• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Harborus of Persia, an educator from 600 BC, is often pictured bearing a torch. Long-assumed to represent the light of knowledge, historians now suspect it represents an episode where he theorized that his house was sentient and attempted to set fire to it.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 8, 2019
For Sale: A Pink Temple to Temperance With a Dubious History of Debauchery
The rosy-hued house in Louisville, Kentucky, could be yours.
This whimsical house, flanked by trees, is up for grabs.
THE PINK PALACE, IN THE St. James–Belgravia Historic District of Old Louisville, is a bubblegum-colored, six-bedroom mansion, complete with a turret, elaborate decorative glass, and more fireplaces than you can shake a log at. It’s up for auction through the Harritt Group until October 15, 2019—at press time, online bidding had reached $125,000—and whomever moves into the stately place will inherit a legacy of both virtue and alleged vice.
Local legend has it that the building began its life as a turn-of-the-century gentleman’s club in the ritzy southern reaches of town, where a residential community was just beginning to sprout around the grounds that had been host to the Southern Exposition. In 2017, the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper colorfully described the building, in its early days, as “a 19th-century Animal House for rich old white dudes who drank, played cards, bedded prostitutes, and complained incessantly about Grover Cleveland’s apparent lack of moxie.” By the first few decades of the 20th century, the newspaper continued, “the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union took it over and painted it pink as a statement that the property was no longer a home to fun of any kind.” Louisville-based author David Dominé elaborates on that tale in the book Old Louisville: Exuberant, Elegant, and Alive writing that the rosy hue was “a defiant attempt to erase its sordid past and start anew.”
But Jana Meyer, associate curator of collections at The Filson Historical Society in Louisville, wonders if the story about cigar-puffing, women-chasing men was little more than a swirling rumor. An old newspaper blurb about an 1891 building permit refers to the “St. James Court Casino,” but Meyer says that if the structure ever did serve a stint as shady hangout spot, “it would have been real brief.” By 1893, a married couple—George Avery and his wife, Kate, who was active in the Louisville Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for suffrage, among other causes—had moved in. Still, the “Casino” moniker stuck around: An 1893 dispatch from the Courier-Journal reported that “Mr. and Mrs. George Avery are now occupying their new residence, the Casino, out in St. James Court.” A few years later, another couple put down roots in the home. Tales of liquor-soaked, debauched nights, Meyer says, “might be more of an urban legend than anything else.”
Little details are everywhere.
According to local news reports, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) moved in sometime in the first few decades of the 20th century. Founded in 1874, the national WCTU had a myriad of missions, from promoting temperance to pushing against unemployment and child abuse to agitating for better education and cleaner water. (Across the South, WCTU chapters were often racially segregated.) Representatives for the organization, which still exists today, did not respond to a request for comment. …
The Blood Rains of the Samedi Islands appear to be a mixture of plant matter, industrial pollutants, and a bizarre ingredient commonly associated with wizards.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 7, 2019
Technology Sabotaged Public Safety
Without us even noticing.
WHEN MY FATHER WAS 18 years old, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving home late. That’s never good, but it was particularly bad then, in 1954, the year he crashed his car on the early-morning Milwaukee streets. Seat belts weren’t common until the 1960s, and federal law didn’t mandate them until 1968. Dad’s unharnessed body was thrown out the windshield, through the quiet night, and onto the pavement. He survived—otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this—but not without permanent disability.
The road to mandatory seat belts was a long one, involving decades of medical and military research, legislative intervention, and corporate acquiescence. But today, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 90 percent of Americans use seat belts, which, the agency claims, save some 15,000 lives a year. They are almost automatic for most drivers and passengers.
Except in one case. Even people who wear seat belts religiously tend not to do so in taxis. New York City cab passengers over age 16 are exempt from seat-belt laws (for now), and a 2014 NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission survey of such riders reported that only 38 percent of them wear seat belts. Why? In a 2008 study of 100,000 car trips, two psychologists concluded that riders might assume a lower risk of calamity in cars for hire: The trips are shorter, the drivers are seen as professionals with lots of road experience, and the passengers (wrongly) perceive a lower risk of harm in the back seat.
