Listen:
Sunday is the President's birthday, and I was wondering if you'd chip in on a gift for him.
The gift is the hashtag #TrumpWearsAdultDiapers.
I can't tell you what it would to Me and him to have that trend on his special day.
Plus it's true. Trump wears adult diapers.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 14, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
These 7 Local Food Boxes Offer a Taste of Travel
Get New Orleans pralines, Jersey Shore sea salt, and other iconic treats delivered to your door.
The Alaska box often includes indigenous food, ingredients, and art.
ALTHOUGH STATES ACROSS THE U.S. are opening back up at varying speeds, COVID-19 is still keeping most of us close to home. Thankfully, we can experience many of North America’s regional and sometimes quirky delights without having to hop in a plane.
“Whoopie pies are undoubtedly our top seller,” says Daniel Finnemore of his mail-order business Box of Maine. “You’ll find them everywhere in Maine: at grocery stores, gas stations, fairs … there’s even an annual Whoopie Pie Festival.” Customers can fill their gift boxes with classic Maine items, including jars of Marshmallow Fluff, chocolate-covered cranberry treats known as Moose Poops, and the state soda, which once outsold Coca-Cola and was likened to “root beer on steroids.”
Maine is not the only state (or city) whose culinary and cultural idiosyncrasies you can enjoy from home. From New Jersey to Alaska, Philadelphia to Albuquerque, local foods that capture their city or state’s identity are on offer, and you can have them delivered straight to your door while supporting local businesses.
Taste Alaska
In March, Midgi Moore’s Juneau Food Tours was gearing up for what she hoped would be a record season. “Then like everything else, we just shut down,” Moore says of the impact of COVID-19. But after a bit of crying and gnashing her teeth, she says, she “got back into the game” with Taste Alaska!, a seasonal subscription (or one-time purchase) box that ships four times annually. Moore’s first shipment focused on the state’s southeast—a region especially known for its Inside Passage waterways—and is filled with locally sourced goods ranging from hot sauce made from kelp to images of Alaskan landscapes by Juneau photographer Mark Kelley. While autumn’s box is still in the works, Moore says it will showcase the state’s interior with foods like caribou jerky and reindeer sausage, as well as an art piece, preferably by an indigenous Alaska Native artist. …
The Pandemic Hunger Crisis Is Only Just Getting Started
In California, food banks are struggling to keep up with surging demand.
On a recent Thursday morning, a drive-through food bank popped up on the campus of Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento, California. Participants picked up bags of rice, canned chicken, and fresh broccoli, all while following social-distancing guidelines. In just two hours, enough food for approximately 4,000 people moved from the gloved hands of staff and volunteers into backseats or car trunks. People drove home with produce from local farms, fresh meat, and nonperishables from across the state.
Serving 8,000 people weekly at two locations, the Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services drive-through operation is just one example of Northern California’s response to high food insecurity, which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. “You have so many people that have been displaced from work, you have so many single moms with children at home, and you have so many isolated seniors, that the demand for services has just gone through the roof,” said Blake Young, the organization’s president and CEO for 15 years. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the organization served approximately 150,000 people each month. In April and May, that number rose to more than 300,000 people.
But the worst may be yet to come, thanks to the ongoing recession. Regional food banks—which are intended to be safety nets, not main sources of food—fear that they won’t be able to meet the swelling need.
“It’s hard to predict how long this is going to last, but we are looking at beyond this year and into next year in terms of the demand,” Young said. “We’re really focused on sustainability, because no food bank can sustain—” he paused. “This is not what a food bank was designed to do.” …
RELATED: A Housing Crisis Timebomb Is Set To Go Off
It doesn’t feel like things can get any worse right now for Americans, what with there being over 2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States and tensions mounting over the murder of George Floyd, but there’s a proverbial pigeon flying overhead ready to shit in our proverbial mouths, and that shit is a very real housing crisis.
Correction: Call it a housing apocalypse because it’s going to make the 2008 housing crisis look like a picnic (in the street). In fact, we were already in the middle of a housing crisis with over 2 million evictions occurring each year. But, now that many of the eviction moratoriums put in place due to COVID-19 are set to expire, things are about to get much worse.
Consider that these moratoriums were put in place because more than 40 million Americans have been forced to file for unemployment amid layoffs. They’ve been able to stay afloat because of an extra $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits, but those benefits will expire at the end of July. If you don’t have your job back by August, then you might have to stop job hunting and start scouting which park bench might be most comfortable to sleep on. …
These protests feel different, but we have to be realistic. There’s a long road ahead.
