• • • google suggested • • •
WORD SALAD: One of the defining electronic music acts of the 2010s, HKE and Telepath cap off their collaborative work as 2814 in this decade with a 10-track release of rare and unreleased gems.
Taking tracks from various compilations and mixing them in with early unheard cuts of tracks from Rain Temple, their earliest collaborative work on the ‘Fragmented Memories’ project which preceded 2814 itself and a few unreleased new tracks, the duo have crafted something of a full album experience that stands up alongside any of their previous drops.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The 19th-Century Charts That Put the World’s Waterfalls on One Impossible Landscape
Imagine the roar.
This detail from a map by C. Smith & Son features a lot of falling water. Embiggenable.
IF YOU’VE BEEN TO A big waterfall, then you know the experience of standing close to one varies greatly. On a sweltering day, the spray feels like a free sprinkler, gentle and invigorating. On a cooler, windier one, it’s more like an unwelcome, soaking rain. (Little wonder that the boats that have ferried visitors past Niagara Falls since 1846 supply hooded ponchos.) The sound of the tumbling water changes, too, from a pleasant muffling to a rib-rattling roar.
A single waterfall can be an overwhelming sensory experience, so imagine the sight and sound and feel of more than 40 thundering at once. In the 19th century, several mapmakers and geographers conjured this by stacking some of the world’s tallest, most forceful, or otherwise notable waterfalls on a single chart.
This version, published in London around 1860 by William Mackenzie, also included some of the largest lakes. Embiggenable.
A handful of these are compiled in An Atlas of Geographical Wonders, From Mountaintops to Riverbeds, the first English edition of a French-language book by a quartet of cartography enthusiasts. The maps were part of a larger 19th-century cartographic trend, which coauthors Gilles Palsky and Jean-Marc Besse describe as “comparative fervor.” (The book, first published in 2014 as Le Monde Sur Une Feuille, is written by Palsky, Besse, Philippe Grand, and Jean-Christophe Bailly, whose professional bonafides range from landscape architecture to poetry.) Inspired, in part, by the earlier work of the roving Prussian naturalist, geographer, and chronicler Alexander von Humboldt, some 19th-century cartographers made sense of the world by relying on measurables and scale, and then comparing the world’s biggest and most spectacular features on a single tableau. They plotted imaginary vistas where the world’s tallest peaks became a single mountain range, or unusual bar graphs in which the longest rivers ribboned down a single chart in parallel squiggles.
The “great measuring of the world,” as Bailly calls it, fulfilled several aims, both individual and political. Printed in atlases that would have lined the bookshelves in a relatively wealthy, curious person’s home, the maps fed a fascination with remote places that few would ever see firsthand. They were also a way to mark, market, and celebrate colonial expeditions and explorers. “Altitudes and lengths invariably functioned as evidence of new discoveries,” Bailly writes, “providing a breeding ground for the fever of comparison and its accompanying tendency to produce visual records.” …
Inside the Chaotic, Cutthroat Gray Market for N95 Masks
As the country heads into a dangerous new phase of the pandemic, the government’s management of the P.P.E. crisis has left the private sector still straining to meet anticipated demand.
In his 30 years as a doctor, Andrew Artenstein had never worried about N95 respirators. The chief physician executive of Baystate Health, he ran his four hospitals in western Massachusetts exactingly, and an essential face covering being out of stock was inconceivable. His doctors, nurses and other responders went through about 4,000 a month, usually for treating patients with airborne diseases. There were always more in the warehouse, just outside the city of Springfield, where Baystate is based. But on April 6, as the novel coronavirus stampeded through the Northeast, Artenstein rose in predawn darkness, on a mission to secure about a quarter-million masks for his thousands of staff members. Baystate Health was just days away from running out.
For the next five hours, he was chauffeured down highways drained of normal traffic, while overhead a private plane bearing four specialists, who would vet the authenticity of the delivery, headed toward the same destination: a warehouse in the Mid-Atlantic, where the masks were being stored by a third-party dealer. A driver had been hired separately for Artenstein, because his frequent interactions with Covid patients meant he might expose the rest of the team to the virus. Two semitrailers were also converging to convey the delivery back to Massachusetts.
