• • • an aural noise • • •
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
Ed. I went out for breakfast… because I wanted to go out for breakfast.
The Latin Typo That Gave Us the Temple of Ridicule
Ancient Rome never had an “Aedicula Ridiculi,” but plenty of people thought it did.
Tempio del Dio Ridicolo. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IN HIS 1698 DICTIONARY OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITIES, translated into English in 1700, the French abbot-scholar Pierre Danet dedicated an entire entry to an Aedicula Ridiculi—in English, Little Temple of Ridicule—in Rome. This chapel, he tells readers, was built on the spot where bad weather had forced the Carthaginian general Hannibal to give up on besieging the capital in 216 BC. “The Romans, upon this occasion, raised a very loud laughter,” Danet wrote, “and therefore they built a little oratory under the name of the God of Joy and Laughter.”
Danet gave the temple’s precise location (along the Appian Way, at the second milestone outside the Porta Capena), but trying to find it in a guidebook today would be an exercise in frustration. There’s a simple reason for this: It never existed. A rather beautiful Roman structure does stand on the site he described, but it’s not a temple—instead, it’s now widely believed to be the tomb of a woman named Annia Regilla, who died nearly 400 years after Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. To give Danet some credit, he was far from alone in making this mistake.
The Natural History of Pliny in a mid-12th-century manuscript from the Abbaye de Saint Vincent, Le Mans, France. Embiggenable.
Despite being fake, the Aedicula Ridiculi was commonly treated as fact in the early encyclopedias of Roman ruins put together by pioneering Italian and French antiquarians of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Bartolomeo Marliani, Onofrio Panvinio, and Jean-Jacques Boissard. Even after being debunked by archaeologists, the Temple of Ridicule would continue to pop up for centuries in texts written for general audiences as a fun factoid: As late as 1852, an essay on the history of wit in Dolman’s Magazine notes, as evidence that humans have always valued humor, that “the ancient Romans went so far as to erect a ridiculi aedicula, or chapel of laughter.”
It’s simple enough to understand how rumors of the temple took hold. Only two ancient texts are ever cited as evidence for its existence. The first is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which mentions in a section on birds that a shoemaker once buried his beloved pet raven “on the right-hand side of the Appian Way, at the second milestone from the City, in the field generally known as the ‘field of Rediculus’” (in Latin, campus Rediculi). The second is a fragment written by the second-century grammarian Festus: “The temple of Rediculus [fanum Rediculi] was outside the Porta Capena; it was so called because Hannibal, when on the march from Capua, turned back at that spot, being alarmed at certain portentous visions.” …
RELATED: The World’s Shortest War Ended Less Than an Hour After It Started
But it’s not easy to say how long the Anglo-Zanzibar War actually was.
The pulverized palace of Zanzibar. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
SAYYID KHALID BIN BARGHASH AL-BUSAID got to be sultan for a day. A little more than that, actually—42 hours—give or take 10 crucial minutes.
It was August 1896 in Zanzibar, the island off the East African coast that is now part of Tanzania, and Khalid’s cousin, Sultan Hamad, had died suddenly. Rumors spread that he had been poisoned, and Khalid was under a cloud of suspicion. In Zanzibar, according to Geoffrey Owens, an anthropologist at Wright State University, “There was a long history of brothers and uncles and cousins trying to overthrow one another.” But the young prince was likely more concerned with the British Empire, which was threatening to declare war on him.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War, as the ensuing conflict is known, was composed of a single battle between an empire upon which the sun never set and an island nation half the size of Rhode Island. It has gone down in history as one of the most lopsided conflicts in history, and certainly the shortest. But due to the murky matters of the rules of engagement, inconsistent reporting, and an extreme lack of clocks on the scene, it’s impossible to say how long the “shortest war” truly lasted.
The palace (Bait As-Sahel) from Zanzibar’s harbor, to the left of the city’s iconic House of Wonders. Embiggenable.
At the time, Zanzibar was technically its own country, though the British had established a protectorate in the region. The colonial power had coveted the island for its clove industry, which was the largest in the world at the time. Zanzibar’s governing structure was “dual jurisdiction,” in which the British legal structure functioned alongside the Zanzibari sultanate, itself a product of the island’s previous colonization by Omani Arabs earlier in the 19th century.