History teaches caution. The movement after George Floyd’s death will only bring change if we learn from past battles.
Protesters participate in a Black Lives Matter rally.
There is an emerging sense that this time is different. It is not only that the protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder are unlike past protests against police brutality and racism – the racial and class composition of protesters alone make this moment different. It is also that this effort, orchestrated perhaps by far more sophisticated organizers aided by equally sophisticated technology, might very well force real, long-lasting change: change that undermines structures of racial domination, including but not limited to the penal system, while also necessarily challenging the deep and enduring belief systems that support them.
More and more of the alienated feel seen and heard, and this has bred a sense of optimism. Even Ta-Nehisi Coates, usually sober and cynical about possibilities for real racial progress, has recently expressed hope that this time is different.
History, however, preaches caution. Despite some apparent differences, we have been here before. With the certainty that the sun will rise, we will probably be here again in the not-too-distant future.
Over 50 years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, investigated the causes of the 1967 racial uprisings and produced a report documenting their findings and recommendations. The Kerner Report was courageous and bold. Not only did the commission recommend that we dismantle various institutions of racial domination that helped to create and maintain Black Americans’ social, economic, and political exclusion, but its members also recommended that we proactively work toward inclusion through unfettered access to high quality education; good jobs; safe and affordable housing; and a fair, compassionate, and responsive welfare system. …
‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.
Am I supposed to take it literally?
In the fall of 2016, a journalist popularized a catchy binary to describe the bizarre behavior of Donald Trump and the effect he had on his rapturous followers.
Supporters of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Salena Zito wrote, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Meanwhile, his detractors, including most of the mainstream press, “take him literally but not seriously.” His roundhouse exaggerations, the sarcasm, the slander, the spurious anecdotes, the not-quite-facts—if you took these literally, we were told, then Trump might indeed seem a clown, a candidate unworthy of the effort required to take him seriously.
If, on the other hand, you recognized his wildcat hyperbole as a signal of a larger virtue—that Trump was a disrupter rejecting conventional modes of political speech to further a coherent agenda—then you freed yourself to take him seriously as a possible president who could do important and necessary things.
This formulation was clever and grotesque at the same time. Although her words were meant to be descriptive, many American took them as prescriptive, and the reasoning worked on many fence-sitters I know. Politically these people were of conservative inclination, and they couldn’t otherwise bring themselves to vote for a candidate who, among countless outrages, insulted John McCain’s record as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The seriously/literally dichotomy gave them permission to think that they were confusing surface for substance, missing the essence beneath the cloud of bombast. They could persuade themselves that the bad taste was something other than bad taste. They could think that the lies were something other than lies. …
Pro-Sports Forgot What Happened During The Last ‘Pandemic Championship’
In early March 2020, NBA star Rudy Gobert tested positive for Coronavirus seconds before a game was about to start, resulting in the NBA suspending its season indefinitely. Other sports soon followed suit: the NCAA canceled March Madness; the NHL suspended its season; the MLB postponed opening day. League executives have spent the ensuing — what day is it? Really? — three months discussing various ways to have sports again, with proposals ranging from playing in empty stadiums to having the playoffs at Disney World to our suggestion: Zoom talent shows (Does anyone on the Orlando Magic know actual magic? Let’s find out.). The sad reality, though, is that crowing 2020 champions may be impossible.
All of this is a huge bummer for sports fans, but it’s not without precedent. Thanks to the influenza outbreak in 1919, we have an example of the time when a virus killed a sports championship. In the midst of the Stanley Cup Finals — “midst,” meaning one more game would’ve decided the championship — a whopping 10 out 13 players from the Montreal Canadiens were too sick to play.
It had been a real rock fight for hockey’s biggest and most-kissed chalice. The Canadiens and Seattle Metropolitans played five brutal games, including a double-overtime Game 4 and single-overtime Game 5. One newspaper described the teams as “pretty well used up,” because zombies hadn’t become a pop-culture reference point yet. Even worse, the rules back then meant Finals games, like Game 4, could end in a tie. So, all of that extra time in Game 4 spent zipping around an icy rink, pounding each other against boards, whacking each other with sticks, and knocking each other’s teeth out didn’t even bring them closer to winning. Injuries were rampant all series, leaving the teams so shorthanded that some of the guys who could play had to be carried off the ice due to exhaustion.
