November 22, 2020 in 3,873 words

_{• • • google suggested • • •}

_{^{• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •}}

Apparently she wants #TrumpMicroPenis to trend. https://t.co/O4IOCzZFqI

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 22, 2020

May I ask you to retweet #TrumpMicroPenis?

Please.

It's such a tiny thing.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 22, 2020

Luján de Cuyo, Argentina: Puente del Inca

_{A brightly colored natural bridge formed by mineral-rich hot springs high up in the Andes.}

_{Puente del Inca. Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

DESPITE ITS NAME, PUENTE DEL Inca (Inca Bridge) was not built by the ancient Inca civilization (unless you believe the old story that it was formed when the Inca king’s guards were mineralized in place as they made a bridge for him to walk upon). Rather, it is a natural arch carved by glacial melt, and coated in minerals that formed its brightly colored hues.

The colorful bridge over the Las Cuevas River is located about 120 miles west of Mendoza, and quite a bit higher in the Andes than the town. As you drive up the slopes, the road passes abandoned railroad stations, rocky Inca messenger huts, and glacial valleys, criss-crossing the Mendoza river several times. Arriving at Puente del Inca, you’ll approach a collection of sheds selling local crafts, a few restaurants of varying quality, and more than a few of the omnipresent Argentinian stray dogs. A short walk through the souvenir sheds leads to the bridge.

Many geologic processes contributed to the formation of this unique bridge. It began as a glacial valley (one of many). Then came the mineral deposits, in shades of red, yellow, and brown. The area had several mineral hot springs that led the colorful layers. A river formed later, during the glacial melt, and carved its way through the mineral deposits, forming the natural arch.

A century ago, this area had been a spa resort, with a hotel, a church, and a small village. The spa was tucked into the side of the cliff, almost underneath the natural bridge. Then, a spring flood destroyed the buildings—even carrying the original roof of the church off and depositing it in the middle of a village lower down. Despite this, tourists could still cross the Puente del Inca for years after the disaster, until a more recent flood weakened the bridge to the point that it was deemed no longer safe for foot traffic. …

South Dakota gripped by pandemic amid Kristi Noem’s no-mask approach

_{State has alarming Covid positivity rate of almost 60% and governor’s hands-off policy, including being the only state without a mask mandate, is having dire consequences.}

_{Downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The state department of health reported 2,020 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, a new record for positive results in a 24-hour period.}

Isolating herself from family after a Covid-19 diagnosis on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, grandmother Cheryl Angel had few options for safe shelter and ended up far afield traipsing from one lonely hotel room to another.

“Our tribe didn’t have anything set up, and if it weren’t for my relatives, I would have died in there,” she said.

Relatives made two-hour drives to leave breakfast and supper outside her impromptu isolation ward, while inside she followed instructions to use a steroid inhaler four times a day and learned to inject herself with an epinephrine medication when she felt faint.

She vowed that if she survived the deadly disease, she would do all she could to help others receive better treatment, as South Dakota fell further into the grip of the coronavirus pandemic.

By the time her two sons caught coronavirus this fall, Angel had recovered and become involved in a grassroots community encampment taking care of homeless fellow Native Americans on Sioux land on the outskirts of Rapid City, in the west of the state

Physician Nancy Babbitt, who agreed to supervise training for coronavirus testing at the settlement, Camp Mniluzahan, lamented the heightened risks such vulnerable residents are facing amid state governor Kristi Noem’s determinedly hands-off pandemic policy – including being the only state without a mask mandate to curb infection. …

RELATED: In 1864, Like in 2020, America Just Got Lucky
_{The arc of history does not bend inevitably toward justice. Sometimes, Americans barely avoid disaster.}

On the Monday following the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House, I made the short drive from my home in Maryland down to Washington, D.C., to visit the Lincoln Memorial. It was unseasonably warm for November, and I rolled up my sleeves as kayakers propelled their bodies forward on the river behind me. Just 48 hours before, every major U.S. news network had projected that Biden had won the presidency. That outcome—even though President Donald Trump and most Republican officials were (and still are) refusing to accept it—pulled the country back from continuing on what has been an ever more dangerous trajectory. For four years, Trump has, among other things, hammered away at government accountability, dismissed the reality of systemic racism, strained relationships with our allies overseas, eroded America’s commitment to human rights around the world and at home, and ignored and exacerbated the climate crisis. Four more years of his administration would have rendered the damage even worse than it currently is.