“The British, at that point, they want a lapdog,” says Elisabeth McMahon, a historian at Tulane University who specializes in East Africa. “They want someone wholly in their pocket.”
Khalid was not that person. …
Sheryl Sandberg Downplayed Facebook’s Role In The Capitol Hill Siege—Justice Department Files Tell A Very Different Story
Sheryl Sandberg faced criticism for downplaying Facebook’s role in the Capitol Hill riots. Facebook says it’s actively working with law enforcement by providing information it has on rioters.
Just after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer admitted the company’s ability to enforce its own rules was “never perfect.” About the shocking events of the day, she added: “I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate and don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operating officer, shortly after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6.
Sandberg was later criticized for downplaying her employer’s role as a platform for the organizers of the siege. But Facebook was far and away the most cited social media site in charging documents the Justice Department filed against members of the Capitol Hill mob, providing further evidence that Sandberg was, perhaps, mistaken in her claim. Facebook, however, claims that the documents show the social media company has been especially forthcoming in assisting law enforcement in investigating users who breached the Capitol.
Forbes reviewed data from the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University, which has collated a list of more than 200 charging documents filed in relation to the siege. In total, the charging documents refer to 223 individuals in the Capitol Hill riot investigation. Of those documents, 73 reference Facebook. That’s far more references than other social networks. YouTube was the second most-referenced on 24. Instagram, a Facebook-owned company, was next on 20. Parler, the app that pledged protection for free speech rights and garnered a large far-right userbase, was mentioned in just eight.
The references are a mix of public posts and private messages sent on each platform, discussing plans to go to the Stop the Steal march, some containing threats of violence, as well as images, videos and livestreams from the breach of the Capitol building. …
RELATED: Trump impeachment trial: Decades of research show language can incite violence
The U.S. Capitol, which was besieged by insurrectionists on Jan. 6, and where the Trump impeachment trial takes place in the Senate.
Senators, acting in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump that begins on Feb. 9, will soon have to decide whether to convict the former president for inciting a deadly, violent insurrection at the Capitol building on Jan. 6.
A majority of House members, including 10 Republicans, took the first step in the two-step impeachment process in January. They voted to impeach Trump, for “incitement of insurrection.” Their resolution states that he “willfully made statements that, in context, encourage – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’”
Impeachment proceedings that consider incitement to insurrection are rare in American history. Yet dozens of legislators – including some Republicans – say that Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol contributed to an attempted insurrection against American democracy itself.
Such claims against Trump are complicated. Rather than wage direct war against sitting U.S. representatives, Trump is accused of using language to motivate others to do so. Some have countered that the connection between President Trump’s words and the violence of Jan. 6 is too tenuous, too abstract, too indirect to be considered viable. …
RELATED: The Ancient Romans Had a Strange Way of Dealing With Figures Like Donald Trump
The practice was called damnatio memoriae, and it has useful lessons for how we move on now.
The past few years have delivered a slightly alarming number of think pieces, essays, and Twitter quips drawing parallels between American decline and the “fall of Rome.” Though it’s often delivered in jest, the comparison isn’t without merit: an empire, stretched beyond its ability to effectively govern, straining under the weight of its own hubris and mythology; a republic that ceded control of its future to a solitary executive; a government that at first turned a blind eye and was later powerless to stop pandemics and famine. Rome seems to stand as a cautionary tale. Whatever you think of the claim, with the Senate trial of former President Donald J. Trump looming, there’s a relevant lesson we can learn from Rome’s example. The empire was at times obsessed with trying to remove unpopular or corrupt leaders from the public record after they were no longer in power. But their attempts to do so show us that if we truly want to erase the legacies of bad leaders, we might be better served by holding them to account rather than by simply trying to eradicate them from public consciousness. A systematic and transparent legal process accomplishes what simple erasure cannot. We need to confront their records in order to forget them.
In ancient Rome, after a particularly woeful leader or other public figure died, authorities could initiate a process called damnatio memoriae—condemnation of memory—which essentially expunged that individual from the historical record. The term itself is not ancient, but it is used by scholars to denote this systematic practice of, well, cancellation. From destroying, decapitating, or recarving statues, to chiseling names from inscriptions and stamping out coinage, to holding public bonfires to destroy documents and portraits, by many accounts the Roman people delighted in exacting the ultimate punishment on failed leadership: erasure.
