• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: The album describes and illustrates feelings, messages and insights from tribal ceremonies. A journey in consciousness to other dimensions and an encounter with the being of nature that surrounds us.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Before WallStreetBets, there were the Wooden Shillings, a group of numerically adept London street urchins who were single-handedly responsible for the Far Orient Trading Company’s disastrous implosion in 1815.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 28, 2021
Meet the Most Passionate Admirers of India’s Rail Network
The Indian Railways Fan Club unites thousands to talk trains, tracks, and subcontinental travel.
A narrow-gauge Indian Railways train navigates the Himalayan foothills around Darjeeling in West Bengal. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
MANI VIJAY REMEMBERS HIS MOTHER TELLING him how, as a child, he would move a measuring tape across the table, mimicking the movement of a train. The IT professional, who grew up in India and is now based in New Hampshire, says he has been passionate about trains for as long as he can remember. There is something about the Indian Railways (IR) in particular, he says—the romance, the chaos, the sounds, smells, and diversity, the nostalgia too—that has sustained his railfanning from childhood until well into his adult life.
In the pre-internet days of the 1980s, when pursuing hobbies meant a lot more physical engagement than a quick web search on the go, Vijay would hover around a distant uncle who worked in the railways. That uncle taught him about the kinds of trains and their various distinctions, and gave him access to engine sheds, locos, and precious memorabilia from the IR. All the while, Vijay wondered if his intense passion for everything railways was a quirk he alone possessed. But after a 1985 move to the United States to study, he met a roommate who loved trains just as much. In 1989, following a serendipitous email exchange with another student from another university, Vijay and a motley crew of Indian railfans, all students then, set up a private mailing list to discuss all things rail.
Mani Vijay has been a railway fan his whole life.
Thus was born IRFCA—Indian Railways Fan Club of America, since the nine founding members were all living in the United States at that time. Today, the club has a ginormous website with an intricate web of facts, photographs, technical data, and resources so well organized that IR officials themselves have been known to consult its archives, albeit not in their official capacities.
The Indian Railways is famously among the 10 largest employers in the world, with about 1.4 million employees. The rail system has over 76,000 miles of track and transports over eight billion people a year. It is often called the lifeline of India, and rightly so, for it remains the cheapest way to travel across the vast country. The drastic differences in landscape, languages, and food available at the stations on an average long train journey makes the IR a flag-bearer for India’s diverse socio-cultural realities. This rose-tinted nostalgia for the romance that rail travel promised has held a large space in the childhoods of millions of Indians. …
This breakthrough WWII avionics technology ultimately resulted in the Clarinaud, the world’s least successful bathroom accessory.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 27, 2021
RELATED: Bainbridge Island, Washington: The Labyrinth Mosaic and Halls Hill Lookout
Overlooking Puget Sound sits a garden with a Buddhist prayer wheel and an elaborate labyrinth.
The 12 rings represent a variety of celestial, seasonal, and Native American Meanings. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
DRIVE AROUND THE FOREST-LADEN BAINBRIDGE ISLAND and it’s easy to forget that downtown Seattle is just 30-minutes away. A well-to-do suburb across the Puget Sound, Bainbridge is home to a quaint downtown area, hiking, and biking paths. It’s also home to a garden labyrinth based on the 13th-century French Chartres Cathedral.
Designed by the Portland-based garden designer and stone artist Jeffrey Bale, the garden sits on a hilltop overlooking the Puget Sound. Consisting of 12 circles that tie the labyrinth to both lunar and seasonal cycles, the labyrinth also features Native American symbology and celestial references.
It’s said that the path has three stages, the inward journey, the outward journey, and a place for meditation and contemplation.
The garden also has a network of paths, several stone sculptures, and a Buddhist prayer wheel that when turned nine times rings a 500-pound bell. The bell contains the inscriptions:
“Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”
“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.”.
…
It wasn’t until 1976 that the Royal Family acknowledged the existence of this demonic tea-set.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 27, 2021
The Night of the Rubber Knives
Republicans appear poised to flinch from reality, protect Trump, and betray the country.
Forty-five senators voted yesterday not to proceed with a second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. That should come as some relief for the ex-president: Twice impeached, he will likely be twice acquitted. But how much relief?
The Senate will still hold a trial. The whole country will again view the video of Trump inciting a crowd to attack Congress as he aimed to coerce his own vice president into somehow overturning the 2020 election. They will see the scenes of violence and death wrought by Trump supporters—supporters who plastered their crimes all over social media because they trusted Trump to protect and pardon them.
Trump wants Senate Republicans to defend him; most Senate Republicans want Trump to go away.
