You're a mass extinction event posing as a civilization.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 13, 2020
Ed. Curiously, the only person God follows is Justin Bieber.
• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
In parts of Maine, one can purchase heavy antlered “moose hats” designed for warning off romantic rivals. While mostly considered gag gifts, hat owners can enter the annual Lovers’ Joust held at the local fairgrounds, where they face off against strangers—or even their partners.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 14, 2019
St. Valentine’s Skull
The skull of the patron saint of lovers lies in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin—maybe.
The skull is flanked by flowers. Embiggenable.
A SKULL RESIDES IN A GLASS reliquary in Rome’s Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, surrounded by flowers. Lettering painted across the forehead identify the owner as none other than of the patron saint of lovers, St. Valentine.
Knowing just exactly whose skull it is, though, is complicated. There was more than one Catholic saint known as Saint Valentine, and there was approximately 1500 years between those martyrs’ deaths and the enthusiastic distribution and labeling of bodies in the Victorian era. Finally, and most troubling, there is the fact that no less than 10 places around the world claim to house the saint’s relics.
Though not much is really known of the real men behind the myth, at least two of the Saints Valentine lived in Italy in the late 3rd century, and another in North Africa around the same time. Over time, the stories of these different men seem to have merged. Most of the mythology about Valentine centers around him being a patron of lovers. In 496, Pope Gelasius I made February 14—originally part of the Roman festival of Lupercalia—a feast day dedicated to St. Valentine. …
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
The Undocumented Agent
After spending nearly two decades facilitating deportations as a Customs and Border Protection officer, Raul Rodriguez discovered that he was not a U.S. citizen. Now he’s at risk of deportation himself.
One afternoon in April 2018, Raul Rodriguez was working on his computer at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in Los Indios, Texas, when two managers entered the building. Somebody must be in trouble, he thought. The managers usually arrived in pairs when they needed a witness.
For nearly two decades, Rodriguez had searched for people and drugs hidden in cargo waiting to get into the United States. He was proud of his work as a Customs and Border Protection officer; it gave him stability and a sense of purpose. Even in the spring of 2018, when public scrutiny of CBP began to intensify—the agency had officially started separating children from their parents—Rodriguez remained committed to his job. Though he wasn’t separating any families at the border, he’d canceled the visas and initiated the deportations of thousands of people in his years of service.
“Hey, Raulito,” one of the managers said, calling him over. Rodriguez walked past agents who were trying to look busy on their computers. Just two years from being eligible to retire, Rodriguez says he had an unblemished record. He couldn’t imagine what the managers wanted.
Rodriguez had been crossing bridges at the border since his parents, who were Mexican, had sent him to live with relatives in Texas when he was 5 years old. He’d wanted to stay in Mexico, but his mother insisted that he go: He was a United States citizen. She’d given birth to him just across the border in hopes that he would have a better life, and it was time for him to seize that opportunity. He started first grade at a public school in Mission, Texas. From then on, he saw his parents only on school breaks. …
Raul Rodriguez was proud to be a border agent. For nearly two decades, he had searched for people and drugs hidden in cargo before it entered the United States. In his years of service as a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, he’d initiated the deportations of thousands of people. His job gave him security and a sense of purpose. Then, one day in 2018, that all came crashing down. Investigators came to Rodriguez’s office to tell him his career in immigration—and his military service before that—was based on a lie. His United States citizenship was fraudulent. He was an undocumented immigrant himself.
McClatchy: newspaper publisher bankruptcy ‘a loss for democracy’, experts warn
Struggling firm insists there’ll be no changes in its 30 newsrooms but experts worry powerful journalism could be lost.
The publisher of the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, the Sacramento Bee and dozens of other newspapers nationwide is filing for bankruptcy protection.
To executives of McClatchy, Thursday’s bankruptcy of the second largest newspaper chain in the US is the fault of its pensioners, who outnumber current employees by a margin of 10 to one.
To industry analysts of the troubled newspaper sector it was simple economics, the inevitable consequence of a company expanding its empire through accumulated debt at the same time its customer base was shrinking.
Yet whatever the reasons for the failure of a company that publishes many of the biggest titles in American journalism, including the Miami Herald, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Charlotte Observer and its hometown Sacramento Bee, there is no doubting the cost: truth and knowledge in an era of rampant fake news and misinformation.
