• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Reflections of memories and dreams, all those stories and good hopes… Close your eyes and recall some of those mystical moments that are left in the distant past … Everything has changed, except the silent, still witness within us. Experience of change is only possible on the canvas of the stillness, as well as the light is only real on the canvas of the dark. The change itself, with all the fractal worlds of all possible, always changing forms, is like a tiny little invisible dot on the surface of the vast omnipresent land of stillness. When you realize this, you’re free. There’s nothing to fear, nothing to lose, nothing to get, and a lot to give.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Last Plane at Tegel Airport Has Survived Hijackers and Cold War
Parked far from the runway, the dilapidated 707 is an artifact of Berlin’s divided past.
Retirement for this 707 means being parked beside a forest. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1970, FOUR FLIGHTS heading from Europe to New York were hijacked in a coordinated action by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Two of the aircraft wound up landing in Jordan on a desert airstrip called Dawson’s Field. Another was diverted to Cairo. Intense hostage negotiations followed.
The pilot of the fourth plane, El Al Flight 219, managed to subdue the two hijackers on board by sending the aircraft into a nosedive 20 minutes after taking off from Amsterdam. One of the hijackers, Nicaraguan-American Sandinista Patrick Argüello, was shot and killed by an air marshal. The second, Leila Khaled, who had already hijacked TWA Flight 840 a year earlier, was overpowered and arrested. During the attack, Argüello critically injured flight attendant Shlomo Vidor. Seeking speedy medical attention for the injured attendant, pilot Uri Bar-Lev disregarded instructions to re-route to Tel Aviv and landed safely in London.
El Al captain Uri Bar-Lev, pictured immediately after the hijack attempt. He was penalized by El Al for allowing one of the air marshals to enter the cockpit—a violation of security protocols.
The Boeing 707 from that fateful flight is today parked in the far southwest corner of Berlin’s recently shuttered Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport. One of the plane’s passenger doors hangs off its hinges. Two sets of boarding stairs in similarly bad shape are lined up neatly adjacent to the aircraft. Mold grows over its mid-century livery, which marks the plane as a Lufthansa 707, not El Al. This curious tableau is clearly visible from the other side of the razor wire-topped fence separating the end of the airport from a trail at the edge of the Jungfernheide forest. The plane is historic for several reasons, but its days are numbered.
This plane has seen a lot.
After the foiled attack, and prior to winding up in the Deutsches Technikmuseum’s possession, the plane returned to normal operation. At the time, hijackings were much more common than they are now—between 1968 and 1972, there were 326 attempted hijackings worldwide. The aircraft remained part of the fleet until April 1984, when it was leased to another Israeli airline, Arkia, until July 1986. Then it was sold back to Boeing in September of that year. “From what I understand,” emails Stanley Morais, El Al’s acting director of international affairs, “Boeing gave it to Lufthansa as a gift celebrating 30 years of working together (in a sort of retro livery) and Lufthansa gifted it to the aviation museum in Berlin.” …
RELATED: Meet the Man Who Walks Across Entire Countries in a Straight Line
YouTube star GeoWizard, aka Tom Davies, shares some straight talk about his linear style of adventure.
English adventurer Tom Davies—also known as GeoWizard—hikes, scrambles and sometimes wades across countries in a straight line. Embiggenable.
TOM DAVIES KNOWS A THING or two about staying the course. The 29-year-old British adventurer, also known as GeoWizard, first gained a following through YouTube videos that showcased his skill playing the popular web-based game GeoGuessr. His channel, which he describes as “home of the mischievous adventure,” has 74 million views and counting.
Davies is perhaps now best known for his “Mission Across” series, which chronicles his adventures trying to cross entire countries in a straight line. He chooses a route, uploads it to a handheld GPS, and sets off. The mission’s success is determined by the accuracy with which he follows that linear route; he even has a grading system. A mission in which there is no deviation of more than 25 meters (about 80 feet) is defined as a platinum run. Less than 50 meters (a little more than 160 feet)? It’s a gold run.
His two attempts to cross Wales were unsuccessful, but Davies recently scored a platinum run across Norway, no small achievement given the country’s abundance of mountains and fjords.
Mountains and dense forests abound in northern Norway, where Davies completed his “Mission Across” adventure.
Davies has encountered everything from barbed-wire fences and hostile farmers to brittle cliffs and gorges. Among his most harrowing moments: getting stuck in a peat bog, slowly sinking as he struggled to move. His next project promises ample adventure. With his best friend Greg, a veteran of the second “Mission Across Wales” attempt, Davies is planning a straight shot across rugged Scotland. …
Debunking the myth of legislative gridlock
Laws and policy are being made in Washington – both inside Congress and out.
So much for gridlock.
President Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan is moving steadily through a series of crucial votes in the House and Senate. Its progress toward passage is part of a process known as “reconciliation,” which would allow Democrats to enact the plan without a single GOP vote.
Of course, the massive bill could still be derailed, but Biden has already forged ahead on a flurry of executive orders on climate change, immigration, racial justice and more.
Laws and policy are being made in the nation’s capital, despite its reputation as suffering from partisan gridlock.
