• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: When we stop for a moment and think about the sources of music, What were the first sounds on Earth? And from what instruments we play, we immediately remember the sounds of birds and animals. About the sobbing of the water and the wind blowing through the tall trees. The sound of the fire ember and the first tribes who lived on the land throughout the earth and performed ceremonies accompanied by music and spiritual dance and trance that creates a connection between man and spirit and earth.
Ed. I’m trippin’ on this one.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
California’s Elusive Urban Lizards Can’t Hide From Citizen Scientists
Researchers mined crowdsourced photos to figure out how city life suits the southern alligator lizard.
A rare hello!
AS A LIZARD-LOVING KID GROWING up in the San Francisco Bay area, Greg Pauly sometimes found himself running an accidental rehabilitation center for wayward reptiles out of his parents’ house. One neighbor wasn’t particularly sold on the squamates that lived around her yard, he recalls, but her cats, Crackers, Peepers, and Stinkers, kept intercepting them and delivering them to her. Pauly remembers that she paid him a dollar to take the unwelcome gifts off her hands, so he adopted the “three-legged, no tail” lizards as pets.
These maimed reptiles were southern alligator lizards, roughly eight inches from snout to vent, sometimes with tails more than twice as long as their bodies. They’re ubiquitous in the region, but often go unnoticed. Unlike their sun-basking relatives, Elgaria multicarinata prefer the shade. They often hang out under shrubs, beneath bits of cardboard or bags of potting soil, or in the shadows of trash cans. “Even if people have them in their yards, they’re not seeing them regularly,” says Pauly. That makes the lizards slippery subjects to study. So when Pauly—now a curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and codirector of the Urban Nature Research Center—and three other researchers recently set out to examine the lizards’ relationships to predators and parasites in urban areas, they had to find a way to collect sightings without spending the rest of their lives poking around the shadowy crannies of California’s yards.
Sending field crews out in search of them would be spectacularly inefficient. “We’d have to go door to door and say, ‘Can I search for lizards in your backyard?’” Pauly says. “Every 10 steps, if I’m doing a survey, I’d have to get permission from a new landowner.” Even then, researchers might work all day with little to show for it. “In the peak season of activity, between April and June, if you take someone like me who has been studying lizards their whole life and send me to a dilapidated building in a grassland area, where there are lots of places to hide, maybe I could get seven, eight, 10 in a day,” Pauly says. “In an urban area, there would be many days when I would only observe one or two.”
Instead, the team relied on the iNaturalist app, where anyone can log observations of living things. Pauly estimates that team member Riley Williams, of the Urban Nature Research Center, spent 40 or 50 hours collating observations submitted between October 2015 and September 2017. The researchers zeroed in on ones with photos, location information, date, and a taxonomic identification vetted by other people on the app—observations that the app designates as “research grade.” The scientists wound up with 723 observations that could offer insights into predation (by way of lizards missing portions of their tails) and 157 that touched on parasitism (in the form of ticks clustered around the lizards’ ears). …
Ed. ‘Little Dude’ probably still lives in my old garage.
If you find yourself alone on Connecticut's Chaugham Lookout during the early hours of the morning, make sure you have these three implements within reaching distance.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 12, 2021
RELATED: Tokyo, Japan: ‘Astro Boy Mosaic’
Japan’s iconic sci-fi hero rendered to 8-bit by notorious French street artist Invader.
The Astro Boy mosiac by Invader. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
JAPAN IS OFTEN INTOLERANT OF vandalism, making it a harsh environment for street art to survive. Although some graffiti can be found in alleys across Tokyo, more or less, those that stand out are quickly removed by the authorities. Even works by world-famous artists such as Banksy and Invader are no exception, but one piece has evaded removal for years, almost miraculously.
A French urban artist known for his 8-bit style, Invader has installed his street art across the world over the years, from pieces in Paris, to a few that can be found in San Diego. He visited Tokyo in 2014, installing several works of art, although only a few have survived.
One of them depicts Astro Boy, or Atom as he is known in Japan, an android superhero character originally created by legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka. Boosted by his rocket feet, he can be seen soaring over unknowing pedestrians in the ever-popular Shibuya district, all done in Invader’s distinctive 8-bit technique.
Unlike the popular mural in the Takadanobaba district, this piece is unsanctioned by Tezuka Productions. However, it seems to have caught the company’s recognition to some degree as it was featured on its official blog in 2019. It’s uncertain how much longer the graffiti will remain, but one can only hope that it stays there as a little icon of the city. …
The time J. P. Morgan invested $4 million in dragon’s blood.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 12, 2021
Of All the Hills to Die On, the GOP Picked Donald Trump.
It’s surreal that it’s come to this.