But it wasn’t actually clear yet how many N95 respirators there would be to pick up — the night before, the dealer confessed that he could only deliver a quarter of what had been promised, after canceling another pickup the previous week. (Because of an agreement between Baystate Health and the dealer, The Times has agreed not to identify him; he also declined to respond to questions.) Baystate Health had been forced to turn to unproven entrepreneurs like this after the corporate distributor it had once depended on ran out of N95s, when national and international supply chains collapsed at the beginning of the pandemic. Their predicament wasn’t unique. Many hospitals, states and even federal agencies were also desperate, transforming the normally staid market for health care commodities into a Darwinian competition of all against all.
Artenstein and his team had no choice except to pursue this tenuous lead. In the past two weeks, the number of Covid cases nationwide had grown about sevenfold. Nurses complained of having to improvise face coverings, even using modified ski goggles. Within a few weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would calculate that at least 9,282 health care workers had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and 27 had died — a fatality count that would pass 1,700 by mid-September. Artenstein knew that his own safety, and that of his doctors and other health care workers, might depend on the success of his mission. …
Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote
How Republicans applied old school racism to new demographics, and lost.
Protesters in Miami, Florida in December 2000.
In March 1965, ABC interrupted a showing of its Sunday-night movie – Judgment at Nuremberg, a courtroom drama about Nazi war crimes – to show shocking footage from Selma, Alabama, where mostly Black protesters were being beaten bloody by mounted police with billy clubs as they tried to cross Edmund Pettus bridge into the city, demanding the right to vote.
John Lewis, then just 25 years old, led the way. “I can’t count the number of marches I have participated in in my lifetime, but there was something peculiar about this one,” he wrote in his memoir, Walking With the Wind. “It was more than disciplined. It was somber and subdued, almost like a funeral procession.”
When they reached the crest of the bridge, they were faced with the full force of Alabama’s police. After a brief standoff, the troopers charged. Lewis recalled “the clunk of the troopers’ heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves hitting the hard asphalt of the highway, the voice of a woman shouting, “Get ’em! Get the niggers.” A few months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed, outlawing racial discrimination at the polls.
Lewis died in July this year, after more than three decades in Congress. On the wall of his congressional office in Georgia hung a poster from that period, showing a Black hand with a pen set against the backdrop of cotton fields, and the words: “Hands that pick cotton can pick our public officials – register and vote.” That was precisely what the segregationists were keen to prevent.
Donald Trump was the only living president not to attend Lewis’s funeral (apart from Jimmy Carter who, at 95 years old, did not attend, but sent a letter). Shortly after he won in 2016, the then president-elect thanked African Americans – for not voting in large numbers. “The African American community was great to us,” he told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “They came through, big league. Big league. And frankly, if they had any doubt, they didn’t vote, and that was almost as good, because a lot of people didn’t show up, because they felt good about me.” …
RELATED: Trump Is Getting More Desperate—And More Dangerous
As Trump’s odds of success decrease, the risks that his ever more extreme efforts pose are increasing.
The good news is that President Donald Trump’s attempts to defy the results of the election and remain in office keep falling flat. In court after court, judges have ruled against the Trump campaign and tossed out its lawsuits. Today, Georgia certified Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the state’s presidential electors, after a federal judge yesterday rejected a prominent conservative lawyer’s suit seeking to block certification.
The bad news is that as Trump’s chances grow dimmer and deadlines near, his attempts to steal the election and subvert democracy have become more dangerous. This is the paradox that defines this moment: As Trump’s odds of success decrease, the risks that his ever more extreme efforts pose are increasing.
In the first hours and days after the polls closed, the president argued that if all the legal votes were counted, he would win. Now he has moved to trying to have votes thrown out—asking state legislators or courts to just ignore the balloting altogether, flout the will of voters, and simply make him president. Incredibly, he and his aides have not even bothered to offer some other pretense. They are now openly explaining, in media accounts (albeit anonymously) and in court filings, that the point is to disregard voters’ wishes.