The fact is that gridlock has always been a myth, resting on half-truths about the legislative process and a basic misunderstanding of how contemporary policymaking works. …
RELATED: The Secret History of Segregation on Your Monopoly Board
The property values of the popular game reflect a legacy of racism and inequality.
TAKE A GOOD LOOK at a Monopoly board. The most expensive properties, Park Place and Boardwalk, are marked in dark blue. Maybe you’ve drawn a card inviting you to “take a walk on the Boardwalk.” But that invitation wasn’t open to everyone when the game first took on its current form. Even though Black citizens comprised roughly a quarter of Atlantic City’s overall population at the time, the famed Boardwalk and its adjacent beaches were segregated.
Jesse Raiford, a realtor in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the early 1930s and a fan of what players then called “the monopoly game,” affixed prices to the properties on his board to reflect the actual real-estate hierarchy at the time. And in Atlantic City, as in so much of the rest of the United States, that hierarchy reflects a bitter legacy of racism and residential segregation.
Cyril and Ruth Harvey, friends of Raiford’s who played a key role in popularizing the game, lived on Pennsylvania Avenue (a pricey $320 green property on the board); their friends, the Joneses, lived on Park Place. The Harveys had previously lived on Ventnor Avenue, one of the yellow properties that represented some of Atlantic City’s wealthier neighborhoods, with their high walls and fences and racial covenants that excluded Black citizens.
The Harveys employed a Black maid named Clara Watson. She lived on Baltic Avenue in a low-income, Black neighborhood, not far from Mediterranean Avenue. On the Monopoly board, those are priced cheapest, at $60. …
History Of Demonstrations On The Capitol https://t.co/iTXH3R6rtj pic.twitter.com/vp5fnaPDpe
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 21, 2021
Soooo The Assassin Plan In ‘Manchurian Candidate’ And ‘Zoolander’ Was Real
The Manchurian Candidate (and later, and probably more familiar to you, Zoolander) is about a powerful intelligence agency brainwashing unwitting Denzel Washingtons into becoming involuntary assassins who can be “activated” on command with no memory of their acts. It’s clearly satire, right? Even if it were possible, nobody would actually do that, if only because intelligence agencies seem to get by just fine on their assassination skills.
Well, it turns out the C.I.A. really did try to create their very own team of mindless assassins. In the early ’50s, Project ARTICHOKE “attempted to induce amnesia and highly suggestive states in its subjects” through “the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, forced morphine addiction withdrawal, and the use of other drugs, chemicals, and techniques” to answer the question “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?” In another document, the question was phrased as “Can an individual of [redacted] descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” because this was something the government did in the ’50s, so of course, they had to do it racistly.
It’s not clear exactly what kind of “weaker” and “less intelligent” person the project targeted, but what we know about the guy who supervised it, Paul F. Gaynor, suggests that it wasn’t male models. …
Chic Apartment Features Exposed Brick Right Outside Living Room Window https://t.co/qmu3AHMs9L pic.twitter.com/nxG2qW4yr3
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 20, 2021
RELATED: 5 Hip Companies That Crashed Spectacularly
It’s worrying when things go wrong with big companies, because maybe the disaster will spiral outward, and it will eventually affect the rest of us. But sometimes, these brands are just so full of themselves and confident in their coolness that their downfall brings us nothing but delight. So join us in mocking these companies who flew too close to the Sun, and couldn’t see the danger through their Dolce and Gabbana shades.
5. Google Quickly Gave Up On Its Attempt To Make Video Games
A couple years ago, video game companies realized something. People had started streaming movies through subscription services instead of buying them, and it was working pretty well. Meanwhile, people still had to buy games, even though running the things requires special hardware and sometimes cold fusion reactors. What if game companies instead started running the games on their own servers and then let people play remotely, charging a flat subscription fee? And so we got services like GeForce NOW, PS Now, and xCloud.
Then Google said, “We’ll do you one better. How about we do that, but we also make people pay full-price for each game? No, they never get a copy of the game. We’ll keep that for them.”
Gamers weren’t so tempted by Google Stadia. And yeah, in time, Stadia had options where you needn’t pay for individual games or where you needn’t pay for the service at all, but with the simplicity of subscribe-once-no-worries off the table, people had a chance to really get thinking about whether cloud gaming is so great after all. Turns out that even with Google owning supercomputers cooled with unicorn tears, streaming a game from them looks worse than running it yourself on a good PC, unless your internet is really good. And if you’re lucky enough to have internet that good, you’re probably in the market for owning your own expensive computer gear, making you the person who needs Stadia the least.
It was clear that Google needed a little something extra to attract the old men yelling at the cloud, and it was the same thing companies use to market specific consoles or digital stores: games. Exclusive games, games you could play nowhere else, games Google itself would create using their Stadia Games and Entertainment division. Stadia opened multiple studios, led by former studio heads from Ubisoft and Sony. Then two years later, Google shut them down, without their having created a single game. …
God Blindsided After Illegitimate Son From Andromeda Galaxy Tracks Him Down In Heaven https://t.co/GVcDYh8tBc pic.twitter.com/QPtPRdf1dI
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 20, 2021
The Double Meaning of the American Dream
Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is filled with symbols of abundance that are also residues of prosaic commercialism.
