• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
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
The World Is Studded With Artificial Mountains
They’re fake, but they can be spectacular (and hazardous).
A towering slag heap in France.
FROM ATOP THE JAGGED MOUNTAIN, cars, people, and houses appear as tiny versions of themselves, the noise of their day to day activity muted so high in the air. Scrubby vegetation grows from cracks in the rock, soaking up the sun and rustling in the slight breeze. Birds caw as they alight at the top of a slope, observing the expanse below them.
The mountain is just another part of the topography to those that live near it, but it is not a natural part of the landscape. The mountain is completely artificial, a colossus formed not by eons of geologic change but the vigor of industrial concrete production. Artificial mountains have sprung up all over the world, the result of hellish manufacturing processes, piled construction and mining waste, or in some cases built deliberately to add a humongous new feature to the horizon.
The majority of the artificial mountains in the United States are the byproducts of cement and steel production, formed at the height of those industries between the late 1800s and mid-20th century. Cement, the binder that holds concrete aggregate together, is made by heating limestone and clay into a product called clinker, which is then ground with gypsum to make powdered cement. Though cement has been made in the U.S. as long as people have needed it, production really got underway in the 1920s, with 159 plants in 33 states operating by 1929. These mountains have long dotted industry-heavy areas of the United States and can be truly gargantuan in scope. Brown’s Dump in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, for example, was over 200 feet tall and covered the equivalent of 130 city blocks.
Railroad cars release hot slag onto Brown’s Dump, located southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Despite their size, it’s almost impossible to know how many there are, as there was no concerted effort to keep track of them while they were being created, says Dr. Heather Brown, Director of Middle Tennessee State University’s School of Concrete and Construction Management. Dismantling those that do exist can be tremendously difficult and expensive, but there is potential money to be made from repurposing them. …
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
White nationalist has long worked at conservative outlets under real name
Guardian findings support watchdog’s report that ‘Paul Kersey’, a prominent author and activist, is actually Michael J Thompson.
Students walk through the Utah State University campus. Thompson has facilitated students’ conservative activism through the Campus Reform organization.
A new report has revealed that a prominent white nationalist author, activist and podcaster known as “Paul Kersey” has in fact worked for more than a decade at mainstream conservative institutions and media outlets under his real name.
According to an investigation by the not-for-profit media outlet Right Wing Watch (RWW), the man who has worked under the Kersey pseudonym is in fact Michael J Thompson.
The Guardian has uncovered additional material that supports reporting by RWW, and further indicates Thompson’s role in moulding rightwing activists from a position near the heart of America’s most influential conservative institutions.
The RWW investigation, published on Monday, reveals the work of “Paul Kersey”, whom it calls a “barely underground member of the white nationalist movement” and a fixture on the roster of racist media outlets and campaign groups.
But it also shows that Thompson worked under his own name at institutions like the Leadership Institute, its media arm Campus Reform, and WND, formerly World Net Daily, a once-popular conspiracy-minded conservative outlet, as late as November 2018. …
5 Cruel Ways Being Poor Is Expensive
Only an asshole, or somebody’s uncle, or somebody’s asshole uncle would think being poor is somehow easier than being rich. But hey, at least it’s cheaper, right? Things like subsidized housing and food stamps presumably exist to keep the overall cost of poor people’s lives down while everybody else is out there juggling multiple yacht payments and carefully considering which brand of high-end almond butter sparks the most joy. But as it turns out, being poor is actually expensive. Look at how …
5. Household Goods Like Toilet Paper Cost More For Poor People
Stupid science has yet to discover a foolproof way to avoid getting shit all over your butthole when taking a dump. Until that breakthrough, you’re gonna need toilet paper. It’s one of the great class equalizers. And yet a study tracking poor people’s purchases noticed that they pay about 5.9% more for toilet paper than rich people. And no, it’s not because of next-gen 7-ply butt wipes; we’re talking the exact same brands. In fact, the study found similar price increases for almost all household goods, including canned tomatoes and paper towels not (necessarily) meant for anuses. So what’s the difference?
People with more cash on hand save money by heading to Costco and purchasing enough bulk toilet paper to polish the tushies of a small country. For example, a $24 30-pack saves way more money per roll than a $5 four-pack. But poor people don’t always have $24 lying around, so they often go for the less cost-effective (but cheaper overall) small packs.
Even worse, buying in such low quantities forces them to repurchase such items more frequently, meaning they don’t have the luxury of stocking up and waiting around for a blowout toilet paper sale that could save them even more money. Not to mention how many don’t have the money to pony up for a Costco membership in the first place. They’re more likely shopping at retailers that don’t offer such bulky discounts. And this isn’t because poor people aren’t aware of the cost difference. The same study found that at the beginning of each month, when paychecks are freshly cashed, the poor are just as good as anybody else at hitting sales and buying in bulk. It’s at the end of the month, when money is stretched, that things get more desperate. And expensive. And scratchy. …
How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class
Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.
