• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Well into the 1960s, Minnesotans of Scandinavian ancestry followed the centuries-old Valentine’s tradition of constructing wax figurines of oneself and one’s beloved, which were then ceremonially melted into one large blob.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 14, 2019
California’s Mexican-American History Is Disappearing Beneath White Paint
It’s surprisingly hard to protect beloved public art.
The Raitt Street mural around four years ago, before the whitewashing.
ON JULY 15, 2019, MARIA del Pilar O’Cadiz learned that someone painted over one of her father’s murals—another one, that is. The news came in a text from her sister, who was driving home from work at an elementary school in Santa Ana, California. She had just passed the wall, on Raitt Street, to see it was a shocking white. When Pilar O’Cadiz received the text at work, she screamed. “My coworkers wondered if someone had died,” she says. “And it felt like someone had.”
Before it was whitewashed, the Raitt Street wall held a mural by artist Sergio O’Cadiz, who passed away in 2002. The mural, which was painted in 1994 by both the artist and local children, with the permission of the owners of the land the wall abutted, contained scenes of the old Santa Ana cityscape, with caballeros on horseback and children carrying banners that read “Love,” “Tolerance,” and “Peace,” among other messages. A painted scroll noted, in English and Spanish, that the mural was dedicated to “the children of Santa Ana and the people who work for their future.”
It was, as one can imagine, a beloved landmark for the community, which might explain why it escaped graffiti and tagging for nearly a decade. It was only in recent years that those depredations began to accumulate. There were some thoughts and discussions about restoring the mural to its original condition, but no action had been taken. Then, in July, neighbors spotted a solo artist—no one knows who it was—attempting to restore the mural, without the permission of the property owner or the O’Cadiz family, according to Voice of OC. For reasons that aren’t quite understood, the property owner had the entire mural painted over. “It’s silencing our history and our community’s value,” Pilar O’Cadiz says.
Local children paint the Raitt Street Mural in 1994, funded by the city’s Safe Haven Youth Program.
Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma was born in Mexico City in 1934. He studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He moved to Orange County around the time that the Chicano Movement, a civil rights effort aimed toward empowering Mexican-Americans and sprinkled with revolutionary themes, began to gain momentum. Perhaps the movement’s most significant and visible expression was in the form of murals. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than 2,000 were painted in Los Angeles alone, the vast majority by Chicanx muralists, according to a timeline from the exhibit ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege, which documented the city’s disappearing murals (and is on display until the end of 2019). Within this context, O’Cadiz became one of Orange County’s most prolific contributors, according to investigative reporter Gustavo Arellano’s 2012 cover story on O’Cadiz for OC Weekly. …
Frank “Wild Mario” Bellini, an old-West entertainer, killed two men with only playing cards. Bellini could hurl a paper card at more than 90 miles an hour and later patented “swish cards”, concealed, innocuous-looking weapons similar in function to throwing stars.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 11, 2019
‘People think of straitjackets’: the podcast unveiling reality in a psychiatric hospital
A nurse wants to shift outdated perceptions of mental health by giving patients a voice.
‘I was a nightmare three years ago. My recovery is a miracle, really,’ says one patient.
“We’re all seen as people catching flies in their mouth and talking to Jesus while wearing tin helmets,” says Chris Dowling*, who is being treated for mental health problems that include depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Mental health needn’t be that debilitating, but even my own family … it’s almost as if they think it’s contagious. They steer clear of me,” he adds. “We have to shift the outdated Victorian connotations of what mental health is.”
Dowling is a patient at St Andrew’s Healthcare, a low-secure unit near Wickford, Essex. It’s for people who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, which deems they are in need of urgent treatment for a mental health disorder and are at risk of harm to themselves or others. The hospital he’s in requires people to enter and exit through an airlock; staff and visitors are required to wear a personal alarm and there’s a long list of restricted items, including mobile phones. Patients work up to being let out on day trips with a member of staff before gaining independent leave and ultimately, if suitable, being discharged back into the community. Some patients are there for a matter of weeks; others stay for years.
In 2017-18, there were around 50,000 detentions under the Mental Health Act, but a huge amount of mystery shrouds what psychiatric hospitals are like. With a lack of voices emerging from these hospitals, people have been left to picture a distorted version of reality, exacerbated by films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Silence of the Lambs, or stories in the media about violent attacks. …
With podcast goodness. Sorry, wasn’t able to embed.
A Brief History Of Money
Has money always been the same? How do we define it? Money’s history is filled with successes, innovations, failures and inefficiencies that have attempted to make the best method to transfer wealth and value. It has been an important concept since very early in human history and one of the most significant inventions, it has taken many forms and shapes. I’ll give a brief summary of the timeline of money in this post.
How did we even come up with the idea of money anyway? Nowadays, central banks are responsible of issuing, regulating and controlling the money that we exchange for goods and services, but in reality, money wasn’t the creation of governments. The need to transfer wealth created a market, and this market emerged out of the division of labour when people began to specialize in specific crafts and had to rely on others for materials or anything else they needed for their specialization. This led to the Barter Exchange.
