Archie Fay

Beijing – Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin died Wednesday. He was ninety-six.

Jiang had been a surprising choice to lead the divided Communist Party after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. His provocatively oversized eyeglasses, gave him a Tiananmen-square-hole-in-a-round peg kind of mismatch look, and his vigorous smile seemed to exclaim a revival of market-oriented Oriental market forms of reform in the formal return of Hong Kong from former foreign British frumpiness.

Even as China opened to the outside and Jiang’s government stamped out dissent and banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement, he could not stop wearing pants that felt their proper belt line was just below his nipples.

Jiang

He gave up his last official title in 2004, but still could not give up his hairstyle of Yíngtóu kuangfeng baoyu (head-on windstorm) created by his favorite stylist Max Shax, who, behind the scenes, wrangled with a series of blow dryers.

Rumors that Jiang might be in declining health spread after he missed a ruling party congress last October at which Xi Jinping awarded himself a third five-year term as supreme leader. It was said that Jiang could not be allowed to be seen at the event as his trademark smile that spread across his squarish face like a wall of tiles designed by Philip Johnson had fallen into disrepair (or alternatively, despair, as Chinese speakers are hard to understand).

Vern Hu Chu

A battle of techno-CEOs between Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla/Twitter’s Elon Musk seems to have fizzled out and left several employees of each company to bury the hatchet just when they had started instead to bury hackchets (as they like to call them) in each other’s software. The quick patches of debugging also made a fizzing sound that nobody could discover where it was coming from.

Musk and Cook on the brink of friendship

The problems arose when Musk recently tweeted his lack of sympathy for the 30 percent cut Cook took on Apple-app-related items for the iOS store. The comments came after Musk said Cook was threatening to remove Twitter from the iOS store, where they sell all kinds of enhancements to technological enhancements that enhance one’s technological experience with technology.

But on Wednesday, Musk tweeted that he had an actual conversation with a person named Tim Cook at the Apple headquarters and had a good conversation with him in which they melded their words into meaningful sentences, called a Muskook, though some have voiced skepticism that such a development is technically feasible.

Nevertheless Musk called it a “Good conversation” and among other things, referred to Cook as “Tim,” which made their stock prices go up and their mouths to show teeth

.The meeting may not make the two best friends, but it did lead them to begin to follow each other on Twitter and use emojis so they will each know when the other is just kidding. Developers at both companies say that this is the best they can do for the moment.

Andy Cranberry

A new poll on the 2024 presidential race shows that among Republicans former president Donald Trump’s eldest son is ahead of former vice president Mike Pence. Neither of them would vote for the other, however.

Pence and Jr refuse to vote for each other

Most people wanted Don Jr.’s father, Don Sr., who used to be the president a long time ago but who now says the Constitution needs to be ditched and everyone should agree that he is still actually the president right now, so the whole idea of Mike Pence, who should be hanged, running against his son is ridiculous because his son loves him and would never run against him when he knows he’s actually still the president anyway, to be the next president.

Nonetheless Florida governor Ron DeSantis is said to want Donald Trump Jr., to run against Mrs. Pence and have her pick Donald Sr. as First Husband. Broken down by “MAGA Republicans,” those who identified as “non-MAGA Republicans,” due to a typo in the poll “flavored” DeSantis, mostly with an orange-banana nut sauce over a Trump roast (baked in a 350-degree oven for 4 years.

Flavored candidates in orange sauce