• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: This gentle tender eclectic selection of diverse chilled-out downbeat songs, will wash away all your winter blues, soothe your sore aches and pains and transcend your spirit to a blissed out Utopian plane.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
To Help a Rare Brazilian Parrot, Start With a Crossbow and Rappelling Beekeepers
A conservation team wanted to know if removing killer bees would make life easier for Lear’s macaw.
Lear’s macaws are brightly colored and quite endangered. Embiggenable. Explore at home..
MAXIMO CARDOSO HAD NEVER USED a crossbow before, but he was intuitively able to assemble the Barnett Raptor FX, a model typically marketed for deer hunting. The field guide also displayed natural marksmanship. So it was agreed: He would be the one to launch the poison.
At the base of a sheer rock face amid dry scrub in Bahia, Brazil, decked out in a beekeeping suit, Cardoso took aim at a 45-degree angle, the crossbow loaded with bolts modified to carry glass vials of insecticide. He was targeting small cavities in the red sandstone above that held nests of invasive Africanized honeybees. Depending on the size of the hive and difficulty of shot, it took anywhere from a single bolt to as many as nine for each of 52 hives. Two or three hits usually weakened a hive enough to allow the team’s work to continue.
Over the following days, the team, with members from five countries, checked the activity of the hives with binoculars and walked the base of the cliff looking for dead bees. If the coast was clear, a pair of expert climbers, also wearing protective bee equipment, rappelled to the cavities from above to inspect them. One used a smoker to pacify the remaining bees while the other further treated the hives with insecticide if necessary. Eventually they were able to chip out the honeycomb by hand, all while dangling several stories in the air.
Once the hives had been treated, rappelling beekeepers went in to clear out the invasive bees.
The bees weren’t the real subject of this scientific conservation effort. The cliffs in the hot, dry caatinga of Bahia are historic nesting grounds for one of the rarest parrots in the world, Lear’s macaw. There, bees and parrots compete for homes in the same small openings in the rock, and researchers suspected that clearing out hives would provide more nesting and breeding opportunities for the macaws, which are bright blue, with yellow cheeks, and named for British poet Edward Lear. …
A 17th-century Soul Sentinel’s job was not an easy one; and not just because of the assorted voracious beasts with a craving for souls.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 15, 2021
RELATED: The Quiet Disappearance of Australia’s Urban Platypuses
Newspapers used to describe sightings of dozens at a time. These days, one researcher says, “most Australians have never seen one.”
In Brisbane, platypuses are getting harder to find. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IT IS DUSK BESIDE A creek and we are instructed to look for a trail of bubbles, under which could be one of the world’s weirdest mammals.
When you’re desperate to see a platypus in the fading light, everything looks like one.
Floating logs from bank-side paperbark trees, gyrating leaves caught in a dance with the wind, and what was probably a water-rat dashing from rocks—they all make the heart briefly skip. But there’s no sign of the egg-laying, duck-billed, flat-tailed, and venomous monotreme.
We did not hack through tropical undergrowth or trek for hours to get here. We turned left at a tile shop and pub in the suburbs of northern Brisbane and parked 130 feet away from Kedron Brook on a side road. There are joggers and cyclists everywhere.
Like many of Brisbane’s waterways, platypuses were once regularly seen here, but new research has found platypuses have likely gone from Kedron Brook and four other greater Brisbane waterways: the Bremer River, Scrubby Creek, Slacks Creek and Enoggera Creek.
The last confirmed sighting at this exact spot was in 2002. …
Ada Lovelace’s 1842 prototype of a robotic home assistant was ingeniously engineered, and might have advanced mechanical engineering by decades if it hadn’t run catastrophically amok in a marketplace.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 15, 2021
No logo, no likes: New York’s offline DIY culture embraces lockdown limitations
From subversive newspapers to free gigs and galleries, a new kind of pandemic creativity is anti-consumerist and pro-community.
Covers of the NewNow. ‘I wanted to make a community, and to address what we’re living through,’ says publisher Kim Hastreiter.