“It’s a big, big loss for American democracy,” said Nicholas Lemann, the dean emeritus of the Columbia school of journalism.
“It’s not just the super incredible home run Jeffrey Epstein story by the Miami Herald that’s gone, it’s the day-to-day coverage of the mayor, the governor, the major companies, you know just being there to make the people who run the place know they’re being watched.” …
5 TV Couples We Should Never Have Rooted For
Television loves “Will they or won’t they?” couples, and will drag shows way past their reasonable expiration date for years simply because they know we’ll tune in to see if two New Yorkers are gonna make out. The thing is, while that kind of romantic conflict is fun to watch in a fictional context starring Jennifer Aniston, it becomes borderline tragic when you apply the lens of reality. Here are just a few of the couples who’ve skewed our idea of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like …
5. Scully And Mulder Would Never Be Happy Together
I’m sorry, but Dana Scully, a smokin’ hot doctor who works for the FBI, and Fox Mulder, a man whose main personality trait is that he masturbates to blurry videos of Bigfoot, make no sense as a couple. I’m not the only one who thinks that, either. Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, shocked everyone by saying just before the premiere of the reboot that the two had “a platonic relationship,” despite the series originally ending with them kissing over their infant son. He famously never wanted them to get together at all, but the internet couldn’t see two people that hot in the same room without screaming “MAKE THEM KISS,” until the writers were forced to do just that.
They clearly weren’t designed to go together, and the writers didn’t know what that would even look like, so they just decided to keep the relationship in a weird limbo for the entirety of the show’s run. They weren’t just a “Will they or won’t they?” couple, they were a “Did they? Wink wink” couple. That’s how little their romance is in the actual DNA of the show. The X-Files is fun because you have a person who doesn’t give two shits about the Loch Ness Monster being a buddy cop to someone who writes Nessie fanfiction. If the creator can’t be bothered to seem enthusiastic about the leads getting it on, then maybe we should ease off it a bit too?
Also, can you imagine what going on a date with Mulder would be like? Or a vacation? What is his actual personality when separated from his work? There are a lot of jokes about Mulder jerkin’ it, but that seems pretty reasonable, since he doesn’t have any kind of social life outside of the X-Files. He has no interest in dating. In Season 8, when Scully is preparing to have a second child from medical rape at the hands of a shadowy organization, she says she “can’t live like this, the subject of some unending X-file.” But that’s the only way Mulder wants to live. …
A TINY AREA OF THE BRAIN MAY ENABLE CONSCIOUSNESS, SAYS “EXHILARATING” STUDY
Scientists examine the “engine for consciousness.”
embiggenable
In a wild new experiment conducted on monkeys, scientists discovered that a tiny, but powerful area of the brain may enable consciousness: the central lateral thalamus. Activation of the central lateral thalamus and deep layers of the cerebral cortex drives pathways in the brain that carry information between the parietal and frontal lobe in the brain, the study suggests.
This brain circuit works as a sort-of “engine for consciousness,” the researchers say, enabling conscious thought and feeling in primates.
To zero in on this brain circuit, a scientific team put macaque monkeys under anesthesia, then stimulated different parts of their brain with electrodes at a frequency of 50 Hertz. Essentially, they zapped different areas of the brain and observed how the monkeys responded. When the central lateral thalamus was stimulated, the monkeys woke up and their brain function resumed — even though they were STILL UNDER ANESTHESIA. Seconds after the scientists switched off the stimulation, the monkeys went right back to sleep.
This research was published Wednesday in the journal Neuron.
“Science doesn’t often leave opportunity for exhilaration, but that’s what that moment was like for those of us who were in the room,” co-author Michelle Redinbaugh, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tells Inverse. …
Simple, solar-powered water desalination
System achieves new level of efficiency in harnessing sunlight to make fresh potable water from seawater.
Tests on an MIT building rooftop showed that a simple proof-of-concept desalination device could produce clean, drinkable water at a rate equivalent to more than 1.5 gallons per hour for each square meter of solar collecting area.
A completely passive solar-powered desalination system developed by researchers at MIT and in China could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Such systems could potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide an efficient, low-cost water source.
