Poo-tee-weet?

 What Vonnegut reader doesn't sit up on reading the headline "Scientists discover a new type of ice"?  Could the Ice-9 described in Cat's Cradle be here at last, initiating the ice-death of everything?  Sadly, it doesn't sound like it.  The gang at University College London (where Jeremy Bentham occasionally puts in an appearance) have stumbled across something they're calling "medium-density amorphous ice" or MDA, which resembles white powder and looks like this (left) on the molecular level:

Pretty.  What is it good for?  It might help us understand the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and if that's not a good day's work, I'm just sorry for you.  

On this sorry planet, however, it's business as usual.  A Chinese "spy balloon" is drifting over Montana and all the usual idiots can't wait to blast it out of the skies, pew-pew!  Rich Hall says a trooper in Montana will pull you over just because he's lonely, but that doesn't mean the place is utterly uninhabited, and sensible people don't want balloon bits landing on somebody's house in Butte.  Like the US, China has a large fleet of spy satellites, so why the Montgolfier-Brothers-era technology now?  One analyst thinks they're flirting with us and simultaneously taunting crisis monkeys like Trump and Empty Greene.  It's working.  It always does.

Here's the kind of incisive commentary you DirecTV subscribers are missing:  Newsmax pundit David J. Harris, Jr., thinks Whoopi Goldberg should be deported to Africa (country unspecified) until she comes to appreciate "what she has here in America."  He also wants to deport Maxine Waters, and he's totally not racist because he's Black so shut up about that.  

Former Trump liar Sarah Hockeypuck Sanders, who now lies in her own name as governor of Arkansas (insert hog noise here) will deliver the official retort to Joe Biden's State of the Union message.  All I ask is that she wear this:

What do you mean, misogynistic?  I didn't buy it for her.  

The US added over half a million jobs in January?  Even CNN grudgingly calls the numbers "jaw-dropping"?  Wall Street "shocked"?  Recession predictions "very wrong"?  Well, what about Hunter Biden's laptop?  And Paul Whelan, hah?  Why's it so cold?  Hearings!

Is this week over yet?