December 13, 2020 in 2,632 words

_{• • • an aural noise • • •}

word salad: The album VOLAR is an invitation from Ensancha el Alma to create a chill out album, the result is Electronic music, chill out, emotional, deep, contemplative, and calm but danceable bpm trance.

A story that starts with magical and deep, ethereal journeys. Soundscapes that then advance to more glitchy sides of electronics and sound movements. It changes in the final music of a soft, shamanic, subtle and psychedelic trance, with a slight touch of goatrance.

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

Spijkenisse, Netherlands: ‘Saved by a Whale’s Tail’

_{This unique sculpture proved invaluable when it saved a train from careening off the tracks.}

_{‘Saved by a Whale’s Tail’ ~ Embiggenable ~ Explore at home}

AT THE DE AKKERS METRO station in Rotterdam’s suburb of Spijkenisse on November 2nd, 2020, a metro train breached the station’s end barriers and nearly plummeted over 30 feet from the elevated rails. All that saved the train and its operator was the fact the front carriage was caught and held aloft by one of two whale tail sculptures near the end of the track.

The driver, the only person aboard at the time, sustained no injuries and was able to leave the vehicle—all while his two-ton carriage was perilously perched upon the fluke of the sculpture.

The two plastic tails stand equal in height to the metros rails, at around 30 feet, they are true to the scale of a real blue whale’s tail. The artwork was installed as a visual pun, as De Akkers station is the end, or tail, of the metro line. In a further play on words nobody expected, the train came to rest on the tail, also known as a whale’s fluke.

The sculptures originally named “Walvisstaarten” (“Whale Tails”), were created and erected in 2002 by a team of architects, artists, and engineers. Following the miraculous events of November 2nd however, local authorities renamed it “Saved by a Whale’s Tail.” …

RELATED: Ivo Zdarsky Is Waiting Out the End Times in His Own Utah Ghost Town
_{The Iron Curtain escapee, DIY aviator, and thriving entrepreneur is ready for anything.}

_{Welcome to Lucin, Utah: population 1. Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

IVO ZDARSKY DOES NOT TALK a big game. He has a gentle, easygoing manner and a gap-toothed smile, with a staccato laugh and a soft voice. He pauses sometimes before he speaks, measuring his words, which are pronounced in a gentle Eastern European accent, a vestige of his youth in Czechoslovakia.

Zdarsky does, however, live in a big house. In an airplane hangar, actually, in Lucin, Utah, an abandoned railroad town of which he’s the sole inhabitant.

“I don’t like walls,” he says. “So half of it is a hangar, and the other half of it is a man cave.” The building is 100 feet by 50 feet, and the man cave is “just one big giant room” inside, next to a workspace and two airplanes: a Cessna Skyhawk* and an experimental craft that’s “like a helicopter and an airplane in one machine.”

Zdarsky spends most of his days alone, tinkering around with different pet projects—the helicopter-plane is just one of the things he’s constantly working on and thinking about. Recently he’s been trying to take the hangar and the man cave completely off the grid, to pull himself even further away from other people. Right now, as he sees it, that’s the smart thing to do. But he can still get lonely—he still sometimes hungers for human interaction—and when he does he turns to the TV. Zdarsky watches a lot of TV.

_{The man in his cave.}

…

Trump Allies Eye Long-Shot Election Reversal in Congress, Testing Pence

_{Some House Republicans plan to try to use Congress’s tallying of electoral results on Jan. 6 to tip the election to President Trump. The attempt will put Republicans in a pinch.}

_{The ensuing fight promises to shape how President Trump’s base views the election for years to come. It goes somewhere.}

President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result. …

A doctor on 9 things that could go wrong with the new vaccines

_{By worrying together, we can prevent much of this from happening.}

_{Nurses check the dose amount of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine before a husband and wife receive the injection in Essex, England.}

Think of the achievement. Within a month of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — its genome was sequenced. Three months later, the first vaccine candidates were being injected into human volunteers in clinical trials.

