January 23, 2019 in 2,605 words

_{• • • to set a mood • • •}

_{^{• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •}}

In an unpublished novel, Frank L. Baum presented the Wicked Witch of the West as a tragically misunderstood advocate for organized labor

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 11, 2017

The Transformation of Namibia’s Etosha Pan, From Parched to Soaked

_{Satellite images track the shift from dry to wet at a vast, prehistoric lake bed in southern Africa.}

_{During wet periods, a thin sheen of water coats the salty expanse of the Etosha Pan.}

THE ETOSHA PAN, IN NORTHERN Namibia, is no stranger to extremes. The white, salty landscape—leftover from a prehistoric lake that dried up millions of years ago—is often dry, cracked, and dusty; the name means the “bare place” or “the great white place” in Oshindonga, a regional dialect of the Oshiwambo language.

But when rain arrives and tops off the rivers that empty into the salt pan, it’s anything but bare: The shallow basin shimmers with highly saline water often just a few inches deep, and becomes a haven for several animal species. As new images from the NASA Earth Observatory show, that transformation from bone-dry to bluish can occur in just weeks.

_{In this false-color image of the Etosha Pan, taken from the Terra satellite, the vegetation is bright green and the water is teal blue. The image on the left was taken on December 11, 2019, and the one on the right is from January 17, 2020. Embiggenable.}

On December 11, 2019, NASA’s Terra satellite pictured the Etosha Pan looking dry, and the surrounding vegetation appearing patchy. By January 17, 2020, the same area was more watery and verdant. The Namibian reports that northern Namibia was pelted with above-average rainfall in December. The rain appears to have nourished the squiggly Ekuma River, which feeds into the Etosha Pan. In the January image, the Ekuma River appears dark blue. …

This 19th-century pocket watch came with a concealed pistol, a stamp for wax seals, and four poisonous darts

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2018

No, Democrats Aren’t Trying to Overturn the 2016 Election

_{A surprisingly durable talking point is wrong in at least four ways.}

The White House’s messaging throughout the impeachment process has been wildly inconsistent on nearly every count save one: Democrats are trying to overturn the 2016 election.

Other ideas have come and gone. President Donald Trump has insisted that he wasn’t pressuring foreign countries to intervene, and then done so again publicly. He has flip-flopped on what kind of trial he wants in the Senate. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney even changed his mind on whether there was a quid pro quo in the course of one afternoon.

Yet the claim of overturning has remained constant since shortly after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, in late September. In a reply brief over the weekend, the president’s lawyers accused Democrats of a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election” and of “nullifying an election and subverting the will of the American people.” The White House team made the same point on the Senate floor yesterday during debate on the rules for the trial.

The notion of overturning the election has persisted because it is a powerful (though not to say true) piece of messaging. The sound bite is shorthand that is easily understood—or perhaps easily misleads. Most crucially, it provides a way for Trump and his allies to evade talking about the substance of the accusations against him. As the shifting stories the White House has told make clear, that is a very difficult task, and there were few substantive defenses of the president yesterday. If, however, the whole point is to subvert the will of the people, then it short-circuits all that debate.

The problem is that the argument doesn’t hold up, for at least four reasons. …

A Matter of Facts

_{The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims.}

WITH MUCH FANFARE, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue in August to what it called the 1619 Project. The project’s aim, the magazine announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. “Our democracy’s founding ideals,” its lead essay proclaimed, “were false when they were written.” Our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. Accordingly, the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. From then on, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

The opportunity seized by the 1619 Project is as urgent as it is enormous. For more than two generations, historians have deepened and transformed the study of the centrality of slavery and race to American history and generated a wealth of facts and interpretations. Yet the subject, which connects the past to our current troubled times, remains too little understood by the general public. The 1619 Project proposed to fill that gap with its own interpretation.

To sustain its particular take on an immense subject while also informing a wide readership is a remarkably ambitious goal, imposing, among other responsibilities, a scrupulous regard for factual accuracy. Readers expect nothing less from The New York Times, the project’s sponsor, and they deserve nothing less from an effort as profound in its intentions as the 1619 Project. During the weeks and months after the 1619 Project first appeared, however, historians, publicly and privately, began expressing alarm over serious inaccuracies. …

4 Ways The Internet Is Built Entirely On Lies

The internet has its open secrets, like the Nazi clubhouses or the fact that we’re all just here for the porn. But before you make your daily trip to youwontbelievewhatfitswhere.com, you should read up on a few other ways this whole thing is all just an inane cycle of grifts. You see …

4. Almost 40% Of Web Traffic Is From Bots

Do you remember how every video, blog, and beloved internet comedy institution used to have a view counter, but most have been removed — to the point where even YouTube is now leery of them? There were many reasons for their decline, but chief among them is that as of 2018, 37.9% of internet traffic was coming from bots.

That was further broken down into 17.5% “good” bots — those that index search engines, archive pages, and scrape travel sites for price trends so you can finally take that trip to Ohio, beautiful Ohio — and 20.4% bad bots. In addition to using foul language and smoking e-cigarettes, bad bots are responsible for DDoS attacks (bringing a site down by overwhelming it with requests), data manipulation, the endless churn of bullshit news articles, and much more of what you find obnoxious about the web.

One of their favorite targets are ticket sites, as bots will rush to snatch up tickets for re-sellers to offer at inflated prices. Government targets are also common, especially voter registration pages, because why make a strong case for your candidate when you can just fuck over the other guy? And then, of course, there are the fake views.

