[Exasperated sigh.]
Retweet if you agree.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 13, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
WORD SALAD: Very soon after delivering the Celtic Vedic album last year, I was immediately drawn to the idea of doing some stripped down dub versions of these tracks. The original album vision is so vast and covers so many musical continents, I thought some DJ inspired spacial dub remixes would really illustrate Jah Wobble’s behemoth bass annihilation perfectly. Wobble himself said to me on hearing the finished original album ” I prefer some of the earlier rough mix dubs “. So myself and Cosmic Trigger, aka Jamie Grashion, one of my erstwhile studio assistant at Meridian labs, leapt back into the remix fray and reinvented the dubular wheel of Celtic Vedic….enjoy the journey, rich cocoa bass and crisp beats seduce and whisper “the door lies within”.
From the comments:
Got lost in this one while writing. Thanks.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Power of a South Pole Sunrise After Six Months of Darkness
Astrophysicist Robert Schwarz has spent more winters at the southern tip of the world than any human in history.
A South Pole portrait of Robert Schwarz in June 2018. Embiggenable. Explore at home… rather bleak.
ON SEPTEMBER, 20, THE SUN BEGAN to rise at the South Pole. It took 30 hours for the sun’s disk to clear the horizon, and weeks later, it is still climbing toward noon. And for the first time in a decade, Robert Schwarz, a.k.a. The Iceman, was not there to see it. “When the sun started coming up, I always thought it was too bad,” Schwarz says. “It means winter at the South Pole is ending.”
Antarctic weather is notoriously bad, so this year’s sunrise wasn’t much to see. But staff at the South Pole say they still laugh with surprise when they step outside into the golden light gleaming off the ice.
In the heart of Antarctica, winter is one long night that lasts six months. As darkness starts to fall in mid-February of each year, a small crowd gathers outside Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to watch a gray C-130 Hercules ski down an icy airstrip and take off. Because no planes brave the sunless Antarctic winter, this flight is the last chance to leave the white continent. Everyone who stays is stuck there until the summer research season starts in November. Antarcticans call it “wintering over.”
As darkness starts to fall in mid-February each year, a gray C-130 Hercules departs Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Embiggenable.
Schwarz has spent 15 winters at the South Pole, nine of them in succession from 2011 to 2019. When he stepped down from his role this year at the age of 50, he had wintered over at “Pole,” as it is colloquially known, more times than any human in history. On a recent Friday, he was at home in Germany, wearing a yellow shirt emblazoned with the word “ANTARCTICA.” He smiled often and laughed easily. On the wall behind him, a framed poster showed Neil Armstrong standing on the Moon. …
Petition calls for Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be named to the National Register of Historic Places
A National Landscape.
Outside of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping where the now-infamous press conference took place. The company offered up appropriately sized reference photos to use as a Zoom background via Twitter.
Should the Four Seasons Total Landscaping be added to the National Register of Historic Places?
“We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper,” reads the change.org petition, which is headed “Add Four Seasons Total Landscaping to the national register of historic places.”
“I’m here for this. I haven’t been this jazzed about a nomination since the Longaberger basket,” Lauren Manning, a preservation planner in Kansas City, wrote on Facebook.
“This is a truly historic location,” agrees petition signer James Cole, from South Bend, Indiana. “What better mark of pure American charlatanism than this could there be?” …More than 2,000 people apparently think so, because they’ve signed a petition recommending that the landscaping company’s home in northeast Philadelphia be recognized for the brief but significant role it played in the 2020 presidential election. …
How The World’s Largest Empire Split Apart
The little told tale of the demise of the Mongol Empire.
Ancient scroll depicting Mongols at war.
When empires fall, they make noise. For hundreds of years dedicated historians have been studying the fall of great empires. They are dissected, reassembled and dissected again. When a new generation comes along, a fresh take usually rises with it and the process of examining these past states begins anew.
