• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Expasion Of Peace, is an album full of good vibes since all over the world we are going through a serious situation where our loved ones have stood in the face of danger, many of us have suffered and moved forward, that is why this album is a call to peace, in our family, our being and our environment.
Ed. In the comments: “Nice Salad”
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Moliagul, Australia: The Welcome Stranger Monument
This stone obelisk commemorates the discovery of the world’s largest gold nugget.
The Welcome Stranger Monument. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IN THE 1850S THOUSANDS OF people traveled to Victoria, Australia in search of fortune as part of the Victorian gold rush. The first recorded discovery of gold in the Moliagul area occured in September 1852.
Two miners, John Deason and Richard Oates originally from Conwell, England, both had small farms and staked a gold mining claim in the area. In February of 1869, Deason was breaking up the soil on the claim when he hit what he thought was a rock. After hitting it a second and third time, he cleared away the soil and unearthed the massive nugget.
Oates was busy plowing in his nearby paddock and was called up by Deason’s son. They covered the nugget and waited until it was safe to remove it and then took it to the Deason’s house.
Deason and Oates, accompanied by a bodyguard of friends, took the nugget into the town of Dunolly and sold it at the London Chartered Bank of Australia. Since there were no scales in the bank big enough to weigh the nugget, it was taken to a local blacksmith’s shop to be reduced in size. It’s believed the nugget as a whole weighed around 241 pounds before it was trimmed. …
PROTIP: While viewing locations on Google Earth, every once in a while hit the back button on your browser. Enjoy the trip. You’re welcome.
RELATED: With No Parade This Year, New Orleans Is Festooned With Mardi Gras ‘House Floats’
They’re uplifting spirits and local artists alike.
The first house float in the Krewe of Red Beans’ Hire a Mardi Artist program is “The Night Tripper.” Embiggenable. Explore at home. Freeway adjacent, just like Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
FOR MARDI GRAS 2021, WHEN THE very idea of a large, tightly packed crowd feels years away, New Orleans has adapted. Instead of floats following parade routes, the city’s artistic verve has turned its attention to dozens of homes and businesses across the city. They’ve been transformed into Bourbon Street–worthy thematic “house floats,” made by artists and everyday citizens. The mood-lifting response to the cancellation of the traditional events also helps support artists who would typically have year-round work preparing the gaudy, celebratory floats for their time in the spotlight.
The concept comes from Megan Boudreaux, a local who jokingly tweeted about making a krewe of her own—membership groups that stage parades and galas for Mardi Gras—after the official cancellation announcement in fall 2020. Her Krewe of House Floats Facebook launched on November 17. So far, 3,000 international members of the group plan to decorate their houses—among them an expat in Dubai—says Boudreaux, who has been named the “Admiral” of the fleet and is decorating her own home as the “USS House Float.”
This inspired Caroline Thomas, an artist who designs floats for the Krewe of Rex and Krewe of Proteus (both founded in the 19th century), to launch Hire a Mardi Gras Artist, which is organized by the Krewe of Red Beans. “You can’t imagine New Orleans without the float builders,” says Devin de Wulf, the founder and head of the krewe, which usually stages a walking parade on the eve of Mardi Gras and is named for the dish traditionally eaten that day. “We have to step up and create work for them.”
Dana Beuhler works on flowers for the “Birds of Bulbancha” house float.
Thomas and her team of 10 (one of six artistic teams), which she leads as the designer-art director, have so far completed four houses. Forty-five Mardi Gras artists and installation carpenters have been employed to work on 21 sites—“an entire parade” worth of floats, Thomas says—due to be completed by the week before the February 16 holiday. Each takes around two weeks, with entirely handmade elements. …
The GOP Is Still Here and Trumpism Isn’t Gone
Big hypocrite energy is still in our Congress. Make it stop.
Supporters wave to outgoing US President Donald Trump as he returns to Florida along the route leading to his Mar-a-Lago estate on January 20, 2021 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
For months prior to 45’s departure, speculation ensued that as soon as disgraced former President Donald J. Trump was out of office, the Republicans would run from him like America did his bleach injection comments. In almost every off-the-record political piece written there was a consistent theme of some type of quiet objection from the GOP. Murmurs of their fears of retribution if they dare object to his willful ignorance, blatant racism, and overall authoritarian whims allowed for the creation of empathy for their cowardice.
We read comments like, “this isn’t who the Republican Party is — they are being held hostage by a madman.” We clung to this idea that the entirety of Trumpism would fade into the dark cold night as soon as his exit was finally solidified. Americans told themselves this tall tale because the alternative was too much to bear. The alternative being that Trump is the GOP and the GOP is Trump. And the truth is that the GOP isn’t unwilling participants in the destruction of our democracy but instead they are willing accomplices.