Barter Exchange
The earliest form of wealth transfer was this method. Transactions were made by exchanging goods that involved parties agreed on. Let’s say livestock farmers met, one raises cows and the other one raises sheep. They agreed in exchanging 5 sheep for one cow and so they make a deal. There you go, that was how business was made. The problem with this method is the “double coincidence of wants” which states that is very rare that one person wants specifically what other person has at the same time that both parties are prepared to make a trade. This inefficiency Is thought to had created the need of money to act as an intermediary in the deal so people weren’t limited in exchanging what they physically had but instead exchange something that could hold a universal value. However, this argument is wrong. It was popularized by Adam Smith in his famous book “the wealth of nations” but it doesn’t justify the creation of money to replace the barter. Economies developed based on mutual trust, gifts and debt. Reputation within a community was crucial for debts to be payed and because communities were small, the exchange of something simultaneously wasn’t needed, all you needed was trust to know that debt was going to be payed sooner rather than later. Trading goods existed mainly when there wasn’t trust in between the parties involved (strangers or enemies), or where debt couldn’t be repaid easily such as in the case of travelling merchants. So in summary, money solved the problem of repaying debt, not a replacement of the barter. The existence of debt and credit systems was present way the barter, so the focus of money was to address this issue rather than replacing the barter.
Commodity Money
The definition of commodity money is that of a physical token that has value from the commodity that is made of. This means that it has an intrinsic value of the raw material that represents. For example, early commodity money was things like grain, or salt that you can eat. It can also have an extrinsic value, like a precious metal or shells by being scarce and beautiful. They have a stable and known value that is relatively easy to spend. …
5 Famous Companies With Unexpectedly Dark Origin Stories
Most companies offer up some inspiring origin story about how its founder had a great vision for helping the world and saw it through, growing from a single garage to a worldwide brand. Meanwhile, the actual backstories of these companies are often weird or horrifying, if not both. Like how …
5. Victoria’s Secret Initially Failed, And Its Founder Died By Suicide
Though Victoria’s Secret uses attractive models and sparks occasional furious debates about whether its whole thing is bad for feminism, it very much caters to a female customer base. But this was not originally the case. At first it catered mainly to men. Founder Roy Raymond started the company after being unable to buy lingerie for his wife in a department store without suffering major embarrassment. We don’t have an exact account of what his experience was like, so we can only imagine:
Raymond: “Hi, I’m looking for women’s wear. Which is to say, not dresses. I’m looking for inner wear. Intimate wear?”
Saleswoman: “Certainly. Perhaps something like this nightgown?”
Raymond: *shrieks*
Whatever happened to him in that department store, Raymond overcompensated and made a lingerie shop that men could visit comfortably, but women sort of could not. He designed the decor after what he imagined a Victorian brothel looked like. Sources say the models in his catalogs looked awkwardly like Pretty Baby-style prostitutes (meaning Susan Sarandon, not Brooke Shields). Despite all the jokes about men ogling the Victoria’s Secret catalog today, modern shoots are designed to appeal to women, and they do a very good job at that, if sales figures are anything to go by.
The success of Raymond’s chain was pretty limited, because men only buy so much women’s underwear. With the company facing bankruptcy, Raymond sold Victoria’s Secret for $1 million. Then the new owners switched tracks and marketed to women, and Victoria’s Secret grew to be a multi-billion-dollar company. His new business venture went bankrupt, Raymond’s wife left him, and he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge to his death. Yeah, you have to wonder how many entrepreneur stories look more like this guy’s than Jeff Bezos’. …
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time — tobacco, alcohol and pot edition
21st April 2016 – Washington, D.C. – U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez participates in a press conference with congressional leaders to discuss the importance of raising the federal minimum wage and urging Congress to pass the Murray-Scott Raise the Wage legislation. Congressman Steny Hoyer ***Official Department of Labor Photograph*** Photographs taken by the federal government are generally part of the public domain and may be used, copied and distributed without permission. Unless otherwise noted, photos posted here may be used without the prior permission of the U.S. Department of Labor. Such materials, however, may not be used in a manner that imply any official affiliation with or endorsement of your company, website or publication.
Prohibinists have spent more than 80 years trying to convince the American people that marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. At first it worked, but not anymore, according to a new survey.
The survey, the product of a collaboration between Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that Americans are three times more likely to consider tobacco “very harmful” than marijuana. Tobacco cigarettes were considered “very harmful” by 81% of those surveyed, compared with 26% of those who considered pot “very harmful.”
Marijuana doesn’t get a completely clean bill of health, however; 27% of those surveyed said they thought it was “somewhat harmful” and 26% said it was “not too harmful.”
But 18% of those surveyed said pot was “not at all harmful.” Only 1% said the same of tobacco. Unlike many surveys, there was little or no difference in the responses from Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Of those answering “very harmful” to both the tobacco and marijuana questions, there was only a one percentage point difference among the three groups.
