Hasta La Gadget!

This is it. The most entertaining Facebook thread of all time.

Oh, you disagree? Then please point me to a better (and true) story than this one, prompted by a mechanic finding an old iPhone ― locked and stuck in airplane mode ― in a Subaru’s dashboard airbag compartment (yep, you read that correctly). Then the car owner goes on a tireless search to figure out not only who it belongs to, but how it got there.

It’s a tale of truly creative internet sleuthing, a lucky break via Craigslist “Missed Connections,” and ― potentially ― unrequited love, though the jury is still out on that.

We have Alex Tom to thank for this tale. He told HuffPost it wouldn’t have happened, had his 2009 Subaru Forester not been a part of the Takata airbag recall. (For an explanation from Subaru about how an iPhone could have possibly ended up in this situation to begin with, scroll to the bottom).

It started, innocently enough, with a trip to the repair shop for replacement of the faulty passenger-side airbag.

Tom said the phone was dead when the shop found it. After a charge, it booted up, revealing this mysterious, blurry photo. Complicating matters: It was locked and stuck on airplane mode.

He checked with the shop, assuming the iPhone 4s belonged to whoever worked on his car. But the mechanic confirmed he found the phone inside the dash airbag compartment.

At this point, Tom’s former classmates from Colorado College and Berkeley Law School, where he’s currently a student, began to ask the important questions on Facebook.

“Why does the phone still think it’s January?” wondered Logan Roberts. “Is there a time traveling portal in your dashboard?”

Tom did some digging:

The hive mind digested the clues. But first, more pressing questions needed to be raised.

For starters, what is that photo on the lock screen? Why is it so blurry? And will Sarah Koenig please turn this into a podcast?

No easy answers here, friends. Bobby “helpfully” suggested smashing the phone open “to see if there are more clues inside.” Nice try, Bobby.

Then Bobby redeemed himself with a great idea:

The “plug it into a computer” tip would add another critical clue: The iPhone once belonged to someone named “Sully.” Problem was, Tom couldn’t recall any Sullies in his life.

Then Tom made another big discovery: how to access the phone’s notifications, which included the weather at wherever the phone was located on Jan. 3, 2015 (”currently 75 with a high of 91”), and ― AND ― a message from “Bonnie” via the “Coffee Meets Bagel” dating app:

And with that, the growing community following the thread went to work.

One group cross-referenced historical temperature data in search of locations that had a high of 91 degrees on Jan. 3, 2015. Another group posted the riveting story to “Missed Connections” on Craigslist, targeting locations identified by the weather-researcher group.

Logan Roberts took a bold stab at solving the puzzle:

[Ron Howard as “Arrested Development” narrator voice]: It was not Troy’s phone. The mystery continued.

Others, inspired by the realization that an anagram of Troy’s name (almost) spells “Cyanide Thor” ― and would make a terrific heavy metal band name ― embarked on a tangent designing a T-shirt for the group (below, left). It was later redesigned to the version on the right:

As the Facebook conversation continued, more people joined the thread, adding expertise.

The Subaru’s sales history was studied in search of clues. Bonnies of all stripes were considered, and Sullies, too. 

“Has anyone considered that Sully might be short for Suliman?” Michael asked. “We can eliminate Suliman the Magnificent, former Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, because he died in 1566 (455 years before the release of the iPhone 4s). But there’s a whole bunch of other Sulimans to be considered.”

Just when it seemed the search had hit a dead end, Craigslist responses began to flood in; Some were helpful, others a little less so.

Then, Logan Roberts hit the jackpot:

Roberts told HuffPost he was shocked the breakthrough came via Craigslist, going so far as to ask “Coffee Meets Bagel” to independently verify the “too good to be true” news.

“I was expecting to hear some random peoples’ ideas about what happened, or maybe have some people with car or phone knowledge chime in,” he said. “But I really thought it would just be a funny addition to the search.

“When, less than 24 hours later I got an email from Melissa at [”Coffee Meets Bagel”], I literally shot up out of my chair at my desk and yelled. I scared the shit out of the guy sitting next to me, but we’d all been following the story so closely, he was thrilled, too, when he found out that we had found Sully …”

As you’d expect, the thread ― at this point already pushing 100 comments ― exploded in celebration, and with long overdue questions for Sully.

“I just laugh-cried. Like people do at the ends of movies like Apollo 13,” wrote Tucker. “Somewhere there is a control room going f**king wild.”