The table is set for both to be badly disappointed—and to turn on each other.
On January 13, 232 House members voted to impeach Trump a second time. Ten House Republicans joined all the House Democrats. That day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement declaring that the Senate would not proceed until after Trump left office on January 20. McConnell’s decision, taken on behalf of the Republican caucus, pushed the trial into the next presidential term—and opened the question of whether a president can be tried after he leaves office.
By postponing the start of the trial in this way, McConnell created the excuse that Senator Rand Paul invoked in his motion yesterday: that it is illegal or improper to try a president after he leaves office for an offense he committed while in office. Whatever the merits of that argument—precedent goes the other way—it’s not one that will please or assuage Trump himself. …
‘A Total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump
Members of the far-right group, who were among Donald Trump’s staunchest fans, are calling him “weak” as more of them were charged for storming the U.S. Capitol.
Members of the Proud Boys, who have engaged in political violence, at a rally in Portland, Ore., in September.
After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump.
In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail Emperor Trump,” the Proud Boys wrote.
But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.
As Mr. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. They have also urged supporters to stop attending rallies and protests held for Mr. Trump or the Republican Party.
The comments are a startling turn for the Proud Boys, which for years had backed Mr. Trump and promoted political violence. Led by Enrique Tarrio, many of its thousands of members were such die-hard fans of Mr. Trump that they offered to serve as his private militia and celebrated after he told them in a presidential debate last year to “stand back and stand by.” On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members stormed the U.S. Capitol. …
RELATED: Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant
Extremist leader repeatedly worked undercover for investigators after his arrest in 2012, former prosecutor and court files reveal.
Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys leader during a march into Freedom Plaza, in Washington DC on 12 December 2020.
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.
In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.
Tarrio, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, denied working undercover or cooperating in cases against others. “I don’t know any of this,’” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”
Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”. …
7 Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Grifter Trump Kids’ Books
The moment Biden took power, grifters across the land could no longer receive a giant sack of money for farting out book-length Twitter threads declaring Trump a genius or supervillain.
But in a world where people had the audacity to charge 20 bucks for a book comparing Trump to Winston Churchill, children’s books about Trump carved out their own special circle of hell. So let’s take a moment to remember these crimes against the English language before they are forever buried in the darkest corners of used book stores across the land …
7. How the People Trumped Ronald Plump Was A Moronic, Premature Cash-In
The Krassenstein brothers represented everything wrong with people who thought that tweeting “The Resistance won’t let President Cheeto Butt get away with this!” whenever Trump got away with something was the zenith of democratic engagement. Their pivot from Ponzi scheme hucksters to making the dumbest people in your yoga class believe that Trump was perpetually on the verge of defeat culminated in 2018’s How the People Trumped Ronald Plump, a book for parents who got mad at their child’s Kindergarten curriculum for not including the vegan perspective on Iran-Contra. While most infamous for portraying Robert Mueller as a bangable Ubermensch …
… there was also a “Persistent Warren” homunculi escaping from the President’s bag o’ rape (but, you know, a family-friendly one) …
… the villainous Loudimir Tootin (got his ass) …
… and horrible hair jokes that somehow didn’t topple Trump’s presidency.
The Krassensteins were mercifully banned from Twitter for “purchasing account interactions” and, God willing, will never be mentioned again until one of them murders the other during a passionate argument over what to call their cryptocurrency newsletter. …
Health Department Gives Tyson Plant ‘D’ Grade After Discovering Raw Chicken Contaminated Nearly Every Surface https://t.co/imXzOIzxSk pic.twitter.com/9RYtNSXdqM
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 28, 2021
RELATED: Ex VP Mike Pence is Reportedly ‘Couch Surfing’ Through Indiana After Getting Booted From Office
As Donald Trump enjoys his post-White House life in his Twitter-less Floridian Mar a Lago estate, former Vice President Mike Pence’s whereabouts after vacating One Observatory Circle last week are a bit more unclear, sparking questions of whether America’s ex second in command is just couch surfing his way through Indiana. Millionaire government higher-ups — they’re just like your annoying crust-punk acquaintance, down to the fly in his questionable-looking hair.
During his farewell address last week, Pence said that he and his wife, who is very appropriately named Karen, would be “moving back to Indiana come this summer” leaving out any specific details of their future abode. “There’s no place like home,” he said later in the address. Despite ex the VP’s nostalgic and #relatable Wizard of Oz reference, records show that the Pences haven’t actually owned property in approximately eight years, as before living in Washington D.C.’s U.S. Naval Observatory during his four-year term as VP, the Pences lived in Indiana’s Governor’s Residence, near downtown Indianapolis.