New Yorkers who once thrived on chance encounters and interconnection with Manhattan’s pace and energy are beginning to find creative footholds in the abnormalities of pandemic life.
Expressions are varied, but each point to the embrace of a profoundly altered state and a DIY punk ethos featuring a partial rejection of commercial imperatives, branding, the internet and politics.
Years after the demise of alternative newspapers like the Village Voice, two of those expressions have taken form in print: the NewNow, from thee former Paper magazine editor Kim Hastreiter, and the Drunken Canal, a self-described “biased news source”, that treats Brooklyn as a foreign land, runs a horoscope of mostly bad omens and a column entitled: “Uh-oh … sorry to hear you’ve been cancelled”.
The founders of the Canal, Gutes Guterman and Claire Banse, both 23, said the concept came to them in July while sitting on a park bench.
“Covid made everyone feels so separate, and we wanted to create some kind of community that people could recognise,” Guterman told the Guardian. “We ran with it in the hope that for someone out there it would better their day. With the chaos and total depression of the pandemic – and we’re not making light of it – the only thing we could do was laugh.” …
The Truth About the Black Panther Party, Beyond the History of Misinformation
A new biopic of Fred Hampton has put the Panthers back in the spotlight. Learn more about them with these documentaries.
From Black Panthers (1968), dir. Agnes Varda.
The new film Judas and the Black Messiah tells the story of how charismatic young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was betrayed by an FBI informant and killed in a police raid. If you want to learn more about Hampton and the Black Panthers, who have often been unjustly maligned in US media, then check out some of these films.
Black Panthers (1968)
One of the works Agnès Varda made during her time in California, this documentary is one of the rare films made by an outsider to portray the Panthers in a positive light. In a remarkably short running time, it manages to touch on a whole host of topics, from protests over Huey P. Newton’s arrest to the Panthers’ social programs to discussions of the role of women within the movement. It carries Varda’s trademark humanism and warmth.
The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)
Before COINTELPRO and the full extent of the US government’s efforts to silence dissidents came to light, activists had to struggle to have their side of each story taken seriously. While the Chicago Police Department claimed that Hampton and his comrades were plotting violence and had fired first on their officers, the Panthers’ meticulous investigation of the fatal night, documented by director Howard Alk in this film, led them to assert that the police raid was in fact an assassination. They would ultimately be proven correct.
On Vimeo.
…
Ed. I’m planning on streaming Judas and the Black Messiah this evening on HBOMax.
How to have better arguments online
The troubled times we live in, and the rise of social media, have created an age of endless conflict. Rather than fearing or avoiding disagreement, we need to learn to do it well.
In 2010, Time magazine made Mark Zuckerberg its person of the year. It described Facebook’s mission as being to “tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world”. During the first decade of mass internet use, this was a popular theory: the more that people were able to communicate with others, the more friendly and understanding they would become, the result being a more peaceable and harmonious world.
In 2021, that vision seems painfully naive. Howling online mobs clash day and night, and some of them commit real-world violence. The internet is connecting people, but it isn’t necessarily creating fellow feeling. At its worst, it can resemble a vast machine for the production of mutual antipathy.
Technology is at least partially responsible for a world in which toxic disagreement is ubiquitous; in which offence seems to be constantly given and taken; in which we do ever more talking and ever less listening. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham has observed that the internet is a medium that engenders disagreement by design. Digital media platforms are inherently interactive and, well, people are disputatious.
As Graham puts it, “agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing”. Readers are more likely to comment on an article or post when they disagree with it, and in disagreement they have more to say (there are only so many ways you can say “I agree”). People also tend to get more animated when they disagree, which usually means getting angry.
But while it is tempting to blame Facebook and Twitter for making us this way, that would be to miss the significance of a wider and more profound shift in human behaviour – one that has been decades, even centuries, in the making. Socially, as well as electronically, there are fewer one-way channels than ever. Everyone is starting to talk back to everyone else. If we are becoming more disagreeable, it’s because the modern world demands we speak our minds. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Ed. This is a one-way channel. Your opinion is not pertinent here.
