• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Great Kenyan Giraffe Rescue
It took a custom-built barge and a whole lot of patience to get these rare animals off a shrinking island.
A male giraffe, Lbarnoti, was rescued from flooded Kenyan rangeland using a custom barge and some patient training. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
ON A SUNNY DAY AT KENYA’S Lake Baringo, a barge floated gently by. Its main passenger calmly munched on his favorite snack of acacia seed pods. At about 16 feet tall, he could easily peer around to take in his watery surroundings. But this was not some idyllic pleasure cruise. This trip, on January 27, 2021, was a rescue mission, to save Lbarnoti, a Rothschild’s giraffe, from floodwaters gradually rising around Longicharo Island, where he and some fellow ruminants had lived for a decade.
Lbarnoti was not the only one to get this treatment. In December 2020, two females, Asiwa and Pasaka, made the same trip, one at a time. They had all been carefully transferred by American-based nonprofit Save Giraffes Now in collaboration with Kenya Wildlife Service, the Northern Rangelands Trust, and local members of the Ruko community. Another six animals remain on the island.
The long-necked grazers are extremely challenging to move around, according to David O’Connor, president of Save Giraffes Now, who was present at the first rescue. Unlike elephants, rhinoceroses, and lions, who can be sedated while being transported, giraffe physiology makes this strategy risky for the animals. “Once they’re down and horizontal, which is not a natural position for them, potentially they could choke on their own saliva. Or because of their unique blood flow system, basically their brain could explode because of the high pressure of the blood going to the brain,” says O’Connor. “And how do you get the tallest creature on Earth across a mile of open lake to the mainland?”
An aerial view shows the rescue of the giraffe Asiwa from the flooded island. Embiggenable.
The solution was a custom-built steel barge. Made by the Ruko community, it was specifically engineered to carry a tall creature weighing as much as 2,600 pounds, with a rectangular steel structure with reinforced sides atop a series of empty steel drums. ”Our hope all along had been not to tranquilize the giraffe at all, but really try to move them, with the amazing team on the ground, to slowly train them to be comfortable on the barge,” says O’Connor. The training is painstaking, involving food such as mangoes and acacia seed pods, and acclimating the giraffes to the barge. With Lbarnoti, the conservationists were able to lure him in voluntarily. Boats then gently pulled the barge an hour-long ride, past crocodiles and hippopotamuses. He arrived safely at the mainland sanctuary of the Ruko Community Wildlife Conservancy, a protected wildlife reserve, where he was reunited with Asiwa and Pasaka (both of whom actually had to be blindfolded and gently sedated for the trip). …
The Beaverton, Oregon overpass that dark-web conspiracy theorists insist is a time portal.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 16, 2021
Why a Tiny Island Created the Biggest Marine Sanctuary in the South Atlantic
Tristan da Cunha was first inhabited to keep an eye on Napoleon; now residents are looking out for lobsters.
The town center of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, the island’s only town. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
LIKE MOST PLACES, THE BRITISH Overseas Territory of Tristan da Cunha is a community made up of teachers, accountants, mechanics, and grocers. But here, on the most remote inhabited island on earth, the weather has a funny way of rearranging the professional landscape.
“We have two dong-ringers that have a look at the weather, and if they think it’s a suitable day, they’ll ring the dong hanging in the middle of the village,” says James Glass, who serves as Chief Islander, an elected community leader. “It’s actually an empty gas cylinder.” Between 40 and 60 days a year, at about 4:30 in the morning, tinny claps engulf the small village of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, population 254. The tolls echo off a 2,000-meter cliff at the village’s north end, rousing Tristanians with news of a placid ocean, and an island-wide shift in occupation.
“Plumbers, electricians, carpenters,” says Glass, “on that day, they’re all fishermen.”
Nicky Swain and his son Ryan sound the island’s dong.
Human life on this tiny volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean is intimately tied to the populations of spiny lobsters that populate its surrounding waters. No one knows this better than Tristanians themselves, which is why they recently joined the UK’s Blue Belt Programme—which aims to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030—in establishing what is now the fourth largest Marine Protected Zone (MPZ) in the world. …
Goodhour Island, of Kiribati, contains only two structures: an abandoned Naval depot from WWII, and a 40-foot stone statue of Amelia Earhart that is said to occasionally shuffle its feet.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 16, 2021
Her name is Rio: Aunt Ciata, the guardian of samba who created Carnival culture
Hiding musicians in yards and back rooms, this fearless community leader protected Afro-Brazilian music and traditions that live on a century later.