Now, less than 12 months after the first case was identified in Wuhan, China, the US is slated to initiate the largest mass-vaccination program in its history. Few achievements in modern science rival the speed and the audacity of the coronavirus vaccine program. With the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine’s imminent emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, it feels as though the long dark of the pandemic — which has claimed over 283,000 American lives and more than 1.5 million worldwide — will soon be relegated to the litany of global tragedies, a thing of the past.

As a physician, clinical researcher, and epidemiologist, I am thrilled with the vaccine data so far. The 95 percent efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines is unprecedented and better than any of us hoped for.

But we need to be careful. We need to temper our enthusiasm with the acknowledgment that the vaccine is a weapon we may not be fully prepared to wield.

A lot can still go wrong.

I lay out my worries here not as a wet blanket, but because I am a worrier. And, like all the worriers out there, one of the reasons I worry is to ensure the things I worry about don’t actually come to pass.

By worrying together, we can prevent much of this from happening. I’m providing my worries in a convenient list format, from low probability to high. …

You Have An Ugly, Noisy Radiator Because Of Pandemic

We’ve all lived in those terrible, old, cheap buildings that seem to be held together by Elmer’s Glue, let more of the outside in than they keep out, and boast as their crowning jewel a big, clunky, silver accordion of metal to (over)heat the place.

It might seem like a relic from a time when electricity was popularly thought to be witchcraft, and it is, but it’s more clever than it lets on. It dates back to a time when people were reeeeally close to figuring out what causes disease, noting that people who spent a lot of time in enclosed spaces with other people tended to get sick and deciding it was caused by a lack of fresh air. They were only wrong in the sense that the stale air has to also contain another person’s germs, but it turned out that encouraging people to get outdoors and keep their windows open was still pretty helpful to public health. When the 1918 flu pandemic came along, it was mandatory. Literally: Big cities ordered their residents to keep their windows open, even on the most frigid days. That meant people were gonna need some big-ass radiators to keep themselves warm, and just like that, the bane of every college dorm was born. …

RELATED: The Bizarre 18th-Century Secret High-Society Cult About … Pugs?

Inherently sly and sinister, secret societies are, by nature, risky things to be a part of. So if you are going to risk your job, home, and maybe even your life to be part of such a club, it better have a cool name with a cool mascot. Like the Society of the Serpent. Or the House of the Raven. Or, in the case of one 18th century sect, the secret Order of the Who’s a Precious Pup Yes You Are Yes You Are.

You’d think that Catholicism and Freemasonry would get along like an atheist’s house on fire. They both love to wear fancy robes, suppress women, and hide their treehouse club-nature behind excessive symbolism. But little over a century after its well-crafted foundation, Freemasons were banned from the Catholic Church by Pope Clement XI under punishment of excommunication. But one group of German Freemasons, led by the Archbishop of Cologne, figured out a loophole. They would just create their own secret society. With para-Freemasonic ideals. And pugs.

This led to the creation of the secret Order of the Pug (Mops-Orden in German). Why name yourself after the canine equivalent of a flattened penny? Because pugs were fashionable in the 18th century and, more importantly, were seen as undyingly loyal and unflappable. (Except, of course, for their many skin flaps). And the Freemason Order of the Pug really went all-in with the short-pawed symbolism. Initiates to the order had to wear a dog collar and scratch the front gate in order to be let into the secret meeting room. Once inside, they would be blindfolded, barked at by the big dog members, and forced to kiss the anus of the chapter’s mascot pug — only afterward revealed to be a porcelain doll.

…

The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn’s Treasure

_{The decade-long hunt captured the world’s attention, but when it finally ended in June, everyone still wanted to know: Who had solved the mystery? This week, as legal proceedings threaten his anonymity, a 32-year-old medical student is ready to go on the record.}

It took two months of correspondence before the man who found Forrest Fenn’s treasure told me his name.

We’d been emailing since September, and I honestly didn’t expect to ever know who he really was. I was fine with that; as a fellow treasure hunter, I completely understood his desire for anonymity.