That possibility is why I was thinking of Lincoln. His bid for a second term in 1864 was another election that could have turned American history in a far more frightening direction. But for the good fortune and lucky timing of two battles that fell in the Union Army’s favor prior to the 1864 election, slavery might have been allowed to continue in exchange for peace with the Confederacy, and our country might look very different than it does. But then, as now (at least for the time being), the United States has managed to avoid a descent into immediate catastrophe. That events could so easily have turned out the other way, however, should make Americans wary of any notion that this country glides across time and space along a natural arc of progress. Our norms, our institutions, or our systems do not inevitably bend toward justice and protect us. That has been made clear. The truth is that, in some instances, we have simply been extremely lucky. And this month, even after a period of uncertainty, we were lucky again.

In the summer and early fall of 1864, Lincoln appeared to be on the brink of losing his bid for reelection. People across the country—or what remained of it—were tired of the Civil War. When hostilities began, many had initially assumed that it would be a relatively quick military exercise to put down the southern insurrection. But the war was now in its third year, and a Union victory was far from assured. The Confederacy was holding its capital of Richmond, Virginia; the bodies of young men who had joined the Union Army were piling up across the South; and the lists of the dead in northern newspapers were growing longer and longer. What’s more, following the Emancipation Proclamation, the war had become as much—if not more—about freeing enslaved people as it was about preserving the Union, a shift that didn’t sit well with many northerners.

Lincoln sensed that his support was diminishing, and quickly. …

OED Word of the Year expanded for ‘unprecedented’ 2020

_{Phrases including mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker and mask-shaming became much more commonly used.}

This year has seen so many seismic events that Oxford Dictionaries has expanded its word of the year to encompass several “Words of an Unprecedented Year”.

Its words are chosen to reflect 2020’s “ethos, mood, or preoccupations”.

They include bushfires, Covid-19, WFH, lockdown, circuit-breaker, support bubbles, keyworkers, furlough, Black Lives Matter and moonshot.

Use of the word pandemic has increased by more than 57,000% this year.

Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, said: “I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for Word of the Year at any other time.

“It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic – in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other.” …

Chile’s Protesters Just Changed Their Constitution (Pay Attention, US)

Voting corrupt authoritarians out of office feels pretty mother-effing good, as a billion babies that will be churned out across the US precisely nine months from now will attest to. That said, it’s not a good idea to get too comfortable after kicking a Mussolini-wannabe to the curb. Just look at Chile, which defeated the dictator Augusto Pinochet via a referendum in 1988 but only managed to get rid of the last remnant of his murderous government … now. As in, last month. And it was all thanks to a bunch of turnstile-jumping schoolkids and pot-banging old ladies, not the country’s politicians.

See, after last year’s massive anti-inequality protests (which felt like a teaser for the rest of the world’s 2020 — everyone was wearing masks, under curfew, and cursing at their dumbass government), Chile just held another referendum to decide if Pinochet’s constitution should stay or go. Here’s a visual representation of the result:

El pueblo comienza a escribir su propia historia y deja atrás el legado del dictador.
Llevamos este cuadro de Pinochet a la plaza para ser quemado por la gente pic.twitter.com/o8eqZeuyH8

— Plaza De La Dignidad (@plaza_dignidad) October 26, 2020

Nearly 80% of voters chose to take Pinochet’s legacy for a helicopter ride and draft a new, more equalitarian constitution. And that’s good, but what the hell took so long? Well, what most feel-good movies about Pinochet’s defeat don’t mention is that, while he wouldn’t have minded staying in power for a couple more centuries or so, he very much left under his own terms and remained involved in government matters until 2002. This was like breaking up with your abusive ex but letting him sleep on the couch and decide what to watch on TV for the next 14 years.

How did he pull that off? By rewriting Chile’s constitution like a kid who makes up fake Monopoly rules when he’s losing. Pinochet and his henchmen knew that the dictatorship would end one day, so they wrote the 1980 constitution to ensure things wouldn’t change too much after they were gone, then forced it on the country via a bogus election (in which government agents were allowed to double or triple dip at the voting urns). The constitution permitted Pinochet, someone who stole millions of dollars from the country while killing and torturing thousands of citizens, to remain as Commander in Chief of the Army until 1998 and become senator-for-life after that. …

UNRELATED: 5 Unspoken Reasons The Holidays Suck For Millions Of Americans

Well, it’s the holidays, and I don’t feel anything. And it’s not because of the pandemic or because I’ve finally been banned from the mall for trying to fight Santa so that I can become Santa: this has been building for years.

For my entire adult life I’ve experienced this weird disconnect about Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’re a millennial, maybe you’ve felt or feel the same way I do — I’ve never seen any kind of media discuss this disconnect, probably because so much money is spent by Big Holiday’s self-mythologizing, and I’m only half-joking here. What I mean is this: an astounding amount of cultural capital is spent, roughly from mid-August to January 1, extolling the virtues of the “holiday season” as a time of happiness, cheer, magic, and good will, when the holiday season has, in fact, been a time of hardship and insane working conditions.