In November 2018, eight people were accused of bilking advertisers out of $36 million by running “empty websites” for bots. Sellers were made to think that their ads were racking up views on big sites like The Economist, but they were in truth only rattling around server farms. At its peak, the operation was using over a million IP addresses and a grab bag of tricks, like fake mouse movements, to make the ad impressions look human. Schemes like that are one of many reasons the internet economy is a shambling mess, but let’s move on to Instagram. …

Mount Vesuvius eruption ‘turned victim’s brain to glass’

_{Scientists discover vitrified remains caused by immense 520C heat of disaster in AD79.}

_{laster casts of victims of the Mount Vesuvius eruption, which destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii in AD79.}

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, the damage wreaked in nearby towns was catastrophic. Now it appears the heat was so immense it turned one victim’s brain to glass – thought to be the first time this has been seen.

Experts say they have discovered that splatters of a shiny, solid black material found inside the skull of a victim at Herculaneum appear to be the remains of human brain tissue transformed by heat.

They say the find is remarkable since brain tissue is rarely preserved at all due to decomposition, and where it is found it has typically turned to soap.

“To date, vitrified remains of the brain have never been found,” said Dr Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II and a co-author of the study.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Petrone and colleagues reveal that the glassy brains belonged to a man of about 25 who was found in the 1960s lying face-down on a wooden bed under a pile of volcanic ash – a pose that suggests he was asleep when disaster struck the town. …

A Catfishing With a Happy Ending

_{Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story.}

_{Adem Guzel and Emma Perrier, who met after an older man used Adem’s identity to catfish Emma.}

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

It was a customer who had caused Emma’s heartache, two months earlier. Connor was one of London’s dashing “city boys,” and 11 years her junior. He had telephoned her at work to ask her on a date, which turned into an eight-month romance. They went night-fishing for carp near his parents’ home in Kent, where they sat holding hands in the darkness, their lines dangling in the water. One day at the train station, Connor told her it wasn’t working; he liked nightclubs more than he liked being in a relationship. When she protested, Connor said that he’d never loved her.

To raise her spirits, Emma huffed and puffed her way through a high-energy barbell class called Bodypump, four times a week. Though she now felt prepared to join the 91 million people worldwide who use dating apps, deep down she did not believe that computers were an instrument of fate. “I’m a romantic,” Emma told me, two years after the internet turned her life upside down. “I love to love,” she said, in a thick French accent. “And I want to be loved too.” …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Floridians woke up to some unusual conditions Wednesday morning: frozen iguanas scattered across the grounds.

“Don’t be surprised if you see iguanas falling from the trees tonight,” the Miami National Weather Service office tweeted on Tuesday.

The weather forecast was pretty spot-on. The temperatures were low enough to throw iguanas into shock. Miami temperatures dropped to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the lowest temperature in nine years.

_{THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.}

On day two of Trump’s impeachment trial, the president fights to bar John Bolton from testifying, and senators fight to stay awake, prompting Roy Wood Jr. and Desi Lydic to develop a special energy drink.

_{THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.}

On the second day of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, lead House manager Rep. Adam Schiff showed remarkable courage and poise in presenting the case against the President.

_{THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.}

Speaking to reporters in Davos, President Trump projected confidence that he won’t be convicted in his impeachment trial because the White House has been successful in keeping “all the material” out of Congress’s hands.

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial has begun, and as expected, Republicans continue their attempts to hide evidence and undermine witnesses, including Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, a man with as many receipts as a grandma on Christmas morning.

_{THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.}

買った猫用のおもちゃが珍しくまるに大ヒット。Maru unusually liked the toy for the cat.

This Brazilian museum secretly outfitted four sets of armor with animatronic skeletons designed to terrify intruders.

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2019

Why American Kids Have Been Going to Soviet Sleepaway Camp

_{Camp Artek is known for its sun, fun, and socialism.}

_{Located beside the Black Sea, Camp Artek is certainly picturesque.}

LIKE THOUSANDS OF KIDS ACROSS the globe, Anton Belaschenko went to sleepaway camp last summer. The 11-year-old from Bethesda, Maryland swam in the sea, went sailing, hiked in the mountains, and sang camp songs. He made new friends and ate “the most amazing pancakes in the world.”

He and his fellow campers weren’t roughing it: their camp has multiple swimming pools and tennis courts, film and music studios, a fleet of sailboats, computers and 3D printers, and an amphitheater that seats 7,000. Anton video-chatted on WhatsApp twice a day with his mom, Anna, because no 21st-century camp would be complete without Wi-Fi.

Anton’s camp, Artek, is more than just a place for kids to build self-confidence and hone outdoor skills. Founded in 1925, Artek was the first and most elite of the Soviet Young Pioneer camps, specialized summer camps for tweens and teens that once numbered in the thousands across the Eastern Bloc.

_{Young bright campers running in the sun.}

Stunningly situated in Crimea on 540 acres of the pebbled coast of the Black Sea, Artek was the exclusive summer destination for the children of the Soviet elite until 1956, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev introduced an international session open to kids from around the world. Soon, Artek was hosting about 30,000 children every year. Some 1.5 million kids from more than 150 countries have camped there in the past near-century.

During the Cold War, the goal was to “kind of convert these children into peace activists of a Soviet-led world peace,” says Matthias Neumann, an associate professor in modern Russian history at the University of East Anglia in England. …

If a bartender offers to serve you a Cossack Spirit Bludgeon, it would be wise to decline.

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2019

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Probably, maybe.}

What doesn't kill you just needs a little more time.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 22, 2020