Earlier this week, the Senate began hearing arguments concerning Donald Trump’s second impeachment and the charge of incitement of an insurrection that he faces after the riots on January 6th. In the incredibly unlikely event that the former President is convicted, he would be barred from ever running for federal office again. Perhaps that’s why the thought of conviction has reportedly been so appealing to powerful Republican lawmakers like Mitch McConnell, who have not exactly made it a secret that they would like to see him ousted from the GOP once and for all.
And yet here we are, with Mitch McConnell voting that moving forward with an impeachment against a no longer sitting President is unconstitutional, after he ensured that there would be no impeachment trial until after the President was out of office. Here we are, with Representative and House impeachment manager Eric Swalwell telling the Senate that on January 6th, a member of the far right group the Oath Keepers had breached the Capitol, was receiving messages about the secure locations of lawmakers, and was planning on releasing gas. And yet, even with all this information in front of them, the chances that enough Republicans will vote in favor of conviction are still slim to none.
Even after all this time, it still never ceases to amaze me that of all hills to die on, the GOP has picked Donald Trump.
Even after the former President’s incitement of the riot put the lives of each and every lawmaker present in the capitol, along with his own Vice President in jeopardy, they are still inevitably going to bow their heads. Frankly, it says more about these lawmakers than it does about Trump himself. …
RELATED: In America’s ‘Uncivil War,’ Republicans Are The Aggressors
Supporters of then-President Trump attempt to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In his inaugural address, President Biden described America as in the midst of an “uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” His invocation of a civil war and the American Civil War was provocative. It was also accurate. There is no formal definition of an uncivil war, but America is increasingly split between members of two political parties that hate each other.
In the same speech, Biden warned of the dangers of “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” This too was accurate. Biden was delivering his address exactly two weeks after a group of supporters of then-President Trump, riled up by his false claims about voter fraud, stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, an act of political extremism and domestic terrorism carried out by at least some people who believe in white supremacy.
Biden didn’t explicitly say that the extremism, domestic terrorism and white supremacy is largely coming from one side of the uncivil war. But that’s the reality. In America’s uncivil war, both sides may hate the other, but one side — conservatives and Republicans — is more hostile and aggressive, increasingly willing to engage in anti-democratic and even violent attacks on their perceived enemies.
The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats: …
RELATED: Facts About The Organic Shaman Who Stormed The Capitol
I tried to warn you, but no, my fellow QAnon patriots, you wouldn’t believe me!
To all of you out there feigning surprise at the latest news that our shaman, Jake Angeli, is craving organic, I say: pshaw, or rather, I told you so! I tried to warn you, but no, my fellow QAnon patriots, you wouldn’t believe it.
Maybe now you’ll finally acknowledge these telltale signs that he was a libtard, plant-eating, Antifa demon all along!
- He’s an actor. And he hides it.
- He actually attended ComicCon, not QCon, back in October of 2020.
- His Star Seed Academy brochure listed “planting an organic, ethically sourced community garden” as a graduation requirement.
- He only wore horns to the Capitol raid because he felt he couldn’t fully express himself in the usual all-black garb.
- He asked the government to help him instead of manning up and stabbing his cellmate for some contraband coconut chia matcha bars.
- …
Scientists Attempt To Convince Public To Take Covid More Seriously By Explaining Concept Of Death https://t.co/MyXMTF2Pc5 pic.twitter.com/e3LtuXrSdl
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 13, 2021
5 Historical Texts Filthier Than Anything In Modern Times
It’s easy to think of perverted art as an enlightened modern invention, like electricity or Smirnoff Ice. Without the Internet warping young minds, our ancestors were probably perfectly content to do it but once a year, through a hole in a sheet, while the whole village booed and threw rocks at them. But in reality, people being gigantic perverts is possibly the only thing that’s remained consistent throughout the whole of human history. Just look at some of the art we used to turn out …
NOTE: These texts could be considered NSFW in some circles, but the authors who made these works have been dead for centuries, so we’ve passed the event horizon from “prurient” to “educational.”
5. The Fisherman Who Saved His Marriage With A Severed River Dong
Fellas, don’t you hate it when your wife promises she’s only with you for your money, but you can’t help suspect it’s because of your internationally acclaimed pump-action megaschlong instead? Well, apparently that was a major worry in Medieval France, where they wrote a hit poem about the situation. The fabliaux were a genre of short comedic tales popular during the 13th century. One of the most famous was The Fisherman of Pont-sur-Seine, which tells the story of a fisherman whose wife declares she loves him “because you buy me shoes and clothe me.” However, the fisherman insists that it’s really because his hard-pumping steam train derails into Satisfaction Gulch every night. He didn’t phrase it like that — it was 13th century France — but you get the drift.
