The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

MADDEN SCOUT: The New York Jets owner Woody Johnson reportedly vetoed a trade for a wide receiver last offseason because of the player’s rating on the Madden video game, according to The Athletic. When the receiver heard about this, he thought, “Thank God.”

COP OF POP: Elton John told Time magazine that he opposes legalizing marijuana in the US and Canada. OK—but you can’t Rocket Man with just Adderall.

BACKYARD PALEONTOLOGIST: Someone in New York found a mastodon jaw in their backyard while gardening, the first discovery of its kind in the state in more than 11 years. Finding teeth in your yard doesn’t always have a happy ending like this.

Personal

FILM BUFF WANTED: Iconic films like Dirty Dancing, Beverly Hills Cop, and Spy Kids will be added to the National Film Registry this year. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is also being added to the list, making it the first Star Trek movie to be archived.

GRAB ME A TOY: Fed up with never getting a prize from the claw machine? Hong Kong’s on it. After receiving complaints, the city’s consumer watchdog will review regulations on claw machines, saying they “capitalize on consumers' enthusiasm for testing their luck.”

For sale

BUNKER BUTTER: Poland’s butter supply is spread a little thin, so the country dipped into its butter reserve to sell roughly 1,102 tons of frozen butter through an auction. A potential shortage of such a vital ingredient could be catastrophic, but the phrase “butter reserve” makes it seem like there’s trouble in Cookie Kingdom.

SKIBIDI SKIN: Fortnite’s X account hinted that the viral internet series “Skibidi Toilet” would be coming to the battle royale game in January. Don’t let your dad read that—he will short-circuit.

CARTWHEEL CHILAQUILES: GOAT gymnast Simone Biles will open a Tex-Mex restaurant called “Taste of Gold” in the Houston airport. The dining spot will capitalize on the airport Olympics of eating as much cheese as possible before racing to your gate.—MM

Researchers discovered 27 species in the Alto Mayo region of Peru that are “new” to scientists, much in the same way a movie from 2007 can be “new” to you if you watch it for the first time today. Among the creatures who were enjoying their anonymity before the expedition upended their lives are an amphibious mouse, a dwarf squirrel, a salamander that climbs trees, and the above “blob-headed fish” that can’t be doing all that great in this photo.

The fish was considered the most intriguing discovery. “The function of this ‘blob’ remains a complete mystery,” said Trond Larsen, senior director at Conservation International, echoing what some bosses are typing into their year-end employee reviews.—DL

🪨 Stonehenge might’ve been a community bonding event. What a year of revelations about Scotland’s mysterious 5,000-year-old monument. A leading archaeologist’s new paper suggests that Stonehenge might’ve been built to unite ancient farming communities in what is now the island of Britain. This could help explain the recent discovery that Stonehenge’s altar stone was carried from more than 400 miles away, Mike Parker Pearson, the paper’s author, said. “We’ve just not been looking at Stonehenge in the right way,” he added, arguing that Stonehenge is a political—as well as religious—monument.

A tongue stimulator is fighting sleep apnea. Brits are testing out an app-controlled nerve implant that helps them breathe easier while asleep via electrical signals that make their tongues protrude to keep their airways unobstructed. One of the patients in the trial—which is the first of its kind in the UK—reported feeling less tired in the few days following a three-hour procedure to install the device. Obstructive sleep apnea is the most common form of the condition, which affects ~8 million people in the UK. The typical treatment is a bulky CPAP machine that can sometimes be uncomfortable to wear on your face, so implantable tech could offer an alternative that makes sleep apnea easier to live with.

Murder hornets have been eradicated from the US. Farewell to the enormous invasive nightmare that you forgot all about. Five years after being spotted in the US for the first time in Washington state, the world’s biggest hornet is officially out of the US. Beekeepers were panicked when the two-inch-long insects first buzzed about in 2019, because they like to decapitate honey bees and can commandeer their hives in less than two hours. Local residents set traps, while researchers contained the spread by tracking one of the wasps back to a nest (which scientists destroyed) where a bunch of queens were about to emerge. There hasn’t been a sighting in Washington—the only US state to ever report them—since 2021.—ML

The most advanced fighter jet in existence has a fearsome adversary campaigning to have it neutralized: the world’s richest person.

Elon Musk recently unleashed a barrage at Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets, produced as part of the most expensive weapon program in history that’s expected to cost American taxpayers more than $2 trillion over several decades, per the Department of Defense.

