• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: We are really happy and thankfull for our first multicultural downbeat VA – Alchemystic Tribe. The theme of the VA is tribal-ethno downbeat with live musician contributions, deep earthy sound from around the world and various influences with a little pinch of psychedelic.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
The Daunting Challenge of Saving Lebanon’s Storied Rail Network
Can rusting locomotives and crumbling stations become a vibrant transportation network again?
Locomotives more than a century old rust on the tracks at the Mar Mikhael station in the middle of Beirut. Embiggenable. Dine at home.
THE COURSE OF ELIAS MAALOUF’S LIFE CHANGED in 2005, when he saw Syrian soldiers burning the archives of Lebanon’s railway system in an abandoned train wagon. He dashed to the wagon and thrust his hands into the fire to save whatever he could. It was the beginning of a life’s work.
Maalouf had gone to the train station in his hometown of Riyaq to film for a documentary the Syrian military’s withdrawal from its 29-year occupation of Lebanon. Maalouf’s family had fled Riyaq for Ecuador during Lebanon’s civil war, which had broken out in the 1970s and lasted for 20 years. The Syrian military entered the country around the same time, leading to a long and bitter occupation.
When he was a child abroad, Maalouf’s parents had told him stories of a glittering Riyaq, where there was a cinema, a cabaret, dancing, and music, all sustained by the trade brought by the train station. But by the time he moved back to Riyaq as a young man in the 1990s, the station had been repurposed as a Syrian military base, and civilians were forbidden from entering.
Elias Maalouf started a campaign to revive Lebanon’s rail system after watching Syrian soldiers destroy old train records.
In 2005, Maalouf, as a young journalist, was expecting to film the departure of the Syrian soldiers, but instead he saw them destroying the records of a heritage he’d dreamed about. He could not resist acting.
“It became very emotional for me,” he says. “It was my dream of entering into the train station that I was never allowed to.” …
PODCAST: The Institute of Illegal Images
Join us for a daily celebration of the world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, we visit the Institute of Illegal Images in San Francisco, a mind-bending place where the art stands out not because of what’s on it but what was in it. …
RELATED: In the Andes, Bright Colors Tell the Dark Story of a Dying Lake
Bolivia’s Lake Uru Uru faces an uncertain future: a growing city, toxic runoff, and drought worsened by climate change.
The muddy shores of Lake Uru Uru in Bolivia are awash in bright sunset colors, a sign of the lake’s dire straits. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
A VIVID SLASH OF UNSETTLING COLOR CUTS across the shores of Bolivia’s Lake Uru Uru, more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The bright oranges and reds evoke the costumes of an elaborate, ancient annual carnaval held nearby in Ororu, the country’s fifth-largest city. In the past, the lake itself seemed to turn pink when thousands of flamingos visited for several months each year.
Now the lake and its city make headlines for the wrong reasons. Increasing urbanization is outpacing infrastructure and has fouled the waters with sewage and clogged them with trash. During a campaign earlier this year to raise awareness of the lake’s dire state, volunteers waded into its muddy edges to collect plastic bottles and other debris, which were then hauled away by the truckload.
Mounting garbage is only one of the problems, however. The shallow lake, which formed in the 1960s when a natural accumulation of sediment changed the course of the Desaguadero River, may not be with us much longer. Regional droughts exacerbated by climate change cause water levels to drop seasonally, and sometimes precipitously. Its neighbor, Lake Poopó, once the second-largest lake in the country (after Lake Titicaca), is all but gone, and not expected to recover.
According to local activists, there is now more discarded plastic and trash than water in Lake Uru Uru. Embiggenable.
But perhaps the biggest threat to Uru Uru, and the source of those stunning colors, is mining runoff. “In the past, silver was exploited, and currently tin, gold, and antimony are extensively exploited [around] the lake,” says Joseline Tapia, a Chilean geologist and environmental geochemist who has studied Uru Uru. …
Farmer moves border stone for tractor – and makes Belgium bigger
Belgian farmer could theoretically face criminal charges for moving 200-year-old marker.
The stone has marked the border since the battle of Waterloo.
The boundary between France and Belgium is believed to have been inadvertently redrawn by a farmer who found the 200-year-old border stone marking the divide in an inconvenient location for his tractor.
The Belgian farmer could theoretically face criminal charges after making Belgium bigger by moving the stone that has marked the border since after the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.
