Graffiti I call Earth in a Tear, etched into the sidewalk near the intersection of Missouri Avenue and Bowen Street here in Longmont. I’ve been meaning to do something with this treasure for some time. Embiggenable.
AHEM !!!
If this is what coming out of pandemic antisocial isolation is all about, I think I’ll choose antisocial isolation.
Today was my day off from work.
I spent the morning riding my bike. People I encountered were friendly and courteous, albeit distant. I enjoyed my ride.
This afternoon I chose to go back to work for a few hours to help get our restaurant ready for the reopening of our dining room in the days ahead.
We’re repairing a lot of stuff and making the place a little more 1950’s Jetson’s-style diner vibe. I’ve been tasked with getting all the technology cleaned up and functioning properly, as well as installing a new 16-camera security system.
People were swearing at us for not having our dining room open. People were outwardly hostile that they couldn’t come inside to continue their journey from obese to morbidly obese (and then probably dead due to COVID-19).
We haven’t gotten the go-ahead from the county health department to open our dining room. And, besides, we’re doing some pretty cool stuff and we’re just not ready.
The traffic outside was unbelievable. Drivers were aggressive and cruel. Language was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe all the racing engines and horns blaring and people swearing at each other.
I wanted to tell them all GO THE FUCK HOME IF YOU’RE SO MISERABLE.
Anyway, I got my work done and, having neglected this place today, I thought I’d put up a few errant ramblings (no strike-out today, sorry).
I had intended to take the day off from this place.
I would prefer to be alive and a little more broke than deal with all the assholes who think their need to get fatter outweighs the risks to the people who are simply trying to keep a small business from failing during a pandemic.
FUCK YOU ASSHOLES. I CAN’T WAIT TO TELL YOU THAT YOU HAVE TO SIT IN YOUR CAR AND WAIT FOR ME TO CALL YOU IN ON YOUR PHONE. DON’T HAVE A PHONE? I DON’T GIVE A SHIT. YOU CAN’T WAIT IN MY LOBBY. AND YOU’LL HAVE TO WAIT A HELL OF A LOT LONGER TO GET FATTER. I DON’T GIVE A SHIT. I CAN ONLY SEAT EVERY OTHER TABLE AND BOOTH. I DON’T WANT TO DIE JUST BECAUSE YOU NEED TO GET FATTER.
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Ed. I didn’t read much today. I didn’t have breakfast. I took the day off and rode my bike instead. It was so nice to get out in the sun, make some natural vitamin D, and clear my head while pounding the pedals. My day should have stopped there, I was in my happy place.
To Work Out Like a Samurai, Swing a Stick, Take a Hike—or Push Some Pencils
Japan’s feudal fighters were plenty tough. But they didn’t ditch their day jobs.
Samurai were fierceness in the front, but all business in the back
With gyms, pools, and spin studios around the world temporarily shuttered, it can be hard to find ways to exercise the way we used to. Atlas Obscura is taking this time to look back at different groups from history, to see what lessons they might have for working out in ways that help us maintain social distance.
IN FEUDAL JAPAN THERE WERE few folks you’d want to cross less than a samurai. The military nobility of the country’s Tokugawa period were equal parts martial artists and state representatives, serving as the loyal officers of local daimyo (domain) lords.
But though they were born into the warrior caste, samurai didn’t emerge from the womb as the fit foot soldiers you might imagine. That required training, and lots of it. Starting in childhood, samurai went to special schools or to private tutors to learn the various martial arts that would come to define who they were.
But what would working out like a samurai look like in the 21st century? And how could such a regimen be adapted for life at home today?
“A lot of calisthenics in the afternoon,” says Michael Wert, an expert in samurai history at Marquette University who has taught Japanese archery in the Milwaukee area for about two decades. “[You] could swing a broom.” …
RELATED: How the Black Death Gave Rise to British Pub Culture
For centuries-old bars, a pandemic is nothing new.
The debate over which is Britain’s oldest pub is fueled by the impossibility of a definitive ruling.
“I’LL BUY YOU A BEER when this is all over,” declares Christo Tofalli, the landlord of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, which lays claim to the contentious title of Britain’s oldest pub and is no stranger to pandemics. While closed, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, in the historic city of Saint Albans, has become a Community Supply Point, providing much-needed groceries and offering free delivery to the elderly. They are even delivering Sunday Roast dinners to residents in lockdown. The threat posed by coronavirus may feel unprecedented, but Tofalli, who manages the pub, says he has been looking to the past for inspiration.
