• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
80,000 Snails, 12 Tiny Electric Fences, and 1 Rediscovered Recipe for ‘Wallfish’
It’s snail-herding season in England.
A snail from the Paxman farm. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
“THEY CALL ME THE QUEEN of Snails,” Lyn Paxman says with a laugh as she guides me through her Somerset farm’s snail pens. As she talks about her free-range molluscs, she readies tiny electric fences and lays down salt traps for the approaching summer snail-herding season. Last year, Paxman’s prized Helix Aspersa Müller (the common garden snail) escaped and made short work of her vegetable patch. This year, she’s fortifying the farm.
Eating snails fell out of fashion long ago in England, but in Somerset, Paxman and her partner, Rob, are busy rearing tens of thousands of garden snails. To market molluscs to famously unadventurous English eaters, the Paxmans have also been reviving a curiously named, cider-soaked West Country dish known as wallfish—a long-forgotten English take on escargot that dates back centuries.
The solar generator for the snail’s tiny electric fences (the white strips).
Wallfish can be traced back to the Romans, who were likely the first to rear snails in enclosures. When they occupied ancient Britain some 2,000 years ago, they’re believed to have brought with them their taste for milk- and wine-fattened snails. Eating snails remained somewhat popular in Catholic, medieval England (at least on Fridays), and in Somerset, snails were given the name wallfish. It was an allusion to snails’ slippery, wall-clinging nature. But categorizing snails as fish was also a sneaky way around the Catholic Church’s prohibition on eating meat on Fridays.
Over time, though, snails all but disappeared from the English menu. Despite a short-lived resurgence of cider-poached wallfish in the 1960s, the dish was increasingly consigned to old recipes, and Somerset’s last wallfish-serving pub closed in the late 1990s.
“The British are quite picky and squeamish,” says Paxman self-deprecatingly on the general dislike of molluscs in the United Kingdom. “When I first went to Greece, I remember freaking out when I ate squid!” …
RELATED: Juneau, Alaska: DuPont Explosives Depot Ruins
The crumbling remains of Juneau’s explosives storage site.
DuPont Dock. Embiggenable. Explore at home, starting at the trailhead where streetview ends.
CONSTRUCTED BY THE DUPONT POWDER COMPANY (now Dow-DuPont), the DuPont Dock and Depot was a storage site for blasting supplies used in the Alaska Juneau mine. It was built seven miles from downtown Juneau due to the threat of an accidental explosion.
The DuPont trail follows the water’s edge of the Gastineau Channel with excellent views of the water to the right. On the left are waterfalls that flow through the lush, mossy rain forests.
When visitors arrive at the ruins, they will see a large dock with moss and plants. Abandoned since the 1940s, the dock is crumbling and inaccessible from land. Inland from the dock is the foundations of the depot, littered with rusty pieces of machinery and mining equipment.
Next to the ruins is a shale beach at the mouth of a small stream, a popular salmon fishing spot during the salmon run. …
The American Pursuit of “Anglo-Saxon Values”
Policing, Voting, and Immigration
The furthest right of the right-wing of the Republican Party is proposing the formation of an “America First Caucus.” An early draft of their proposal was leaked to the press and calls for “common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and a return to the architectural style that “befits the progeny of European architecture.” I’ll translate that to proposing an America that gives preference to white traditions and even makes America look a little whiter while doing so.
Some of the usual suspects are involved in this venture, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), Louie Gohmert (R-Tx), Barry Moore (R-Ala), and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz). Since the leak, most if not all by now have disassociated themselves with the “unapproved, early rough draft” of their clearly racist programs.
“I had nothing to do with the draft published Friday, describing it was a “staff-level draft proposal from an outside group that I hadn’t read.” The scum and liars in the media are calling me a racist by taking something out of context.” ~ Marjorie Taylor Greene
While I could spend time lambasting Marjorie Taylor Greene and others of her ilk, the truth is there’s nothing new under the sun. Several in Republican leadership have come out against the America First Caucus, I assume for saying the unspoken part out loud. But what the America First Caucus is promoting is no different than what white America has pursued since they discovered an America already inhabited by people of color as they face a demographic trend that will make them a minority around the year 2045. They are actively seeking ways to keep America white, control those who are not, and limit the voting as much as possible of those unlike themselves.
“Mass immigration threatens the long-term existential future of America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity.”