When Pete Buttigieg accepted a position at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company, he already had sterling credentials: high-school valedictorian, a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship. He could have taken any number of jobs and, moreover, had no obvious interest in business. Nevertheless, he joined the firm.
This move was predictable, not eccentric: The top graduates of elite colleges typically pass through McKinsey or a similar firm before settling into their adult career. But the conventional nature of the career path makes it more, not less, worthy of examination. How did this come to pass? And what consequences has the rise of management consulting had for the organization of American business and the lives of American workers?
The answers to these questions put management consultants at the epicenter of economic inequality and the destruction of the American middle class. The answers also explain why the Democratic Party’s left wing is so suspicious of the nice and obviously impressive young man who wishes to be president.
Management consultants advise managers on how to run companies; McKinsey alone serves management at 90 of the world’s 100 largest corporations. Managers do not produce goods or deliver services. Instead, they plan what goods and services a company will provide, and they coordinate the production workers who make the output. Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential. …
McMillions: the bizarre story of how one man stole $24m from McDonald’s
In a stranger-than-fiction new docuseries, an FBI investigation into a decade-long scheme to fix the McDonald’s Monopoly game is revealed.
A still from McMillions.
It was always a crime story hiding in plain sight. From 1987 to the 1990s, McDonald’s crowned dozens of winners in its promotional Monopoly game, which awarded customers prizes ranging from a free drink to a car to a million dollars. Big-time winners – the rare ticket-finders – were interviewed on the news and profiled in the papers. Except none of the winners was real. Or rather, none actually stumbled upon a lucky ticket. They were picked in a scheme run by a rogue ex-police officer, Jerome Jacobson, involving mob connections, false addresses, smuggled tickets and over $24m in illegal winnings – a genuinely crazy, rabbit-hole story of greed, deceit, and good old American scamming explored in McMillions, a six-part HBO docuseries out this week.
The series kicks off in 2001, when Doug Mathews, a young and hungry FBI officer who seems more at home at a southern barbecue than a law enforcement office, stumbles upon another bombshell in plain sight: a Post-it note on his boss’s desk that simply asks: “McDonald’s Monopoly Fraud?” Mathews and his team in Jacksonville, Florida, have one lead – an anonymous tip that some past winners know each other – and little reason to doubt the security of one America’s largest food chains. Without spoiling too much, things quickly expand from Jacksonville to winners up and down the east coast, a nightclub owner resembling Al Capone and a network of stolen golden tickets.
Though the story seems tailor-made for an Adam McKay movie or bestselling book, it remained largely hidden for years, in part because news of the investigation dropped right before 9/11. The McMillions co-director James Lee Hernandez didn’t hear of it until 2012, when he scrolled through Reddit to kill time before bed and saw a post in the TIL (Today I Learned) thread: “Today I learned nobody really won the McDonald’s Monopoly game.” As someone “obsessed” with the game as a child – his first job was working for his local McDonald’s – Hernandez started digging. There wasn’t much – an article in a Jacksonville newspaper about the mail fraud indictments of false “winners”, but nothing with a bird’s eye picture of the story or FBI investigation. The missing information “set me on fire”, he told the Guardian. “In this day and age, if you can’t learn every single thing in two seconds on the internet, it drives you crazy. So I kept looking into it.”
Hernandez put in Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government, which took three years to materialize and revealed names of those involved in the investigation. In 2017, he reached out to FBI agents and prosecutors, who all “said this was their favorite case they’ve ever worked but nobody’s ever reached out to them”, he said. Hernandez teamed up with a fellow film-maker, Brian Lazarte, to start interviews, eventually linking up with Mark Wahlberg’s production company Unrealistic Ideas and HBO.
Though the facts of the case are by now well documented, the six-part series unfolds through the eyes of FBI investigators as they attempt to assemble a series of loosely connected clues …
6 Normal Towns That Became Weirdo Tourist Hotspots
Not every population center is blessed with prodigious oil reserves, spectacular scenery, or the world’s fifth-largest cheese wheel. There may be enough reason to live there (gotta live somewhere), but not enough to visit. So sometimes overlooked places have to think outside the box to keep their coffers filled. And hey, taking a flying leap off the screaming cliffs of insanity is still technically “outside the box.”
6. Scranton Was A Dump Until The Office
The Office was not shot in a sleepy northeastern Pennsylvania town, but plain old Southern California. Still, the financial impact of luring reverent Prison Mike fans has proven real tempting for Scranton. Sure, you can buy a Dunder Mifflin coffee mug from a boring online repository, but there’s just something special about getting it in the city where the company never really existed, right? At least, that’s what the city leaders are betting on. From Office-themed booze cruises on Lake Wallenpaupack to themed restaurants that name all their sandwiches after characters from the show, local businesses have taken full advantage of the national exposure.