In the specific case of a “bad emperor”—and they appear to have been in ample supply—acts of damnatio could take multiple forms. After death, whether natural or otherwise, leaders who had seriously violated legal and social norms were denied public cult—divine status—by the Roman Senate. Such a decision meant no memorials would be built in their honor (sorry, no imperial library, Commodus), and further, any buildings constructed for such purpose during their lifetimes would be deconstructed or put to another use. Likewise, the imperial markers of their reigns were hidden, buried, destroyed, or altered. Pay close attention to the Roman busts the next time you are able to visit a museum: If the proportions of the profile seem a little “off” you might be looking at a Caligula recarved into an Augustus.
Beyond removing physical evidence of a condemned individual, loyal family, friends, and slaves often found themselves executed, exiled, driven to suicide, or on the less gruesome side of the spectrum, compelled to change their family name. Even these secondary individuals were not immune to a de facto form of damnatio—one especially memorable example is a statue of Julia Mamaea, mother of Emperor Alexander Severus (222–235 A.D.), with Mamaea’s face kicked in, presumably at an inflection point after her son’s term in power had ended. The goal of the damnatio of friends and family was to expunge all social connections to the deceased. …
Voting Machine Company Sues Fox News For $2.7 Billion #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/zfeUYzcxBo pic.twitter.com/1DUP9TowEt
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 8, 2021
‘Hey Bro, Think You’re Man Enough To Be On The Pill?’
“Aren’t you on the pill?” may as well be tattooed down the treasure trail of every backward-capped bro in the world. We get it: condoms suck but, unless you’re one of those teen dads who was taught to pull out for Jesus, it’s one of the best ways to avoid getting someone pregnant save for some rather invasive taint surgery.
But what if there was a third way? Something that not only could save men quite a few awkward moments at the self-checkout trying to find the barcode on a box of Trojans, but also teach them two valuable insights into female sexuality? Namely, the daily responsibility of birth control and what a goddamn hormonal kick in the balls it is to be on the pill.
This could become a reality in the next few years, as successful trials of a male birth control pill are finally netting positive results. In tests overseen by Dr. Christina Wang, a male birth control pill has finally passed safety trials in 2019 and has now entered the Russian roulette phase of having actual couples try it out to see if the male partner is indeed shooting blanks. There are also other applicators with the same hormonal cocktails being tested. For example, Dr. Wang has a gel that, when rubbed in vigorously, she promises will make men forget all about using a condom and — Look, I swear I didn’t accidentally read a porn synopsis instead of a medical article, okay?
So why has it taken a full 60 years longer for a male pill to enter the scene than the female pill, which has been around since the Swinging ’60s? The only extra hurdle male hormonal birth control faces is that men are, well, total babies (the thing they’re trying to avoid) about it. When polled, most dudes will claim they’d gladly take a pill that reduces their sperm count from rampaging fascists hordes storming the capitol to a bunch of confused tourists that can’t find the Oval Office. But whenever these pills hit the clinical trial phase in the past, that eagerness is revealed to be based on complete ignorance of what a birth control pill does to the human hormonal system. …
Ed. Read on. I’ve been through hormone debrivation hell since October, 2020. It’s comforting to read exactly what’s been happening to me.
Controversial Puppy Bowl Star Shits During National Anthem https://t.co/6TA4bzfQZ9 pic.twitter.com/2QmpH00S2Q
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 8, 2021
RELATED: Mailmen Really Did Use To Deliver Babies
When the U.S. Post started its Parcel Service in 1913, it brought about all kinds of shenanigans. People used their trusted mailman to deliver all kinds of esoteric goods, from bugs to bacteria to entire bank buildings. But the most bizarre and precious cargo a U.S. postman has ever had to handle had to be widdle babies.
Would you trust your mail carrier to deliver your baby? No, not like that; in the more literal and more irresponsible sense. When USPS raised their parcel weight limit from 4 lbs to 11 lbs in 1913, plenty of American parents reckoned: “Hey, that’s about the same weight as our bouncing baby!” So some made full use of their new post office policy by ‘mailing’ — nope, that actually doesn’t need air quotes– by mailing their children to their relatives instead of making the trip themselves.