During Trump’s four-year reign of terror, the GOP backed him 100%. They made legions of excuses about his abusive rhetoric and childish tantrums. When the insurrectionist melee exploded on January 6, we thought collectively: “This will be the final straw.” The GOP will walk away from their power-hungry and depraved leader whose hate speech left our Capitol building riddled with bullets, broken glass, and five lives lost. We were wrong. Hours following the attack on the Capitol, six senators returned to the floor and continued with their fruitless pursuit to stop the certification of the election and voted to overturn the will of the people with 121 House Republican members following suit.
Since that horrific day in our nation’s capital, we have learned more about Republican members giving reconnaissance tours to the terrorists the day before and now we have QAnon, gun-toting members calling for the execution of Democrats on their social media platforms. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is the embodiment of the new GOP which is in fact a domestic terrorist organization. In 2018 and 2019 videos and posts are being unearthed of the volatile GOP member encouraging violence against Democrats and using varied slurs to describe them. There are now calls for her removal from Congress and yet the GOP remains thoroughly silent. We have reached a point in our politics where the execution of a person once thought to be far-fetched or highly unlikely seems to be almost inevitable. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: America no longer has a two-party political system; we have one party and an anti-Democratic cult.
RELATED: Merrick Garland’s ‘flawless’ work in Oklahoma City crucial in white supremacy fight
Those who know the attorney general nominee from the 1995 case say the US could have no better ally in the battle against extremism.
Merrick Garland in Washington Through each turn of his career, Garland’s work in Oklahoma City has been revisited and commended.
The message was a stark one. “America is in serious decline,” the person wrote. “Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”
It reads like an entry on a message board popular with the insurrectionists who broke into the US Capitol on 6 January – expressing a sentiment at once shocking and shockingly routine in 2021 America.
But the words are from 1992 America, written in a letter to a newspaper by Timothy McVeigh, who three years later would carry out the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in US history. An anti-government, white supremacist army veteran, McVeigh set off a truck bomb underneath a day care facility in a federal building, killing 168 people including 19 children.
The attack spawned the largest criminal case in US history. With conspiracy theories threatening the public trust even in those relatively innocent times for the truth, and the contemporaneous murder trial of OJ Simpson having fed widespread disillusionment with the American justice system, federal prosecutors knew that they would be working under a microscope.
But the lead prosecutor dispatched by Washington to Oklahoma a day after the bombing, Merrick Garland, demonstrated a particularly honed sense for what the investigation required and how to deliver it, according to former colleagues. …
Superstar Cities Are in Trouble
The past year has offered a glimpse of the nowhere-everywhere future of work, and it isn’t optimistic for big cities.
SOME EVENINGS, WHEN pandemic cabin fever reaches critical levels, I relieve my claustrophobia by escaping into the dreamworld of Zillow, the real-estate website. From the familiar confines of my Washington, D.C., apartment, I teleport to a ranch on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho; to a patio nestled in the hillsides of Phoenix, Arizona; or to a regal living room in one of the baroque palaces of Plano, Texas.
Apparently, many of you are doing the same thing. Zillow searches have soared during the health crisis, according to Jeff Tucker, the company’s chief economist. “We’ve seen online searches for Boise, Phoenix, and Atlanta rising fastest among people who live in coastal cities, like Los Angeles and New York,” Tucker told me. Higher search volumes on Zillow have coincided with a booming housing market in the South and the West, as rents fall in expensive coastal cities.
Zillow tourism and a few affluent workers decamping for Atlanta might strike you as a fad—kind of like this whole remote-work moment. Indeed, if you’re lugging your computer to the living room every day to sit on the couch for eight hours, you might not be thinking to yourself, I’m practically starting the next industrial revolution.
But maybe you are. As a general rule of human civilization, we’ve lived where we work. More than 90 percent of Americans drive to work, and their average commute is about 27 minutes. This tether between home and office is the basis of urban economics. But remote work weakens it; in many cases, it severs the link entirely, replacing spatial proximity with cloud-based connectivity. What knock-on changes will this new industrial revolution bring? …
Rest Of Zoom Call Can Only Imagine Carnival Of Forbidden Mysteries Surrounding Coworker With Camera Turned Off https://t.co/oPsvBYLijO pic.twitter.com/nsBnMJEBXS
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 31, 2021
5 Unsolved Mysteries To Stroke Your Chin Over
Listen, we know it’s our responsibility to investigate every crime ever committed, but things have been hectic lately, and we’ve fallen behind. That’s why the following crimes remain officially unsolved. We have a couple theories, though. (Warning: They’re weird ones.)