“President Donald Trump’s strategy for retaining power despite losing the U.S. election is focused increasingly on persuading Republican legislators to intervene on his behalf in battleground states Democrat Joe Biden won, three people familiar with the effort said,” Reuters reported Thursday. “A senior Trump campaign official told Reuters its plan is to cast enough doubt on vote-counting in big, Democratic cities that Republican lawmakers will have little choice but to intercede.” …
5 Of The Weirdest Things (That Managed To Happen Twice)
Life is random. But that just means that, given enough time, some stuff will happen that doesn’t seem random at all. And you know what they say: leopard jumps on me costing me the presidency, shame on you. Leopard jumps on me costing me the presidency twice, shame on me.
5. A Hollywood Dancer Suffered Two Separate Attacks From The Same Leopard
To set up this story, we should mention that Juliet Prowse did not spend her career doing stunts with big cats. In fact, she probably assumed she’d live and die without even once being attacked by a leopard. She was an actress and a dancer, widely known for a relationship with Elvis after costarring with him in G.I. Blues. Even if you don’t remember hearing her name before today, there’s a chance you’ve already read the following anecdote: In 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to the US, and after being barred from entering Disneyland, he had to content himself with a Hollywood visit to the set of Prowse’s film Can-Can. Seeing her lift her skirt and flash her butt in the film’s title dance, he said, “The face of humanity is prettier than its backside,” and called the whole thing “lascivious, disgusting, and immoral.”
In the ’80s, CBS kept inviting Prowse to their annual TV special Circus of the Stars. Picture Dancing with the Stars except it’s not just dancing, and no one’s actually competing. Celebs who appeared over the years included everyone from Alex Trebek to Weird Al, and they wanted Prowse to come and put on roller skates or something, but she turned them down because that sounded dangerous. Then they asked her to join a big cat act in 1987, and she said sure, because she loved animals. Rehearsing at California State University, a leopard named Sheila jumped her and bit her neck. The bite narrowly missed her carotid artery, but rather than sending the Sheila to cat jail, another performer just punched her in the face (Sheila, not Juliet) and kept her on.
That bite needed five stitches. Later that year, Prowse, now 51, came on The Tonight Show, and of course Sheila the leopard was there too. The two walked past a wall of mirrors, and seeing the images of a bunch of unidentified leopards seemed to set Sheila off. She attacked the only target nearby, which happened not to be a skulking leopard rival but Prowse. The dancer ended up in the hospital, with this throat wound a bit more serious (“She wasn’t playing this time,” Juliet would say).
Prowse recovered, and she returned to the stage, playing Roxy in Chicago. When she later died of pancreatic cancer, the feral leopard of cancers, the Washington Post opened their obituary with “Juliet Prowse, 59, who parlayed skillful dancing, sultry good looks and arguably the best legs since Betty Grable into stardom in ’60s movies and TV specials, died Sept. 14.” That’s a fun look back at what old-timey news writing was like, back in the year of (*checks timeline again*), uh, 1996. …
RELATED: Correction: Brown Stuff Leaking Down Rudy Giuliani’s Face Likely Not Hair Dye, Experts Say
It was the drip seen ’round the world. During a surreal, falsehood-laden press conference with President Trump’s lawyers on Thursday, a notably moist Rudy Guiliani suffered an embarrassing stye mishap, with what appeared to be sweaty streams of hair dye running down his face, leading to countless headlines …
… memes …
Me:
“There will never be a political photo funnier than the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference.”Rudy Giuliani:
“Hold my hair dye…” pic.twitter.com/Irtl69bXse— Jonnie W. (@Jonnie_W) November 19, 2020
… memes …
We're at the point where Rudy's hair dye is sending out cryptic messages #RudyGiuliani #TrumpIsANationalDisgrace #ConcedeTrump #sweatyrudy pic.twitter.com/0AyLpLTStV
— Uncle Bingo (@ItsUrUncleBingo) November 19, 2020
… and more memes …
Gonna tell my kids this was Rudy Giuliani sweating hair dye during today's disastrous press conference. pic.twitter.com/mAZUKaqzsu
— BrianKeene (@BrianKeene) November 19, 2020
… and two separate twitter accounts, @RudyGHairDye and @giuliani_dye dedicated to commemorating the mishap.