A reveller with Imperatriz samba school dances during the carnival parade at the Sambadrome, Rio de Janeiro, 20 February 2012.
This week, Rio de Janeiro should have been celebrating, its streets alive with local people and tourists honouring the city’s Carnival, a tradition dating back to the 17th century. But for the first time outside the two world wars, the city’s flagship event is cancelled. It’s the only reasonable decision given how out of control the pandemic is in Brazil – yet locals and tourists are still mourning the loss of the world’s most prestigious pre-Lent festival, one rooted in the sound of samba.
A century ago, samba becoming synonymous with Brazil’s cultural identity would have seemed impossible. In the early 20th century, Rio’s ruling elite were ashamed and afraid of the rhythm, which was linked to African-Brazilian cults. Samba faced police persecution: musicians were frequently arrested, their instruments confiscated or destroyed; gatherings were abruptly shut down. It might not have lasted were it not for the intelligence and diplomacy of the entrepreneur, artist, spiritual guide and community leader known as Aunt Ciata.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rio de Janeiro was a bustling Latin American capital. Slavery was officially over and the industrialisation of Brazil was gaining momentum. Rio attracted working-class Latin Europeans and African-Brazilian migrants from the north-eastern state of Bahia searching for better living conditions. Ciata, born Hilária Batista de Almeida, was one of them. She arrived in Rio aged 22 in 1876, moving to a neighbourhood known as Little Africa thanks to its predominantly African-Brazilian community, and became one of many so-called aunts – including Bebiana, Amélia, Perciliana and Veridiana – who shaped the community.
From Bahia, Aunt Ciata brought the culture inherited from her African ancestors and the habit of celebrating life as a form of resistance. “Her parties used to last five, sometimes seven days, nonstop,” says Gracy Mary Moreira, Ciata’s great-granddaughter and custodian since 2007 of Casa da Tia Ciata, a cultural institution dedicated to her memory and legacy. Ciata’s riotous gatherings attracted all kinds of people, from the African-Bahian community to working-class immigrants – Jews, Arabs, Latin Europeans – and even curious white middle-class Cariocas (denizens of Rio). For Ciata, the fuller the house, the better. …
I argued a shooting death case in front of Amy Coney Barrett. Here’s why she shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court.
Brad King before he was killed by part-time sheriff’s deputies.
Now that it’s been two several months since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, I can confidently say she is not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Sure, she was nominated by the vilest figure in the last century of American politics. Sure, McConnell rammed her nomination through the Senate while millions of Americans were dying, getting evicted, and trying to figure out where their next meal was coming from. And sure, Barrett is an ideologue who will undoubtedly be toxic to women, unions, the LGBT community, immigrants, and any other vulnerable population you can think of. Those curiosities render her unqualified from the get-go. But this column is not about any of that stuff, about which billions of useless words have already been spent. This is a story about Brad King, who is dead, and his parents, Matt and Gina, who are alive. I had the privilege of representing them in front of then-Judge Barrett earlier this year, during the brief period of time she presided over the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Brad was killed in his own backyard in central Indiana after he called 911 to report a mental health crisis. He was 29. Because of his mild schizophrenia, he lived with his parents. He had no history of violent or aggressive behavior whatsoever. In her testimony, Brad’s mother Gina described him as “just sweet” and, as much as she worried about his mental health, she was never concerned about her safety or anyone else’s. A “bad day” for Brad was a day when he would “be more quiet and stay in his room.” Even in leaving him alone, Gina’s only concern was that she “felt sorry for him. Because I know sometimes when Brad would get nervous, he would want to call people. Sometimes if he was having a bad day, he would say, ‘I need to call my brothers and talk to them,’ or ‘Let’s call Grandma’ or something.”
Where the Kings live, as in most of America, the only responders to mental health calls are cops, many of whom might have had a few hours (at best) of training on recognizing mental health issues. But Brad had made emergency calls before, and experienced deputies were always able to talk him down without incident.
On November 29, 2016, things didn’t go so smoothly. Two volunteer, part-time sheriff’s deputies, one who was a full-time researcher for Eli Lilly and the other an insurance agent, answered the call. They killed Brad within thirty seconds of laying eyes on him. Their story was that Brad lunged at a deputy with a ten-inch kitchen knife that he produced from the pocket of his shorts.
Brad wasn’t able to tell his side of the story. But the story told by the cops didn’t add up. …
RELATED: The Founders Were Wrong About Democracy
The authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.