Having moved from the teeming cityscape of Taipei to the rural American South in the 1970s as a preteen, I know something of the shock, at once awe-inspiring and estranging, of that first sight of the great American landscape—just sheer land—that seems to stretch on forever. Watching Minari, the new semi-autobiographical film from Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean-American family newly arrived in the heartlands of 1980s Arkansas, I remember again that uncanny sense of feeling at once free and lost.
From the get-go, there are hints of how tenuous this new beginning is for the Yi family. The father, Jacob Yi (played by Steven Yeun), has moved his entire family, in spite of his wife’s doubts and objections, across the country from California in order to chase his hopes of building a family farm. (“Five acres is a hobby … but my dream is 50 acres.”) But fragility touches every early frame—from the awaiting trailer house parked on cinder blocks to the wildflowers and insects surviving in the cleared acreage, the initially puzzling parental insistence that their lively little boy “should not run” despite the wide open spaces, and the young wife’s softly spoken first words, “This is not what you promised.”
In all this, Chung’s visual vocabulary stands out as the master narrative engine: It retells the story of the American dream, not as a progressive triumph or debilitating failure, but as a peculiar and cyclical mix of allure and disappointment, absorption and distraction, allegiances and betrayals. Jacob is a complex character. He’s bolstered by an ambition that he privileges more than anything in the world (perhaps even more than the family that the dream is meant to benefit in the first place), but he’s also keen to hold onto his roots. Through the everyday objects in the film and the small moments in the Yis’ daily lives, we start to discern this double melody at the heart of Jacob’s aspirations.
The small television in the Yis’ home, for example, is the trigger for an exquisite scene of mundane domestic heartbreak, and a subtle example of the interplay between American mass consumption and diasporic longing. The grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) at one point watches a video of a Korean vocalist singing some love ballad. She tells the kids that it used to be their parents’ favorite: “Whenever someone made your mom and dad sing this song, they’d get all lovey-dovey.” A distant look comes into the eyes of the young wife, Monica (Yeri Han). “Did we,” she murmurs, before going back to her silent dinner next to her husband. When the grandmother retorts, “They come to America and forget everything,” her words don’t merely mourn the passing of young love but remind us that the American dream often overtakes other goals and pledges. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Minari is not available on any of the usual streaming services. If you’re fast, however, you can book a private, at home, screening of the film via the A24 films website.
Stromatolites—fossils of earliest life on Earth—may owe existence to viruses
Stromatolites at Shark Bay, Western Australia. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
As the Mars Rover sets out to look for evidence of life on another planet, scientists back on Earth suggest viruses played a key role in creating stromatolites, our planet’s earliest lifeforms.
It may pain us to hear this during a deadly viral pandemic, but life as we know it on this planet may never have occurred if it weren’t for viruses, scientists studying billion-year-old ‘living rocks’ say.
In a paper published in the March issue of Trends in Microbiology, a team of scientists from UNSW Sydney and the U.S. looked at evidence of the world’s oldest lifeforms in fossils known as stromatolites, layered limestone rocks often found in shallow waters around the globe. They wanted to understand the mechanism that led colonies of single-celled organisms known as microbial mats to create these intriguing rock structures.
And they believe viruses may be the missing piece of the puzzle that could help explain how a soft microbial mat transitions—or lithifies—into the hard stromatolite features that are prevalent in such places as Shark Bay and the Pilbara, Western Australia. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Documentary on Keith Haring by French artist and fashion designer Maripol.
FINALLY . . .
The 30 Most Popular Email Signoffs, Translated
On the subtle art of saying “Thanks!” when you mean “Go die in a fire”
Those with a gift for the dark arts of email valedictions can speak volumes with a single word, an abbreviation, or an artfully placed (or withheld) exclamation point. But like all great endeavors in poetic expression, email signoffs are too often ignored, unappreciated, or willfully misunderstood by the heedless masses who genuinely think you’re expressing gratitude when you say something as nuanced as “Thanks;” or well-wishes when you say something as devastating as “Best.”
These are doubtless the same people who will text you “ok” or even “k” to mean “alright,” even though it is well-established at this point that either of those utterances in a text message signifies the beginning of a blood feud; or who write “ha” when they mean “hahahahahahaha,” which is like saying “Fuck off and die” when you mean “Nice to meet you.” With all that being said, it seems like there is a real and urgent need for an “Email Signoff Translator” to help folks who are subtextually challenged better navigate their professional lives, and so here we are. Hopefully this will clear up a lot of confusion in the future.
All the best, = “I grudgingly respect and fear you.”
As ever, = “You bore me so relentlessly that it is almost interesting.”
Best = “I have decided to spare you, for now.”
Best regards = “I’m on my best behavior because I need something from you.”
Best wishes = “Please do not email me again!”
Cheers, = “I like you but I don’t respect you.”
Cordially, = …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:
can't stop laughing at these early jim henson commercials where one guy just kills another for not liking wilkins coffee pic.twitter.com/ZtfE06p0pR
— will (@twothickscoops) February 20, 2021
