• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
A New Zealand Festival Turns Detritus Into Offbeat Art
Amateur sculptors are invited to grab some driftwood and make a masterpiece.
Sunrise lights up the grey at Hokitika beach.
ONE OF THE EASIEST WAYS TO make residents laugh in Hokitika is to comment on their excellent sunny weather. This spot that bills itself as a “cool little town” sits on New Zealand’s “Wild West Coast,” a region known for its grey, rainy weather and dramatic landscapes. It’s home to a small aquarium and kiwi center, a gorge filled with bright turquoise water, and what feels like the highest density of greenstone galleries in the country. And every January, the windswept coast is bedecked with colorful pennants marking the beginning of the Driftwood & Sand festival, which will line the beach with sculptures as charming as some of the town’s many resident artists.
The town’s beach abuts the mouth of the Hokitika River, which rolls through the mountains and forests in the center of the South Island. The fallen wood and other forest detritus it picks up wash out to sea and back onto the shore, in quantities large enough that there are jokes from the town’s history about shooting a pigeon above the beach and taking hours to find the body. These masses of driftwood have given Hokitika and its roughly 3,000 residents a year-round attraction and popular photo spot in the form of a large driftwood sign of the town’s name, and a seasonal one in the Driftwood & Sand festival.
The town’s driftwood sign has become a go-to photo spot.
Driftwood & Sand started in 2002, when a limestone carving symposium was taking place in Hokitika and Hoki-born artist Don Buglass decided to make a sculpture out of driftwood on the beach alongside it. The idea of a beach sculpture festival had been brewing in the back of his mind, with some inspiration from his poets’ society, and came to the forefront during a discussion about what events to host alongside the symposium.
“There’s just so much material, so much potential on the beach,” he says. “I got sick of people just going down there to walk their dogs or to bring out firewood.” …
Americans’ Faith in Law Is at Stake in the DACA Case
The Supreme Court has the opportunity to prove to the country that despite all the hardships that surround us, humanity is not dead, cruelty does not rule the day.
I have been studying and working in law for 70 years, and based on those decades of experience, I fear that the Supreme Court’s decision in the DACA cases, expected later this week, will test the public’s belief that law and justice intersect in America.
Legal scholars might well scoff at such a dramatic prediction, considering that the cases involve the interpretation of the esoteric Administrative Procedure Act (Ambien for law students), and that no matter the Court’s decision, it could be supplanted immediately or eventually by either the executive or legislative branches. But the Court’s verdict, no matter how fleeting, could have a profound effect on respect for the rule of law, particularly because it comes so closely on the heels of the heartless ruling on the Wisconsin election, which forced citizens to choose between protecting their lives and exercising their constitutional right to vote.
My concern requires a step back to consider what and who is involved here. The recipients of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) policy were children brought to the U.S., many by their parents. Despite the president’s characterization of Mexican immigrants in general, I suspect that very few 5-year-olds were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” with them, or were “rapists.” By virtue of their age, few knowingly violated the laws of the United States when they came here; they were the most innocent of lawbreakers. As a result, the Obama administration decided to afford them protection from deportation, and to give them opportunities that they so clearly deserved.
The country, in return, has received countless benefits from their presence here. Dreamers, as DACA recipients are called, have contributed to every aspect of American society—education, research, business, charitable works. And, as The Washington Post has pointed out, an estimated 29,000 DACA recipients are health-care practitioners fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Their importance to society is reflected in the amicus briefs filed with the Court from every segment and region of the nation, pleading for continuance of the policy. …
Trump is unravelling – even his supporters can’t ignore it now
The president is leaning heavily on sarcasm to excuse a range of blunders, but US conservatives are unimpressed.
Perhaps the only people more incompetent than Trump are the ragtag team of sycophants he has surrounded himself with.
I don’t know what kind of disinfectant Donald Trump has been injecting, but the man does not appear to be well. The president’s lethal medical musing has turned him into (even more of) a global laughing stock and the widespread ridicule has clearly bruised his fragile ego. While Trump has never been a paradigm of calmness or competence, he has become increasingly irate and erratic in recent days. Now even his diehard supporters seem to be cooling towards him. Is the “very stable genius” starting to unravel?
Let’s start with the president’s weekend tweetstorm, which, even by Trumpian standards, was spectacularly unhinged. On Sunday, Trump lashed out at what he called a “phony story” in the New York Times that claimed he spends his days eating junk food and watching TV. “I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see [in the Times] that I am angrily eating a hamberger & Diet Coke in my bedroom,” he tweeted. “People with me are always stunned.” He then deleted the tweet and replaced it with one in which hamburger was spelled correctly. (This was clearly a challenge for him: he has previously misspelled hamburgers “hamberders”.)