Tom jumped in and formally introduced Sully to the thread:

And Sully, good sport that he is, finally pulled back the curtain on so many of the mysteries that had plagued everyone else the previous few days. Like, who is featured in the lock screen photo?

Several mysteries remain, of course. Not the least of which is who is Bonnie? Has she settled down? Is she still interested in going on a date with Sully? 

(”Coffee Meets Bagel” has reached out to Bonnie and offered to host the major characters of this saga at their headquarters in San Francisco; We eagerly await the outcome).

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the iPhone’s apparent time-bending abilities: “Why did a phone that was lost in June 2014 (and presumably died a few days later) reset to January 2015 when it was finally charged again?” Asked Tom.

Subaru, though, came through. The carmaker’s corporate communications director, Michael McHale, assured HuffPost nobody was ever in danger of taking an iPhone to the face if the airbag had exploded. Here’s his explanation of how the phone likely ended up where it did:

Where the phone was found really is not the “airbag compartment”, it’s just the inner dash below the airbag. Sounds like it dropped behind the glove box. If the airbag deployed, the phone would still be in the dash until the body shop found it when they replaced the deployed airbag. It would not cause the airbag to go off as the airbag wiring is tucked well out of the way for anything falling back there to interfere with it or damage it.

Basically this is the same principle as how socks disappear when you do laundry. When you overfill your washer (top loader) and the clothes spin out, the sock goes over the top of the tub and falls inside the washer, never to be seen again until the repairman comes to fix your washer. Two go in but only one comes out.

And as for Tom, he’s just happy to have been along for the ride.

“I certainly didn’t expect this to gain this level of attention,” he told HuffPost, “but it was truly amazing how invested people became, and I was really impressed with the general creativity in all the ways people suggested to track down the owner of the phone.”

Click through here to read the full Facebook thread ― which we highly recommend. 

HuffPost has blurred the last names of Facebook users who weren’t consulted for this article.

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After posting a yard sign directing Chinese people to stay off his grass, a California man says he isn’t being racist, just specific.

The sign, which El Monte resident William Alarcon made and posted on his lawn Monday night, read: “Chinese, keep your dogs off my grass. Respect your neighbors.” He taped a separate “Keep off the grass” sign on top.

Alarcon told ABC Eye Witness News that the sign was directed at his neighbors, sisters Alexis and Rose Anne Yu. The women are Filipina, not Chinese. 

“I’m not being racist or anything, I’m being specific,” Alarcon, who says he is Native American, told the news station. “The Hispanic woman was doing it and I spoke to her and she stopped doing it.” 

The Yu sisters told the news station that they saw Alarcon putting up the sign on Monday night while on their nightly walk with their dogs. When they passed his house, Alarcon told them to “read the sign,” they said.

Alexis Yu took a photo of Alarcon’s message and emailed it to the El Monte police department.

“I don’t understand,” she said of the sign. “Why would you write something like that? And to direct it to a race for that matter.”

Alarcon apparently backed down after his sign made the news. It was gone by Wednesday afternoon, ABC reported.

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Earlier this year “The Shadow Brokers” — an entity claiming to have stolen hacking tools from the NSA then offering them for sale — seemed to pack up shop, but the group has continued on. Today, it made a new post that contained a number of working…

Microsoft and Porsche have announced a new partnership that will see the duo working together on Forza-related efforts. The partnership is for the next six years, and will have both companies collaborating on ‘co-branded initiatives’ between Microsoft’s Turn 10 Studios and Porsche. All of its starts with the Forza Racing Championship Season 3: The Porsche Cup, which Porsche is sponsoring. … Continue reading

It took six seasons for me to kinda sorta get into HBO’s “Girls.” And now that it’s over, my feelings about its ending are mixed. I grew up with “Girls” ― or rather, my relationship and expectations of how shows like “Girls” represent women like me, black women, has grown. 

Like “Sex and the City” before it, “Girls” will forever be a vivid portrait of a particular moment in time, an immortal pop cultural image of being a 20-something woman in New York. Even now, it’s a little surreal to go back and watch season 1 of the show ― where the clothes already seem weirdly dated, the pop culture references (like Marnie’s cringe-worthy Kanye cover) of another era. 

But what’s also strikingly dated is how the show did, or rather didn’t, deal with race. From day one, “Girls” received a swift backlash from people who didn’t like how abundantly white the show was.

“Girls” never really made any powerful insights about race. It couldn’t. And more importantly ― it didn’t really have to.