IF THERE WAS ONE idea shared by just about every author of the Constitution, it was the one articulated by James Madison at the convention on June 26, 1787.
The mass of the people would be susceptible to “fickleness and passion,” he warned. They would suffer from “want of information as to their true interest.” Those who must “labour under all the hardships of life” would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.” Over time, as the population expanded and crowded into cities, the risk would only worsen that “the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”
To protect property from the people—and ultimately, the people from themselves—the Framers would have to erect “a necessary fence” against “impetuous councils.” A Senate to counterbalance the House of Representatives, selected from a more elite few and serving for longer terms, would be one such fence. The indirect election of the president through an Electoral College would be another. A federal judiciary confirmed by the Senate and serving for life would provide one more. And so on through the constitutional design.
The system of government in the United States has evolved in many important ways since 1787. But the mistrust of unpropertied majorities—especially urban unpropertied majorities—persists. In no other comparably developed society is voting as difficult; in no peer society are votes weighted as unequally; in no peer society is there a legislative chamber where 41 percent of the lawmakers can routinely outvote 59 percent, as happens in the U.S. Senate.
This system is justified today with the same arguments as when it was established a quarter millennium ago. “We’re not a democracy,” tweeted Senator Mike Lee of Utah in October. Lee explained his meaning in a second tweet that crammed Madisonian theory into fewer than 280 characters. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and [prosperity] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” …
Experts Say Severe Weather Will Continue Until Gargantuan Child Shaking Earth’s Snow Globe Calms Down https://t.co/cioFqlEsiY pic.twitter.com/bb88C0BlVc
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 16, 2021
Buffalo Bill’s Home From ‘Silence of The Lambs’ Is Transforming Into A B&B
Are you sick and tired of your basic vacation destinations? Have you wished you could enjoy a good night’s sleep, complete with dreams of screaming lambs? Do you really really really like moisturizing? Well, folks, you’re in luck. The home where Buffalo Bill kept his victims in Silence of The Lambs will soon become a functional B&B. Although garnering fame in the 1991 horror classic, which premiered exactly 30 years ago on Sunday, the Perryopolis, Pennsylvania home was first built in 1910, and comes decked out with several features including a wraparound porch, several fireplaces, an on-property vintage railroad caboose, and an in-ground pool. Who knew Buffalo Bill had such sweet digs?
It was just really something to witness, doing the walk-through with the Realtor,” property owner Chris Rowan told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of his not-so diabolical plan to transform the fictitious torture chamber into a quaint Northeastern retreat. Although the eerie basement scenes, including the one featured in the movie’s dramatic climax, were filmed at a different location, Rowan, a prop stylist and art director, says he’s considering using his creative chops to refurbish the basement to look a bit more like Buffalo Bill’s lair. “With my background as an art director and prop stylist, I plan to recreate the well, have it fabricated and installed,” he explained to the Pennsylvania publication “I’m not going to dig into the earth, but I want to install something along the lines of the film and give fans a pretty unique photo opportunity.”
Rowan is currently running a contest for which fan will be the first to spend a night in the famous pad, where the winners will be announced in March, but it seems most Silence of the Lambs enthusiasts may have to wait to be able to vacation Buffalo Bill’s home, as regular bookings will only begin “in a few months.” …
SOMETHING ELSE BARELY UNINTERESTING AT ALL: Silence of the Lambs was released on Valentine’s Day, 30 years ago.
Neighbors Come Together To Watch BMW Owner Struggle In Snow https://t.co/EtdLp2NyBA pic.twitter.com/dvQyMYRP0s
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 17, 2021
RELATED: Twitter Celebrates Valentine’s Day By Sharing Cringe-Worthy ‘Mansplaining’ Incidents
Valentine’s Day has come and gone, leaving in its wake countless boxes of half-eaten chocolates, day-old flowers, and some pretty tapped bank accounts. Yet in honor of this annual occasion, several Twitter users banded together to celebrate this holiday of romance and love by honoring the special men in their lives — the irritating mansplainers that can’t seem to shut the hell up.
For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced this annoyance, mansplaining expands far beyond its eponymous implication of men explaining things. Mansplaining is an incredibly grating phenomenon occurring when dudes baselessly decide their knowledge is superior to the women or nonbinary folks they’re speaking to, condescendingly explaining concepts they assume the other party not to know, even though the people they’re patronizing are already well aware of the information at hand.