Musk fired off his surface-to-air criticism in reaction to a declassified Pentagon report that highlighted a litany of technical issues plaguing the state-of-the-art stealth planes designed for air strikes, electronic warfare, surveillance, and aerial combat.

• Musk claimed the jets flown by the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines have too many technical requirements, making them an “expensive [and] complex jack of all trades, master of none.”
• He reiterated his long-held belief that increasingly sophisticated unmanned drones are making fighter jets obsolete, calling those still developing them “idiots.”

Musk, the co-head of the newly formed government belt-tightening committee DOGE, is not the first person to criticize F-35 spending, with lawmakers and government watchdogs long questioning whether they’re worth the staggering cost.

Budget destroyers

The US currently has 630 F-35s and plans to bring the total number delivered to 2,500 in the next two decades, with the goal of operating them until 2088.

But the F-35s have been a bigger drain on the budget than initially projected, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found earlier this year. And the Pentagon’s combat testing found that the planes are dogged by technical issues across their elaborate systems, from gun glitches to cybersecurity concerns.

• Yearly operation and maintenance costs per plane ballooned to $6.6 million from a target of $4.1 million.
• The total price tag of sustaining the aircraft increased 44% to nearly $1.6 trillion between 2018 and 2023, partially due to plans to use them for longer.
• F-35s are mission-ready this year only about half the time due to technical issues and parts shortages. That is lower than their 71% mission readiness rate in 2020, and well below the military’s target of at least 80%.

The recently surfaced reliability issues prompted Rep. Matt Gaetz to bash F-35s as a “failing” program. Meanwhile, the federal spending watchdog Project on Government Oversight says Lockheed Martin has no incentive to control upkeep costs due to the structure of its contract with the Pentagon, as all of the maintenance and repairs are outsourced to the defense contractor.

Drone threat

Some military watchers claim jets as a weapons class are being disrupted by no-frills unmanned aerial vehicles that are upending modern warfare. After observing their extensive use in the Ukraine war, as well as China flexing its unsettling attack drone swarms, the Pentagon is scrambling to spend $1 billion on thousands of cutting-edge military drones and anti-drone systems from startups like Anduril Industries over the next two years.

Meanwhile, Spain, France, and Germany are reportedly deciding whether their co-developed next-gen jet they plan to start producing by 2040 will be controlled from inside the cockpit.

Jets still rule the skies

Some warfare experts say that the extent to which low-tech drones are a game-changer has been exaggerated, while others warn that sophisticated, jet-like unmanned systems also wouldn’t be cheap. F-35 defenders claim that in many scenarios drones can’t compete with a plane operated by an ace, though drones without a servicemember onboard will likely act as wingmen to piloted jets on missions in the future.

The people piloting the Pentagon are convinced F-35s—which are widely regarded as the world’s most capable jets, for all their flaws—shouldn’t be written off. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said this summer that they are key to the US maintaining air superiority. While acknowledging delays and cost issues, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said this week that it’ll probably be decades before drones overtake jets and noted that 19 nations are buying F-35s from the US.

Looking ahead…Lockheed Martin is on track to meet the goal of delivering at least 100 F-35s by the end of the year, despite recent delays from software upgrade issues. But Musk and his DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy could try to slow-walk further F-35 contracts next year, according to Bloomberg, and the future of next-gen jet R&D is unclear under the incoming Trump administration.—SK

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

It will be known in Flat Earther circles as the revelation heard around the world.

A group of YouTubers who’ve been convinced for years that our planet is not a sphere were taken on an expedition to Antarctica led by Colorado pastor Will Duffy on Dec. 14. He took four Flat Earthers and four Globe Earthers (people who weren’t failed by the educational system) on a journey that proved to at least one sphere-denier that the Earth is round.

“Sometimes you are wrong in life,” said Flat Earth influencer Jeran Campanella after learning he was wrong about something that was disproven centuries ago.

Why Antarctica? In Flat Earth lore, Antarctica is a 150-foot-tall ice wall that surrounds all the other continents and oceans. The theory also states that NASA employees guard the wall to prevent citizens from climbing over it and falling over the edge of the Earth.

So not only did a random pastor without government clearance lead the expedition, he showed the flat-earthers how there are 24 hours of sunlight in Antarctica, something that is only possible due to the tilt of the round Earth at its southernmost point.

There’s at least one holdout. The evidence fell flat for Austin Whitsitt, who said the 24-hour sun doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. “I don’t think it falsifies plane earth, I don’t think it proves a globe,” he said. “I think it’s a singular data point.”—DL