It didn’t help that “Girls” creator and star Lena Dunham, just 25 when the show premiered, was messily figuring out race in the public eye ― and failing. 

“The race stuff blew up first,” Dunham recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter back in February. “The second night we aired was the first time I met my boyfriend [Jack Antonoff]; we were on a blind date. I had been metabolizing the criticism all week, and I made a really, really dumb joke that I’m perfectly fine to repeat now ’cause I was f–in’ 25. I said, ‘No one would be calling me a racist if they knew how badly I wanted to f–k Drake.’” 

It’s an anecdote that makes Donald Glover’s cringe-worthy appearance as Hannah’s black Republican boyfriend in Season 2 all the more telling. And the black female characters on “Girls” in particular, from Jessica Williams to Danielle Brooks, were always so unsatisfying, so one-note. 

“Girls” never really made any powerful insights about race. It couldn’t. And more importantly ― it didn’t really have to. 

It took me awhile to accept this, of course. At 23, when the show first came out, I wasn’t thinking about the nuances of race, of how Lena Dunham was writing what she knew and, quite frankly, she probably didn’t know many black people. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that while, yes, New York is diverse, on any given Sunday in Williamsburg or Bushwick or Bed-Stuy you will see throngs of white girls doing brunch at trendy cafes with nary an OG Brooklyn black or brown face in sight. 

Back then, I was one of those women of color who called out the show when it first came out, who balked at the idea that a series set in Brooklyn had not a single prominent black character, who didn’t find Lena Dunham’s body radical or revolutionary, who couldn’t “relate” to any of these characters, who got that they were supposed to be obnoxious but found that in itself obnoxious. 

Something it took me awhile to figure out is that a lot of my issues with the show really had nothing to do with it or with Dunham. It was the bubbling up of a frustration that had always existed but perhaps hadn’t been given an outlet. Hate-watching “Girls,” for me, provided that outlet, a way for me to navigate my feelings ― not just about buzzwords like “representation” and “diversity” but, quite honestly, about white girls. 

I knew (and know) women like Hannah, Shoshanna, Marnie and Jessa. White girls who are complex and messy and imperfectly human. White girls who are also hopelessly clueless about the ways in which their whiteness takes up space. White girls whose feminism often makes no room for me, and indeed sometimes leaves me feeling alienated, even when they purport to “mean well,” or are “just figuring things out.” That tension has always been a difficult thing to define, and even more difficult to process when the “white girl” perspective has always been the default perspective. 

I knew (and know) women like Hannah, Shoshanna, Marnie and Jessa. White girls who are complex and messy and imperfectly human. White girls who are also hopelessly clueless about the ways in which their whiteness takes up space.

Because of this, I could never connect with “Girls.” Not relate, but connect. I saw all the pieces for what they were and I appreciated them on a certain level, the way one appreciates a piece of valuable art in a museum ― with distance. There were episodes of the show that are truly brilliant, and that I would marvel at and admire. But even watching these well-written, expertly directed vignettes, a general sense of apathy never left me. I didn’t want or need “Girls” to represent me. But I still wanted to be represented. Somehow. 

And strangely, that’s what I took away most from this show. It gave me an understanding, a peek into a perspective I didn’t understand. And it also helped me to find the language to express my frustrations about why I couldn’t relate or connect to it.

Because “Girls,” for better or worse, marked a seminal moment in the representation conversation.

It came out just as Shonda Rhimes’s “Scandal” was blowing up ― the first primetime drama with a black female lead in 30 years. Think about that. Post-2012, we have “How to Get Away With Murder,” and “Being Mary Jane,” and “Queen Sugar,” and “Shots Fired,” and “Empire,” and “Black-ish,” and “Rebel,” and “Underground.” We’re not there yet, of course, but it’s a testament to the beauty and power of shows starring black people, made by black people. 

In 2017, [“Girls”] leaves behind a TV landscape full of increasingly diverse, intelligent, messy, complicated, smart and funny women.

It feels appropriate that as “Girls” heads out, Issa Rae’s “Insecure” is just beginning to hit its stride on HBO. “Awkward Black Girl,” Rae’s web series which provided the template for “Insecure,” was for me a badly needed answer to an industry that had yet to tackle the black female 20-something experience.

In 2012, it felt like “Girls” needed to be more than what it was, because there just weren’t many shows by and for young women on our screens. In 2017, it leaves behind a TV landscape full of increasingly diverse, intelligent, messy, complicated, smart and funny women. What a full circle moment. 

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