U.S. Mint Introduces New Seven-Cent Coin To Bolster Citizens’ Math Skills https://t.co/KyiM62YbGA pic.twitter.com/Ed6BSC4chE
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 15, 2021
4 Historical Figures With Undeserved Reputations
The thing about history is that it tends to concern people who are no longer at liberty to say, “Uh, wait, I can explain.” Thanks to the troubling lack of blogs published by historical figures, we pretty much have to take the word of whoever was around and literate, so naturally, sometimes we get it wrong. It’s okay. It happens …
4. Shakespeare Wrecked Richard III To Make A Point
Had Shakespeare known we’d be using his silly little plays as our primary reference points for tons of historical figures centuries later, he might have been a bit more careful, and he did Richard III especially dirty. His incarnation of the English ruler is about as physically cartoonish as a human villain can get, with a hunchback and a withered arm, and he flits about arranging the deaths of anyone who inconveniences him, if not stabbing them himself. You might think it’s not possible for a person to be that straight-up evil, and it’s probably not.
In reality, Richard III probably didn’t kill anyone Shakespeare wrote that he did. In some cases, we’re certain: Prince Edward died in battle, and most of his other supposed victims were ordered killed by Edward IV with no apparent input from Richard. In fact, he was downright salty about the execution of the Duke of Clarence. As for the “princes in the tower,” no one knows what happened to them. It’s possible that Richard had them murdered, but there’s no evidence either way, and he’d already declared them illegitimate, so it would give a whole new meaning to the word “overkill.” Also, not that it matters, but he wasn’t a hunchback. He had scoliosis that caused one shoulder to sit slightly lower than the other and made him walk a little funny. His arm was fine.
So what was Shakespeare’s problem? Mostly that he was living in the Elizabethan era. In a weird collision of dynasties, Edward IV was Lizzy’s great-grandfather, so he couldn’t be portrayed as a murdery scumbag, but his brother was fair game. It was essentially the real-life version of the plays about the royal family on Game of Thrones — in fact, Tyrion Lannister was largely based on Richard III. Did Shakespeare have to write the story at all? Maybe not, but he had a bigger point to make. At the time, the succession was on everyone’s mind, what with the whole “Virgin Queen” thing, and the possibly secretly Catholic Shakespeare was no fan of the powerful Cecil family, who endorsed the Protestant James VI of Scotland for the position. It’s possible that Richard III was meant as a stand-in for William Cecil’s second son, Robert, who did have a hunchback and “a reputation for dissimulation,” i.e., a taste for chaos, and Shakespeare banked on his audience recognizing the allusion. Today, though, we only know Robert Cecil as — seriously? The Iron Bank guy on Game of Thrones? This shit is more interlinked than those royals. …
Police Union Honors Law Enforcement Officers Injured Carrying Out Capitol Attack https://t.co/8zAKglVdnm pic.twitter.com/OHuxY0YJud
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 15, 2021
RELATED: 4 Reasons Tech Titans Went From Gods To Garbage
Ah, to return to the simpler times when we first fell in love with our Big Tech Boys. That time in the early 2010s when Elon Musk made headlines as “the real-life Iron Man,” Jeff Bezos as “the next Steve Jobs” and Mark Zuckerberg as “the only true unicorn.” They were worshipped for their genius, their innovative, convenience-enabling ideas, and aloof nerd-cool. So what happened that made them so widely despised in such a short time? What made us lose faith in the peerless disruptors who promised that a better tomorrow was only a few more apps away? Well …
4. We Got To Know Them As People
The innovative thing about our tech moguls’ dickflappery isn’t that they’ve become hated, it’s that they’re hated in their own time. Tycoons have always been in general massive turds of people. Henry Ford was a fascist and an anti-Semite, Thomas Edison was a lying thief and an anti-Semite and Andrew Carnegie drowned an entire town trying to cut down the commute to his country club.