Lacking permanent quarters, politicians close with the former second couple say they’ve been couch surfing, reportedly staying at the “dolled-up” retreat cabin of current Indiana governor Eric Joseph Holcomb, whatever tf that means, and living a home that allegedly belongs to Pence’s brother in his hometown of Columbus, according to Business Insider. You’d think with all this new time on his hands not being VP and his reported $1 million net worth, Pence would have more than enough resources to find himself a nice house instead of pestering his inner circle. But hey, I guess we all need that annoying friend who only ever hits you up when they’re visiting from out of town and don’t want to pay for a hotel. Keepin’ it classy, Pence! …
From The Archives: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion https://t.co/3eywkuczVA pic.twitter.com/cllkTwtrjS
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 28, 2021
RELATED: Sorry, The Oval Office ‘Diet Coke Button’ Predates Trump By Decades
If you’ve been floating along on a Leslie Knopian cloud of relief ever since Biden’s election and the words “Diet Coke button” mean nothing to you, we really hate to ruin this for you, but many people are only now becoming aware of the existence of a red button on the famous Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that former President Trump used to summon a butler carrying a bottle of Diet Coke on a silver tray. He also sometimes let people think it was the button that launches the nukes and scared the hell out of them. Even a broken clock tells a good joke exactly once.
Following Biden’s inauguration, the media seems engaged in some kind of Button Watch over whether or not he removed the button, which is all kind of pointless, because the button has a long and mostly uncarbonated history. It might date back as far as President Johnson, who was said to have “had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office” to warn him when his wife was nearby so she wouldn’t catch him banging one of the many groupies he apparently had.
…
YouTube Removes Thousands Of Underperforming Covid Misinformation Videos https://t.co/j0FlkvkLqN pic.twitter.com/WAHnBB6LYT
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 27, 2021
Cash injection: could we cure all disease with a trillion dollars?
Could such a large amount of money end the Covid pandemic? Eradicate disease? Provide universal healthcare and fund vaccine research?
You know that daydream where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had $1tn to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world – make some real difference to people’s lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.
A trillion dollars – that’s one thousand billion dollars – is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1% of world GDP. It’s what the US spends every year and a half on the military. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which is officially the mass purchase of government bonds, but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5tn was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way.
And it is not just governments that have this kind of money. Two of the world’s biggest companies, Microsoft and Amazon, are each worth more than $1tn; Apple stock is valued at $2tn. The world’s richest 1% together own a staggering $162tn. That’s 45% of all global wealth. At the start of 2020, private equity firms held $1.45tn in what they call “dry powder”, and what the rest of us call “cash”: piles of money sitting around awaiting investment. Just imagine what you could do with it.
Since the coronavirus hit, as after the 2008 crash, money has suddenly been found. Tens of trillions of dollars in economic stimulus packages are being chopped up, partitioned, allocated, siphoned. What if we could spend that cash? If only we could divert some of it, scrape a bit here and there from governments and banks, or quantitatively ease $1tn into existence and spend it before anyone noticed. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine what we could achieve.
Let’s take just one example: healthcare. You could eradicate malaria – hell, you could attempt to cure all diseases. Let’s say our aim is to protect humanity from the next pandemic, create a new field of human biology, transform the human experience by curing, preventing or treating all known diseases. If it sounds like I’m getting carried away, all these ideas are projects that scientists are thinking about and even working on, but are hampered by lack of resources. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
The Myth That Gets Men Out of Doing Chores
They’re just as good at recognizing messes as women—they just don’t feel the same pressure to clean them up.
When you think of messiness, you might think of the unsavory ways it manifests: sweaty socks left on the floor, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter. Messes themselves are easy to identify, but the patterns of behavior that produce them are a bit more nuanced. Really, messiness has two ingredients: making messes, and then not cleaning them up.
There is a widely held belief that boys—and later on, men—are particularly messy. At least some grounds for this stereotype exist, but sex has little to do with it. “There’s no evidence of inherent, biologically based sex differences in cleanliness or messiness,” Susan McHale, a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, told me. She said innate preferences for orderliness might vary from child to child, but cultural factors have a significant influence, and it’s worth investigating which half of the messiness recipe is driving the gender disparity.
People’s mess-creating tendencies have not attracted much attention from researchers, but sex does not seem to be a reliable predictor of some innate ability to muck up a space. “Going to college, I wanted to move out of the dorms because the girls’ bathroom was disgusting,” Amanda Rodriguez, the author of the parenting blog Dude Mom and the mother of three teenage boys, told me. “I think that girls have it in ’em. They can do it just as well as boys can.”