Thousands of pages have been written about the fall of the Roman Empire. We have gone into great detail about the fracturing of Alexander The Great’s Empire. Even modern empires, such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union are given out-sized attention in how they rose and inevitably fell. But what about the largest empire in the history of the world?
The Mongol Empire was the largest continuous land empire ever to be assembled in human history. It stretched from the icy regions of the Far East and swept all the way down through the plains of Eastern Europe and the arid scrub of the Levant. It connected China to Baghdad. It would encompass Moscow and Jerusalem. Yet, unlike other similar states from world history, this empire fell and no one seems to care how or why.
So how did the world’s largest empire fall apart? …
How big tech got bigger: How Amazon became a pandemic giant – and why that could be a threat to us all
Online retail grew massively in lockdown, and Amazon reaped huge profits. But where is the company’s relentless innovation and automation heading – and is it time to clip its wings?
Before the Covid-19 crisis, Amazon was already a vast presence in the economy.
For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon “associate”, in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. “When I get home,” she says, “it’s about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. I’m always exhausted.”
Anna is a picker in one of the company’s most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the “totes” destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot “drives”: squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift “pods” – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers.
Everything has to happen quickly. According to the all-important metric by which a picker’s performance is measured, Anna says she has to average 360 items an hour, or around 3,800 a day. This translates as one item every 6.7 seconds.
In March, the Covid-19 lockdown meant that customer orders suddenly rocketed. Anna says that lots of her colleagues started putting in overtime, and new recruits arrived en masse. “They hired a lot of people,” she says. “I thought there should have been fewer people in the warehouse, to have distancing.” Suddenly, there wasn’t enough space in the canteen. “They took out some of the tables because of 2-metre distancing, but it was impossible to find a free table or chair. You had to stand.”
Only in April did masks become mandatory. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “There were problems with the air-con [in the warehouse]. Maintenance checked the temperature, and it was more than 30C.”
An AI tool can distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a true conspiracy
It comes down to how easily the story falls apart.
In the age of social media, conspiracy theories are collective creations.
The audio on the otherwise shaky body camera footage is unusually clear. As police officers search a handcuffed man who moments before had fired a shot inside a pizza parlor, an officer asks him why he was there. The man says to investigate a pedophile ring. Incredulous, the officer asks again. Another officer chimes in, “Pizzagate. He’s talking about Pizzagate.”
In that brief, chilling interaction in 2016, it becomes clear that conspiracy theories, long relegated to the fringes of society, had moved into the real world in a very dangerous way.
Conspiracy theories, which have the potential to cause significant harm, have found a welcome home on social media, where forums free from moderation allow like-minded individuals to converse. There they can develop their theories and propose actions to counteract the threats they “uncover.”
But how can you tell if an emerging narrative on social media is an unfounded conspiracy theory? It turns out that it’s possible to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true conspiracies by using machine learning tools to graph the elements and connections of a narrative. These tools could form the basis of an early warning system to alert authorities to online narratives that pose a threat in the real world. …
Not Being In Daylight Savings Time Certifiably Sucks
Ahh turning back the clocks, the absolute worst part of the year. 6 p.m. becomes eerily indistinguishable from midnight. 3 p.m. dusk mocks summery 9 p.m. sunsets. My mom begins sending me near-daily screenshots of her countdown until daylight savings starts again. It happens every November without fail, but in a year defined by plagues, contentious elections, murder hornets, and the essential destruction of time, the sun setting earlier and earlier offers a devastating blow in already tough circumstances.
So why, exactly, do we do this? Time shifts were first proposed in late 19th century New Zealand, with the intent of having more time to hunt bugs and soon after in England in the early 20th Century. Germany was the first country to actually enact daylight savings time in 1916 as a way of conserving energy during the first World War, According to National Geographic. In 1918, the United States, like many of the other countries that participated in World War I followed suit. Since then, the concept of moving the clocks has become a contentious topic across the U.S., as most of Arizona, aside from the Navajo reservation, opted out of the practice in 1968, with Hawaii never even recognizing the time shift. As of 2020, a number of other states including Arkansas and Massachusetts are contemplating dropping daylight savings alltogether or keeping the clocks forward year-round.
