Today is Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
It is the 197th day of the year.
168 days remain.
WHAT’S ON TAP
NOTABLE & NOTEWORTHY: An update to Grok hopes to curb more off-the-rails opinions.
Suspect who swiped BEYONCE’s hard drives ID’d by investigators and JAY CUTLER shows off his recent kills. More in SHOWBIZ.
“STANS” heads to the theater and the CHRISLEYS bring back their podcast. Details in CASTING CALL.
PRINCE HARRY continues charity work in Africa. Details in ROYALS.
###
Another sad chapter in the ongoing FYRE saga closed Tuesday, when the brand assets for the controversial festival sold on eBay for $245,300.
BILLY MCFARLAND watched the bids come in for the final hour of the auction in a livestream. “Damn, this sucks,” he said, in the final moments of the countdown. To make matters worse, eBay typically collects a chunk of the final sale price, which in this case could be in the low-five figures.
No word yet who the lucky buyer is.
McFarland owes about $26 MILLION in restitution to the customers and vendors who were left screwed over by the total failure of the first Fyre Festival in 2017. [via Morning Martini]
###
UPDATE: The team managing X’s chatbot, Grok, says they’ve updated its backend so it stops spouting off praise for Hitler and looking first through ELON MUSK’s feed for how to shape its opinions.
In a post on X, the team said the bot’s “reasoning” knew it was called Grok, made by xAI, so it first searched through xAI’s and Musk’s feeds to align itself with the company. Musk’s replies are chock-full of all kinds of nonsense, leading it to its bizarre and controversial comments last week.
“We are actively monitoring and will implement further adjustments as needed,” they say. [via xAI]
###
The chair of the Maharees Conservation Association in Ireland says a message-in-a-bottle launched over a decade ago from Newfoundland, Canada, washed ashore across the Atlantic last week.
The note was dated September 14, 2012, with a simple message: “Anita + Brad’s day trip to Pell Island. Today we enjoyoed dinner, this bottle of wine and each other on the edge of the Island. If you find this please call us,” concluding with their phone number.
That very bottle has since been found. Turns out Anita and Brad are now married with three kids. When they sealed the bottle, they had been dating long-distance for about a year. [via NBC News]
###
Astronomers have identified the largest collision of black holes ever recorded.
The celestial phenomenon created a larger black hole with 225 times more mass than our Sun – twice the size of the previous record-holder.
The incident, at the edges of the Milky Way, was recorded using four gravitational wave detectors located around the Earth working in sync. More details on the finding will be presented this week at the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Glasgow, Scotland. [via Live Science]
###
A former college wide receiver chased down and tackled an arsonist while enjoying an afternoon hike in Los Angeles on Sunday.
Scott Mitchell and his girlfriend stumbled across a disheveled man walking away from a burning tree. Before they could question him about it, the guy took off running, which is when Mitchell gave chase.
“Even without digging, I was able to chase that guy down. I didn’t know I still had it, I’m not going to lie,” he told NBC News.
Other hikers helped hold the man down until officers arrived on scene. He is now being held on suspicion of arson upon a structure or forest land, with a $75,000 bail. [via NBC]
###
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Morning Martini to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.