Which leaves the second half of the messiness equation: the likelihood that someone cleans up a mess once it’s made. As researchers have studied gender imbalances in how couples divvy up housework, one common but flimsy rationalization they hear from men in different-sex relationships is that women have higher standards of cleanliness or are simply better at managing housework, so it’s only natural that they’d do more of it. For instance, Darcy Lockman, the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, quotes a dad reflecting on his household contributions:
When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.
…
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Biden calls for unity, but is that even possible?
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Redditors boost the stock price of GameStop to insane numbers, the pandemic possibly creates a baby bust, and the Baseball Hall of Fame inducts no new players this year.
If the Pence family shows up at your door, are you letting him crash?
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
President Biden is busy cleaning up his predecessor’s messes, among them this country’s relationship with Russia, and Stephen was caught off guard by the new administration’s return to norms around transparency in foreign policy.
It turns out that Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” had nothing to do with a vaccine roll-out and everything to do with how quickly Trump worked to destroy America! Now it’s up to the Biden administration to get millions of Americans vaccinated.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Being an endangered animal isn’t a competition, but it becomes one when pandas get all the attention at the expense of other, more unfortunate-looking creatures. Sam highlights animals that are more important to our ecosystem than those zoo-royalty attention hogs.
Seth takes a closer look at Republicans admitting they will do everything possible to sabotage the Democrats’ agenda while moving quickly to quash the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
小さい箱にすっぽり収まるまる。The small box is perfect for Maru!
FINALLY . . .
Imagining the Future Amid Alejandro Cardenas’s Profound, Brooding Canvases
In “ALEXANDRIA,” bright stripes and zigzags pop against sprawling environments, telegraphing both impressive depth and intense seclusion.
Alejandro Cardenas, “If this were to continue” (2020), acrylic on canvas, 48 x 65 inches. Embiggenable.
In David Lynch’s surreal crime drama Twin Peaks (1990), the most recondite, plot-turning scenes happen in the Black Lodge — specifically, in its Red Room: a depth-deceiving, austere sitting area cordoned off by velvet curtains. There, spectral versions of people converse with barely intelligible intonations and long pauses that incite anticipation.
The ethereal quality of the Red Room emanates throughout nearly every artwork in ALEXANDRIA, Alejandro Cardenas’s first solo show with Almine Rech. The artist created each piece in this presentation amidst the ravage of the pandemic and wildfires that engulfed Los Angeles in 2020, and it shows. From prophetic apricot skies, to barren spaces and isolated characters, the allusions in this exhibit all feel like simulacra of the moment.
Alejandro Cardenas, “If it strikes” (2020), acrylic on canvas, 40 x 32 inches. Embiggenable.
The work sits along the east and west wings of the gallery — a nod to the way global scholarship melded in the Egyptian city of Alexandria during the Hellenistic period, one of the inspirations for the title of the show. The paintings in the west wing are grouped by their forest green color palettes, while those on the east side all bear sterile, marble backgrounds. Though the minimalist backdrops, which Cardenas calls “non-spaces,” vary in hue, every acrylic features at least one otherworldly, gender-ambiguous character evincing an emotive pose. These figures — who simultaneously evoke Dali’s Surrealism and Avatar — are emblematic of Cardenas’s work, but feel particularly evocative in the pandemic era.
Installation view of ALEXANDRIA, Almine Rech, 2021 Embiggenable.
The artist’s claymation-like humanoids are faceless, but affecting: in “If this were to continue” (2020), a creature painted violet and chartreuse bears down on the floor across from its brooding cyan and copper counterpart. These characters’ body language emotes the exasperation of a harrowing breakup, or perhaps a natural disaster. In “If it strikes” (2020), a pastel figure cocks its hips left as if posing in a Spring/Summer 2021 show. What these characters lack in grins and scowls, they make up for in gestures. Standing in their company, I’m immediately reminded of the bodily hyperbole required to show affection while wearing a mask. Bright stripes and zigzags allow the personalities in these paintings to pop against their sprawling environments, telegraphing both impressive depth and intense seclusion. Perhaps that’s why the sculptures in this show, “Continuous Sentry and Sea Krait” (2021) and “Sea Krait Gerwalk mode” (2021) — hollow silhouettes that perch in the middle of each wing of the gallery — don’t elicit the same intrigue as the acrylics. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Specially engineered to acclimate your hot or cold beverage to room temperature over time. https://t.co/5tXfoiJdcJ pic.twitter.com/g36BQyf7vs
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 28, 2021