But that wasn’t how they were regarded in their own day, when the Myth far outshone the Man. It’s usually only after a good half-century, two dozen unlicensed biographies and a reopened mineshaft filled with the bones of orphan workers that the general populace becomes aware just how gross Great Men really were. And for a good while our tech tycoons were heading down that same path. The 2010s were still rife with mainstream movies about the complicated genius of men like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs — the last magnate who died before we stopped pretending the farts from his unwashed posterior smelled like roses. But billionaire tech playboys lead a very public life. They regularly connect with their customer base/fans through social media, interviews and, recently, Congressional hearings. They wanted us to get to know them.
And now we do. We know that Dara Khosrowshahi openly admits to not caring about Uber’s horrific rape problem (it’s extremely bad) by basically saying ‘we live in a society’ when asked. Or that Jack Dorsey is slowly and openly transforming into the David Koresh of social media minus the charm, principles, or natural leadership qualities. Or that business genius Jeff Bezos is too dumb to understand that he’s the villain in his favorite TV show. Or that Elon Musk — actually, we don’t have the time to discuss the Supreme God-Emperor of space bros right now. He gets his own little chapter later. But there’s always time to talk about how unappealing Mark Zuckerberg is, who every time he tries to appear relatable in front of a camera looks like an intergalactic sentient mantis wondering why that grub is asking him to explain how Facebook profited from Russian election meddling.
The Social Network may not have meant to be flattering in 2010, but a decade later we’ve all realized that the Zuck riffing like a West Wing character and being played by everyone’s first-year college boyfriend Jesse Eisenberg still made him a million percent more personable than the county fair wax model awakened with the soul of a graphing calculator that we know him as. Can you even imagine anyone today thinking it’d be a box office hit to release a serious rags-to-riches movie about a tech mogul like Mark Zuckerberg? You couldn’t find a decent actor to play him — and not just because Disney destroys all of their faulty animatronic Woodrow Wilsons. …
The Worst Snowstorms In U.S. History https://t.co/E5qdl1BMN0 pic.twitter.com/EaSbziOCIp
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 16, 2021
Stream This Dystopian Animation, Where Mob Violence Is Only a Right Swipe Away
“I want us to confront our own biases and all the ways in which we enact power over others,” explained filmmaker Arafat Mazhar of his cautionary tale of technology and intolerance in Pakistan.
What if there was an app that could ensure mob violence was meted out with the ease of a right swipe? If the question sounds alarming in itself, then the answer is even more unsparing in the hand-drawn animated short film SWIPE (2020). Set in Pakistan’s technologically advanced but politically oppressive dystopian future, the 14-minute Urdu short features Multan residents hooked to “iFatwa,” an app that crowdsources religious death sentences. Unfolding over a day, SWIPE’s central protagonist is Jugnu, a 10-year-old kid whose addiction to the app ultimately ends in tragedy.
Behind the film is a group of 20 young Pakistani animators, musicians, and storytellers who comprise Puffball Studios, an interdisciplinary production house led by the multi-hyphenate Arafat Mazhar, who directed, produced, voice-acted, and co-wrote the film, in addition to scoring it. In an email interview with Hyperallergic, he described the film as “a plea for introspection of the world that we are leaving for our children.” SWIPE falls under a genre Mazhar terms as “cyberkhilafat.” An obvious play on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, cyberkhilafat films are attuned to the social realities of Pakistan and meant to “explore how modern forms of Islam, technology and power are combined to dictate political and social norms that mute individual identity.”
