powered Los Angeles business woman who finds herself drawn into the world of the investigation in New York.” Additionally, Meryl Streep will reprise her Season 3 role as Oliver’s girlfriend, Loretta Durkin.

train conductor delights commuters with zippy rhymes

Fortunately, I'm not even into Allison Brie... It’s not looking gouda for the fate of these cheeses. Certain French frommages are under threat of extinction due to a lack of microbial diversity, experts say, with varieties of bries, blues and the infamously stinky Camembert topping the high-risk list, according to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “It’s very important to preserve diversity, even in microorganisms, and in particular in those we use for making food,” Jeanne Ropars, a research scientist specializing in evolutionary genetics and ecology at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Culture magazine. Milk market news site US Dairy explains that most natural cheeses are made from the same four basic ingredients: milk, salt, rennet — a blend of animal enzymes that causes milk to coagulate, separating the cheese curd from liquid whey — and “good bacteria.” These microorganisms are the foundation of all the textures, smells, colors and flavors of all cheese, from Italian fresh mozzarella to the funky German Limburger (which is created with the same germs that cause foot odor). The fungi alters the originally orange, gray and green Camembert into a white wheel resembling brie. This singular strain is what cheesemakers rely on for this aesthetic — and what makes the industry so fragile. “Diversity is necessary for the survival of species. Without it, species are unable to cope with environmental change,” Ropars said as he urged scientists to identify or develop alternatives to Penicillium camemberti and other cheesemaking microorganisms. Ropars explained that the fungi are asexual, so there’s no way to avoid the extermination of genes when they mutate — and once that biodiversity is lost, there’s no way to get it back. To make more Penicillium camemberti, scientists have to clone it, and cloning an individual bacteria year after year can introduce harmful errors into the genome. The issue impacts not only how cheese is made, but how they’re regulated and traded globally. Many French cheeses fall under Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) standards, which officially links a variety of cheeses to the region where it was produced, according to the European Commission. PDO guidelines would have to be rewritten before dairies could produce traditional cheese with unconventional ingredients. According to Ropars, cheese lovers and the cheese industry are going to have to get used to seeing brie and Camembert appearing in colorful hues and variant flavors, which is just a small change to endure to keep the highly coveted cheese alive and well. It's a catastro-brie! Why your favorite cheese might be in danger of... NYPOST.COM It's not looking gouda for the fate of these cheeses.

They took PDA to new heights. A pair of “reckless clowns” had a mid-day tryst while riding on the top of a moving subway train in Queens, according to photos of the apparent death-defying sex act. “Men appear to be having sex on top of a NYC MTA train. What is the MTA doing about this?” an X user posted along with two images showing three people on the roof of a 7 train as it crosses raised tracks above the Van Wyck Expressway. The X account — which describes itself as “transit workers against corruption” — said the subway surfing romp happened last Friday afternoon, but the MTA was not able to confirm when it occurred. The transit agency slammed the obscene and dangerous stunt. “The only thing dumber than riding on top of a subway train is dropping pants in the process,” MTA Communications Director Tim Minton said in a statement to The Post. “Those reckless clowns aren’t thinking about the mess cleaners and other transit workers will have to deal with when their stupid stunt goes tragically wrong.” The MTA has tried to crack down on subway surfing with a campaign in September discouraging youths from risking their lives atop moving trains after a huge uptick in both incidents and deaths.

Johnny Oleksinski Running time: 55 minutes. Rated 13+. Streaming Feb. 16 on Prime Video. For months, questions have swirled around what exactly Jennifer Lopez’s musical film “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story” would be. We knew that the movie would feature songs from her new album, also called “This Is Me… Now,” and somehow concern itself with the many highs and Los of her topsy-turvy romances. Well, now that it’s here in all its gaudy glory, I can reveal that the Amazon flick is a whole lot wilder than touching introspection set to music. This ain’t an acoustic Springsteen on a stool, or Miley in the backyard. J.Lo has delivered an over-the-top song-and-dance camptacular, both gravely serious and deliriously funny, providing one cuckoo moment after another. It’s easy to imagine Lopez instructing director Dave Meyers, “Let’s get loud.” Her flick is blaring. An example of how surreal the cinematic therapy session is: Husband Ben Affleck (who made a splash at the Super Bowl) dons a lion’s mane wig to play a cable news host named Rex Stone, who announces on his show called “The Truth” that “love is dead!” Because the film is such a proudly ludicrous and thinly veiled retelling of actual events, it’s pass-the-popcorn entertaining. If only more A-List celebrities would interpret their headline-making personal lives as an absurd, big-budget musical co-starring Jane Fonda. I yelped when the “9 to 5” actress, playing an omniscient character called Sagittarius, looked down on J.Lo’s struggles from the cosmos and observed, “It’s like a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ marathon. And it’s four in the morning, and I stop judging them and I start judging myself.” Sag is a member of the high-in-the-sky Zodiac Council, alongside Trevor Noah (Libra), Kim Petras (Virgo), Keke Palmer (Scorpio), Sofia Vergara (Cancer), Jenifer Lewis (Gemini), Jay Shetty (Aries), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Taurus), Sadhguru (Pices) and Post Malone (Leo), who whimpers, “It makes me super sad. I just wanna give her a big hug!” Heaven’s top priority, naturally, is Jennifer Lopez. Or, sorry, not Jennifer Lopez at all. Her character here is called — wait for it — “The Artist.” Those ethereal beings watch closely as Artist endures a bad breakup with a guy with Affleck’s jawline, marries three times and then learns to love herself in the end. Literally. She croons a song to her inner child in the Bronx who shouts at her, “I didn’t get enough love from you! You left me alone!” After her dramatic opening split, which is visualized as a motorcycle accident on a vast stretch of water-covered land, Lopez has a kooky fantasy: She imagines that she is an assembly-line worker at the “Heart Factory,” where her and a group a women keep a huge mechanical ticker beating by feeding it flower petals. “This Is Me… Now” is never aesthetically realistic, per se, but some parts clearly take place in Los Angeles and New York, while others turn into a “Mad Max: Fury Road” perfume ad. You just never know. On the rebound in the sort-of-real world, she starts dating an angry “New Guy,” who punches the walls of her home — which, not giving a damn about subtlety, is a glass box — and keeps her attached to him using an even less subtle rope. When that courtship crumbles, the Artist moves on again. During a wedding dance, J.Lo marries three guys in a Bollywood-y montage. Part of the fun of watching “This Is Me… Now” is playing a game of “Name That Ex.” Is that dude Ojani Noa, Cris Judd or Marc Anthony? After all her marriages collapse, one fling she drags home with a bottle of booze is a dead ringer for Casper Smart. It’s that misguided hookup with a far younger man that leads her pals to stage an intervention. “We think you might be a sex addict,” says one. “Or a relationship addict,” chimes in another. “Running from one relationship to the next.” Those blunt bombshells, and the prodding of her therapist played by Fat Joe, results in her attending “Love Addicts Anonymous” — the hits, they keep on coming! — where she performs a moving number called “Broken Like Me” in a gymnasium. Lopez’s dancing, and all of the vigorous ensemble choreography, is fabulous throughout. And the $20 million production looks snazzier than your average Marvel movie these days. The “Singin’ In The Rain”-inspired finale is a heart-warmer. But the star is really Lopez’s brain, and how she earnestly determined that the best way to tell the story of the past thirty years would be to have Kim Petras and Post Malone play talking constellations. And for the life of Jenny from the Block, that was the right call. 'This Is Me... Now: A Love Story' review: Jennifer Lopez's tell-all... NYPOST.COM J.Lo has delivered an over-the-top song-and-dance camptacular.