5. So Many Americans Work On Christmas

There is, statistically, a good chance you already know what I’m talking about. But before I rant further, a quick note: I’m talking about Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I imagine you’ve experienced this no matter what winter-adjacent holiday you might celebrate simply by dint of what a cultural colossus Christmas is. Be it Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or Skweltegog: The Feast of the Undying Doom Serpent, you’ve probably felt the effects I’m going to describe.

And in fact, not really celebrating Christmas is part of what I’m talking about. I was raised a devout Catholic, so now as an adult I don’t believe in God (but I do believe that I’m a horrible iniquitous piece of shit who CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT and DESERVES TO BE PUNISHED for BEING SUCH A BAD PERSON). What I’m saying is I don’t believe there’s anything inherently special about Christmas. And, based on the demographics of people who read Cracked, there’s a good chance you don’t, either. There’s about a 40% chance you’re religiously unaffiliated, and about a 50/50 shot you don’t call yourself a Christian.

To me, the idea of Christmas is a lot like Thanksgiving: a broadly secular received holiday tradition during which time I shall chase down and consume neighborhood birds (because turkey is too expensive). Christmas is such a huge part of American culture that I’m not certain if not believing in the magical aspect of it makes it any less powerful. And you know what? Despite my general cynicism, to quote my high school drama teacher at the casting of our winter play, I’m no Scrooge.

My teacher said it’s because I’m “too ugly,” but here I mean because, well, I kinda like the idea of Christmas. A time of comfort and coziness and treats and being around the people I choose to be with? Well, that just sounds dandy! But that’s just not the reality of Christmas for me and most other people my age. For us, Christmas is synonymous with work. …

RELATED: Christmas Dies Hard
_{The middle of a global pandemic might seem like a good time to cut back on holiday excess. But we live in America.}

WE KNEW the doors were about to open when “Ride of the Valkyries” began to boom over the public-address system. By 4 a.m. on Black Friday in Athens, Georgia, several hundred people had lined up outside Best Buy in the predawn chill, supervised by police straddling motorcycles and ambassadors from a local Chick-fil-A handing out free breakfast biscuits wrapped in foil. Our most dedicated patrons had been sitting outside in folding chairs since the day before.

At the front of the line, some people clutched sheets of paper handed out by managers guaranteeing a deeply discounted laptop or camera. (Best Buy devised this ticketing system during my tenure as a salesperson in the mid-2000s to avoid the sort of stampede that makes the news every year.) But many more people had come out in the middle of the night, not to buy a particular product, but to bear witness to the bacchanal of extreme shopping itself and maybe pick up a $5 DVD. I’m still not sure whether, in the Apocalypse Now scene that “Ride of the Valkyries” was intended to evoke, the store’s employees were supposed to be the soldiers in helicopters or the Vietnamese villagers below.

There were no near-death experiences during the three years that I helped open Best Buy on Black Friday, even if the occasional shopper was overcome with holiday spirit and tackled a palletful of discounted Blu-ray players. The mornings were busy, but they crackled with a mildly perverse consumerist conviviality. For most of the people who thronged the store, the wee-hours shopping trip was as much a part of their Thanksgiving tradition as turkey. Store employees feasted, too—it was the one day of the year when my Best Buy location acknowledged how backbreaking retail work is, stocking our break room with a free lunch of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. My co-workers and I jockeyed for those opening shifts because the eight hours always flew by—a wild reprieve from the everyday monotony for employees and even shoppers. It was a frankenholiday, pieced together from leftover parts of Thanksgiving and Christmas, but with a life of its own.

Despite ages of hand-wringing from both ends of the political spectrum—either the annual carnival of consumerism is obscene and wasteful, or gifts shouldn’t supplant Jesus as the reason for the season—holiday shopping has metastasized. Black Friday is now more of a euphemism for weeks [the entire year] of pre-Thanksgiving sales than a reference to a fixed moment in time. Every year, it seems to get bigger, as do the gestures of those pushing against it. Nordstrom, for one, has used its store windows in the weeks before Thanksgiving to promise shoppers it won’t jump the gun on Christmas decorations, while the big-box stores have begun opening on Thanksgiving itself, cannibalizing the holiday that once formed Black Friday’s pretext. (Amid this year’s pandemic, Best Buy has joined other major retailers in announcing that it will be closed on Thanksgiving.)