5. Who Gassed The Furries?
In 2014, Midwestern furries held their convention in December, because while summer’s the most popular convention season overall, winter works fine when you’re wearing a giant animal costume. They met at a hotel by the airport in Chicago for three days of festivities, less than 20 percent of which involved furry sex. Then, late Saturday night, the smell of chlorine spread through the convention center. At first, everyone assumed this came from some vulpine body fluid, but it was poisonous chlorine gas, and 19 furries ended up hospitalized.
Chlorine gas leak sickens 19 at "FurFest" convention: http://t.co/lDd5nQlISX pic.twitter.com/LuC4q7KZiE
— NBC10 Philadelphia (@NBCPhiladelphia) December 7, 2014
The building was evacuated, and attendees huddling outside wondered what possibly could have sent the gas their way. Maybe it was a leak from the air conditioning system? Unlikely, as AC systems do not carry chlorine gas. Maybe it came from pool chemicals? Also unlikely, as the hotel did not have a pool. Technicians investigated the hotel while wearing masks (gas masks, not animal masks), and they found the source: a broken mason jar containing white powder. Someone had released the gas intentionally, declared the police.
Ten years ago, you see, the internet generally agreed that furries were the absolute lowest lifeform and deserved every kind of scorn. And maybe that was just a meme and few people had strong actual feelings either way, plus anti-furry sentiment largely vanished by the middle of the decade, but for a while, the hate was evidently real in some people. The December 2014 attack was the most concrete example of what the community refers to as fursecution.
In 2014 someone released chlorine gas at Midwest FurFest which evacuated the hotel, and they all gathered around to help keep this baby warm when the family had to run out in a hurry and didn’t have time to grab their coats pic.twitter.com/YffyKuK2Qp
— Nathan Bobinchak (@bobinchak) December 7, 2019
It was a difficult night, made slightly easier though by the presence of a large number of dogs from a K-9 convention held earlier that day. Police diligently spent weeks interviewing dozens of guests and staff as well as merchants who might have sold the chlorine powder, but the investigation bore no fruit. The furries will never know who gassed them that December. But in the years that followed, they used the experience to grow closer and bring new people into the community. Or became Nazis, whatever …
Cheech Marin Opens Art Museum #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/YpScBud7SG pic.twitter.com/SB9s8dpj82
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 1, 2021
RELATED: 15 Times Legal and Corporate Snags Changed Pop Culture
Creative types dream of working for Hollywood. Just imagine — the scenarios you dreamed up, fully realized with top-of-the-line special effects; your characters brought to life by A-listers; your creations changed for all kinds of bullshit reasons. That’s the sad reality of it — when you’re playing for the big leagues, the stakes get impossibly high. Producers, lawyers and stakeholders all get to have a say on what goes, and often you have no choice but to listen to them — with results such as these…
15
Source: Screen Rant
14
Source: The Directors Series
13
Den of Geek
12
Source: Los Angeles Times
11
…
Jared Fogle Says Prison Has Made Him Realize How Wrong He Was To Endorse Subway https://t.co/rmVKTarQRT pic.twitter.com/u5G1fQIGaE
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 1, 2021
RELATED: 5 Huge Scandals That Now Seem Pretty Dumb In Retrospect
A new president has taken office, so now things will return to normal. That means no more will we be saying, “Yeah, the president has been fined $2 million for illegally misusing charity money, but there’s no time to think about that right now.” Instead, we’ll get back to making a huge deal over the usual milquetoast Beltway nonsense … or will we?
Maybe not. Maybe the rules of the game have changed forever. As such, it might be useful to reflect on some controversies of the recent past and marvel at how much the world cared about …
5. The “You Didn’t Build That” Brouhaha
The Controversy:
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” said then-President Barack Obama at a July 2012 campaign speech. And with that line, he laid bare the cynical lie at the foundation of socialism. He was denying that we’re capable of creating anything on our own, and if that’s what he believes, well, then no wonder he thinks the government has the right to take as much as it wants from you.