This postnatal shipping only ever happened in very rural areas. Places that deeply trusted/relied on their post office and where everyone knew the postman’s first name and favorite beer. It usually wasn’t very far either. The first recorded case of a baby going postal was in Glen Este, Ohio, where postman Vernon O. Lytle was tasked with taking the Beagle Boy a mile up the road to see his grandma. (His parents did have him insured for $50 in case the baby came back with a dent and they had to buy a new one). But the distances did keep growing. Some of the later examples include a two-year-old who was shipped all the way from Stratford, Oklahoma, to an aunt in Wellington, Kansas. And the (very lithe) six-year-old Edna Neff of Pensacola, Florida, was pack(ag)ed off to her father 720 miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia.
But the real exploit wasn’t bagging a government employee as a temporary babysitter while you stay home and drink moonshine. For most, it was about money. Thrifty country parents realized that it was much cheaper to put their kid on a train with a book of stamps kissed onto their forehead than buying an actual train ticket. Those that didn’t do it for the savings did it for the fame. One girl, May Pierstorff, even got a book made of her exciting adventures riding the rails of Idaho with her new post office pals. …
Humane Trap-And-Removal Program Sedates Tenants So They Unconscious During Eviction https://t.co/UJuYDbWM9t pic.twitter.com/pcPrgzphhh
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 7, 2021
RELATED: Inventor of Modern Condoms’ Family Battle To Get Their Factory Back
Before Julius Fromm invented the modern condom, your options were pretty bleak and usually involved animal intestines. Thankfully, in 1912, he developed the method of dipping glass tubes in latex and rolling it off that created the thin, seamless latex condom we’re all grateful for today. During the next decade, he also started installing the condom vending machines that saved everyone’s lives in high school and basically became known as the king of condoms. People talked about Fromms the same way we talk about Trojans today.
At this point, it’s important to mention that Fromm and his factory were German because then the Nazis happened. They forced Fromm to sell them his business at a fraction of its value, ostensibly for the war effort but also because Fromm was Jewish, and they couldn’t just let him succeed at stuff. Fromm and his family fled to London with what was left of their lives, and he could only watch helplessly from a distance as his siblings were killed in concentration camps and their murderers handed his livelihood off to Hermann Goering’s godmother. He died four days after celebrating the end of the war.
So they had to return the factory to Fromm’s family, right? Wrong. After Godmother Goering died in 1939, her boyfriend inherited the business, and he wasn’t letting it go without a fight. …
Michigan Restaurant Server Asks Frozen Bodies Of Dining Couple On Outdoor Patio If They’d Like To See Dessert Menu https://t.co/mmTPAPBTPR pic.twitter.com/ODZHCJCca2
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 7, 2021
Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown
It used to be okay to admit that the world had simply become too much.
APRIL 1935 was a nervous month. Unemployment in America stood at 20 percent. A potential polio vaccine was failing trials. The term Dust Bowl made its first appearance in newsprint. A thousand-mile storm carried away much of Oklahoma. And Fortune magazine introduced its readers to “The ‘Nervous Breakdown.’ ”
Soon reprinted as an 85-page book, the article cited experts “whose names loom largest in the fields of mental hygiene.” The takeaway? The nervous breakdown was deemed to be “as widespread as the common cold and the chiefest source of misery in the modern world.” Anyone could be susceptible; it could be precipitated by nearly anything, and it prevented one “from carrying on the business of normal living.” Resolution of the breakdown entailed a time-out, ideally at one of the deluxe sanitariums profiled a few pages in.
Right now—I think we can all agree—Americans are once again living in a nervous time. Pandemic. Wildfires. Indefinite homeschooling. Postelection political chaos. TikTok. Feelings of impending collapse have arguably never rested on firmer empirical ground. But today we no longer have recourse to the culturally sanctioned respite that the nervous breakdown once afforded. No longer can we take six weeks at the Hartford Retreat, one of the healing getaways described in Fortune—all long since closed or transmuted into psychiatric facilities that require a formal mental-health diagnosis for admission. No restorative caesura is forthcoming for us. The nervous breakdown is gone.
For 80 years or so, proclaiming that you were having a nervous breakdown was a legitimized way of declaring a sort of temporary emotional bankruptcy in the face of modern life’s stresses. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Jane Addams, and Max Weber all had acknowledged “breakdowns,” and reemerged to do their best work. Provided you had the means—a rather big proviso—announcing a nervous breakdown gave you license to withdraw, claiming an excess of industry or sensitivity or some other virtue. And crucially, it focused the cause of distress on the outside world and its unmeetable demands. You weren’t crazy; the world was. As a 1947 headline in the New York Herald Tribune put it: “Modern World Viewed as Too Much for Man.” …
Ed. The ‘Nervous Breakdown‘. You’re welcome.