A local amateur historian taking a walk in forest near to the Belgian village of Erquelinnes discovered two weeks ago that the stone dating back to 1819 had been moved 2.29 metres (7.5ft). The farmer’s perimeter fence had also been shifted.
The Franco-Belgian border, stretching 390 miles (620km), was formally established under the Treaty of Kortrijk of 1820.
While amused by the enlargement of his town, David Lavaux, the mayor of Erquelinnes, gently pointed out that the farmer was legally obliged to move the border stone back – and that it would be best not “to create a diplomatic incident”. …
The Strange Tradition of “Practice Babies” at 20th-century Women’s Colleges
A photo archive shows college coeds vacuuming, preparing baby bottles, diapering babies, and generally practicing at motherhood.
“Little Meghan”
Their names were Dicky, Dickey, Dickie, and Donny. There was Bobby, Bobby II, Bobbie III, Grace, Edna Mae, and Joan. They were also called “Apartment Babies,” or “Practice Babies,” and they shared a last name — Domecon; short for Domestic Economics.
Plucked from local orphanages, asylums, and almshouses, hundreds of these babies were chosen to help college coeds “apprentice for motherhood.”
In 1919, Cornell pioneered the first degree-granting program in the country for women called “Domestic Economics.” Its aim was to apply scientific principles to domestic tasks deemed “Mothercraft” — such as making meals, cleaning and ironing, household budgeting, and raising children. Female coeds — five or six at a time — lived together in on-campus “Homemaking Apartments” and collectively mothered the practice babies.
Ranging in age from three weeks to a few months old, babies were loaned to the college for a year. The contracts between the orphanages and Cornell stated the babies “could be returned at any time if there was dissatisfaction on the part of the college.”
Their birth names and identities were erased, and they were fatted and raised by a rotating lineup of up to six practice mothers at a time. The co-eds’ work was divided into six parts, including the job of mother and assistant mother. …
“On my college debate team I would pick the most dipshit, indefensible positions and argue them until it irritated everyone in the room, so becoming a senator was the natural next step.” – Ted Cruz https://t.co/8M5mmfLZR0
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 4, 2021
Florida Man: 6 Crazy Details Of A Serial Police Impersonator
Jeremy Dewitte is a serial police impersonator out of Orlando, Florida, and quite a prolific one at that. At the time of this writing, he is currently facing seven charges of falsely personating a police officer, along with a handful of other charges, with more being added as investigations continue. Dewitte’s facing 85 years in prison, and if the court rules that he’s a habitual felony offender, those sentences could be doubled. 170 years for being a wannabe cop. To put that into perspective, the leader of the NXIVM sex-trafficking cult only got 120.
Make no mistake, Jeremy Dewitte is a very strange man, and the further you look into his story, the weirder it gets. We’ve dug into this story as far as we could without risking a psychotic breakdown, and we’re barely able to scratch the surface here …
6. What Is It With This Guy?
Dewitte runs a company called Metro-State Special Services which, according to their own website, provides motorcycle escorts for funerals and VIPs and “offer a full fleet marked motorcade unites [sic], such as Ford Crown Vic Patrol Cars and BMW / Kawasaki Patrol Motorcycles,” that are “equipped with state-of-the-art communications and police style LED lighting and siren packages.”
And the company’s police cosplay game is definitely en pointe. They’ve even been known to park their vehicles next to real police cars and even arrive at accident scenes simply to get photos of their fleet “in action” next to real police cars. They even had official-looking badges made, which, oddly enough, are made to look like the same ones used by the LAPD …
depicting Los Angeles City Hall, but whatever.
While their website implies it heavily, they stop short of saying they offer actual security because Dewitte (as well as many on his staff) have felony records; as such, they legally cannot be licensed to provide security. They mainly do funeral escorts. They’re supposed to escort the funeral procession to the cemetery and direct traffic at intersections to allow the procession to remain together from point A to B, and that’s it. They have zero authority to enforce traffic laws or pull people over, yet there are dozens of videos showing Dewitte doing just that, and the fact that he uses his own body cam definitely isn’t helping his legal defense. …
The Colorado legislature has passed a bill legalizing the composting of human remains as an after-death alternative to burial and cremation, which is more environmentally friendly than the traditional processes. #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/aEDZjNsLMp
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 5, 2021
RELATED: Japanese Town Uses Relief Money To Erect Giant Squid Statue
On today’s installment of lessons in *fish-cal responsibility* the rural town of Noto in Ishikawa, Japan used a Covid-19 relief payment worth millions of yen not on investing in PPE, public health campaigns, or aiding small businesses suffering from the pandemic, but to give back to their community, engaging in an act of true squid-pro-quo, in the form of erecting a massive cephalopod statue in their midst.
