• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: The music of the Free Mind album raises serious issues of a complicated personal way through fractal levels of life. There is nothing beyond us, and to set us free from emotional bonds we should free our mind from opinions and conceptions. Each of the ten melodies sends the listener on a journey about a new landscape in the deep moods of psychill, dub, ambient, trip hop. Each stage of the journey advances us on the knowledge way, music being the great guide.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Why Did Antarctic Explorer Ernest Shackleton Keep ‘Conking Out’?
A vitamin deficiency may have changed the course of a continent’s history.
Ernest Shackleton, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, and Edward Wilson (right to left) as they were preparing to explore the Ross Ice Shelf as part of the British National Antarctic Expedition in November 1902. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
ACROSS THE WHITE EXPANSE OF Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, three figures moved north toward the open water beyond their horizon, and the ship that waited for them there. It was January 1903, and the bright sun of austral summer would not set. A skua, one of the large brownish-gray seabirds common around McMurdo Sound, might have surveyed the trio from overhead, assessing whether there was anything of interest on the sled that two of them pulled. The inquisitive birds often divebomb human interlopers on their continent, and claim whatever they can carry off.
The bird would not have known it was looking down at giants in the saga of British polar exploration: The two men pulling the sled were Robert Falcon Scott and expedition doctor Edward Wilson, both of whom would die on that same ice shelf nine years later as they returned from the South Pole. Beside the sled, a younger man kept pace on skis. Wilson had noted in his journal that this third man suffered bouts of breathlessness and, frequently overcome by weakness, could not be counted on to pull the sled. The young man’s name was Ernest Shackleton. The man who would become legendary in polar exploration was then on his first expedition to Antarctica and, according to new research, suffering from beriberi, a nutritional deficiency more commonly seen in the tropics. Young Shackleton’s bout with beriberi, contends the lead author of the new paper, changed the course of Antarctic history.
Shackleton would return to Earth’s white underbelly twice more, leading expeditions in 1907 and 1914, and he was setting out on another when he died in 1922 at age 47. The story of his leadership during the Endurance saga from 1914 to 1916 remains one of the best known adventures of the era. The man whose singular will earned him the nickname “The Boss” managed to bring every member of his crew home safely despite losing their ship to the ice, surviving for months on shifting floes, navigating 800 miles of roaring Southern Ocean in an open lifeboat, and crossing an uncharted mountain range on foot.
During his most famous expedition, Shackleton’s ship Endurance was ultimately lost to pack ice. Embiggenable.
“He was, obviously, a tremendous character, in many ways, physically very powerful,” says retired anaesthetist and Antarctic medical history buff Ian Calder, who calls Shackleton a boyhood hero. “The thing that puzzled me was that he always seemed to be conking out.” …
PODCAST: Basilica Cistern
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 an old friend who takes us under the streets of Istanbul and into an encounter with Medusa. …
RELATED: The Unfortunately Action-Packed Afterlife of a California Grave-Robbery Victim
Nearly 140 years after being snatched, almost dissected, and eventually reburied, Clara Loeper may finally get a headstone.
Clara Loeper’s remains were buried at—and stolen from—Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
DENNIS EVANOSKY IS DEEP IN the underbrush, holding out his arms for balance as he makes his way across the uneven terrain around the perimeter of the massive Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. He’s looking for a grave, the final resting place of a woman whose afterlife has been startlingly action-packed.
It’s February 2021, and Evanosky and I are searching for Clara Loeper, a 21-year-old whose corpse was snatched from this cemetery in 1883. Her cadaver was returned to its grave after turning up on the slab of a medical college dissection room—but where was it now? Like many graves in this old burial ground, it’s been lost to time and the initial failure to provide a tombstone. “It’s important to mark the graves that are unmarked,” says Evanosky, a local historian, author, and Mountain View docent. “It’s a respect thing for me to rediscover these people and let others know where they are.”
The recent search to unearth the history of Loeper’s burial began—as many quests to unspool local mysteries do—on Facebook. Throughout much of 2020, photographer Mike Ahmadi posted images scanned from glass plate negatives found in his neighbor Howard’s barn. He’d upload photographs daily, paired with prompts like, “Well, here is one for you super sleuths to figure out.” Armchair historians who visited the “In Howard’s Barn” page enjoyed helping him identify the people and places in the pictures.