Humanity Is Flushing Away One of Life’s Essential Elements
We broke phosphorus.
IN A FIELD OF SUGAR BEETS outside Cambridge, England, Simon Kelly stands above a narrow trench gouged into the rusty earth, roughly 15 feet deep and 30 feet long. “Welcome to the pit,” says Kelly, a bespectacled, white-bearded geologist in a straw hat and khaki shirt. “You’re seeing something that hasn’t been seen in a long time.”
The rock layers exposed in the trench date back more than 100 million years, to when England lay submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea. Kelly—a researcher at a nonprofit geology consultancy—specializes in marine fossils of that era (“Dicranodonta vagans!” he exclaims when I find a stone pocked with the impressions of tiny clam-like shells, which he asks to keep). That’s why he had an excavator dig this trench in 2015, and why he has spent countless hours since then sifting through its trove of treasures. “Going out to Simon’s hole, are you?” Kelly’s wife deadpanned when I picked him up on the morning of my visit.
I had come because “Simon’s hole” also contained objects of more recent historical significance: dull, round pebbles that once helped feed the United Kingdom. By the 1800s, centuries of cultivation had sapped Britain’s soils of nutrients, including phosphorus—an essential element for crops. At the time, manure and bones were common sources of phosphorus, and when the country exhausted its domestic reserves, it looked elsewhere for more.
“Great Britain is like a ghoul, searching the continents,” wrote Justus von Liebig, the German chemist who first identified the critical role of phosphorus in agriculture. “Already in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipzig, of Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations.”
Then, in the 1840s, geologists discovered phosphorus-rich stones buried in the fields around Cambridge—the same smooth, coffee-colored rocks welded into the walls of Kelly’s trench. “This is what they were after,” he says, pointing to a layer of bean-to-buckeye-size lumps. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
After a viral obsession with QAnon, this PR rep is taking on her most important client — herself.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Do you have a problematic Karen in your life? Our Karentervention Virtual Rehab Clinic can help.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まるの時もはなの時も、歯の生え変わりにさみしさは特に感じなかったのに、みりの小さな歯が全部生え変わってしまうと思うとなぜかちょっと寂しい気持ちに。I’m happy that my Kitten Miri has grown up, but I’m a little lonely to lose her little teeth.
FOLLOW-UP . . .
“Verified” Homes Parody the Absurdities of “Internet Vanity Culture”
Your home can now be marked by the blue checkmark motif universally associated with digital VIP status, sculpted by artist Danielle Baskin.
A verified badge installed on a San Francisco house’s facade thanks to “Blue Check Homes.”
ARE YOU TIRED OF PEOPLE WALKING BY your home and not knowing exactly how important you are? Perhaps you are a person of great renown, but your plebeian neighbors are none the wiser because your building’s facade looks just like theirs. You wish there were some subtle, tasteful way to apprise the world of your distinguished status.
Look no further: “Blue Check Homes” will install a custom plaster crest featuring the white and blue checkmark motif universally associated with the great and the good. For a small fee of $2,999.99 and following a brief verification process that involves arbitrarily assessing your individual value based on your job title and social media presence, you can join the few illustrious figures considered checkmark-worthy in our endemically narcissistic society.
“Blue Check Homes” is, of course, a parody of Twitter’s ubiquitous “verified” badge, a symbol that lets people know an account of public interest is authentic. (Other social media platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, also use the blue check system.) The spoof business is the brainchild of artist Danielle Baskin, who creates works that poke fun at “Internet vanity culture” and “terrible capitalist ideas.”
“The blue checks used across most social media platforms create a fascinating dynamic,” Baskin told Hyperallergic. “Besides indicating that a brand is authentic, the blue check for public figures doesn’t really mean much. Maybe you have one because you were on a platform early or you know who works there, or you just randomly got in because you once appeared in a news article or own a trademark.”
“And yet, seeing the blue check shapes our perception of that person,” she added. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
It took a day, but here it is: The Simpsons intro recreated using ONLY stock footage. pic.twitter.com/f7gxh16LVC
— Matthew Highton (@MattHighton) February 3, 2021