It turned out that the hambergers were just an appetiser. A rant about the “Noble” prize, which Trump seems to have confused with the Pulitzer prize, followed. This was subsequently deleted and replaced with a tweet stating it had all been an exercise in sarcasm. He is a master of sarcasm, as we all know.
While none of Trump’s aides seem able to shut down his Twitter account, they are trying to tone down his daily press briefings. Trump didn’t hold a briefing over the weekend as he normally does, while Monday’s event was cancelled and then reinstated. “We like to keep reporters on their toes,” the White House director of strategic communications, Alyssa Farah, tweeted with a winking emoji. She then deleted the tweet – presumably to keep reporters on their toes. Monday’s briefing was notable for the briefness of Trump’s remarks; instead of treating it like a political rally, he ceded the floor to a number of CEOs. …
The Very Real Threat of Trump’s Deepfake
The president’s first use of a manipulated video of his opponent is a test of the boundaries.
When people began talking about the political implications of deepfake technology—manipulating a video to transpose one person’s face on another’s body—they usually assumed that deepfakery would be deployed by some anonymous, hostile non-state actor, as a no-return-address, high-tech sabotage of democracy. Who imagined that the return address would be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Yet it has happened.
April 26, 2020, was an especially manic day in the presidency of Donald Trump. The day might have been expected to be a personal and familial one: the 50th birthday of Trump’s present wife and the first lady of the United States. Yet something was gnawing at him. Perhaps his business troubles were weighing on him. The pandemic has cut Trump’s corporate income by something like three-quarters since mid-March. Or perhaps Trump was still seething at the widespread ridicule of his press conference of April 23, when he suggested using disinfectant “by injection.” Or perhaps something else had shifted his mood from its usual setting of seething aggrievement to frothing fury.
Whatever the cause, between early afternoon and near 9 o’clock eastern time, Trump fired off a sequence of crazy-even-for-him tweets and retweets. He demanded that reporters be stripped of the “Noble prizes” they had supposedly been awarded for their reporting on Trump scandals, apparently conflating them with the Pulitzers—and then pretended that his misspelling of Nobel had been intentional. He complained about reporting on his work habits and hamburger eating, also misspelled. He fulminated against Fox News’ insufficiently adoring coverage, and against reports that he was considering scapegoating Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for the mishandling of the pandemic. He retweeted an increasingly wild and weird range of supporters’ Twitter accounts.
And then, at 8:25:50 pm ET, the president retweeted an account he had never retweeted before. The account had posted a video of former Vice President Joe Biden, crudely and obviously manipulated to show him twitching his eyebrows and lolling his tongue. The caption read: “Sloppy Joe is trending. I wonder if it’s because of this. You can tell it’s a deep fake because Jill Biden isn’t covering for him.” …
5 Cities Around The World Dealing With Surprising Problems
When moving to a new city, people tend to worry about typical city things. What’s the traffic like? Is there a lot of smog? Is this the kind of place where naked people leave their curtains open? You know, the basics. Problems we don’t tend to expect is whether or not all the movie theaters double as homeless shelters or what the chances are that the entire town gets swallowed by sinkholes. And if those seem improbable, for the people in these cursed locales, they wouldn’t even crack the top ten of the weird urban crises they have to put up with daily.
5. In Hong Kong, People Voluntarily Sleep In McDonald’s
Long before the current protests, Hong Kong had another situation where the disenfranchised refused to be moved by the Man. And by the Man, we mean Ronald McDonald, whose restaurants serve as halfway houses for Hong Kong citizens escaping their terrible living conditions.
For years, McDonald’s in Hong Kong have hosted “McRefugees,” people who take full advantage of the open-all-hours restaurants by spending the night. And their numbers are rising exponentially. According to one study, 84 out of 110 burger joints suffer from supersized snoozers. Over a period of three months, one McDonald’s can put up to 334 of its customers to bed, while others regularly host up to thirty tables of people who treat these budget dining establishments as McB&Bs.
It’s not uncommon for people to take a quick 60 in a fast-food restaurant, but those unfortunates tend to be homeless and jobless. But while Hong Kong’s McRefugees have their share of runaway teens and the mentally ill, over 70% of guests at the Hamburglar Inn are functioning adults with jobs and homes to get to. Except that, in their case, said jobs and homes are so terrible they necessitate crashing on Ronald McDonald’s couch now and then.
