These are the top maybe-not headlines from the past 36-hours presented by The Conversation Project from raw engagement data from our social media to the headlines posted over the past day.
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The 8 topics that our followers ranked as the most conversational are:
FIRST US CASE OF WUHAN CORONAVIRUS CONFIRMED BY CDC
The patient, who is not being named, is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He is in his 30s and lives in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. He had recently returned from Wuhan. He arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, before any health screenings for the Wuhan coronavirus began at US airports. He sought medical care on January 19. The CDC and Washington state are now tracing the people he was in contact with to see if he might have spread the disease to someone else. The patient became ill four days after arriving in the United States and sought care. Based on the patient’s symptoms and travel history, doctors suspected the novel Wuhan coronavirus and sent specimens to the CDC in Atlanta, where tests Monday confirmed the virus. The patient is faring well but is still being kept in isolation out of an abundance of caution, health officials said.
[SOURCE: cnn.com]
TRAIN CARRYING CORN HAS MASSIVE SPILL, TRANSFORMS TRACKS INTO A “YELLOW BRICK ROAD”
On a cold winter day in Crystal, Minnesota, Mike Parker noticed an unusual sight near his house. The neighboring train tracks were completely covered in golden kernels of corn as far as the eye could see. And best of all, this magical sight resembled the fantastical Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz. After snapping a picture of the tracks, Parker naturally shared it on Twitter. Users there thought his photo was fake; after all, the spill was too clean and there were no wild animals enjoying this embarrassment of edible riches. But despite all the skeptics, it turns out Parker’s picture was totally real. The spill occurred on the Canadian Pacific rail line and stretched about 2,000 feet long. There’s speculation that the amount of corn lost to the tracks was about 900 bushels or about $3,500 worth of the grain. It turns out that very few animals got to enjoy the bounty of corn kernels that awaited them. Railroad workers used a high-rail vacuum truck to suck up the spill and took the golden path with them.
[SOURCE: mymodernmet.com]
INFAMOUS X-RATED CARTOON FRITZ THE CAT NOW STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME
A satire of college life in America, the 80 minute movie is raunchier than anything you’ve seen in the American Pie franchise; filled with group sex scenes in bathtubs and anthropomorphic cat boobs. Based on a comic strip series by cartoonist Robert Crumb, Fritz The Cat reportedly follows ‘a hypocritical swinging college student cat raises hell in a satiric vision of various elements on the 1960s’. Fritz The Cat proved highly controversial upon its release, and has often been dubbed the most ‘outrageous’ animated adult film of all time.
[SOURCE: unilad.co.uk]
A PHOENIX MOM CONFESSED TO KILLING THREE KIDS UNDER THE AGE OF 4
Responding officers found a 7-month-old girl, 2-year-old girl and 3-year-old boy in a living room area, authorities said. The children were unresponsive and pronounced dead after officers administered CPR and fire officials provided first aid. Police were interviewing the 30-year-old father and a 49-year-old relative who lives in the home, according to authorities. There was no obvious trauma to the children, and relatives initially believed illness may have been a factor, police said. It’s too early to determine how the children died, police said. The investigation remains ongoing.
[SOURCE: cbsnews.com]
OPRAH WINFREY CHOOSES THE NOVEL “AMERICAN DIRT” FOR HER BOOK CLUB
Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt,” one of the year’s most anticipated and debated novels, is Oprah Winfrey’s new pick for her book club. Winfrey, interviewed Friday by telephone, told The Associated Press that one blurb that stood out was novelist Don Winslow’s comparing “American Dirt” to John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Cummins, who also spoke recently to the AP, says she first thought of the book in 2013 and was inspired for various reasons. Her husband emigrated from Ireland and she remembered the many years it took for him to get his green card, and the anxiety, before they married, that he might be deported. She also was moved by what she considered the media’s sensationalized coverage of immigration, and, more indirectly, by her lasting grief over a 1991 tragedy when two of her cousins were raped and forced off a bridge, falling to their deaths.
[SOURCE: apnews.com]
DEREK JETER TRENDING TOWARD UNANIMOUS CALL TO HALL OF FAME
Asked whether he thought about his own candidacy, Jeter said, “I try not to. I really don’t. That’s something I’ll think about when my career is over. My career’s not over. I’m not even thinking about next month, let alone five years down the road.” Well, five years has come and gone since his last game, and the only drama regarding Jeter’s candidacy on his first year on the ballot is seeing whether he follows Mariano Rivera as the second player to be elected into the Hall unanimously. With the announcement of the BBWAA’s voting coming Tuesday, Jeter had been named on all 210 ballots made public as of 10 p.m. Monday on the Twitter feed @NotMrTibbs.
[SOURCE: nypost.com]
VUITTON’S DIAMOND AS BIG AS A TENNIS BALL STEALS THE SHOW IN PARIS
The LVMH-owned brand, which said last week that it was the new owner of the 1,758-carat Sewelo, displayed the glinting, blackened stone at its Place Vendome store in Paris. The company has not said how much it paid for the diamond. The size of a tennis ball and covered in carbon, it was discovered in Botswana last year and will be cut into gems. Its name, Sewelo, means “rare find” in Setswana, and the stone will be turned into a collection of fine jewelry, according to Lucara, a Canada-based diamond mining company which is partnering with Vuitton and an Antwerp-based manufacturer to produce the gems, and which owns the mine where it was found. Vuitton, better known for making pricey handbags, only entered fine jewelry in 2012 – where it competes with Bulgari, also owned by LVMH, and Richemont’s Cartier.
[SOURCE: reuters.com]
DISNEY+ TO LAUNCH A WEEK EARLIER THAN PLANNED IN THE UK
Pricing has also been revealed – it will cost £5.99 per month or £59.99 a year, making it more expensive than the earlier DisneyLife platform. Disney+ launched in the US and Canada in November, where it became the most downloaded app. The new launch date may be an attempt to tackle piracy of shows like The Mandalorian, suggested one expert. The other European countries that will receive Disney+ at the same time as the UK are Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland. The Netherlands already has access as it was used as a testing ground for the platform. In the US, Disney+ costs $6.99 (£5.36) per month.
[SOURCE: bbc.com]
Eight Things To Talk About uses the raw engagement data from the social media engagement from The Conversation Project to generate the top-ranking headlines over the course of a weekend.
A full weeks’ data (from Friday to Friday) is compiled, weighed, and sorted to produce the content for the Wrap-Up Show with J Cleveland Payne, published every Saturday as a podcast available at ThisIsTheConversation.com or wherever your favorite podcasts are found.
To ‘participate’ in the rankings of the headlines for this newsletter or the podcast, follow the Conversation Project on social media and engage with the posts to give them more ‘votes.’ The Conversation Project can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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