There is one tiny problem amid this frenzy — according to some hairstylists, that brown mystery goo running down the Borat 2 star’s temples and forehead is likely not hair dye.
“Hair dye doesn’t drip like that, unless it’s just been applied,” due to a chemical reaction of dye and peroxide during the coloring process causing the pigment to stick to the hair, David Kholdorov, who works at a Manhattan barbershop told The New York Times. He says it also seems unlikely that the unknown liquid oozing down Giuliani’s face was fresh dye, as leaving coloring chemicals on the hair can cause burns and irritation. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Hair mascara?
How a Deadly Police Force Ruled a City
After years of impunity, the police in Vallejo, California, took over the city’s politics and threatened its people.
The sisters of Sean Monterrosa, who was killed by the police, hold his portrait.
Three police officers in an unmarked pickup truck pulled into the parking lot of a Walgreens in Vallejo, California, responding to a call of looting in progress. It was just after midnight on June 2nd, and a group of people who had gathered around a smashed drive-through window quickly fled in two cars. Sean Monterrosa, a twenty-two-year-old from San Francisco, was left behind. As the police truck closed in on Monterrosa, Jarrett Tonn, a detective who had been with the Vallejo police force for six years, was in the back seat, aiming a rifle. No one told Monterrosa to freeze or to put his hands up, but he fell to his knees anyway. As the truck came to a stop, Tonn fired five rounds at Monterrosa through the windshield.
A week earlier, a police officer in Minneapolis had killed George Floyd. Now the Bay Area was in the throes of an anti-police uprising. People marched, drove in caravans, and painted tributes to Floyd on walls and boarded-up windows. Police in Oakland, about thirty miles from Vallejo, launched tear gas at protesters, who gathered in intersections, blocked traffic on the freeway, looted stores, and lit fires in two banks. A man linked to the far-right Boogaloo movement was charged with killing a security officer outside a federal building. People ransacked malls in San Francisco, San Leandro, and the wealthy suburb of Walnut Creek, stealing from Best Buys, Home Depots, video-game stores, small businesses, and marijuana dispensaries. More than seventy cars were taken from a dealership; a gun shop was robbed of twenty-nine firearms. A curfew was instituted in Vallejo, but many people defied it. When Monterrosa got to the Walgreens, the store had already been looted.
Forty-seven minutes before Monterrosa was killed, he sent a text message to his two sisters, asking them to sign a petition calling for justice for Floyd. Monterrosa, whose parents emigrated from Argentina, had been critical of the police since, at the age of thirteen, he received citations for selling hot dogs outside night clubs. As teen-agers, Monterrosa and his sisters went to protests for people killed by cops in San Francisco: Jessica Williams, Alex Nieto, Mario Woods. In 2017, Monterrosa was arrested on weapons charges, for allegedly shooting into a building; he returned from jail covered in bruises. (The case was dismissed after his death.) He told his family that the police had smacked his head against the concrete in his cell.
When Monterrosa was young, the neighborhood where he grew up, Bernal Heights, was largely Black and brown, but as tech companies moved in San Francisco became richer and whiter. Now, Monterrosa’s mother says, their family are the only Latinos on the block. Sean encouraged her to know her rights as a documented immigrant. His mother generally thought that the police were a force for good, but Sean disagreed, saying that they were out to get Black and brown people.
Monterrosa loved San Francisco, but he couldn’t afford to live there. Since the age of eighteen, he’d moved back and forth between the suburbs and his parents’ place, working a variety of jobs. He got a carpentry position two months before the Bay Area issued shelter-in-place orders in response to the coronavirus, then he was laid off. He moved in with a new girlfriend. A couple of days later, he came to the Walgreens.