For many Hongkongers, their work is so exhausting and hard to travel to, it sometimes makes more sense to just not go home but walk to the nearest McDonald’s and put their heads on one of its least sticky tables. Not that they have a lot to go home to, anyway. With the city having the most expensive housing market in the world, many citizens can only afford “cage homes,” filthy, tiny, badly wired rooms in dangerous neighborhoods where the number of roommates rivals the number of cockroaches under your bed. Compared to those living situations, hanging out in a well-lit, spacious McDonald’s in the better part of town is like a four-star hotel experience. …
UNRELATED: Outside-The-Box Protests Through The Years
We tend to think of protest as an American tradition, dating back to the time when early colonials dressed as football players and threw away tea during the National Anthem. Or something. It’s easy to forget that not only are public demonstrations a worldwide phenomenon, but over time protesters have found really, really clever ways to make their voices heard.
AHEM!
Following is a collection of outside-the-box ways people stood on their soapboxes. …
The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever
The big will get bigger as mom-and-pops perish and shopping goes virtual. In the short term, our cities will become more boring. In the long term, they might just become interesting again..
Last weekend, I walked a mile along M Street in Washington, D.C., where I live, from the edge of Georgetown to Connecticut Avenue. The roads and sidewalks were pin-drop silent. Movie theaters, salons, fitness centers, and restaurants serving Ethiopian, Japanese, and Indian food were rendered, in eerie sameness, as one long line of darkened windows.
Because the pandemic pauses the present, it forces us to live in the future. The question I asked myself walking east through D.C. is the question so many Americans are all pondering today: Who will emerge intact from the pandemic purgatory, and who will not?
In the past three weeks, I’ve posed a version of that question to more than a dozen business owners, retail analysts, economists, consumer advocates, and commercial-real-estate investors. Their viewpoints coalesce into a coherent, if troubling, story about the future of the American streetscape.
We are entering a new evolutionary stage of retail, in which big companies will get bigger, many mom-and-pop dreams will burst, chains will proliferate and flatten the idiosyncrasies of many neighborhoods, more economic activity will flow into e-commerce, and restaurants will undergo a transformation unlike anything the industry has experienced since Prohibition. …
Pompeii ruins show that the Romans invented recycling
xcavations reveal that rubbish left outside the city walls wasn’t just dumped. It was being collected, sorted and resold.
A reproduction of the market square, from The Houses and Monuments of Pompeii, by Fausto and Felice Niccolini, 1854-96.
They were expert engineers, way ahead of the curve on underfloor heating, aqueducts and the use of concrete as a building material. Now it turns out that the Romans were also masters at recycling their rubbish.
Researchers at Pompeii, the city buried under a thick carpet of volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, have found that huge mounds of refuse apparently dumped outside the city walls were in fact “staging grounds for cycles of use and reuse”.
Professor Allison Emmerson, an American academic who is part of a large team working at Pompeii, said rubbish was piled up along almost the entire external wall on the city’s northern side, among other sites. Some of the mounds were several metres high and included bits of ceramic and plaster, which could be repurposed as construction materials.
These mounds were previously thought to have been formed when an earthquake struck the city about 17 years before the volcano erupted, Emmerson said. Most were cleared in the mid-20th century, but some are still being discovered.
Scientific analysis has now traced some of the refuse from city sites to suburban deposits equivalent to modern landfills, and back to the city, where the material was incorporated into buildings, such as earth floors. …
No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out
We need to start preparing for a darker reality.
THE PAST FEW MONTHS have been bleak. Every day has brought word of new casualties from the coronavirus. The world economy entered free fall. And even for those who do not have a sick relative or a mortgage that can’t be paid, the isolation imposed by social distancing has begun to take a heavy psychological toll.
In these circumstances, I—and, I imagine, many others—couldn’t resist latching onto any piece of news that promised quick deliverance from the pandemic. I scoured the papers for positive stories. And I found at least three reasons to hope that the suffering the virus imposed might end sooner than the most pessimistic experts warned.
First, because some people who have COVID-19 don’t seem to show any symptoms, I wondered whether the disease might be far more widespread than the initial data suggested, raising the prospect of the United States’ reaching herd immunity without mass casualties. Second, reports that some existing drugs might prove effective against the disease led me to hope that doctors could soon be in a much better position to heal patients who contract the virus. And third, because some foreign governments have seemed successful in containing the virus through ambitious test-and-trace programs, I thought the United States might find a way to open up its economy without inducing a large resurgence of cases.