This is where, in this year of all years, I should solemnly intone that things will be—will have to be—different. So much about holiday shopping seems impossible, or at least ill-advised: the crowds, the exorbitant expenditures, the elderly mall Santas greeting an endless stream of stuffy-nosed children. Retail and delivery workers have already been pushed past the breaking point in their “essential” jobs, and shipping delays and inventory shortages have dogged stores since March. If any of the hand-wringers really wanted to sever Christmas from consumerism, now would be the time. But the Ghost of Christmas Past has much to tell us about what we should expect this year, and shopping isn’t going anywhere. …

Bodies of man and his slave unearthed from ashes at Pompeii

_{The casts of what are believed to have been a rich man and his male slave fleeing the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago, are seen in what was an elegant villa on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii destroyed by the eruption in 79 A.D., where they were discovered during recents excavations, Pompeii archaeological park officials said Saturday, Nov. 21, 2020.}

Skeletal remains of what are believed to have been a rich man and his male slave attempting to escape death from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago have been discovered in Pompeii, officials at the archaeological park in Italy said Saturday.

Parts of the skulls and bones of the two men were found during excavation of the ruins from what was once an elegant villa with a panoramic view of the Mediterranean Sea on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city destroyed by the volcano eruption in 79 A.D. It’s the same area where a stable with the remains of three harnessed horses were excavated in 2017.

Pompeii officials said the men apparently escaped the initial fall of ash from Mount Vesuvius then succumbed to a powerful volcanic blast that took place the next morning. The later blast “apparently invaded the area from many points, surrounding and burying the victims in ash,” Pompeii officials said in a statement.

The remains of the two victims, lying next to each other on their backs, were found in a layer of gray ash at least 2 meters (6.5 feet) deep, they said. …

Hokkaido city calls in ‘Monster Wolf’ to scare off wild bears

_{Officials in Takikawa, Hokkaido, installed a “Monster Wolf” near a residential neighborhood after wild bears became a nuisance, increasing the risk of deadly encounters with humans.}

The wild bears were becoming more than a nuisance, lumbering into a small city on the northern island of Hokkaido in search of food and increasing the risk of deadly encounters with humans.

As bear sightings, and the danger, increased, officials in the city of Takikawa, population 40,000, turned to a mechanical solution.

In September and October, officials installed a “Monster Wolf” near a residential neighborhood and another in a field in a suburban area to keep the wild bears at bay.

The mechanical wolf, originally developed by the machinery-maker Ohta Seiki, stands 2.6 feet (0.8 meters) tall and is 4 feet (1.2 m) long, its maker said. But when planted high in a field, it appears more than a match for a wild bear.

With fake fur, bared fangs and flashing red eyes, the wolf turns its head from side to side and makes howling, screeching sounds when its motion detectors are triggered. The screech can travel about a kilometer, and it comes in more than 60 varieties, including a dog’s bark, a hunter’s voice and gunshots. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Belgium is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, with excellent standards of healthcare. But the coronavirus doesn’t care how rich you are.

_{THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.}

States across the country roll out new COVID restrictions while Trump’s admin recommends you go see your elderly grandparents because this may be “their final Thanksgiving.”

_{THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.}

Did Trump run for president just to make money? Maybe. Did he realize that becoming President could make him even more money than he imagined? Definitely. Here’s a look at how Trump cashed in on the presidency.

Bill reports on all the news that has yet to occur.

_{THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.}

FINALLY . . .

Tree of the week: ‘This juniper reminded me that magic is everywhere’

_{This Phoenician juniper in Rafina, east of Athens, helped the photographer Lena Konstantakou find inspiration when she returned home after 11 years in the UK.}

_{‘It was love at first sight.’ Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

AS AN ARTIST AND PHOTOGRAPHER, Lena Konstantakou has always taken inspiration from ordinary things. “I love trees and the sea, so I’m lucky to live in Rafina,” she says. The beautiful port town is 16 miles (25km) east of Athens.

Konstantakou, who was raised in the capital, lived and worked in London for 11 years before moving back to Greece a decade ago. She remembers feeling profoundly uninspired on her return. “I was feeling lost and nostalgic for the big city, so I started photographing the surrounding woods in order to ground myself in my new environment.”

It was on one of these walks in 2011 that Konstantakou discovered this Phoenician juniper. “It’s at the bottom of a hidden path and so it’s rarely visited by tourists, but as soon I saw it it was love at first sight.” She estimates that the tree is five metres (17ft) tall and between 300 and 400 years old. “It looks like a beautiful 19th-century dress; I think it’s the way the branches elegantly drape down its back.”

While the juniper’s thick branches and imposing frame form part of its appeal, its significance to Konstantakou comes down to timing. “This tree helped me to reconnect with the natural world at a time when I was desperate for inspiration, and for that I will always be grateful,” she says. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.}

ONE MORE THING:

Beaver rehabilitating at woman's home keeps building dams out of her stuff https://t.co/DrDZ8xb5cj pic.twitter.com/wPVSR5LOOP

— The A.V. Club (@TheAVClub) November 23, 2020

ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:

crying in the car is better than therapy

— Cassandra | #WalkAway (@sprincas) November 23, 2020

The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020