If you tire of the dry humor of The Office, you can pivot to classic horror and celebrate The Exorcist at Farley’s Eatery and Pub on Spruce Street. No, it wasn’t filmed in Scranton either, but Farley’s is where Jason Miller, the Scranton native who played Father Karras, dropped dead of a heart attack. His bust and ashes are displayed on the street outside, because The Exorcist wasn’t a creepy enough legacy for him.
…
Berlin artist uses 99 phones to trick Google into traffic jam alert
Google Maps diverts road users after mistaking cartload of phones for huge traffic cluster
Google Maps Hacks by Simon Weckert.
A Berlin-based artist managed to create a traffic jam on one of the main bridges across the Spree with nothing but a handcart and 99 second-hand phones. But one other thing was unusual about the jam: it only existed on Google Maps.
Simon Weckert’s artwork Google Maps Hacks involved the artist pulling a small red cart at walking pace down some of the main thoroughfares of Berlin. The 99 phones in the cart, all reporting their locations and movement back to Google’s servers, gave the search company the impression of a huge cluster of slow-moving traffic, which was duly reported on the company’s maps.
“Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic,” Weckert wrote.
In his statement, Weckert cited a journal article by the German anthropologist Moritz Ahlert: “Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is, how we interact with maps, their technological limitations, and how they look aesthetically.
“What is the relationship between the art of enabling and techniques of supervision, control and regulation in Google’s maps? Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behaviour, opinions and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge? Maps, which themselves are the product of a combination of states of knowledge and states of power, have an inscribed power dispositive.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Governments are evacuating their citizens from Wuhan to escape the coronavirus outbreak. As of Sunday, there are over 17,300 confirmed cases of coronavirus with at least 360 deaths. It’s now spread to at least 20 countries outside China.
So countries are taking strict precautions, which includes quarantining citizens returning home from Wuhan.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Are Trump supporters proclaiming victory in the impeachment fight? Jordan Klepper heads to Trump’s Iowa rally to ask them.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump keeps Republicans in his corner on impeachment, gets sporty-spiritual with Sean Hannity and spins a fake story about Michael Bloomberg.
Republican Senators including Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski and Marco Rubio spent the weekend offering lame justifications for their vote against calling witnesses in the Trump impeachment trial.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Senate Republicans all but completing their cover-up of the president’s crimes as they block witnesses and move to acquit him.
まるなりに、鬼の箱を再利用。Maru reuses the box of the ogre.
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
FINALLY . . .
For Sale: 28 Acres of Historical Amish Stuff
Amish Acres featured a gigantic barn, buggy rides, and the longest-running Amish musical.
After 50 years, Nappanee, Indiana’s premier Amish attraction has closed its doors.
IN 1962, RICHARD “DICK” PLETCHER was a senior in college, working at his family’s furniture store in Nappanee, Indiana. Like his father before him, he had a dream: to preserve an Amish farm and open it to the public, to celebrate the small town’s rich Amish heritage. After graduation, Pletcher moved home and founded an arts and crafts festival that peddled Amish goods. “We sold hams and jams,” Pletcher says. “We even began giving buggy rides downtown.” In 1968, after seeing an Amish farm go up for auction, Pletcher seized the moment and followed his dream.
For 50 years, Amish Acres was one of the most famous tourist attractions in the area, and claims to be the only Amish farm listed in the National Register of Historic Places. But Pletcher, 78, is now ready to retire. Amish Acres closed on January 1 and will likely be divided into a number of smaller businesses, unless a high-roller with a penchant for Amish attractions snaps up the whole thing. The 28-acre property will be auctioned on February 5 by Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, Inc.
Present-day Indiana was once the home of Native Americans such as the Potawatomi, but in the 19th century, the U.S. forcibly removed them to clear the way for white settlement. The town of Nappanee likely takes its name from an Algonquian word, possibly meaning “flour.” The farm that became Amish Acres was originally homesteaded by Moses Stahley, the son of one of the earliest Amish settlers in Indiana. In 1893, the family moved to Kansas after a windmill controversy divided the Nappanee Amish—conservative Amish rejected the use of modern windmills and manure spreaders, and moved West—and the farm passed into the hands of a cousin and a son-in-law. The farm fell into disrepair under its final homesteader, Manasses Kuhns, who finally sold to Pletcher in 1968.
At Amish Acres, some tours were conducted on a horse and buggy.
Pletcher, his college friend Fred Simic, and Albert Kuhn, the son of Manassas, soon restored the farm to its original condition. “Albert had memories of how things looked when he was a kid, and he helped me through the whole process,” Pletcher says. “We got an entire crew of Amish carpenter farmers who helped us construct all of our original buildings.” Pletcher’s crew would spot old Amish structures around the town, buy them up, and rebuild them on Amish Acres. (Pletcher is not Amish, but says he is descended from Anabaptists, the Christian movement that spawned groups such as the Amish and Mennonites.) …
These abandoned radomes in Washington State conceal a terrifying past
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) June 21, 2017
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, perhaps.