Since 2017, I had been pursuing Fenn’s treasure, too, becoming a kinda-sorta searcher in order to tell the story of Fenn’s hunt in my upcoming book Chasing the Thrill, to be published by Knopf in June. I’d been in the trenches, read Fenn’s clue-filled poem over and over, ended up in places I probably shouldn’t have been, and gone to places where other people died trying to find it.

A decade ago, Fenn hid his treasure chest, containing gold and other valuables estimated to be worth at least a million dollars, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Not long after, he published a memoir called The Thrill of the Chase, which included a mysterious 24-line poem that, if solved, would lead searchers to the treasure. Fenn had suggested that the loot was secreted away at the place where he had envisioned lying down to die, back when he’d believed a 1988 cancer diagnosis was terminal. Since the hunt began in 2010, many thousands of searchers had gone out in pursuit—at least five of them losing their lives in the process—and the chase became an international story.

So many people had invested and sacrificed so much in pursuit of Fenn’s treasure that it was possible the finder would face threats, be they legal or physical, from people who resented them or wished them ill. …

New Jersey Vineyard Owner Could Be the Source of Mysterious Booms Driving an Entire Town Crazy

_{Police are investigating a series of loud noises annoying the residents of Mullica Township.}

_{Embiggenable. Explore at home. Explore here, too.}

Earlier this month, 911 dispatchers in Mullica Township, New Jersey started fielding dozens of calls from residents who reported hearing—and feeling—a series of powerfully loud sounds. One caller said that the blast “shook my entire house,” another felt like it was “blowing our house off the foundation,” while a third reported that it sounded like “a bomb dropped from a plane.”

Mullica Township Police Chief Brian Zeck told NJ.com that the department was investigating (and trying to eliminate) the source of the booms; they quickly ruled out military planes at the New Jersey National Guard Base, commercial flights landing at Atlantic City International Airport, and hunters who were out for deer and duck seasons.

“We don’t know where it’s coming from,” Zeck said last week. “We’re weeding out the sounds of fireworks. We haven’t found the source of a detonation.”

But a man in nearby Hammonton has admitted that his homemade “hail cannon” might be what is driving Mullica Township mad. Rob Butkowski made the 16-foot long cannon from junk metal, scrapped street signs, and a modified propane tank, and he uses it to keep birds from eating the grapes in his vineyard. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

President Trump shows no signs of conceding the election to Joe Biden, but why is that such a big deal? If you don’t know, now you know.

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

どのくらい小さな箱ならば入ることを諦めるのでしょうか。When Maru found a smaller box, do you think that he gives up entering?

FINALLY . . .

Aliens Off The Hook: The Story Behind the ‘Monolith’

_{Embiggenable. Explore at home.}

DEC. 2 WAS THE DAY ATASCADERO officially entered the national lexicon thanks to the installation of a giant steel monolith at the summit of Pine Mountain. With its origin, a mystery, the internet, and its 7 billion detectives went to work guessing who, what and why this monolith appeared and turned the town forever into a Final Jeopardy answer.

Many speculated that the mystery object with a mesmerizing metal shimmer had to be the work of some major production company or movie studio preparing for a worldwide release. While those that thought it was a marketing stunt bickered over what movie was coming out next, others pondered if it might have been planted here but our very own space invaders.

For 12 hours, though, Atascadero was the place to be in America. The next morning, tourists from Fresno, Visalia, Ventura, and many areas in the county ventured to the top of the Pine Mountain to see the San Lucia Mountain range’s reflection in the shine of the steel. Instead, they found some exposed rebar and a hole in the ground where the monument once stood.

However, unlike its appearance, a video of a group of teens tearing it down removed all doubt as to if the aliens had returned for their mystery item. For a day, the City sat still, almost unsure how to react to a group of guys coming into their town and removing something that many had claimed as theirs. …

FDEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: It’s back, this time cemented in.

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

ONE MORE THING:

BREAKING: Wait—Sorry, False Alarm https://t.co/m2C9va9auu pic.twitter.com/jYS1jLvS3d

— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 12, 2020

The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020