There was real reason to indulge in each of these hopes. But in the past several days, a series of developments have undermined the factual basis for all of them. So I am, finally, starting to reconcile myself to a darker reality: The miracle of deliverance is not in sight. …
UNRELATED: Belgians urged to eat more chips by lockdown-hit potato growers
Belgians are well known for loving chips (frites), often with a big dollop of mayonnaise, but hard-up farmers now want them to eat chips twice a week.
Romain Cools of the potato growers’ union Belgapom presented it as a matter of survival, as a major export sector fears ruin in the coronavirus crisis.
About 750,000 tonnes of potatoes are piled up in Belgian warehouses, as the lockdown has sent orders plummeting.
“Let’s all eat chips twice a week, instead of just once,” Mr Cools urged.
Since mid-March, restaurants in Belgium and many other markets for potato growers have closed. The cancellation of Belgium’s many spring and summer festivals has added to their woes. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Coronavirus & Darwin Team Up to Teach America a Science Lesson.
Protesters around the world are demanding their respective governments reopen their economies despite the coronavirus pandemic. Assault-style rifles and QAnon signs have been spotted alongside American flags. This anger over the strict lockdown measures has been echoed around the world. And many international protests have exhibited similar far-right rhetoric in recent days.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
The bottom line, according to public health experts, is that the grim figures we’re seeing every day are better than the truth.
Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as a way to fight COVID-19, then tries to play it off as sarcasm.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump, stung by the backlash to his comments about injecting disinfectant to treat Covid-19, spent the weekend giving a Twitter tutorial on the art of sarcasm.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Dr. Clean will clean your body, and every organ in it.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump suggesting that coronavirus could be cured with disinfectants, claiming it was a joke and then threatening to stop doing press briefings altogether.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
FINALLY . . .
A One-Table Restaurant Is Opening in a Swedish Meadow
There’s just one chair, too.
The view occasionally includes a cow that wandered over from a neighbor’s farm.
THIS MARCH, LINDA KARLSSON AND her husband Rasmus Persson faced a dilemma: Karlsson’s parents showed up at their front door. The couple live in Ransäter, Sweden, and although Sweden has been in the news for having laxer policies than the strict lockdowns implemented by many countries to slow the spread of COVID-19, Karlsson and Persson fully intended to follow the recommendations issued by the government.
“When they decided to come to our new house and pay a visit without telling us beforehand,” Karlsson says, “we refused to let them come inside.” Her parents are both over 70, which places them among those at high risk for coronavirus. So Karlsson and Persson instead placed a table in the meadow outside their home and served them food through their window.
As the couple watched Karlsson’s parents enjoy their meal, they decided this was something others might like to try: dining in their meadow without safety concerns. For Karlsson and Persson, that meant opening a restaurant for one—just one table and one chair, completely contact-free.
That idea is now a restaurant set to open on May 10. The name, Bord för En, translates to “Table for One.” From opening day until August, the couple, who live at home with their daughter, will designate one of their two kitchens for the restaurant. (The house having two kitchens had always made it seem perfect for that purpose.) Reservations are available from 10 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., but only one person can book per day. That special guest can choose a three-course breakfast, lunch, or dinner, served in a picnic basket sent down a rope with the help of an old bicycle wheel. …
RELATED and FOLLOW-UP: Sweden And Denmark Took Very Different Approaches To Fighting The Coronavirus. The Data Shows Many More People Are Dying In Sweden.
Sweden has seen a 34.5% increase in excess deaths this month compared to a 6.5% rise in Denmark.
Sweden and Denmark both had relatively mild flu seasons this winter, with fewer people dying compared to recent years. Then COVID-19 struck, and the neighbouring countries adopted very different strategies.
While the Danes were among the first in Europe to go into lockdown, Sweden opted for the herd immunity approach, making it one of the few advanced economies in the world to do so. There was no strict lockdown, and social distancing was recommended but not dictated.
A visiting ban at care homes was introduced at the beginning of April to protect the elderly, gatherings of more than 50 people were prohibited, and universities and colleges were recommended to offer remote learning.
But otherwise, life carries on essentially unchanged: Most schools, restaurants, bars, clubs, and gyms are open, and people are practising social distancing.
A lot has been said and written about Sweden’s strategy. Its outlier status has been met with horror by some, curiosity by most, and applause by those pressing their own governments to lift restrictions that are having a destructive effect on economies and societies. With the leaders of the UK, the US, and other countries under increasing pressure to scale back their lockdowns, the question of whether Sweden’s approach is working is of international concern. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs. The other bird seems to be looking for something tasty to kill.
Ed. Yes, that’s a cut-and-paste of another day.