One photograph seemed to show a medical school dissection, with nearly 20 students crowded around two corpses. One commenter mentioned Clara Loeper and her unfortunate ties to the Eclectic Medical College, wondering whether this might be a photograph of the school. Intrigued, I started tracing Clara’s story through old newspaper accounts. She was born with a marked spinal curvature and partial paralysis of her limbs, and was unable to walk or talk. Her mother, Wilhemina Loeper, spoon-fed her. Seven weeks before Clara’s death on April 3, 1883, Dr. Rudolph of the Eclectic Medical College came to visit.
Believing Clara would soon die, Dr. Rudolph asked Wilhemina to donate her daughter’s body so that doctors could learn more about her condition. Mrs. Loeper was unwilling to send Clara’s body to the college, but agreed to a future autopsy at home. This wasn’t what Dr. Rudolph hoped to hear. The next day, he ran into Mrs. Loeper on the street, repeated the request, and was again refused. …
I Am Sikh and Tired
Wracked with pain about being othered, I dressed up like Captain America. Here’s what happened.
My turban and beard have always made me a target of anxiety, stereotyping, or outright racism. Post-9/11, the hate has been taken to a whole new level. Sikhs have been killed, attacked, and verbally abused in a never-ending American saga. We might not ever know what was in the mind of 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who shot and killed eight people including four Sikhs at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis on April 16. But it hurts to keep seeing Americans who look like me paying the price for looking different, for standing out.
Ten years ago, in my anger and frustration, I accidentally found a way to confuse fellow Americans into thinking I am one of their own.
In the aftermath of the 2012 massacre on a Sikh house of worship by a White supremacist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a photographer convinced me to don the uniform of an American superhero I had illustrated months before. And so, dressed as Captain America, I walked out onto the streets of New York City.
I found myself in a sort of twilight zone. I got hugs from strangers. Police officers took photos of me. I got access to a fire department truck. I got pulled into weddings. I was able to stand outside the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland while holding a banner that read: “Let’s kick some intolerant butt with compassion.”
Captain America does not exist, but the story does. …
RELATED: The Story Behind a Misunderstood Satanic Monument
When Confederate memorials began to be toppled in June, far-right organizations called for the destruction of the Satanic Temple’s bronze statue of Baphomet. Here’s why that doesn’t make sense.
The Satanic Temple’s bronze statue of Baphomet.
“Satanic Panic” never really ended; it just fell out of fashion in mainstream media. With the rise of QAnon in Trump’s America, however, Satanism has received renewed interest across the conservative media spectrum. When the Black Lives Matter protests started bringing down Confederate memorials in June, far-right publications and organizations like The Washington Times and Turning Point USA called for the destruction of the Satanic Temple’s bronze statue of Baphomet, its patron deity with the head of a goat and angel wings.
These attempted takedowns betray long-held Republican beliefs in freedom of religion and respect of private property, leading Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves to denounce their legal and spiritual corruption. In an open letter posted on his Patreon, Greaves critiqued the false equivalence between Confederate monuments and the Baphomet statue, arguing that Satanists pose no real threat to religious freedom, and that Baphomet does not even currently stand on public property. (The statue is currently housed in the Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts.)
“You can really learn about people’s cultural baggage by seeing how they react to the Baphomet monument,” Greaves told Hyperallergic. “It’s interesting to think this debate could merely be about what’s offensive to some type of individual, and that there is nothing qualitatively different about the Baphomet statue — which is openly symbolic of pluralism, diversity, and nonbinary identity.” (The Satanic Temple does not believe in the existence of Satan, nor does it worship the occult.)
An illustration of Baphomet by Eliphas Lévi.
While the statue is based on a drawing by 19th-century cult historian Éliphas Lévi, Baphomet’s folk history dates further back to the Crusades, when members of the Knights Templar were charged with heresy for allegedly cohabitating with Muslims. Scholars and archaeologists believe its name to be a bastardization of Mohammed (i.e., Mahomet) that appeared in trial transcripts. Baphomet was a symbol of gender nonconformity, sexual alterity, and religious deviance well into the 20th century, becoming solidly associated with modern Satanism after the Church of Satan created its sigil in the 1960s.
