• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Parents Allow Excited Children To Tear Open One Turkey For Thanksgiving Eve https://t.co/2PeORJr6AG pic.twitter.com/gNXF2sf97t
— The Onion (@TheOnion) November 26, 2020
Herndon, Virginia: Kidwell Farm
The birds are rarely well behaved. Embiggenable. Explore at home. It might be barely at all uninteresting to explore at home here as well.
PARDONING THE THANKSGIVING TURKEY IS a White House tradition dating back to 1863 when Tad Lincoln successfully interceded with a call for clemency. In modern times, the lucky birds are selected by the poultry industry for their size and docility, and pose for a very quick photo with the president before being shuffled off camera and out of view. Lesser known is the longterm fate of these chosen birds, after they receive the nation’s highest avian honors.
In recent years most of the turkeys have ended up in an outdoor pen on Kidwell Farm, the government’s demonstration exhibit of agricultural technology from the Great Depression. And despite the President’s 2017 prediction of a “very, very bright future,” most of the Turkeys of the United States don’t make it through their first winter. “We usually just find ‘em and they’re dead,” Kidwell Farmer Marlo Acock told ABC News.
The slaughter isn’t a byproduct of shoddy veterinary care, but a reality of modern agribusiness. In order to attain their unnaturally plump gait, most Thanksgiving turkeys are fed a gluttonous diet of corn and soybeans. By the age of 18 months or so, the Presidential turkeys are simply too fat and unhealthy to survive for more than a few months outdoors. …
Ed. Seems to give pause to wonder what’s going to happen in a couple of weeks to the millions of fat and unhealthy people who shared Thanksgiving while not at home.
Today I’ll be delivering Thanksgiving dinner to many fat and unhealthy people who couldn’t muster the effort to prepare the meal themselves.
They call me an essential worker. Alright I’m a delivery boy!
White House Guests Sprayed With Viscera After Pardoned Turkey Wanders Into Landscaping Crew’s Wood Chipper https://t.co/SXoA8Q3BHy pic.twitter.com/l0FRvSNPHX
— The Onion (@TheOnion) November 24, 2020
Republicans Rediscover the Dangers of Selling Bunk to Their Constituents
Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power has consequences.
THREE WEEKS AFTER the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election, many Republican members of Congress find themselves boxed in. Some have privately congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for their historic win. But publicly, most Republicans have remained silent, while others have actively encouraged President Donald Trump’s baseless accusations of mass voter fraud.
The situation these Republicans face is one that many southern members of Congress would have recognized during the aftermath of the 1860 election. Southern congressmen had spent years stirring up anger and promoting fear of their opponents, and were so successful that by 1860 they had lost control of their message. Abraham Lincoln’s election caused a mass movement among white southerners to leave the Union. Even though they knew that the claims being embraced by their constituents were conspiratorial and overblown, many southern members of Congress felt they had to get on board or be left behind.
Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power had consequences in 1860, and it surely will have consequences now. In 1861, those consequences included a four-year Civil War that claimed the lives of 750,000 people and nearly destroyed the American democratic experiment. Thankfully, we’re still a long way from that today. But the experience of 1860 should serve as a warning of what can happen when political leaders deliberately inflame their supporters, trading short-term political gain for long-term ruin. …
‘Is anybody in there?’ Life on the inside as a locked-in patient
ake Haendel spent months trapped in his body, silent and unmoving but fully conscious. Most people never emerge from ‘locked-in syndrome’, but as a doctor told him, everything about his case is bizarre.
Jake Haendel was a hard-partying chef from a sleepy region of Massachusetts. When he was 28, his heroin addiction resulted in catastrophic brain damage and very nearly killed him. In a matter of months, Jake’s existence became reduced to a voice in his head.
Jake’s parents had divorced when he was young. He grew up between their two homes in a couple of small towns just beyond reach of Boston, little more than strip malls, ailing churches and half-empty sports bars. His mother died of breast cancer when he was 19. By then, he had already been selling marijuana and abusing OxyContin, an opioid, for years. “Like a lot of kids at my school, I fell in love with oxy. If I was out to dinner with my family at a restaurant, I would go to the bathroom just to get a fix,” he said. He started culinary school, where he continued to experiment with opioids and cocaine. He hid his drug use from family and friends behind a sociable, fun-loving front. Inside, he felt anxious and empty. “I numbed myself with partying,” he said.
After culinary school, he took a job as a chef at a local country club. At 25, Jake tried heroin for the first time, with a co-worker (narcotics are notoriously prevalent in American kitchens). By the summer of 2013, Jake was struggling to find prescription opioids. For months, he had been fending off the symptoms of opioid withdrawal, which he likened to “a severe case of the flu with an added feeling of impending doom”. Heroin offered a euphoric high, staving off the intense nausea and shaking chills of withdrawal.