…
RELATED: Tucker Carlson condemned by LGBTQ+ activists after yearbook page goes viral
Page tied host to Dan White Society, possibly named for the man who killed Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official.
Tucker Carlson in Washington DC on 29 March 2019.
An unearthed page from Tucker Carlson’s 1991 Trinity College yearbook went viral this week, apparently linking the controversial Fox News host to an assassin who killed Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected politician.
The yearbook entry tied Carlson to the Dan White Society, potentially named for the San Francisco supervisor who fatally shot Milk as well as the city’s mayor, George Moscone, in 1978.
“I’m rarely at a loss for words, but this is truly despicable and well beyond the garden variety homophobic crap we’ve come to expect from this guy,” said the LGBTQ+ activist Cleve Jones, whom Milk mentored.
“I just can’t wrap my mind around the depth of his depravity.”
Political commentator Travis Akers posted the yearbook reference to social media on Wednesday, a day after Carlson attacked the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, whom he called a “mentally unbalanced middle-aged man”.
Carlson accused Wemple of pulling out his “dusty college yearbook” to see if he’d “done anything naughty at the age of 19”. …
Link to digital archives of the yearbook: https://t.co/nkAJIiIiLP
— Travis Akers (@travisakers) April 22, 2021
Tucker Carlson has not explained why he listed himself as a member of the “Dan White Society” in his college yearbook. https://t.co/1zmAg0lb7P
— Adam Rifkin
(@ifindkarma) April 21, 2021
(@ifindkarma)
Ed. Perhaps Tucker Carlson is nothing more than hot air. Oh well.
How RBG Became ‘Notorious’
In her fight for women’s rights, the then–ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg did something unexpected: She argued on behalf of men.
Tim Cook’s 5-Word Response to Facebook Is Brutal and Brilliant at the Same Time
Apple’s CEO is clear that he isn’t making decisions based on what’s best for Facebook, but for Apple and its customers.
Tim Cook.
Tim Cook’s interview with Kara Swisher for her Sway podcast was revealing on several fronts. Probably the most reported part of the conversation was the revelation that Apple’s CEO doesn’t expect to still hold the top job in 10 years. That’s certainly interesting, but honestly, it’s no surprise that Cook might not want to continue the pace required to manage the world’s most valuable company when he’s 70.
There was also plenty of nodding toward future products like augmented reality glasses, and even the possibility of an Apple car someday. Either would certainly be welcome, but we already expect that Apple is working on both. It wasn’t much of a surprise.
Far more interesting, at least as far as I’m concerned, was Cook’s response when asked by Swisher about how Apple’s upcoming privacy changes will affect Facebook.
“I’m not focused on Facebook, so I don’t know,” Cook said. Reminded by Swisher that Facebook has said Apple is increasingly becoming one of its biggest competitors, Cook doubled down on his position.
“Oh, I think that we compete in some things,” said Cook. “But no, if I’m asked who our biggest competitors are, they would not be listed.” …
Experts Warn Acknowledgement Of Armenian Genocide Risks Drawing U.S. Into WWI https://t.co/K9POUutWmt pic.twitter.com/bR8QYgwvHx
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 22, 2021
RELATED: Artist Turns Alleged Armie Hammer Messages Discussing Cannibalism, Other Concerning Topics Into NFTs
Earlier this year, Armie Hammer, known for his roles in films like The Social Network and Call Me By Your Name faced allegations of sexual misconduct, emotional abuse, manipulation, and physical violence from several women as disturbing screenshots seemingly depicting the actor discussing rape and cannibalism fantasies emerged online, Vanity Fair reported.
Following the allegations, Brooklyn-based artist Julia Morrison decided to take a step to validate some of her own alleged experiences with the actor, creating a series of NFTs respectively entitled “Armie DM TMI NFT: Dibs on Ribs” and “Armie DM TMI NFT: Caligula Triptych,” that will be sold on Foundation, according to The Daily Beast. While Morrison says the art pieces, which come “complete with a physical lightbox of the exchanges” center around her own unsettling interactions with Hammer over social media, the piece partially stems from her visceral reaction to hearing the stories of the women who say Hammer abused them and witnessing how they were continually forced to prove themselves as credible in the public eye.
“I’m sick of people not believing women,” Morrison said. “I would read all the comments and it’s so triggering to see people saying stuff on the internet, like, ‘Fuck these women, we don’t believe them. They’re making it up. They’re doing it for this, they’re doing it for that. When I saw the House of Effie girl’s press conference, I cried,” she continued, referencing Effie, one of Hammer’s former partners who has spoken candidly about her gut-wrenching experiences, which she says include rape and physical abuse by Hammer over the course of their four-year relationship.