But it’s more than just a political issue. Time shifts can lead to a host of tangible consequences, including increased rates of depression, as well as higher numbers of heart attacks, and car accidents. It also has links to workplace injuries, miscarriages, and suicides, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Yikes.
Yet as we wait for our government to figure out how to best handle this yearly annoyance, and bust out our Happy Lights, there is one coping mechanism nearly guaranteed to bring some semblance of a smile to our faces in these trying times — a series of certifiably dank memes and Twitter posts. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY:
So the sun just sets at like 12 PM now, huh? The clock strikes noon and the sky darkens with an insect cloud in the shape of a man? The voice in the walls is getting louder and blood is running out of the faucets, and we're just supposed to get used to it? I hate daylight savings
— ben "limited breadsticks" flores (@limitlessjest) November 11, 2020
RELATED: 5 Real Terrorists Who Straight Up Sucked At Terrorism
With the constant, tragic news cycle of 2019, it’s hard to keep up with all the depressing stories. There’s climate change, war, recession, and it feels like we see a new terrorist attack every other day. It’s hard to feel good about anything, really. Well, if there is such a thing as a feel-good terrorist story, then here are a few.
5. Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh Disappeared Up His Own Blast-Hole
The flight to Somalia that Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh boarded in February 2016 could have ended in terrible tragedy. He had successfully concealed a bomb inside his laptop, and arranged to sit exactly where it would do the most damage. If the plane had been at cruising altitude when the bomb went off, it would have triggered a secondary explosion in the fuel tank that would have turned the whole thing into an airborne barbecue.
Thankfully, the flight was delayed, and Borleh’s bomb was on a timer. Since the plane was still well below cruising altitude when the bomb went off, he ended up briefly on fire before being sucked out the hole he had just made, while everyone else aboard just kind of blinked and tried to figure out what happened.
Plane crash in #Somalia after failing to take off at capital's airport, all passengers survived, but only 2 injured. pic.twitter.com/BMgLdy8Upl
— Omar Nor (@Omaar_nor) February 2, 2016
The plane landed safely, leaving only two people with injuries and a whole lot more who will never complain about a delayed flight again. …
Indoor Dining Will Soon Be Banned In As Many As 15 Colorado Counties, And Likely Denver
Gov. Jared Polis announced on Tuesday afternoon that numerous counties in the State of Colorado are soon going to be moving to a new, more restrictive phase on the coronavirus dial which means indoor dining will no longer be allowed at restaurants. The phase will be “Red – Severe Risk,” which is a new level on the dial, and the activation will happen on Friday at the earliest.
Denver, Jefferson and Arapahoe County are among 15 counties moving to Level Red.
“We expect to be there,” Hancock said, referring to the new Red phase.
Karen LuKanic, who owns Congress Park staple, Chef Zorbas, said she was concerned about how the temporary pause on indoor dining will affect her business.
She recently opened her newly renovated dining room after a summer of outdoor only dining. In that time, she said the restaurant brought in only about 35% of the prior year’s sales.
“My biggest fear or reaction is I need to figure out if it’s safer for my employees to get back on unemployment so they’re OK,” LuKanic said. “If I can’t give them the hours to work and I can’t come up with the money to pay them, then I have some tough decisions ahead of me.” …
RELATED: COVID In Colorado: 15 Counties Listed As Advancing To ‘Level Red-Severe Risk’
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shared a list of counties transitioning to the next level of restrictions on a new COVID-19 color dial. The dial updates Level Red – Severe Risk to “indicate counties where there is severe risk of COVID-19 spreading rapidly, while allowing some businesses to remain open at very limited capacity.