SWIPE’s iFatwa mimics the language of extrajudicial violence, currently on the rise throughout the subcontinent as a by-product of a vicious strain of religious intolerance and unwitting adherence to the idea of protecting one’s honor. The app enables users to execute strangers via a simple gesture. Perhaps it’s no surprise that most of the cases on iFatwa are against women – a testament to an inherently patriarchal country’s pastime of suppressing the rights of women. (As per the Global Gender Gap Index 2018, Pakistan is the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women.) The victims range from a female anchor finding herself on the app for incorrectly draping her dupatta to an elderly woman getting right-swiped for being caught making posters for a women’s protest march. Although anyone can submit a case on the app, a person is only executed once their case has amassed 10,000 swipes-right (swiping left bestows clemency, used sparingly in the film). Meanwhile, users who opt to kill most often are rewarded with the distinction of becoming a ghazi (warriors). Bloodshed essentially becomes a video game. …
A young boy addicted to iFatwa, an app that crowdsources religious death sentences, spends his days swiping on the lives of strangers as he attempts to get a top spot on the Ajar Board.
Swipe is a hand painted animated short film about Pakistan, made by a team of 20 Pakistani animators, musicians, storytellers, and actors over the course of 1 year. Written, drawn, animated, composed, acted all under one roof, Puffball Studios, Swipe is our attempt confronting a growing crisis resulting from a culmination of the nexus of technology, extremism and fascism. At the heart of this story is a confrontation with increasingly hostile, alienating, divisive circumstances and a plea for greater empathy, before it’s too late. …
First US Stamp by Alaska Native Person Spotlights Tlingit Lore
The stamp, designed by Tlingit and Athabascan artist Rico Lanáat’ Worl, features the raven as a trickster-spirit within a field of gold stars, holding the sun in his beak.
The “Raven Story” stamp by Rico Lanáat’ Worl.
The Tlingit nation (meaning “People of the Tides” in the Tlingit language) is indigenous to the US Pacific Northwest, and its art features some of the most iconic motifs associated with Native American cultural production. Cedar poles and canoes, as well as shamanic objects and adornments, are all known to feature carved and painted formline representations of important totem animals, including the raven, wolf, bear, eagle, and others.
Now, for the first time in recorded history, the US Postal Service has debuted a stamp designed by an Alaska Native person: Tlingit and Athabascan artist Rico Lanáat’ Worl. Worl is a well-established working artist with his own art and accessory brand, Trickster Company, as well as a teacher and social designer with Juneau-based Alaska Native arts nonprofit Sealaska Heritage Institute.
Worl’s forever stamp is titled “Raven Story” and takes one of the signature characters in Tlingit lore as its subject. Though Raven appears in many Tlingit stories, the stamp’s image features the Trickster-spirit within a field of gold stars, holding a round sun in his beak, referring to a specific tale. In an interview with Mary Louise Kelly for NPR, Worl translates the story as “Raven and the Box of Daylight,” the Tlingit iteration of the light-bringing story that pervades the mythologies of many cultures.
“It is a story that is a gateway for learning about Tlingit culture for a broad audience, for a national audience,” Worl said to Kelly. He continued:
[…] Raven is all black on a white background. His feathers are kind of stretched out backwards. He’s got a hand — a human-shaped hand kind of jutting out from one part of his body, indicating that moment of transformation. Raven is in a moment where he’s stealing some stars from this clan leader, and he’s kind of bringing stars out to the world to share with the world, to share with everyone in the world.
…
Ed. You’re welcome.
‘You could see it all from that marvellous glass cabin in the Cascade mountains’
Continuing our series about memorable encounters, we hear the story of the fire watchman of Desolation Peak in Washington State.
Desolation Peak lookout cabin in Ross Lake national recreation area. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
A years ago, I travelled to the Cascade mountains of Washington state to research fire lookouts – crow’s nests for smoke spotters to raise the alarm in case of forest fires. My goal was Desolation Peak, the cabin where rookie vedette Jack Kerouac spent 63 eventful days in the summer of 1956.
At the time I was writing a book about far-flung and abandoned beacons, sheds, and ghost towns. Of all the outposts, Desolation Peak (1,860 metres tall, about six miles south of the Canada-US border) was perhaps the riskiest in terms of who I’d meet when I got there because, unlike Big Creek Baldy in Idaho (yes, that was its name), Desolation Peak was still staffed and in service. So I knew that there was someone sitting on top of the mountain. I was going to hike up to their cabin and it would be pot-luck whether they’d be an enthusiast and welcome me in or a grizzly jobsworth who’d tell me to get stuffed.