On Sunday, Twitter user @J_Dot_J took to the platform with a question for her followers “In honor of Valentine’s Day, what’s the most obvious thing you’ve ever been mansplained about?” she wrote. “Mine was once mentioning a 30(b)(6) depo for work on here, and a guy sent me the text of the rule and offered to send me a PowerPoint that explains what a corporate representative is.”
In honor of Valentine’s Day, what’s the most obvious thing you’ve ever been mansplained about?
Mine was once mentioning a 30(b)(6) depo for work on here, and a guy sent me the text of the rule and offered to send me a PowerPoint that explains what a corporate representative is.
— Cold JJ (@J_Dot_J) February 14, 2021
Over the next few days, several users seemed to understand this irritating trend all too well, flocking to the thread with their own alleged examples of times mansplainers did not, in fact, know who the hell they were talking down to. …
FIRST UP: Harry Potter and the Mansplaining Mishap
Nation’s Idiots Announce Plans To Jump Off Their Roofs Into A Pile Of Snow And Break Their Fucking Legs https://t.co/tbbLU5L61N pic.twitter.com/E5gPWY66Td
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 16, 2021
RELATED: So, About Those Commercials On ‘Wandavision’
Those fake commercial breaks in Wandavision have basically become the Zapruder film to the nerdy Kevin Costner that is the internet. Since the show began, fans have scoured the phony ads for clues, prompting a lot of different opinions. One of the most prevalent theories is that each commercial represents a different Infinity Stone; like the “Hydra Soak” soap, which comes in a blue cube, not unlike the Tesseract.
They also seem to reference specific traumas in Wanda’s past, including the death of her parents, her imprisonment, and “Lagos,” the country where she accidentally blew up part of an office building full of innocent people.
The commercial seen in this week’s episode is somehow even grimmer. The stop-motion, early 2000s-style spot features a boy stranded on a desert island. He’s seemingly saved by a sunglasses-clad shark who tosses him a package of “Yo-Magic” yogurt, which he struggles to open as his body eventually dies and rots in front of our eyes — and all from the same streaming service that gives us Muppet Babies.
Some people think that the boy’s skeletal fate is a reference to Red Skull, who is forced to watch over the Soul Stone like an interplanetary jewelry store security guard. But it could also be referencing one of Wanda’s traumas — just one that hasn’t happened yet. This ad could be a manifestation of Wanda’s fears for her children who were seemingly created by magic, which despite what some fundamentalist school health classes might teach, isn’t actually how babies are made. This is not entirely dissimilar from the comics, although we have yet to learn that Wanda made Billy and Tommy with pieces of the goddamn devil. It’s as if the commercial is telling Wanda that her powers (“Yo-Magic”) won’t be able to save the twins. …
FULL DISCLOSURE: Haven’t watched Wandavision, don’t intend to. The commercial was amusing.
‘You Go Back Where You Came From,’ Says Texan Pointing Gun At Snowman Trespassing On Property https://t.co/T7OHCABfSP pic.twitter.com/vnWAzDkwBH
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 16, 2021
RELATED: It’s All Rigged
What Robinhood and Facebook have in common
As of January 10, nine brokerages had set the one-year target stock price for GameStop at about $10.
But that’s not where it would stay—at least for a while. It climbed in price because a subreddit, r/WallStreetBets, engineered a short squeeze.
That kicked off a wild ride, revealing many things not just about how digital technologies are transforming our world, but also about how they are not. It was yet another stark demonstration that technology is not simply a tool—neutral on all possible outcomes, good or bad—but something more dynamic, messy and complicated. It’s a complex system where the workings of both the technology and our society, and crucially, how they interact with each other matter greatly.
This is how the squeeze worked: A few large hedge funds had “shorted” GameStop. That means that they had borrowed the stock, with the intention of returning it when the share price moved lower, as they expected it would, leaving them with a profit. Obviously, this works only if the future price of the stock is indeed lower. If the share price rises, the hedge funds would have to buy the stock at the new, higher price, leading to losses. Investors on r/WallStreetBets had noticed that this particular short position was especially vulnerable because a large portion of its existing shares was tied up in the short betting. They explained to others in the forum that if the price went up and up, the hedge funds would eventually be forced to cover those short positions by purchasing the stock back at a much higher price—from them.
They started buying. The stock started rising. …
Angel Otero’s Exquisite Domestic Interiors
In “The Fortune of Having Been There”, Otero’s paintings seduce us with the whole as well as their individual parts.