Despite his worsening addiction, Jake married his girlfriend, Ellen, in late 2016. Early in their relationship, Ellen had asked him if he was using heroin. He had lied without hesitation, but she soon found out the truth, and within months, the marriage was falling apart. “I was out of control, selling lots of heroin, using even more, spending a ridiculous amount of money on drugs and alcohol,” he said. In May 2017, Ellen noticed that he was talking funnily, his words slurred and off-pitch. “What’s up with your voice?” she asked him repeatedly.
On 21 May, a highway patrol officer stopped Jake on his way to work. He was driving erratically, speeding and swerving between lanes. That morning, he had followed his normal routine, smoking heroin before brushing his teeth. It was also normal for him to smoke, or “freebase” heroin while driving, heating the powder on a piece of foil and inhaling the fumes. “I actually got pretty good at that,” he told me. As the officer approached his car, Jake could feel that something was different in his body. He needed to conceal the baggie of heroin, which lay visible in the open centre console, but he couldn’t reach over and close the compartment. His arms flailed uselessly against the dashboard. The police arrested him for possession of a controlled substance.
Jake made bail, but could hardly walk out of the station. In the next two days, his condition deteriorated and, on 24 May, his wife called an ambulance to their home. He stumbled to the front door, leaning on the walls to support himself. The medical responders thought he might be having a stroke, so he was rushed to hospital. Brain scans showed an unmistakable imaging pattern: profound, bilateral damage to the white matter, the bundles of nerve fibres that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
5 Of Modern History’s Dumbest Inventions (Came From One Guy)
You may be familiar with Hugo Gernsback, the futurist inventor, and namesake of the Hugo Awards. What you may not be familiar with are some of his, err … more far-fetched inventions and predictions that never made it to the assembly line. Here’s a collection of his more interesting ideas that leave us wondering what life would have been like in a more Gernsbackian timeline …
5. The Lampifier – The Entire Living Room In One Lamp
Move over unitaskers. Make way for the greatest multipurpose lighting/entertainment/appliance/furniture/storage and pet apparatus of the 20th century. The Lampifier is a Swiss army knife when it comes to home decor. It might be cheating to include this beauty on the list because it’s actually 12 products in one. The stunning three bulb lamp not only illuminates your room but six transparent photos of you and your family. Nestled next on this futuristic Christmas tree is an AM/FM radio, flanked by a small candy bowl platter, orbiting around the central lamp post.
If candy doesn’t sound filling enough for you, the subsequent level contains a pleasant three-foot table for you to eat your meals at. And if you enjoy more of a, uh, liquid dinner, fear not, for your evening nightcap and morning hangover is not far out of reach. The Lampifier comes with two bottles of your favorite hooch built into it. Your choice of liquor is also accompanied by six glasses if you were so inclined to share (or are the specific kind of alcoholic that needs a new glass each round). You’ll also find a small table holding a telephone. The phone itself is included with the purchase of the Lampifier, making it the only smartphone that serves you liquor (until they make the iPhone XXX).
The very bottom of the Lampifier is an umbrella stand built into a flower pot. The flowers are then watered by the run-off from your umbrella, though it’s rather incredulous to believe that it rains enough for the flowers to be satiated year-round. Though we suppose it could also catch any spilled soda water from mixing your six cocktails. The stand has space for four umbrellas and comes with a matching his-and-hers pair. To top it all off — the umbrella stand also houses a sterling silver ashtray and a three-tiered magazine rack.
If the amount of freebies this product includes isn’t already overwhelming, what really takes the cake is that the Lampifier is topped with a canary cage and a live bird. Slap some wheels on the bottom of this baby, and you have the single most versatile home furnishing that anyone has ever conceived of. …
RELATED: You Can Now Email A Literal Dumpster Fire Emblazoned with ‘2020’
Have you had enough of this damn year? Have you moved well beyond the banana bread, organizing, and sweatpants, phases of quarantine, longing for a new way to express your inner rage as we enter the second wave? Have your neighbors gotten sick of you screaming into the void? (a.k.a. your pillow at 3 a.m.) Do you wish you could just watch the dumpster fire that has been the past 365 days burn from afar … literally? Well, reader, do I have some good news. You can now email an actual dumpster fire, where your message will be gloriously tossed into a burning trash receptacle emblazoned with “2020” via conveyer belt as the entire process is live-streamed both on Twitch and the organization’s HEY Email Research Lab’s website.
“What’s this experiment all about?” asks a box on HERL’s site, entitled notes.txt “Well, 2020’s been a rough year. An absolute dumpster fire of a year for a lot of people. That’s when it came to us. Can email be a conduit for catharsis? If you could type out an email, press send, and see it being consumed in an actual dumpster fire, would it help reclaim a little bit of what we’ve lost? Let’s find out.” The endeavor works fairly simply. Send any text or image you want to destroy in a blaze of glory to their email (“PG-13 rules apply”), live stream the entire fiasco, and “experience catharsis.” Let’s hope this works — we need a metric crapton of catharsis right about now.
