It’s rare that I get this newsletter finished on Thursday, but the other Jim and I are playing golf at an event we’re sponsoring today, benefiting our friends at Hattie Larlham. One of my foursome pulled out at the last minute, and it was like pulling teeth to find a fill-in. I even have a list of clients on my desk, organized by the different events we attend and who likes what; golf, shooting, fishing, hockey, and baseball. And none of them could make it. So, if you’re a client and like to play golf, drop me a line so I can add you to the list for the next time somebody bails on me!
Something about ...
Royal Watchers
If your social media wanderings take you to Prince William or the new British PM espousing a brilliant new cryptocurrency, you can take it for what it is; a new AI deepfake. This is at least the second time hackers have used famous people to scam others surrounding crypto.
Laptop Farming
A few weeks back, I had a piece about a cybersecurity firm mistakenly hiring a North Korean hacker. Now, the Justice Department has arrested a Nashville resident for hosting a “laptop farm”, which allowed numerous North Koreans to land jobs with American companies and get up to who knows what during the course of their employment.
ATM PINs
Curious as to how common your ATM PIN is? I wasn’t either, until I saw this graph which uses 3.4M ATM codes revealed in different data breaches. Turns out mine leans a little toward the “most common” side of things, while Nancy’s is a little more rare. In both cases, we chose numbers for the words they spell out, rather than the actual four digits.
Real Estate
Last week, it was a 61 acre estate in Hunting Valley, listed for just under $20M. This week, it’s a 24 acre estate just around the corner and on the market for $14M. If you’re into pickleball or alpacas, this is the place for you.
If you’re looking for something a little more icon-ic, there’s a 1903 era Catholic church that’s been converted to a single family home in Bolivar, OH. And if you look hard enough, you’ll see some alpacas there, too.
Jeans
Earlier this year, I shared a piece about people not washing their jeans, so as to get cool crease patterns on them. Now, police are using those unique patterns to catch criminals. Make sure you wash your clothes!
Nancy's Nuggets
Nancy had a lot of interesting finds this week from sealions outfitted with cameras and GPS units that are mapping the sea floor, to real life hobbits (from 700,000 years ago) in Indonesia, to a little something for all you Wizard of Oz fans, and then to top it off, where the Stonehenge stones came from.
Excited to have our son and his girlfriend in town from NYC this weekend. Getting together with friends tonight, and then taking them to the Browns game tomorrow. We generally do our best to avoid the preseason games, but she’s never been to an NFL game before and was very excited (much to Nancy’s dismay). Looks like rain but our seats are under cover so we’ll stay dry.
I’ll leave you with the newest co-branded treats from Oreo and Coca-Cola. Enjoy!
Have a great weekend.
Abbey