With my longsuffering friend Colin, I drove north from Seattle on Interstate 5, then east along the Skagit River and into the densely forested Cascades. The journey took 48 hours with a stopover in a Bates-style motel in the one-horse town of Marblemount – the last services for 70 wild miles of boscage and bears.
Next morning, we traversed a series of dams before zooming 20 miles up Ross Lake in a powerboat driven by a taciturn lumberjack. The rest of the day, we hiked pine needle paths beneath western red cedars and ponderosa pines with trunks a couple of metres across; trees so high that the Pacific silver firs below appeared as mere ankle-biters. Up and up Desolation we went until, near dusk, we emerged near the top and pitched our tent. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
American demand for avocados has tripled over the last 8 years, which brought money to struggling regions of Mexico. But that cash has also attracted the cartels who have used violence and extortion to muscle their way into the market.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump is acquitted 57-43 in the most bipartisan impeachment vote ever, Mitch McConnell concedes that Trump is guilty but says it’s up to the criminal justice system to take care of him, and team Trump can’t help but gloat.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me commentary on hawk vs duck. Oi. Get your “Welcome to Fight Day!”
まるは白いカバーをかけたソファがお気に入りなので、ソファ怪獣が少し悪さをしたくらいでは動きたくない。Maru likes the sofa with the white cover, so he doesn’t want to move even if the sofa monster does something wrong.
FINALLY . . .
Where All the People Who Left California Probably Went
It’s feeling a lot less like a hellscape after the mass exodus.
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the approximately 37 gajillion people that moved out of New York and California in 2020. Let me be the first to say that most of these people tried to sell their possessions on Craigslist for exorbitant prices. I offered $25 for that preamp that you’ll never use again because you never had a voiceover career in the first place, Patty. Enjoy Tampa.
Will this exodus dramatically decrease the tax revenue in these garbage states? Honestly… probably, yes. So our best hope is that most of the people who left (who should in no way be allowed to drive the 50-foot U-Hauls they rented) are economists, and that they’ll take their doom and gloom tax revenue forecasting with them. Governor Handsome Newsom and Governor Definitely-An-Author-Now Cuomo don’t care about your obsession with numbers, dweebs.
Here’s a list of places that people I no longer have to think about, moved to. Also, $36 is more than a fair price for a lightly used KitchenAid mixer. You can’t fit it in your suitcase anyway, Kevin. Enjoy Pine Bluff, loser.
- Out of business. Randy worked the register at Peggy’s Prefrozen Pizza a few blocks from my apartment. He once told me he liked hot-air balloon rides. What a tool. Thankfully, Peggy’s was shut down not because of the pandemic, but because someone kept leaving bags of poop in their mailbox until the mailman stopped delivering their mail. Eventually, they were past due on all their bills and LADWP turned off their power. Now I never have to see Randy’s stupid face ever again.
- Pahrump, Nevada. I absolutely hate reasonable, rational people. Unfortunately for me, none of these types of people would ever move to Pahrump. But the woman who lived next door to me for six years who didn’t own an item of clothing that wasn’t bedazzled moved there with the ghost of Stephen Miller’s hairline.
- Hell, probably? I hate to speak ill of the dead, but who in their right mind divorces Jennifer Garner? Have you seen her Instagram? A lot of people died last year but when Ben Affleck bit the dust, it was so easy to remove his entire existence from my brain. Upon hearing that he died while being zipped into a velociraptor costume for the latest Jurassic Park film, I immediately ignored the alert on my phone and continued yelling at the Starbucks barista who wouldn’t give me a second napkin.
- …
Ed. Fancy that! I formerly resided in a building.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Tucker Carlson has the questions AND the answers in "Tucker Jeopardy!" pic.twitter.com/GsWIvcerES
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 16, 2021