After Tonn shot Monterrosa, he got out of the truck and turned his body camera on.
“What did he point at us?” Tonn asked.
When Monterrosa got to the Walgreens, the store had already been looted.
“I don’t know, man,” an officer said.
“He pointed a gun at us!” Tonn shouted.
“Do not move!” the officers yelled, training their weapons on Monterrosa, who lay limp on the pavement in a pool of blood. Two of them reached down and rolled him over, revealing a hammer sticking out of his pocket.
“Oh, fuck,” Tonn exclaimed.
“You’re good, man,” an officer said.
The officers cuffed Monterrosa.
“Fucking stupid!” Tonn shouted. He kicked the truck. “This is not what I fucking needed tonight,” he told a captain. “I thought that fucking axe was a gun.”
“Calm down,” the captain said. “Take some deep breaths.”
Tonn inhaled deep and slow.
“You’re going to be all right,” the captain said. “We’ve been through this before.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
President Trump’s recent purge has fueled speculation in Washington: What is Trump up to in the waning days of his presidency?
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top stories of the week and gives a new monkier to this period of our history in his final monologue of 2020.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
In his final New Rule of 2020, Bill takes explores the striking similarities between Donald Trump and other infamous cult leaders.
What the hell happened this week? Trump un-concedes, loses legal battles in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and sells America off for parts.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まるはなの秋散歩。Maru&Hana enjoy the autumn leaves.
FINALLY . . .
‘It was a total invasion’: the virus that came back from the dead
In 1978, a photographer at a Birmingham lab fell ill with smallpox, prompting a race against time to prevent an epidemic. Does the outbreak carry lessons for Covid-19?
After Janet Parker caught smallpox, there was a mass vaccination programme in Birmingham.
ON FRIDAY 11 AUGUST 1978, Janet Parker was getting ready for work when her head started to pound. She thought she was coming down with flu: she felt sore all over. But she had lots to do that day, so her husband, Joseph, drove her to Birmingham University, where she worked as a photographer in the medical school’s anatomy department.
At 40, Parker’s life was steady. She and Joseph, a Post Office telecoms engineer, lived in a modest house in Kings Norton, a quiet suburb of Birmingham. They had two dogs, and were close to her parents, who lived nearby. Parker was an only child, and her father worked for a small family firm in Birmingham’s jewellery quarter. She got into a grammar school and stayed on beyond 16, unlike many children from her background. Her first job was to photograph crime scenes for the West Midlands police, being summoned, often in the middle of the night, to photograph the aftermath of brutal murders, bodies with alarming injuries and blood-spattered walls.
In 1976, aged 37, she got a job with more regular hours, as a photographer in the medical school on the leafy campus in Edgbaston. Her job was to photograph tissue sections on slides, and take pictures for academic materials. Occasionally, she would photograph primates; the medical school had a large animal colony at the time, with macaques, baboons and marmosets, as well as rabbits, rats and mice.
There was no staff canteen; instead, a group of employees, mostly women, met in a bay off a corridor in the anatomy department. They were known as the “coffee club”. “We’d meet up mid-morning, lunchtime and mid-afternoon,” says Glenda Miller, 70, then a research technician. “We’d knit and chat. Sometimes, Janet would study.” She was taking an Open University degree.
On Monday 14 August, Parker didn’t turn up. On Wednesday, Miller rang to see how she was. By now she had developed red spots on her chest, limbs and face. Parker’s GP had made the tentative diagnosis of chickenpox after a home visit, although her mother was sceptical as she had nursed Parker through the illness as a child. The doctor prescribed an antibiotic for cystitis and a painkiller. “Janet sounded tired,” Miller continues. “Then she said, ‘I’ve never felt so ill in my life.’ And that was it. I never heard any more.” Just over a week later, on Thursday 24 August, Parker was diagnosed with smallpox, a lethal, highly contagious virus that had been eradicated with great fanfare only a year before. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Barack Obama said WHAT?!? pic.twitter.com/I9f6oLqZCz
— ClickHole (@ClickHole) November 20, 2020
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