In the summer of 1348, which was some hard-to-specify number of centuries after Ye Olde Fighting Cocks served its first beer, the Black Death appeared on the southern shores of England. By the end of 1349, millions lay dead, victims of what medieval historian Norman Cantor describes unflinchingly in In the Wake of Plague as “the greatest biomedical disaster in European and possibly in world history.”
Medieval society could muster little response, Cantor writes, except to “Pray very hard, quarantine the sick, run away, or find a scapegoat to blame for the terror.” Nobility and wealth was no defense: Princess Joan of England was struck down on her way to marry in Spain, while the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury perished shortly after being ordained by the Pope. The plague even halted (temporarily) the perpetual conflict between the French and English.
This pestilence returned repeatedly too; Cantor writes that “there were at least three waves of the Black Death falling upon England over the century following 1350.” …
We Need to Grieve One Hundred Thousand Deaths
To mourn in a moment of collective trauma is to experience not one but multiple layers of loss.
Two years ago, after becoming sick with a virus that led to pneumonia, my 71-year-old father died unexpectedly of a blood clot at NYU’s hospital. My brothers and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and on the day of my father’s death in March—one of those balmy days when the pivot from winter to spring sings along your skin—I found myself mourning not just his death, but the fact that he had been alone when he died, without ceremony, without goodbyes, without family or friends or his beloved book collection around him. He died without any of the bulwarks against meaninglessness that we spend our lives carefully knitting into being.
Recently, I’ve heard from many people about how hard it is to have a loved one in the hospital right now (whether for COVID-19 or another medical problem), and to be unable to squeeze their hand, hug them, whisper what may be last words. In one sense, I know how they feel. But in another sense, I have no clue, since my father did not die during a pandemic. As the U.S. death count from COVID-19 reached 100,000, I thought about how different it is to mourn a single death and to mourn a death in the middle of a mass trauma—to mourn amid so much death.
That number—100,000 dead from the coronavirus—is hard to grasp. For those who have lost someone, the pandemic’s scope is not just a statistic; within the abstraction lies an intimately life-changing event. For the rest of us, it is a fact we must try to wrestle into perspective. One hundred thousand people is nearly the population of the city I now live in; it is a neighborhood’s worth of people in Brooklyn, my longtime home; it is perhaps 10 times the total number of people most of us will cross paths with in our entire lives. It is graveyard upon graveyard upon graveyard. It is mass burials at Hart Island, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and nursing homes. It is PTSD for the nurses and doctors in the hardest-hit areas. Mostly, it is the shocking echo that follows the loss of even onev person: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. A lament: O, O, O, O, O.
After my mother died at the age of 55, in 2008, I wrote a book about mourning. I read through scholarly texts and novels and poems that touched explicitly on grief. In the process, I learned how physical it is, causing changes in cortisol levels, memory, sleep, and appetite; leaving the mourner exhausted, scattered, struggling to resume “normalcy.” But perhaps the key thing I learned is that grief needs a vessel: It needs language, it needs lamentation, it needs expression, it needs demarcation in time; it demands a pause in everyday activity. My mother died on Christmas Day. I recall the shock of comfort in having my mother’s sisters and brother gather with us a few days later, the “small, good thing,” as Raymond Carver put it, of sharing bread, wine, and stories late into the night. Their presence was soothing: the light in their faces, their enduringness. In this pandemic, you lose the person, and you lose the ability to mourn that person together. And you lose that after having already lost the ability to spend time with your loved ones in the hospital, in hospice, or at home in the days, hours, or minutes before they died. …
America begins to unlock for summer – but is it inviting a disastrous second wave?
Covid-19 deaths are still rising, but there are signs of quarantine fatigue – and experts warn relaxing the rules too soon could have devastating consequences.
Folly Beach in South Carolina last weekend. Dr Fauci this week said that new localized outbreaks were ‘inevitable’ as mitigation measures are relaxed.
Monday is Memorial Day – the traditional start of the American summer. Shutters are going up, doors are being unlocked, barriers removed. Every state is relaxing quarantine rules to some extent, betting that the country finally has Covid-19 under control.
There are signs that for some Americans quarantine fatigue is overcoming fear of infection. With the economy reeling, others have dismissed the pandemic as a political plot – for them relaxing quarantine rules can’t come soon enough. But people on the front line are worried, and experts warn the outbreak has proved a “trust-destroying disaster” that could have devastating consequences.
On Friday, White House coronavirus taskforce member Dr Anthony Fauci said new localized outbreaks were “inevitable” as mitigation measures are relaxed. He said a full-blown second wave could be avoided if the holy grail of containment measures – testing, quarantine and contact tracing – continued to be adhered to.