But no matter how much the fisherman talks up his electric King Kong Rockin’ Johnson (again, not the exact phrase used in the poem), his wife stubbornly insists that “there’s nothing else I find more foul … [than] your little hanging bit of bowel.” He’s out on the river pondering this dilemma when he notices a giant penis floating by. Apparently, a priest was engaged in a steamy affair with a local riverbank lady when her husband burst in. The priest tried to flee, but his massive erection weighed him down and he had no option but to jump in the river, where he drowned. His dead body then drifted down the river, with his bloated death-boner sticking in the air like the mast of some mighty warship.
The fisherman, finding himself in the shade of this alarmingly free willy, realizes it could be the solution to all his problems. After cutting off the dead priest’s boner (this probably took a team of lumberjacks three days), the fisherman races home and shows it to his wife. He claims that a group of knights attacked him and forced him to choose which body part they cut off. Naturally, he chose his penis, declaring that this wouldn’t inconvenience his wife one bit. However, his wife immediately announces she’s divorcing him. Which is the correct response to your man dropping waterlogged genitalia on the carpet, but she insists her decision is actually unrelated, declaring: …
From The Archives: Health Experts Worry Coronavirus Will Overwhelm America’s GoFundMe System https://t.co/riMpX0AAyR pic.twitter.com/AcNa4hsgKb
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 13, 2021
RELATED: 4 Occupational Hazards Stand-Up Comics Deal With
Stand-up comedy is a very fun job. The only thing more exhilarating than making an audience laugh is getting paid to do it. However, comics do occasionally find themselves in some pretty dangerous situations. Statistically, the risk of these encounters is probably below average compared to all other professions, but what these situations might lack in frequency, they make up for in craziness.
4. Audience Members Wanting To Kick Our Ass After The Show
Having a member of the audience want to confront the comic afterwards can happen from time to time. No matter how careful we are in what we say, no matter how well we think we can read a room, there’s always the possibility that someone will get bent out of shape enough to want to get in our faces about it after the show.
There are two ways to look at the situation. The first is, that angry customer could arguably be emblematic of that “cancel culture” we hear so much about lately. That person could have just been looking for any excuse to be offended. That certainly is a possibility. The far more likely explanation is that the customer’s ears worked just fine. That’s just the risk of being “edgy”– eventually you’re gonna encounter someone who felt the cut went too deep. Just because they’re offended doesn’t mean they’re right, but it doesn’t mean you win by default, either.
Having the confrontation actually turn physical can be rare, depending on the comic’s disposition to escalate it. A lot of times either security steps in, or the people the confronter came with are able to convince them to walk it off and go home. But every once and awhile, there will be that one audience member waiting for you in the parking lot. …
Plan B Releases New Heart-Shaped Tablets For Valentine’s Day https://t.co/HXHLALcJTR pic.twitter.com/F6AiOUzeZr
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 13, 2021
RELATED: 13 Fun, Little-Known Facts To Stimulate Your Brain
Turns out, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker held hands while walking up to Princess Leia to get their medals — and, somewhat disappointingly, that didn’t end up in the finished movie. Check out the full story, plus 12 more:
13.
Source: CNBC
12
Source: BBC
11
Source: News 13
10
…
An Atlanta Krispy Kreme doughnut shop belonging to Shaquille O’Neal, who also acts as a spokesperson for the franchise, was heavily damaged in a fire Wednesday morning. #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/31VBzmrrr5 pic.twitter.com/6uiU3m9pB1
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 12, 2021
Highwayman’s 1750 confessions reveal ‘unusual’ ambivalence about gay sex
Rare pamphlet includes roistering criminal’s surprisingly enlightened attitude to the advances made to him by an innkeeper’s son.
The Life of Thomas Munn, alias, the Gentleman Brick-Maker, alias, Tom the Smuggler, runs to 24 pages.
An “incredibly rare” deathbed confession from an 18th-century highwayman, written just before he was “hung in chains” for robbing the Yarmouth Mail and detailing his enlightened response to a failed gay seduction, has been acquired by Horsham Museum.
The Life of Thomas Munn, alias, the Gentleman Brick-Maker, alias, Tom the Smuggler runs to 24 pages and was printed in 1750. It is part of the once-popular genre of deathbed confessions, a precursor of true crime, and purports to be an autobiography handed by Munn to the Yarmouth gaoler on the morning of his execution on 6 April 1750.
The pamphlet, which would have been sold for pennies by hawkers, details Munn’s life of smuggling, robbery and “pranks”, revealing how he turned to a life of crime after growing up in Kent in a brick-making family. He later went to Sussex to become a dancing master, writing of how he “got a set of Young Fellows as undiscerning as myself … to go with me Morris-dancing, as it is called in that County”. This is, said Horsham Museum, one of the earliest documented references to morris dancing.