However, these stories seemingly had a personal connection to Morrison, who says she interacted with the disgraced actor over social media. According to The Daily Beast, Morrison and Hammer first met over Instagram, when the actor messaged her in 2017, asking her about her photo series “For Arabella.” While she says she didn’t see the message at the time, one of her friends later pointed out that Hammer followed her on the platform, after which, she sent him a message. Considering these interactions Morrison, like many of us, says she was “addicted” to reading each new story, learning the heartbreaking twists and turns of the news as it broke earlier this year. …
Whole Foods Testing Palm-Scanner Payment System #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/m9Ha6t0w9U pic.twitter.com/dyEhdza9mv
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 23, 2021
RELATED: 5 Shameless Acts Of Product Placement That Backfired Completely
We don’t like to admit it, but most Hollywood movies are basically just long episodes of The Price is Right with explosions and occasional nudity; lucrative showcases for consumer products that you can go out and purchase in the real world. And for the most part this arrangement works pretty well — brands help shoulder the exorbitant cost of film and television production, and we get tricked into buying more useless garbage we don’t need because we simply wanted a two-hour reprieve from the horrors of reality. But as we’ve mentioned before, sometimes these product placements have the opposite of the intended effect, such as how …
5. Reebok Paid $1.5 Million To Be Insulted in Jerry Maguire
Presumably after screaming into a phone about wanting large sums of currency exhibited to them, the filmmakers behind Jerry Maguire secured a sweet deal with Reebok for $1.5 million dollars — or, roughly enough to pay for Tom Cruise’s produce crate budget. All they had to do was include a Reebok commercial in the movie. Which sounds crazy, but it was to be motivated by the story when, after nearly dying (and almost certainly suffering severe brain damage) Jerry’s only client, Rod Tidwell becomes a superstar and finally lands a coveted endorsement deal with Reebok.
But for some reason, the commercial was cut from the finished film — and this is a movie that didn’t cut the scene where its hero drunkenly gropes his only employee hours after breaking up with his fiancee.
Removing the commercial would be bad enough, but in its absence, the only remaining reference to the sneaker brand was earlier in the film when a bitter Rod loudly proclaimed: “F— Reebook!” Not surprisingly, the folks at Reebok weren’t super thrilled that they spent over a million dollars to be insulted by the future star of Snow Dogs. So they sued the producers for a cool $10 million, alleging that their brand’s depiction in Jerry Maguire was “highly derogatory and negative” and “the essence of Tidwell’s views on Reebok are summed up in his quintessentially disparaging and vulgar remark.” …
Could You Pass The U.S. Citizenship Test? https://t.co/09MoHOCgLt pic.twitter.com/CCDoCvDIjH
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 23, 2021
The Case for the $40-An-Hour Worker
Polarization and tribalism are stirred when the aim is sub-middle class pay.
The Los Angeles housing boom, when carpenters entered the solid middle class.
One of the most surprising recent additions to the American political bedrock is the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. Only a few years ago derided as a deranged notion of socialist radicals, the campaign for a $15 hourly has assumed outsized, totemic stature across parties, a proxy for a right to a bare, dignified existence.
But while the proposed wage, twice the 12-year-old current federal minimum, has been a boon to many bottom-of-the-rung workers already receiving it at Amazon, Walmart and elsewhere, there is a big thing it is not: A ticket to the middle class.
Yet both major parties, driven by an unusual convergence of thinking about how to win future national elections, seem likely to gravitate to a debate on what does constitute a middle-class wage. If historical precedent is a guide, the new talk seems likely to revolve around more or less $40 an hour.
The new zeitgeist, in other words, appears likely to be more intentional, truly middle-class wages.
That is the theme of this new blog: a conversation leapfrogging over the current buzz, and turning to what may be the next idea of the moment. We are at the onset of a dramatic new decade, coming off a once-in-a-century pandemic and a similarly rare economic downturn, an apparent point of departure that is hard to credibly parse, involving far too much stimulus to easily process. At a still-to-be-determined frequency, we will surface and wrestle with a single bold idea in big science, politics, economics, technology, society, geopolitics — whatever. I invite your own stab at the next zeitgeists. I hope you will invite your friends, co-workers and family to follow and participate, too. …
RELATED: How to build a life: Don’t Wish for Happiness. Work for It.