His opponent, Mitt Romney, countered by listing such entrepreneurs as Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and Papa John (we’re tempted to mock these specific examples for various reasons, but let’s stay on topic here). That year’s Republican National Convention adopted “We Built It” as a theme. It featured a live performance of a song called “I Built It,” a completely fictional rags-to-riches story from a country artist who immediately vanished back into obscurity, and just look at the inspired crowd swaying to it with perfect rhythm:
But really …
He did say “you didn’t build that,” but when someone uses the word “that,” you’ve got to go back through their words to see what that they’re talking about. Like, millions of people are apparently still very confused about what Meat Loaf meant when he sang “I’d Do Anything Love (But I Won’t Do That),” but if you just listen to words right before every time he says that line, the answer’s right there.
Obama said, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” He was saying you did build your business, but you didn’t build the bridges or roads. The broader speech was about all the various ways businesses benefit from public works, from the fire department to the research behind the internet, but that line in particular was about the very narrow subject of transport infrastructure. …
Trout Offended Fly Fisherman Would Just Throw Him Back Like That https://t.co/uecQ7JLnAP pic.twitter.com/ivBVdwmjpl
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 31, 2021
How To Recognise Negging & The Men Who Do It
“In one more drink, I’ll be ready to hit on you.” “You’re too much of a nice girl for me.” “I like your shoes, they look really comfortable.” According to one popular Reddit post, these are a few classic examples of “negging,” a tactic self-described “pickup artists” use in an attempt to attract women.
Sound terrible? You’re right. The technique originated in “pickup artist” communities in the late ’90s and early 2000s, in which some straight men aimed to become experts in “the art of seduction.” These communities have been widely condemned as misogynistic, and even accused of inciting violence against women: Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014, was a member of online pickup artist forums.
In a New York Times article published in 2004, pickup artist Neil Strauss credited the invention of the “neg” to fellow pickup artist Erik von Markovik. “Neither a compliment nor an insult, a neg holds two purposes: to momentarily lower a woman’s self-esteem and to suggest an intriguing disinterest. (‘Nice nails. Are they real? No? Oh, they look nice anyway.’),” Strauss writes.
No sooner did the general public learn of negging than they, largely, condemned it. Urban Dictionary’s most popular definition, written in 2009, is: “Low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances. This is something no decent guy would do. …
An Artist Develops a Daily Habit of Drawing Plants During COVID-19
A comic artist speaks to artists across the world to see how they — and their practices — have been holding up.
…
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
FINALLY . . .
The Library of Possible Futures
Since the release of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
THE PANDEMIC, WHICH HAS SEEMED stranger than science fiction in so many ways, has occasioned much debate about the role of speculative fiction in imagining the future: The possibilities of such stories have felt, to some, like answers amid uncertainty, even as others have questioned the limits of dystopian visions. But perhaps an equally relevant literature to revisit is speculative nonfiction: the constantly evolving genre we might call “pop futurism.”
What are the telltale signs of a “pop futurist” book? It sketches out possible tomorrows, highlights emergent trends to watch, and promises ways for even nonspecialists to apply these insights to their own life and work. It’s likely to sport an arresting cover, a style dating back to the work that arguably pioneered this genre and still casts a long shadow. Future Shock—the book by Alvin Toffler that helped popularize “futurism” as a concept in mainstream culture and business, and which recently marked its 50th anniversary—was printed in multiple colorways so that it would jar the eye as a neon rainbow beaming off bookstore shelves. Other titles have kinetic lettering that judders off the page, as if traveling at high speed. The writing’s tone usually sits somewhere between start-up pitch and self-help mantra, with the oracular confidence of the returned time traveler.
Though their contents have varied over time, refracted through the concerns of each era, the appeal of pop-futurist books remains the same: We all want to know what’s coming next. They tap the ancient power of the future to fascinate and frighten, in a way that both soothes and feeds our contemporary anxieties. Like all good pop-science or self-help texts, they vow to separate signal from noise and give us a bit of comforting control (however illusory) in a chaotic world. They offer clues about where the future is heading, no matter how muddled the present looks.
But the most important promise underlying much of the canon inaugurated by Future Shock is that with the right foresight, readers can not only prepare for what’s coming, but also profit from it. This whiff of insider trading presents the future as a commodity, an exercise in temporal arbitrage in which knowledge of new developments yields a financial edge. It’s no coincidence that the authors of such works have historically skewed white, male, and capitalist in mindset; many of them work as futurists, consulting in the gray area between business, government, technology, advertising, and science fiction.
This mercantile approach has dominated pop futurism, though it may be changing. This past year saw an astonishing number of new entrants to the field—strangely apt at a time of deep uncertainty about what will happen tomorrow, never mind the next decade. Could such a historically swaggering genre still provide some solace, let alone true insights? …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
It's "judgment".
No e.
You've been judgd. https://t.co/1azurfpNE8
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 1, 2021