Munn was back making bricks some three years later, at one point recounting how he “trudged” to Horsham to meet a potential wife. The woman, Munn reveals, was a wealthy 70-year-old widow: “I instantly observed the poor old Soul could not bite me, because she had ne’er a Tooth in her Head, which made her kiss might soft”. A local solicitor is also in the running for her hand in marriage, and Munn gives up his suit after the solicitor visits the widow, and she “daddled up Staires with him, and seem’d to be long enough there to have tried a Cause”. It was, however, “a very unhappy Match,” he notes. …
RELATED: Nightlife meets wildlife: the albums mixing birdsong and techno beats
A Bogotà nightclub has used the sounds of animals and birds in the Colombian capital to make a new kind of dance track.
Aterciopelados video from the sounds from your window project.
Stuck inside and unable to hit the dancefloor, many of the regulars at the electronic dance nights at Bogotá’s popular nightclub Kaputt found themselves missing the clubbing community when they were forced into lockdown by Covid-19. But then came a rallying cry from DJs Jorge Pizarro and Felipe Rodríguez: start recording the “sounds from your window”.
Now the results of that callout are reaching a global audience, with a set of albums blending the sounds of animals and birds in the Colombian capital with techno beats available for streaming.
The aim is to galvanise action to protect biodiversity, says Héctor Buitrago, from the Grammy award-winning rock band Aterciopelados, and co-founder of VozTerra, the collective that came up with the idea for the albums. While incorporating the sounds of nature into classical music might be more commonplace, VozTerra decided to turn to Pizarro and Rodríguez to tap into Bogotá’s dance scene.
The club’s “coolness factor is the perfect tool to engage young curious minds with ecology”, says Rodríguez. “Fans of electronic music may also be more willing to engage with ecology than those of other genres because dancing to it is spiritual, a mystical experience.” …
Ed. It’s six degrees outside right now. I’m wanting spring. Today’s aural noise is destined to backdrop a bike ride.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including President Trump’s second impeachment trial and scandalous new allegations surrounding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“We’re in this together” is the new “Thank you for your service” – just something to say to the people doing the dirty work so we can feel better about not doing it ourselves.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Fox News digs up some trivial Biden scandals, an insurrectionist is allowed to take a vacation to Mexico, and a guy is stuck third wheeling on a deserted island. What the hell happened this week?
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
FINALLY . . .
A Forgotten Black Founding Father
Why I’ve made it my mission to teach others about Prince Hall.
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Embiggenable.
MASSACHUSETTS ABOLISHED ENSLAVEMENT before the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American Revolution, in 1783. The state constitution, adopted in 1780 and drafted by John Adams, follows the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming that all “men are born free and equal.” In this statement Adams followed not only the Declaration but also a 1764 pamphlet by the Boston lawyer James Otis, who theorized about and popularized the familiar idea of “no taxation without representation” and also unequivocally asserted human equality. “The Colonists,” he wrote, “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.” In 1783, on the basis of the “free and equal” clause in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the state’s chief justice, William Cushing, ruled enslavement unconstitutional in a case that one Quock Walker had brought against his enslaver, Nathaniel Jennison.
Many of us who live in Massachusetts know the basic outlines of this story and the early role the state played in standing against enslavement. But told in this traditional way, the story leaves out another transformative figure: Prince Hall, a free African American and a contemporary of John Adams. From his formal acquisition of freedom, in 1770, until his death, in 1807, Hall helped forge an activist Black community in Boston while elevating the cause of abolition to new prominence. Hall was the first American to publicly use the language of the Declaration of Independence for a political purpose other than justifying war against Britain. In January 1777, just six months after the promulgation of the Declaration and nearly three years before Adams drafted the state constitution, Hall submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature (or General Court, as it is styled) requesting emancipation, invoking the resonant phrases and founding truths of the Declaration itself.
Here is what he wrote (I’ve put the echoes of the Declaration of Independence in italics):
The petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & christian Country Humbly shuwith that your Petitioners Apprehend that Thay have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable Right to that freedom which the Grat — Parent of the Unavese hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind and which they have Never forfuted by Any Compact or Agreement whatever — but thay wher Unjustly Dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their Derest frinds and sum of them Even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents — from A popolous Plasant And plentiful cuntry And in Violation of Laws of Nature and off Nations And in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity Brough hear Either to Be sold Like Beast of Burthen & Like them Condemnd to Slavery for Life.
In this passage, Hall invokes the core concepts of social-contract theory, which grounded the American Revolution, to argue for an extension of the claim to equal rights to those who were enslaved. He acknowledged and adopted the intellectual framework of the new political arrangements, but also pointedly called out the original sin of enslavement itself. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
