It’s winter travel season

Tough love: After Kelly’s 73-year-old mother-in-law lost $150,000 to a scammer over nine months, the family took over, and the MIL is pissed. The family froze her credit, moved into a bigger home so they could live all together and took over her finances. Kelly’s MIL has shown no signs of being mentally incapacitated. What do you think? Let me know when you rate this newsletter at the end.

In searches for VPNs after Pornhub was geo-blocked Florida. That was just hours after a new law kicked in requiring porn sites to track users by verifying their age. Friendly reminder: Free VPNs are always shady. I use ExpressVPN. Get four months free with my link.

💍 Introducing the future MrsBeast: Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, proposed to his girlfriend, author Thea Booysen, on Christmas Day. She said yes. They met in her home country of South Africa in 2022. He’s been ready to pop the question for a while, but she told him to wait until she finished her master’s program. Now she’s got a ring and a diploma.

Nothing’s more expensive than a cheap boat: Facebook Marketplace is full of deals, but this one might take the cake. Jason Morrison scored a full-sized Cruisers Yacht for free. It’d been sitting abandoned for 15 years. With mold, engine issues and structural problems, it’s gonna need lots of expensive parts and tons of work before it can set sail. No, thanks!

And 1,100 pounds — that’s the size of a metallic ring that fell from space into a village in Kenya. No one got hurt. Phew. It seems to be a piece of a rocket launch vehicle. Here’s what it looks like. Yikes!

🤖 Everyone thinks it’s the guys who want it more: Futurist Dr. Ian Pearson says nope, women will lead the sex robot craze. Given that human-like bots cost over $15,000, Pearson thinks it’ll be 2050 before people are doing it more with affordable robots than humans. Btw, his past predictions have an 85% accuracy rate. I know what some of you are thinking: “And I don’t need to pick up his dirty underwear!”

Don’t worry, she woke up: Instagram influencer Victoria Rose (aka @woahvicky) faked her own kidnapping. She posted bogus ransom notes to her 3.5 million followers, then called it a prank because she was “bored.” Her followers weren’t laughing, and she wrote them a terrible apology. What a narcissist.

🍏 Bad apple: This doesn’t happen often. Move over, Newton (the $700 tiny pre-iPad), Pippin (the $600 gaming console) and Portable (the 16-pound $6,500 laptop). Make room for Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro AR headset, which has sold fewer than 500,000 units since launch. They’re not making it anymore. About 600,000 are stocked up to last the rest of the year. Don’t buy one.

I spy a killer: This is a strange story. Ring camera footage caught Maria Munoz confronting her husband’s mistress and giving her cheating spouse, Joel Pellot, an ultimatum on the doorstep. Maria died days later. Her husband said she overdosed, but toxicology results didn’t add up. He secretly poisoned her with drugs he stole from the hospital he worked at just to avoid an expensive divorce. He’s serving a life sentence.

When the risk of getting cancer starts to decline. The risk is highest in our 60s and 70s, then it drops. Researchers studying lung cancer found a key protein, NUPR1, that behaves differently in older cells. I love reading about breakthroughs like this. I hate cancer.