The system uses multiple layers of flat solar evaporators and condensers, lined up in a vertical array and topped with transparent aerogel insulation. It is described in a paper appearing today in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, authored by MIT doctoral students Lenan Zhang and Lin Zhao, postdoc Zhenyuan Xu, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and eight others at MIT and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
The key to the system’s efficiency lies in the way it uses each of the multiple stages to desalinate the water. At each stage, heat released by the previous stage is harnessed instead of wasted. In this way, the team’s demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.
The device is essentially a multilayer solar still, with a set of evaporating and condensing components like those used to distill liquor. It uses flat panels to absorb heat and then transfer that heat to a layer of water so that it begins to evaporate. The vapor then condenses on the next panel. That water gets collected, while the heat from the vapor condensation gets passed to the next layer. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In 1969, two “conventional” married couples met, swapped partners, and lived in a group marriage, hoping to pioneer an alternative to divorce. It didn’t work. Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…
A massive iceberg breaks away from Antarctica, a freak-out over a reclined airplane seat goes viral, and a photographer wins a major award for his photo of fighting mice.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available to embed.
President Trump and Michael Bloomberg slam each other on Twitter, and Bloomberg comes under fire for his past comments defending stop-and-frisk policing.
With the Democratic presidential candidates turning their attention to South Carolina ahead of that state’s primary, proud Charlestonian Stephen Colbert plans to be all over this election like shrimp on grits.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Few people outside of Hollywood know that the hosts of “Last Week Tonight” and “The Late Show,” John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, moonlight as movie stars. Tonight they offer a sneak peek at a few of their upcoming films.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump and his attorney general turning the Justice Department into a political weapon to protect Trump’s friends and punish his enemies.
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.
Here’s me commentary on a royal rumble between a Honey Badger, a Python, and a Jackal. Cheers to all you legends who’ve been sending this video over to me for a couple o’ months. Have a good one!
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
There is no other animal in the kingdom of all animals, as fearless as the crazyass Honey Badger. Nasty as hell, it eats practically whatever it wants. Randall is disgusted.
From the comments:
When I grow up, I want to be a honey badger.
はなが珍しく小さな箱に入ったので、まるにも横に並んでもらいました。そうしたら、まるがまさかの格好に…。It is rare that Hana gets into the small box.
Actual translation:
The hana was unusually in a small box, so I had it lined up sideways. If you do that, it looks like it ’s just…
Millard Fillmore's private collection of mummified beehives lives on in this small-town apothecary
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 28, 2017
FINALLY . . .
The Rude, Cruel, and Insulting ‘Vinegar Valentines’ of the Victorian Era
Nothing like getting surprise hate mail from a would-be lover on February 14.
A vinegar valentine for spurning advances.
IN THE 1840S, HOPEFUL AMERICAN and British lovers sent lacy valentines with cursive flourishes and lofty poems by the thousands. But what to do if you didn’t love the person who had set their eyes on you?
In the Victorian era, there was no better way to let someone know they were unwanted than with the ultimate insult: the vinegar valentine. Also called “comic valentines,”* these unwelcome notes were sometimes crass and always a bit emotionally damaging in the anti-spirit of Valentine’s Day.
Vinegar valentines were not sweet at all.
Vinegar valentines were commercially bought postcards that were less beautiful than their love-filled counterparts, and contained an insulting poem and illustration. They were sent anonymously, so the receiver had to guess who hated him or her; as if this weren’t bruising enough, the recipient paid the postage on delivery. In Civil War Humor, Cameron C. Nickels wrote that vinegar valentines were “tasteless, even vulgar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and penny pinchers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-minded valentines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valentine publisher.
For the mean saleslady in your life.
Some vinegar valentines were playful or sarcastic, and sold as comic valentines to soldiers—but many could really sting. “Lady Shoppers” and salesmen were sent or handed vinegar valentines admonishing their values; some vinegar valentines called physicians names like “Doctor Sure-Death” (a character who ran expensive bills), and others chided the “stupid postman” who was sending the note. One vinegar valentine titled “Old Maid” and reprinted by Orange Coast magazine in 1984, is more than a little harsh …
The Lazarusaur could return to life if left undisturbed in a cave for four days
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 14, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Likely, perhaps.