For years, this particular threat to public safety didn’t affect people who didn’t take taxis. But now, thanks to Uber and Lyft, trips by hired car have increased dramatically all over the country. Americans took 2.6 billion ride-share trips in 2017, and they were almost as likely to forgo a seat belt on those trips as New York City taxi patrons. One survey found that 43 percent of car-hire customers reported not always wearing a seat belt, and 80 percent don’t buckle up for short trips.
Sixty-five years later, my oldest kids are now about the age my father was when he was hurled from a vehicle, absent a seat belt, to permanent effect. Because of Uber and Lyft, they are far more likely than I was to risk a similar fate. …
The Fragility of American Citizenship
Some people are learning that their birth or naturalization certificates aren’t enough to prove citizenship—a problem that the Fourteenth Amendment should ideally prevent.
Establishing U.S. citizenship is supposed to be easy. In 1868, the first sentence of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment declared: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” In light of those words, either a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate is all that is needed to prove U.S. citizenship and to gain all the rights that come along with it—to vote, to hold public office, and to enter and remain in the United States.
The power of those words is diminished today. Through a variety of initiatives, the Trump administration is undermining the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee, and many Americans are learning the hard way.
Naturalized citizens are at particular risk of losing their citizenship under the Trump administration, as Baljinder Singh recently discovered. Singh has lived in the United States for nearly three decades, married a U.S. citizen, and became a naturalized citizen more than 10 years ago. Nonetheless, last year the government revoked his citizenship. Why? Because when he arrived in the United States as a teenager, the government recorded his first name as “Davinder” rather than “Baljinder”—quite possibly due to an interpreter’s error—and he never received the notice to appear in immigration court under that different name.
Singh is among the first targets in a denaturalization campaign launched by the Trump administration, which opened a new office in Los Angeles last summer, staffed by dozens and dedicated to investigating the citizenship files of 700,000 naturalized Americans.
But even some born within America’s borders are having their citizenship questioned. Take, for example, retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant Enrique Martinez. His birth certificate stating he was born in Texas was good enough for the U.S. Marine Corps. Nonetheless, the State Department refused his application for a passport on the grounds that it was insufficient proof that he was a U.S. citizen. …
Moby, Of All People, Is Somehow Involved In A Trump Scandal
Our story begins in 2017, when the middle-aged man who still calls himself Moby wrote a Facebook post about how his friends in the intelligence community (because Moby has friends in the intelligence community) told him that there was no doubt that Donald Trump was being manipulated by Vladimir Putin, that the pee tape was real, and other valuable things about the president’s alleged corruption. None of us knew Moby to be a liar, so anyone who saw that post likely assumed he had reached the insanity portion of his fame cycle, finally joining the ranks of the Jose Cansecos and Gary Buseys of the world.
And then last week, about two and a half years after the post, an article about Val Broeksmit, the son of a Deutsche Bank senior executive, was published by The New York Times. Broeksmit had been handing American investigators every document they could possibly want in their ongoing efforts to investigate Trump. While he was in LA trying to sell the movie rights to his life story, he ran into Moby. He apparently told the musician what he knew about Trump and Deutsche Bank, so then Moby arranged for Broeksmit to meet his “friends who work in D.C.” One of those friends was Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the guy Nancy Pelosi chose to head the impeachment inquiry. …
This is the world’s most beautiful air conditioner
And it requires zero electricity to operate, thanks to the passive cooling techniques utilized by its designer, Maxime Louis-Courcier.
While environmental awareness is undoubtedly a macro necessity, taking steps to shrink our own carbon footprints on a smaller scale is crucial too. Incorporating eco-friendly practices into homes—which are our own miniature worlds, after all—isn’t always easy, but thoughtful design can help. For instance, Paris-based industrial designer Maxime Louis-Courcier recently addressed the need for more sustainable home appliances by designing an air conditioner and air humidifier made from an unlikely collection of natural materials.
Louis-Courcier’s innovative appliances eschew traditional electricity completely. His “woven air-conditioner” weighs about 22 pounds and can be hung on any wall. It’s made out of high-thermal-conductivity composite yarn that holds tubes of phase-change materials, or PCMs. These bio-based fatty acids melt at about 77 degrees Fahrenheit, absorbing heat as they liquify. That reduces the temperature in a given space—a low-tech and passive way to cool a room. The PCMs become transparent once they’ve melted, which turns the tubing blue. As the amount of heat stored in the cooling unit increases, a randomized blue pattern is gradually revealed, making this functional home appliance an artistic wall covering too. The cooler the temperature, the more solid the material, making the object a monochromatic white again.