Fauci said he was hopeful that the US would be ready, though a recent study by Harvard University found that only nine states were conducting, or near to conducting, the minimum recommended testing. Hours after Fauci spoke, Donald Trump ignored health guidance and ordered houses of worship to open for in-person services at the weekend.
These disparate responses to the pandemic are not just happening in the White House, but across America. …
Facebook Is Punishing Employees For Working Remote
The competition to be the biggest asshole billionaire rages on and, while Jeff Bezos’ is putting on a Jordanesque-like performance, Mark Zuckerberg is looking to stage a comeback. Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced that any Facebook employees moving out of Silicon Valley would face pay cuts based on their remote location.
Ahh, this is Zuck squeezing employee compensation long-term: pic.twitter.com/LlR2C8tJKW
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) May 21, 2020
Aww, were you planning to move out of your outrageously priced (median estimate of $2,341 per month) Silicon Valley apartment to save money? Go ahead and do it, but that’s not your money you’ll be saving. It’s the company’s money because despite 50% of employees reporting that they were just as productive working from home as they were at the office, Facebook doesn’t pay you based on your efficiency, results, or talent — they pay you based on your rent.
Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg, but the man is an innovator. Not in tech so much, but when it comes to screwing over people, there’s no one more creative than Zuckerberg. And yeah, it’s hard to feel sorry for Facebook employees who are making huge salaries in their own right, but isn’t it alarming that a corporation can take advantage of your personal cost-saving measures? If you brought lunch every day to ensure that you saved money by not eating out, wouldn’t it be weird if the company paid you less based on lower food expenses? …
RELATED: Ways Prison Life Is Even Worse Than On TV
If shows like Oz, Breaking Bad, and Prison Break are any indication, prison is an unending nightmare of shanking, corruption, and tubs of boiling sugar to the face. The weird thing, though? These shows didn’t touch on the truly nasty stuff …
4. The Food is So Bad, It’s Almost Unconstitutional
There’s a reason why “prison food” is our go-to descriptor whenever we eat something that tastes rank. There’s one prison foodstuff, however, that strikes fear into the hearts of even the hardest convicts like a digestible Batman. Its name? Nutraloaf.
“With a name like that, how could it be bad?” you ask, like a damn fool. Although the recipe varies from state to state, Nutraloaf — or simply, “the loaf” — is a meatloaf-esque chimera made of bread and random bullshit like potatoes, oatmeal, rice, beans, potatoes, carrots, and meat (but in the loosest sense of the term). We realize that list of ingredients doesn’t sound terrible, but that’s only because it’s hard to communicate how inedible this thing is. It’s been described by people who’ve eaten it as “absolutely detestable” and “like chewing on chalk,” and what it lacks in taste, smell, and mouthfeel, it makes up in being an effective method of torture.
In recent years, prisoners have even filed lawsuits arguing that being served ‘loaf violated their eight amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment — an argument that is clearly true. Yet, one prisoner’s successful attempt was later overturned on the grounds that the amendment “requires only that prisoners receive food that is adequate to maintain health; it need not be tasty or aesthetically pleasing.” To constitute a violation of the eighth amendment says the ACLU’s David Fathi, Nutraloaf would have to be so disgusting that “no reasonable person would eat it [thereby causing them to] lose weight and have health problems.”
Nevertheless, some states have started to outlaw the loaf on the grounds that while it doesn’t violate the constitution, ‘loafing prisoners doesn’t make them less disruptive — and can even make them worse. Because if they’re stuck eating tasteless crap for 30 days, they might as well make it worth it. …
RELATED: To Encourage Folks to Bone, Trojan Released a … Cookbook?
Many of us have become our most base selves while sheltering in place, doing little more than eating, sleeping, rubbing against stuff and/or each other, and showering only when necessary to accomplish one of those other things. There’s a problem with part of that equation, though: Unless you managed to lock it down with someone before getting locked down yourselves, your options for finding a mass of meat to hump are inherently limited, and the stressful conditions of love in the time of corona are putting a damper on cohabiting couples’ sex lives as well. As a result, condom sales have wilted right alongside our collective erection.
In an attempt to remedy this, Trojan tried to combine boning with another activity that’s getting decidedly more action: baking. Rising Time: 25 Bread Recipes to Remind Couples to Have Sex at Home, the cookbook of fairly standard bread recipes they released for free this week, is built on two straightforward but intrinsically faulty premises: that anyone needs to be reminded to fuck and it’s a good idea to do it while you wait for your dough to rise. It disproves the latter suggestion all by itself pretty immediately.