The survey also asked people how harmful they considered alcohol to be: 51% said they considered it “very harmful,” with Republicans (at 46%) only a bit less likely to say so.
• • • •
While you can’t fool all of the people all of the time about pot, it turns out you can fool Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), who says he believes marijuana is a gateway drug to hard drug use. …
The joy and promise of Burger King’s Impossible Whopper
Burger King’s new Impossible Whopper is exactly what it claims to be: a vegetable product that looks exactly like a thin, gray, lumpy fast-food beef patty — and tastes like one too. If you ordered it with all the standard Whopper toppings — including, ugh, mayo — and gave it to somebody who asked for the real thing, he probably wouldn’t notice. The idea of eating one of these on a Friday fills me with holy dread. But paired with fries and Dr. Pepper on a Tuesday afternoon? It’s one of the least-bad things I’ve felt guilty spending $6 on from a monarchy-themed mass-produced food retailer in some time.
We have certainly come a long way from the soggy corn-flavored lumps that are still called “veggie burgers” on the menus of bars, even in rural southwest Michigan. The Impossible Burger is a miracle of engineering, a triumph of sheer human ingenuity on par with the Jacob’s Creek suspension bridge or the invention of the washing machine. It puts to shame the aspirations of medieval alchemists, who I’m sure would agree with me that turning one kind of hard metal into another is far less impressive than transforming soy and potatoes into factory-farmed cow flesh. The idea that it exists at all fills me with joy and a feeling of promise.
Does it matter, though? Yes, because unless we want the entire planet covered in pink radioactive hog excrement in 50 years, we are all going to have start eating a lot less meat. It has nothing to do with lunatic arguments about the “ethics” of killing dumb animals, and everything to do with responsible stewardship of creation — though as it happens the processes inherent in factory farming as we know it are insanely cruel. This has been clear for ages, but unlike so many of the other existential crises we face, I think that solving it will be remarkably easy. We are not destroying our landscapes and creating poop lagoons visible from space in order to sell $50 cuts of steak — we’re doing it to make cheap meat products that will be created under industrial conditions, prepared by an assembly line, and eaten out of a bag.
Which is why I am optimistic about the possibility of replacing cheap meat with things like the Impossible Burger. We already see this at places like Taco Bell, where a priest of my acquaintance once argued it was probably borderline acceptable to eat on a Friday given the plant-based composition of what appears inside their bargain menu “beef” tortillas. …
FULL DISCLOSURE: I tried the Impossible Whopper. I liked it. It’s a huge sandwich, so skip the fries.
Once popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, scrovelhouses—specialized laundromats that wash black magic from clothes—are making a comeback.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 4, 2019
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
YouTube decided to lose all my subscribed channels sometime in the last 24 hours.
Maybe Video Goodnesses will come back once I have time to figure out how the latest YouTube functions.
FINALLY . . .
Found: 2,500 Medieval Coins, and Evidence of Tax Evasion
Making heads or tails of a discovery in southwestern England.
Whoever buried it didn’t come back for it.
IT’S OFTEN SAID THAT LIFE’S only certainties are death and taxes, but people have spent centuries figuring out ways to evade the latter. Look no further than a hoard of 2,528 11th-century coins recently discovered in England, which together bear witness to regime change, domestic unrest, and, amid it all, fraud.
The coins were found in January 2019, by metal detectorists in southwestern England’s Chew Valley. This week, the British Museum released details: 1,236 coins date to the brief reign of King Harold II (which started and ended in 1066) and 1,310 to the first years of William I’s reign, following the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings. Three of the coins represent types known to numismatists as “mules,” or illegitimate blends of different coin faces cast by moneyers in hopes of avoiding taxes on new coin dies.
If William had seen these counterfeits, they may have hit his ego harder than they hit his purse. Two of the mules depict William on one side of the coin and Harold on the other, indicating that the moneyers reused old dies to mint the coins so they wouldn’t have to pony up for more of the updated variety. (The third mule splits its sides between William and Edward the Confessor, Harold II’s predecessor.) According to the British Museum, these are the first known examples of William/Harold mules, and they surely would have been two too many for William the Conqueror. After all, you don’t go to the trouble of leading a massive military conquest just to split coin space with your dethroned rival.
Three kings—Edward, Harold, and William—are found among the lot’s “mules.”
Gareth Williams, the British Museum’s curator for Early Medieval Coinage, says that this find represents an exceptionally large haul for the time period. The coin hoard adds greatly to the known examples of each type, and offers a new opportunity to study the evolution of English coinage in a period of massive social and political upheaval. Already, thanks to information on the coins, the researchers have learned of mints not previously known to exist. Some of the coins also attest to the linguistic impact of the Norman Conquest, with the incorrect usage of Old English characters illustrating the real-time process of different cultures coming into contact for the first time. …
American author Constance Woodyard based most of her characters on how she imagined her possessions would act if they were transformed into people.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 31, 2019
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?