“This simple hanging system allows you to line the wall with as many modules as necessary,” Louis-Courcier writes on his website. “While covering the wall, the object absorbs the heat in contact with the air, and creates a barrier with the heat that penetrates through the walls.” …
Vintage filth: a guide to history’s rudest texts
After the discovery of the racy fragments censored from the 13th century’s most popular poem, can any other ancient texts match up?
A scene from Boccaccio’s Decameron, 1487, by Sandro Botticelli.
You will, of course, be familiar with the epic Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), the vast poem written in the 13th century that is reckoned to have been the most popular book of the medieval period. It is also sensual and subversive, with bits so pleasingly filthy they were censored. Some of the more highly charged fragments, torn out of one of the original manuscripts, have now turned up in that hotbed of medieval sexuality, Worcester Record Office.
The love-pilgrim’s “staff” is “stiff and strong”; he talks of being “full of agility and vigour, between the two fair pillars … consumed with desire to worship”. Racy stuff – and we can no doubt expect a new popular edition soon. But is it the tip of the … iceberg? Should we be racing to read the dirty bits of other ancient texts? You bet your life we should. Here are a few suggestive suggestions:
Catullus The Roman poet Catullus is the father of dirty books. Some readers loved his earthy sexual imagery, others less so, but he didn’t have much truck with critics, attacking them in a poem so filthily abusive it wasn’t translated literally until the 1970s: “Up your ass and in your mouth / Aurelius … / Calling me dirt because my poems / have naughty naughty words in them.” I feel we need more of this engagement between writers and critics.
Martial The other great dirty writer of the Roman period, writing a century after Catullus and more satirist than satyr, unpicking his fellow Romans’ fascination with pederasty, oral sex, voyeurism and incest. It was all too much for some later scholars. “To read Martial is to walk with him along the streets of ancient Rome, but few of us need accompany him when he bathes in the sewers,” wrote one Victorian translator/censor. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
What happens when your town dries up? In California’s Central Valley, residents of Stratford—traditionally an agricultural community—describe how difficult their lives have become in the wake of sweeping droughts that have decimated the farmland. Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…
After two problematic phone calls with world leaders, Donald Trump is in the worst trouble of his presidency.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Meanwhile… Do you like alcohol but worry that simply drinking it doesn’t look stupid enough? Stephen Colbert has the answer!
Do you love the website you’re currently on and think it’s never done anything wrong? Huh. Okay then. Maybe you should watch this video.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the White House threatening to obstruct the impeachment inquiry and refusing to cooperate with subpoenas.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Cheers to ASUS for sponsoring this video!
一見紙袋に見えますが、実は…？This seems to be a paper bag. However, in fact…?
Drunken Ledge, in southern New Hampshire, is one of the few places in America where the disorienting view—a result of compounding optical illusions—creates a lingering sensation of intoxication.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 4, 2019
FINALLY . . .
Newspaper Rock
One of the world’s largest collections of petroglyphs records 2,000 years of human activity.
Newspaper Rock.
FOR APPROXIMATELY 2,000 YEARS, Native Americans have been carving petroglyphs into a single slab of sandstone located in San Juan County, Utah. While the precise meaning of the petroglyphs is not fully understood, the panel nonetheless provides an intriguing insight into human activities in the area.
Petroglyphs are hard to date, but archaeologists believe the earliest petroglyphs on Newspaper Rock likely date back to the Archaic, Basketmaker, Fremont, and Pueblo cultures, up until around 1300. Later, Utah, Navajo, and Anglo tribesmen added to the panel. In the Navajo language, the rock is aptly known as Tse’ Hane, or “the rock that tells a story.”
About 650 individual designs cover the surface of the 200-square-foot rock, making it one of the largest collections of petroglyphs in the world. The petroglyphs were made by chipping away at the desert varnish, a dark coating found on exposed rock surfaces in arid environments, to reveal the lighter rock beneath.
The designs range from abstract shapes and symbols to more recognizable human and animal figures. Some of the stranger designs include wagon wheel-like shapes and bizarre, broad-shouldered humanoid figures with horns on their heads. Others depict deer, buffalo, bighorn sheep, lizards, snakes and turtles. …
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
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? I have absolutely no idea.