Standing at an impressive 29 feet wide, 13 feet tall, and a whopping 42 feet long, the giant squid monument, embodying the town’s aquatic calling card, cost roughly $228,181 or roughly 25 million yen, built with the intention of drawing in tourists once the pandemic is over, Kotaku reported. While apparently in line with the funds’ intention, with the site noting that local governments had the autonomy to decide how to spend the money, it seems many people were unhappy with this fishy spending.
As the outlet noted, reports have stated that some residents have floundering opinions of the investment, skeptical if it is in fact necessary or whether it, like many of the large attractions smattered around the world, will actually have an impact on the locale’s PR, especially considering that many of the nation’s large cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto are still struggling with the virus, with the nation as a whole experience an alarming surge in Covid-19 cases. Yet it seems those in charge maintained that building a giant, decorative squid was the best use of their funds – “The individual in charge did claim that the funds didn’t need to have a direct relationship to covid-19 and that the town was taking a long, post-pandemic view with the project,” Kotaku noted in their coverage. …
The Japanese coastal town of Noto is facing criticism after a giant squid statue was installed using emergency funding intended for coronavirus measures. Crafting the pink-and-white creature with flared tentacles came at a cost of ¥25m (£164,000), with the 13-metre-long statue installed as part of a tourism drive to help the area’s virus hit economy.
Couple Worried Relationship Will Lose Spark Once They Move Into Leader’s Compound https://t.co/wuN9LVkaQ3 pic.twitter.com/KfdPyxBjfQ
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 4, 2021
Decayed Corpse of ‘Cult’ Leader Found in Colorado HQ
Seven members of the “Love Has Won” group were taken into custody on various charges, including child abuse, abuse of a corpse, and tampering with human remains.
Several members of a bizarre spiritual group called “Love Has Won” have been taken into custody after the badly decaying body of the group’s leader was found in its headquarters.
Amy Carlson, 45, whose followers call her “Mother God,” was found dead in a mobile home in Casada Park, west of Crestone. Saguache County Sheriff’s deputies and Colorado Bureau of Investigation detectives found the self-proclaimed “divine being” of the group after a tip-off from a member who told them her body had been transported to Colorado from across the country.
The death and its connection to Love Has Won—which law enforcement and ex-members have previously called a “cult”—were first reported by Be Scofield.
While being interviewed by law enforcement, the group would not use the word “deceased,” when referring to Carlson’s death, according to a source familiar with the case. They claimed Carlson was not dead, but was merely “out of communication.” …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: After having tried to save humanity for 19 billion years, saying she believed that everything society teaches is a lie, Carlson apparently died of cancer. Then there’s the mention that she was eating one grilled cheese a day.
Ed. One of my favorite things to do: Pick a story, any story. Read it in its entirety. Then look for The Daily Mail‘s take on it.
The Weed That Killed Abe Lincoln’s Mother
And she didn’t even have to be near it to die.
Ageratina altissima, also known as White Snakeweed.
There is a lovely wildflower that grows wild in woods and fields throughout the states east of the Mississippi River in the United States. Its scientific name is Ageratina altissima but it is commonly known as white snakeroot.
White snakeroot is a perennial and produces clusters of small white blossoms. It grows to a height of four to five feet (between one to one and one-half meters) tall.
Even though it is a pretty plant, especially when blooming, it was named appropriately. Just as a snake can have venom that can kill, so does this harmless-looking plant. Every farmer should be familiar with this deadly beautiful flower.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, there was a strange illness that made its way around and of which no one could determine the cause. Entire families would die from it and it would even kill cattle, goats, sheep, and horses. Those who lived in rural areas were the most affected and it terrified everyone.
The symptoms were severe, a person (or animal) would develop weakness, vomiting, tremors, and delirium. Horses would stagger around blindly until they dropped over dead. Farmers were helpless as they watched their animals, families, and even themselves die.
Eventually, it was determined that humans got the sickness from cow’s milk. Thus the illness was named ‘Milk Sickness’. It was so prevalent that areas were named for it. Places such as Milk Sick Ridge, Milk Sick Cove, and Milk Sick Holler exist to this day in the South. …
The US Mistake That Handed the USSR Prime Technology and Accelerated the Cold War
Sometimes, you can’t keep track of every little detail
B29s in flight.