Baking is an exact science that requires precise measurements and timing, and sex is emphatically the opposite of that. Wander away for some squishy fun, and the next thing you know, your dough is overmixed and your kitchen is on fire. That’s something that Trojan acknowledges in its very first recipe when it advises you that you need to preheat your oven sometime before your dough (and dick) finishes rising. Later, it suggests bending your partner over the counter right there in the kitchen so you can “reach out and preheat the oven” mid-thrust. Ah, romance. …
How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy
Organisms that don’t follow the herd may not be stragglers, but nature’s way of hedging its bets.
Dense clouds of starlings dip and soar, congregating in undulating curtains that darken the sky; hundreds of thousands of wildebeests thunder together across the plains of Africa in a coordinated, seemingly never-ending migratory loop; fireflies blink in unison; entire forests of bamboo blossom at once. Scientists have studied these mesmerizing feats of synchronization for decades, trying to tease apart the factors that enable such cooperation and complexity.
Yet there are always individuals that don’t participate in the collective behavior—the odd bird or insect or mammal that remains just a little out of sync with the rest; the stray cell or bacterium that seems to have missed some call to arms. Researchers usually pay them little heed, dismissing them as insignificant outliers.
But a handful of scientists have started to suspect otherwise. Their hunch is that these individuals are signs of something deeper, a broader evolutionary strategy at work. Now new research validating that hypothesis has opened up a very different way of thinking about the study of collective behavior. …
Ed. Nothing says safer at home than the dozens of cars that are swarming my street looking for a place to park because the neighbor is having a party, complete with a mariachi band. There’s probably a lot of Corona in the cooler.
Trump Your steaming pile of shit tees up controversy as he plays golf in a pandemic
President Your steaming pile of shit visits own golf club in Virginia as US coronavirus death toll approaches 100,000.
Donald Trump Your steaming pile of shit plays golf at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
Donald Trump Your steaming pile of shit teed up fresh controversy on Saturday, by leaving the White House for his golf course in Virginia.
Early on a fine morning in Washington DC, the president was seen by reporters “in his typical golf wear of white polo shirt and white baseball cap … before he departed the White House” for an undisclosed location. Secret Service agents accompanying the president were photographed wearing masks. Trump was not seen to cover his face.
He later arrived at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, where he was pictured playing a round.
As of Saturday morning, more than 1.6m cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the US, with the death toll approaching 100,000.
As public health experts warn about the potential cost of reopening too soon, the Trump administration is encouraging states to kick start their economies and people to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend, traditionally the start of the American summer.
At the White House on Friday, coronavirus taskforce member Dr Deborah Birx said that though there was still “significant virus circulating” in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, activities such as golf are encouraged. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the haphazard reopening of the economy and President Trump’s experimentation with drugs.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill warns of the economic and environmental costs of our dependence on Amazon.com.
This week’s top stories: Obama’s commencement address, Trump‘s hydroxychloroquine regimen, mask wars, and teaching in the time of corona.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
He’s the man Democrats have chosen to take on Trump in November, but just what was Joe Biden’s secret to winning the nomination? Hear how the former vice president was able to unite party support by treating voters like a bunch of know-nothing shit-for-brains.
FINALLY . . .
The Things Inside This 105-Year-Old Time Capsule Have Hardly Aged a Day
The slew of ephemera was tucked in a copper box behind a cornerstone at Arlington National Cemetery.
TIM FRANK WAS STRESSED OUT. Once conservators pried the time capsule open, he feared, they might find a mangled mess: a tattered flag, shredded papers, and a rollicking party of flies or silverfish. “My heart was racing through the whole thing,” he says.
Frank is a historian at Arlington National Cemetery, the military burial ground in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. On October 13, 1915, when construction was beginning on the Memorial Amphitheater, a memorabilia box was sunk behind the cornerstone to fete the project. The copper box was stuffed with ephemera, including postage stamps and six coins; a U.S. flag; a Bible signed by the building’s architect; copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; a photo autographed by then-President Woodrow Wilson, who was on hand to place the cornerstone; and a handful of local newspapers, including the Evening Star.
The same day, that paper ran a series of stories about the construction. One headline read “CARE TAKEN TO PROTECT PAPERS IN MEMORIAL CORNERSTONE,” and the accompanying article zeroed in on all the ways that the people who’d prepared the time capsule had armored it against the elements. The story described it as finicky, exacting work—the task of an “anxious” crew committed to rethinking some of the procedures that had guided “all cornerstones heretofore laid in government buildings.”
The time capsule didn’t spend a century entirely undisturbed: Several decades ago, when the amphitheater underwent some renovations to accommodate growing crowds, the box was removed and hauled off to the National Archives for a while, then eventually reinstalled under a replica cornerstone. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Next Creation I'll be sober.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 22, 2020