If you want to improve your well-being, you need to make a plan and act on it.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
IN HIS 1851 WORK American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” This is basically a restatement of the Stoic philosophers’ “paradox of happiness”: To attain happiness, we must not try to attain it.
A number of scholars have set out to test this claim. For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that valuing happiness was associated with lower moods, less well-being, and more depressive symptoms under conditions of low life stress. At first, this would seem to support the happiness paradox—that thinking about it makes it harder to get. But there are alternative explanations. For example, unhappy people might say they “value happiness” more than those who already possess it, just as hungry people value food more than those who are full.
More to the point, wishing you were happier does not mean that you are working to improve your happiness. Think of your friend who complains about her job every day but never tries to find a new one. No doubt she wishes she were happier—but for whatever reason, she doesn’t do the work to improve her circumstances. This is not evidence that she can’t become happier, or that her wishes are bringing her down.
In truth, happiness requires effort, not just desire. Focusing on your dissatisfaction and wishing things were different in your life is a recipe for unhappiness if you don’t take action to put yourself on a better path. But if you make an effort to understand human happiness, formulate a plan to apply what you learn to your life, execute on it, and share what you learn with others, happiness will almost surely follow. …
RELATED: Experience: I accidentally became a global fashion brand
People across the world were wearing unofficial merch with my band’s logo on it. I decided to cash in, but do it ethically.
Peter Boothroyd: ‘What began in South Korea soon made its way to Japan and China.’
I’ve been playing and recording music since 2012. Working under my surname Boothroyd, I’ve gained a small committed fanbase through releasing on independent labels and performing live. But in 2015, I decided to give up touring after a final headline show at Milton Keynes Gallery. I’m a big fan of the Beatles, and much like they stopped playing live in 1966, I did the same, in order to concentrate on studio material. Also, I wasn’t getting many bookings – it wasn’t exactly Boothroydmania.
Five years later, having yet to come up with my Sgt Pepper, I was living alone in a caravan in Morecambe. One morning, I received a message on Instagram: it was a photograph of the Argentinian pop star Chule Von Wernich wearing a T-shirt with my name on the front and the poster for that final gig on the back.
A month passed and I received a text from my mum: she had come across a photo of a woman on Facebook wearing a top with “Boothroyd” across the front and “Tri-Angle Records” underneath (a label I had released music with). It definitely wasn’t official merch.
I did a reverse image search and found a South Korean e-commerce platform selling a collection of clothes bearing the Boothroyd logo. The presentation was slick: there were models, professional photography, even videos of people wearing T-shirts, hoodies, jeans and dresses bearing my name. Hundreds of buyers had left reviews.
It was bizarre; I couldn’t work out how it had started, or why it was so popular. I quickly realised that it had nothing to do with my obscure electronic music: Boothroyd had somehow become a popular Korean clothing brand. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Greek Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Alexandros Avramidis talks about his time covering the European migrant crisis.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Will we be sleeping with robots by 2025? Desi Lydic finds out!
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Desi Lydec for making this program available on YouTube.
After Tucker Carlson freaks out on Fox News about under-policing, the police respond with an abundance of force.
Stephen Colbert Presents Tooning Out The News is Now Streaming, only on Paramount+.
Seth takes a closer look at House Democrats voting to admit Washington D.C. as the 51st state while Republicans freak out about everything from voting rights to the Green New Deal.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
洗濯を始めると洗濯機の上に集まるまるとみり。はなは大きな音や濡れるのが苦手なので近づきません。When I start washing, Maru&Miri come to the washing machine. Hana doesn’t like loud noise and getting wet, so she doesn’t come during the laundry.
FINALLY . . .
Two Words That Will Take You to the Holy Land of Acceptance
With a list of common things the author is trying to be a little more accepting of.
LICE WILL FIND YOU, PEOPLE WILL hit Reply All and Do Not Call lists are only marginally effective. Oh well.
Dogs will be dogs, every time, in every way. Oh well.
Hemorrhoids and stretch marks are forever. Oh well.
Experts make mistakes and parenting books have limited applicability. Ditto diets. Oh well.
The great love of your life will never stop running a little late, making that sound when he chews and the repeating himself stuff will only get worse. Oh well.
You will never really understand your bank fees or how the Internet router works. Oh well.
Unless you knock yourself out, with the night comes the worry. Oh well. …
Ed. Who cares?
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