The counties moving to Level Red on Nov. 20 are:
- Adams
- Arapahoe
- Boulder
- Broomfield
- Clear Creek
- Denver
- Douglas
- Jefferson
- La Plata
- Logan
- Mesa
- Morgan
- Routt
- Summit
- Washington
Under Level Red restrictions, outdoor activities are encouraged and most indoor activities are prohibited or strictly limited. Capacity limits are also significant. …
Ed. I wonder if my indoor activity is going to be prohibited on Friday. Also wonder if my boss will be defiant.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
How can faithless electors hand Trump the presidency? Here’s what electors exactly are, how they came about, and the various loopholes that allow for faithless electors to vote against their state’s electorate.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Somewhere in an alternate reality, Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Jordan Klepper hits up the Million MAGA March to talk to the folks who won’t let that achievement go uncelebrated.
All Desi Lydic wants is a nice Thanksgiving, but her cousins Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are too focused on voter fraud.
While the current president remains hunkered down at the White House reviewing legal strategies with Rudy Giuliani, Republican lawmakers like Sen. Marco Rubio are beginning to publicly admit the truth that Joe Biden will be sworn in as President in January.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Big News breaks down Trump’s latest coup attempt failures and his shameless tweet taking credit for a vaccine with analysis from Oscar-winning director of “Totally Under Control” Alex Gibney. Watch the full segment on CBS All Access.
気に入って何度も出入りした結果上部がボロボロになり、穴の開いた箱は猫吸引ボックスへと変化してしまいました。 Maru went in and out so many times so the top of the box was tattered. And the box with holes turned into a cat suction box.
FINALLY . . .
‘We are all here to heal’: Transylvania’s mud bathers
In our new series, Emily Garthwaite tells the story behind her image of a woman relaxing in the mud at a former Romanian salt mine.
‘This woman came to the mudflats almost every day’.
From the Middle Ages until the early 20th century, the town of Turda in Transylvania, Romania, was famous for its salt mining industry. In 1932 the salt mines closed, leaving much of the community unemployed and the quarries derelict. In 2009 the European Union funded renovations to the salt quarries, with health spas opening soon after.
During the summer, elderly people in Turda can be found swimming in the water-filled quarries or bathing on the mudflats that surround them. The clay treatments are used to ease the effects of degenerative rheumatic conditions in preparation for the bitterly cold winter. Family members smooth mud across their relatives’ backs, and groups of women plaster themselves across the cracked earth as their muddy skin dries under the hot sun. Mud-encrusted wrinkles and body hair take on the same chocolatey texture, and despite the lack of colour there’s an incredible vibrancy in everyone’s sludgy grins.
I spent two weeks in the town in 2015, volunteering for a charity. When I wasn’t working I would go for walks around the town. The first time I saw the mudflats, I returned to my accommodation and had a friend help translate a sign that read “My name is Emily. I’m from London. I would like to photograph you. And I promise to make you laugh!” It instantly sparked amusement among the elderly bathers, and within moments they were all posing. After a couple of days, I returned to the mudflats and I was greeted by mud-caked strangers who had heard of an English woman photographing them. They requested I photograph them, too.
Nikolai, an 80-year-old Turda resident, told me: “[Communist dictator Nicolae] Ceaușescu removed the bars and theatres. He removed our community. Then we were suddenly free [after his regime was toppled]. We didn’t know what to do, so we went to the mudflats.”
Another bather, Andrei, said: “It’s a free space for Romanians, Romas, whoever. We are all covered in clay, and we are all here to heal.” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
While cobbling up these errant ramblings barely uninteresting at all things I also managed to print 2oo menus. So it wasn’t a total time suck for me. What’s your excuse?
TIME SUCK
Something that’s engrossing and addictive, but that keeps you from doing things that are actually important, like earning a living, or eating meals, or caring for your children.
ONE MORE THING:
White, black, brown, yellow, man, woman, transgender, gay, straight, Democrat, Republican, young, old, ALL of you will taste the same to the zombies.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 17, 2020
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