So who exactly is behind this glorious disaster? Well, aside from the Where’s Waldo costume and hoodie sporting strangers who occasionally tend to the blaze, the project is the brainchild of HEY Email research labs related to software company, Basecamp’s HEY email division. “Here at the HEY Email Research Lab, we take great pride in pushing the bounds of email technology,” reads the site’s about page. “We leave no stone unturned or avenue unexplored in pursuit of this lofty goal. Do our experiments have practical applications for HEY? Not usually. But damn it, we’re SCIENTISTS. We leave it to the suits upstairs to figure out the rest.”
Despite Basecamp only existing since 1999, they claim to have been around for approximately five decades and have several activities their “interns” can complete. “Unfortunately, our budget has been frozen since the late 1970’s. To be honest, we’re not actually sure the big wigs know our department exists anymore. We put in a request for a new mainframe years ago…”
Whoever this mysterious team is, it seems they were definitely forward-thinking, launching the feature just in time for everyone’s favorite Seinfeld-originating, grievance-airing holiday, Festivus. After all, as @CoachMoneyball wrote in a Twitter post immortalized by Hey Alma, “I think at the end of 2020 the airing of grievances is going to take longer than usual this Festivus,” so we better start soon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to email a copy of this article to the 2020 dumpster fire, where it belongs alongside all the other relics of this damn year. Happy Holidays, folks! …
The Logic of Pandemic Restrictions Is Falling Apart
This is why you can eat in a restaurant but can’t have Thanksgiving.
Two weeks ago, I staged a reluctant intervention via Instagram direct message. The subject was a longtime friend, Josh, who had been sharing photos of himself and his fiancé occasionally dining indoors at restaurants since New York City, where we both live, had reopened them in late September. At first, I hadn’t said anything. Preliminary research suggests that when people congregate indoors, an infected person is almost 20 times more likely to transmit the virus than if they were outside. But restaurants are open legally in New York, and I am not the COVID police. Josh and I had chatted several times in the early months of the pandemic about safety, and I felt sure that he was making an informed decision, even if it wasn’t the one I’d make.
As weeks passed, my confidence began to slip. The number of daily new cases in NYC started to balloon, heightening the risk of transmission in any closed space, but Josh kept going to restaurants. Maybe he was misunderstanding something about the risk. Maybe he’d want to know. The next time he posted about COVID-19, I told him, as gently as I could, that if he was trying to stay safe, it would be a good idea to stop dining indoors.
My suspicions were correct. Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe. He and his fiancé had even gone one extra step, making a Google Map of places they knew were being particularly strict with temperature checks. They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.
Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe? …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Stephen and A Late Show’s writers were so taken by the mystery of an unexplained monolith found in the Utah desert that they were compelled to devote the entire monologue to it. Thankfully, the monolith allowed time for updates on the president’s pardoning of Michael Flynn and his speakerphone antics at Rudy Giuliani’s sham hearing in Pennsylvania.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Trump and his gang of very bad lawyers laying the groundwork to spend four years baselessly claiming the election was stolen from him.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
新しい家族が増えました。道路わきの側溝で雨に濡れていたところを保護された子で、2カ月くらいの女の子です。This is Maru’s new family. She is a kitten about two months old, protected by a gutter on the side of the road.
FINALLY . . .
‘All we could do was run’: the strange story of Gerald, the turkey who terrorized a city
When the bird who dominated Oakland’s rose garden turned violent, the question of his fate caused ‘rifts that will never heal’
THE TURKEY LOCKED EYES WITH her from across the park.
Like many Oaklanders, sixteen-year-old Jojo Thompson had heard plenty of stories about Gerald, the “feisty” turkey harassing visitors in the city’s rose garden. But before visiting the seven-acre public park with a friend on a recent October afternoon, she thought the tales had been exaggerated.
After seeing the agitated turkey closing in on some people nearby, Thompson and her friend took refuge behind a tree. But they weren’t safe for long – Gerald soon had the teens in his sight. The bird started stalking them, menacingly, Thompson recalled, then chased them up the hill and out of the park. She lost both her shoes in the process.
“I had heard of his attacks, but I never thought it would happen to me,” Thompson said. “All we could do was run.”
Gerald’s unusually aggressive behavior in the rose garden has taken on an almost mythical status in parts of the California city over the past six months. Stories of his reign of terror in the otherwise tranquil spot first spread across town, then sparked national and international headlines.
The reports were often similar: Gerald would spot an unsuspecting victim from across the garden. He would take off running, either chasing them away or, if they stood their ground, mounting and scratching them until they fled. He often targeted the young and older people – those who could not quickly outrun him. He seemed particularly attracted to wheeled vehicles including, unfortunately, baby strollers. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
The Bureau of Land Management is investigating after a helicopter crew in Utah stumbled upon a shiny metallic monolith standing roughly 10 feet tall in a remote area of the state, which they believe may be an illegal art installation. #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/TvmpresHs0 pic.twitter.com/n9ZTvGYUh8
— The Onion (@TheOnion) November 26, 2020
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