Game 5 tied-up the series, making Game 6 win-or-go-home (provided the didn’t have another tie). That’s when the virus hit. Hours before the puck was set to drop, several players developed 100-degree fevers. Some were bedridden. Canadiens manager George Kennedy offered to forfeit, but Seattle manager Pete Muldoon thought winning the Cup by forfeit was bullshit. Someone suggested borrowing players from other teams. League president Frank Patrick, presumably gesturing wildly at a series of hospital beds with groaning patients, nixed the idea of bringing replacement guys into the middle of an outbreak. …
William Leith: my problem with money
The writer always had a hard time with cash. Then an unexpected cheque arrived in the post – and things got worse.
Taking a pounding: William Leith.
It’s like I actively want to be poor. Like I’d rather be poor. I’ve never told anyone this, but I have a mental disorder in the area of finance. I am driven by a mechanism designed to prevent me from being rich; worse, it masquerades as a mechanism designed to do exactly the opposite.
It is an enemy agent, it lies deep in the wiring of my brain, and I don’t know how it works.
I know I need to dismantle this mechanism and replace it with a new one before I die a pauper’s death. But I’m terrified of doing this because I suspect that the mechanism is, actually, me.
Money is weird, anyway. We’re supposed to instinctively understand it. But we really don’t. For instance, most people think it’s real. It’s not. But because we think it’s real, it is real. It somehow emerged from the early murk of human interaction.
It is us. It’s our masterpiece. It’s killing us.
I consider my own financial situation. Just thinking about it, I am sick with dread; icy dread spreading up from my stomach into my chest and neck, and now I can’t stop thinking about it, the bad thoughts and feelings are seeping out and getting everywhere. It’s like a crime scene that I must clean up before I can even begin to get away. And the more I try to clean it, the dirtier it gets.
But I must not think like this! …
MOGGY BRAINED Fiendishly tricky brainteaser asks you to spot the cat in this cityscape
IN NEED of something to do this weekend? Well this brainteaser should keep your mind busy for hours.
Shared on Reddit the fiendishly tricky puzzle is challenging players to spot the cat in this busy cityscape.
Can you spot the cat hidden somewhere in this cityscape? Embiggenable.
The black and white image is made up of dozens of skyscrapers that blend into one another making the feline especially difficult to spot.
The kitty is also white, and only true puzzle aficionados will be able to seek her out. …
Ed. Took me no time at all. There’s a spoiler, and the solution, at the link.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Here’s all the news you may have missed this week.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
2020年6月6日の日記。Diary of June 6, 2020.
FINALLY . . .
This Gigantic Laughing Kookaburra Is Out to Brighten Your Day
A sculptor hitched the cackling bird to a trailer and is taking it on the road.
It’s huge, with a great sense of humor.
FARVARDIN DALIRI, A SCULPTOR WHO lives in suburban Brisbane, Australia, recently built an oversized, electrified laughing kookaburra that stands roughly 15 feet tall. Laughing kookaburras, formally known as Dacelo novaeguineae and native to Eastern Australia’s eucalyptus forests, are known for their calls, which ring out like peals of laughter at dusk and dawn. (Some mornings, when kookaburra cries clatter through the neighborhood, Daliri’s wife thinks that he has slipped outside and switched on the giant bird.) Daliri installed a secondhand car battery and motor to crank the bird’s beak open and closed; inside its metal body, he nestled an amplified recording of a real-deal kookaburra. When the automata is flipped on, the oversized bird seems to cackle.
Though Daliri made the sculpture to delight the area’s human residents, it seems to intrigue the feathered denizens, too: “Some come closer and closer and sit on electric lines and watch,” he says. “Other kookaburras laugh back.” Daliri doesn’t monkey with his enormous creation in the morning, though. When laughter drifts in through the windows, “it’s the real ones laughing,” he adds. “Mine is sleeping.” Atlas Obscura spoke with Daliri about larger-than-life sculpture, and why laughter matters now.
Australia is full of big things. What draws you to oversized art?
I’ve made many sculptures, and most of them are oversized. I made a mythological snake that was a totem for the First Nations people in Burdekin Shire, and a 33-foot crocodile as a tourist attraction just before entering Townsville. Once you make [sculptures] in this size, they’re impressive. Their body shape and anatomy is so fascinating. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