Angel Otero, “Naked Island” (2020) (detail), oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 84 x 108 x 1.5 inches. Embiggenable.
There are no human figures in Angel Otero‘s paintings, yet the trace of people is ever-present. A work titled “Naked Island” (2020), for instance, which depicts a wicker rocking chair floating improbably in a bathtub, is a nod to his great-grandmother. Blind and in her 90s when Otero was a child, she, along with his grandmother, raised him in Puerto Rico; the image of a chair in the tub, where she would sit to be bathed, is imprinted in his memory.
You would have to ask Otero about the symbolism in this particular painting to glean such an intimate anecdote from the artist, who shies away from explicit references. It is one of nine currently on view in The Fortune of Having Been There at Lehmann Maupin, an exhibition of works he created between the start of the pandemic and now, based loosely on recollections of his upbringing, notably furniture from his childhood home. Combining traditional brushwork and collage with his idiosyncratic “skins” — sheets of oil paint left to dry on panes of glass, peeled away, and affixed to the surface — he crafts uncanny domestic scenes with sly winks to modern art history.
Angel Otero, “Lucky Mirror” (2020), oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 84 x 108 x 1.5 inches.
There are three standout works in this show. “Lucky Mirror” (2020), prominently installed in the gallery’s entrance, is recognizably Otero, a tempestuous jungle of abstract gestures overlaid with some representative forms that achieves cohesion without sacrificing dynamism. The zig-zag shape of an unfinished game of dominoes, for example, carefully rendered against the capricious, variegated background, nevertheless echoes the cadence and rhythm of the surrounding brushstrokes.
Angel Otero, “Fishing Pearls” (2020), oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 84 x 72 x 1.5 inches. Embiggenable.
Six other works are installed in the second gallery, among them “Fishing Pearls” (2020), a strange bathtime mise-en-scène. A sailboat floats in a porcelain tub, and in the foreground, a little white table is minimally set with a water glass and a vase holding a bejeweled palm leaf. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
まるさんが男前に見えてきた。Maru is gentleman!
FINALLY . . .
An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia
Embiggenable.
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE THE internet without Wikipedia. Just like the air we breathe, the definitive digital encyclopedia is the default resource for everything and everyone — from Google’s search bar to undergrad students embarking on research papers. It has more than 6 million entries in English, it is visited hundreds of millions of times per day, and it reflects whatever the world has on its mind: Trending pages this week include Tanya Roberts (R.I.P.), the Netflix drama Bridgerton, and, oh yes, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
It was also never meant to exist — at least, not like this.
Wikipedia was launched as the ugly stepsibling of a whole other online encyclopedia, Nupedia. That site, launched in 1999, included a rigorous seven-step process for publishing articles written by volunteers. Experts would check the information before it was published online — a kind of peer-review process — which would theoretically mean every post was credible. And painstaking. And slow to publish.
“It was too hard and too intimidating,” says Jimmy Wales, Nupedia’s founder who is now, of course, better known as the founder of Wikipedia. “We realized… we need to make it easier for people.” …
BE SURE TO SEND A CARD. Wikipedia turns 20 on Friday.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING: ‘May I, Papa?’: McDonald’s Is Releasing A New Fig And Ladyfinger McFlurry For Fancy Little Boys Who Desire A Treat
Local participation unlikely.
DON YOUR TARTAN-PRINT LEISURE nickers and command Barkley to warm up the Rolls-Royce, because McDonald’s is releasing a toothsome new offering for America’s blue-blooded lads. In a press release this morning, the fast-food giant announced it is coming out with a new fig and ladyfinger McFlurry for fancy little boys who desire a treat.
Ah, how splendid!
Marketed as the McDandy, this fig-based confection is served inside of fine porcelain saucers gilded with Baroque, gold-leaf patterns, making for a luxurious yet yummy after-dinner indulgence for monied young moppets who yearn to cap off an afternoon of backgammon and bidding on antique baubles at Christie’s by stuffing their rosy cheeks with something sweet and decadent. Little lords who would prefer not to rub elbows with grubby commoners in the restaurant can pay for a car-side service upgrade, where a tuxedoed McDonald’s employee will deliver your McDandy to your idling vehicle and adorn you with a Turkish-cotton bib so you don’t risk sullying your silken ascot if any of the beluga caviar “sprinkles” happen to spill onto your shirtfront. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: This fig and ladyfinger McFlurry is not available for a limited time.