On July 31st, 1944, a massive air raid was launched against the Showa steel mill situated in Japanese occupied Manchuria. A flight of B-29 Superfortress bombers was taking part in the raid launched from Allied air bases hundreds of miles away. The B-29 was a massive engineering success for the United States and allowed the Allies to bomb targets at much farther ranges than their adversaries.
As the planes approached their targets one of the machines suffered an engine failure. The B-29 Ramp Tramp could not get the engine to refire and they began to lose altitude over enemy territory. There was no way that the flight could return to base due to the distance so instead they were diverted to the nearest friendly airfield in Vladivostok in the Soviet Union.
At this point, the USSR had been engaged in a horrible fight along the Eastern Front in Europe and they had firmly lashed themselves to the mast of the Allied cause. Vladivostok’s airfields were open to American planes in distress.
As they guided their wounded bird into land at the foreign airbase the only thing on the minds of the pilots was relief. No one was thinking about the long term consequences of such an emergency landing. …
Ed. Read on for Soviet bomber envy.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
The pandemic accelerated online shopping, which overwhelmed supply chains. Now, the Port of Los Angeles is handling historic cargo volumes.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
John Oliver explains why some people don’t want to get the Covid-19 vaccine and how they might be reassured. (Even you, Mike in Baltimore.)
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
From kissing Trump’s ass to swallowing his own boogers, this is The Daily Showography of Ted Cruz.
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.
Here’s me commentary on an intense game of Chess between Anish Giri and Magnus Carlson. Yeah, nah it’s intense.
まるさんにぴったりサイズの箱とは？ Which box does fit Maru perfectly?
FINALLY . . .
Completely Random Facts About Bathrooms
Bathrooms are the one solitary spot in a home or apartment where you can enjoy some quiet time, or they are large crowded places where you want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Here are some completely random facts about bathrooms to think about and ponder.
A 2013 Michigan State University field study observed 4,000 people in restrooms in East Lansing, Michigan, and found that women wash their hands and use soap more often than men. The study found that 35.1% of men wet their hands but did not use soap, and 14.6% didn’t wash their hands at all. This was compared to 15.1% of women who only wet their hands and didn’t use soap and 7.1% who didn’t wash their hands at all. Source
The Brady Bunch never showed a toilet on screen during scenes in the bathroom because the network thought it was too crude. Source
Having the urge to go to the bathroom as soon as you get home has been scientifically studied. In a 2015 study on patients with overactive bladders, researchers called the phenomenon of having to urinate when people got home or close to home “latchkey incontinence.” One explanation was that we have created a Pavlovian response and associated our homes with the use of the toilet. So when the key gets in the door, or you get close to the bathroom, the urge starts to come on. Source
During the time of segregation in the United States, the planners of the Pentagon designed the building to have 284 bathrooms, twice the number of bathrooms needed for the staff levels, so they could be split into “white” and “colored.” But in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited this segregation for federal employees. Virginia tried to fight the order due to its Jim Crow laws but finally gave up and gave control to the federal government. Source …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
The Little Cat Hated Me Until He Groomed My Hair into A Cat Spit Helmet
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff. I hadn’t made the cut.
Embiggenable.
“If cats could talk, they wouldn’t.” Nan Porter
We drove for a day and spent the night in a hotel to pick up my husband’s birthday present, a Maine Coon kitten he fell in love with on the Internet.
When we went to the cattery, we found that the cattery was a converted living room. There were kittens of various sizes everywhere. One kitten was smaller than the others and sitting by itself.
The introverted kitten was ours. The owner said that the reason the kitten was alone was that it was born in a litter of one. The kitten played with the other kittens sometimes but preferred to sit by himself.
When the owner pulled the kitten to the visiting area, it strolled past me like I wasn’t there and walked straight to my spouse. The kitten bumped his leg; he picked him up, and the cat was ours. I drove on the way home because the kitten snuggled in my husband’s lap.
Once home, it was clear this was my spouse’s kitten. Oh, I wasn’t mistreated, no yowling or scratching. They ignored me. My husband took care of the kitten. Food, water, brushing, and petting were mainly his tasks. I was back-up if he was late coming home. The kitten accepted my offers only if my spouse was not around, but he did not seek my attention. There was no time for him to waste dealing with the second-in-command. My husband named the cat The Lone Ranger in honor of his one kitten litter: Ranger for short. …