Unlike these artistic renderings, the Baphomet statue’s demeanor is not inherently sinister — an aesthetic departure from the iconography of the Church of Satan, which is unaffiliated with the Temple. Greaves and sculptor Mark Porter intentionally designed its calm and stoic facial expression to reflect the Temple’s non-violent mission and political status. …
Dr. Fauci: ‘There’s No Longer A Need For Statues To Wear Masks Outside’ https://t.co/vfjcRUVeuv pic.twitter.com/sCTzpFLTKx
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 13, 2021
No One Can Apparently Decide If ‘MTG’ Refers to Magic The Gathering, Marjorie Taylor Greene
There are three kinds of people in the world, a differentiation determined by one’s assumed meaning behind three letters – MTG. While if you’re former Executive Assistant and/or reformed workaholic like yours truly, the letters evoke wartime flashbacks of scheduling and rescheduling the same meeting over and over and over again, it seems the rest of humanity can be neatly divided, either associating the acronym with the beloved card game, Magic the Gathering or QAnon-supporting Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ambiguity it seems Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learned the hard way this afternoon.
It all started when Greene, who recently went viral for her terrible pull-up form, apparently decided to put her physical prowess, professionalism, and exemplary mental stability to the test, allegedly chasing down AOC throughout the halls of the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, Business Insider reported. “You don’t care about the American people,” Greene reportedly yelled before running after her colleague. “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”
Marking the second time this year the New York Congresswoman has found herself pursued by right-wing maniacs while attempting to do her job, and a perfect scenario to paraphrase the viral TikTok Dr. Doofenshmirtz line of “Wow! If I had a nickel for every time I was doomed by a puppet, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice,” Ocazio-Cortez was apparently not too happy with Greene’s behavior. “I think it’s pretty public record that this is a pretty belligerent person that’s not in control of themselves,” the lawmaker explained the following day, calling upon a tidbit from her pre-congressional life for context. “I used to work as a bartender. These are the kinds of people that I threw out of bars all the time.”
As wild goose chases through the halls of Congress often do, the fiasco went viral, leading to several tweets surrounding the affair, including one of the above AOC quip comparing Greene, referred to as MTG in the post, to a rowdy pub patron. “Friendly reminder to keep generously tipping your bartenders, servers, delivery, venue, and hospitality workers,” the lawmaker posted in Thursday.
(And no this is not intended for magic the gathering players, you’re cool w/ me)
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 13, 2021
However, it seems the tweet was taken as a context, with fans of the other MTG, Magic The Gathering, apparently confused by the sentiment …
However, it seems the tweet was taken as a context, with fans of the other MTG, Magic The Gathering, apparently confused by the sentiment …
Some politics reporter: MTG and AOC clashed today
Every single nerd I know: ????????????????? Why is Magic the Gathering fighting AOC?—
Austin of Other Diversities
(@sailorsctaustin) May 13, 2021
Austin of Other Diversities
… and even taking it as a slight …
at first glance i thought @AOC meant 'magic the gathering' and i was like what did the card game do to deserve this
https://t.co/4tr6QhFUbk
— Katherine Proudmoore
(@katProudmoore) May 13, 2021
(@katProudmoore)
…
GOP Removes Liz Cheney From Leadership Post #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/m2nvwNstjK pic.twitter.com/klznAuYugD
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 13, 2021
RELATED: New Ranking Categorizes ‘A24’ Actors By How Badly They’d Lose In A Fistfight
Reader, have you ever sat down to watch an A24 film, Midsommar, Uncut Gems, or every art school student’s favorite highly-pretentious art-house pick, The Bling Ring, and began wondering exactly if and/or how’d you’d respectively fare against the dude in a bear costume, Adam Sandler, and that one guy smoking a bowl to Ester Dean’s “Drop it Low” in a fistfight? In what is a true spiritual successor to the infamous “food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass” line plot …
food mascots and whether or not I'd be able to kick their ass pic.twitter.com/hKOx8vjHnd
— ℳatt (@matttomic) September 29, 2019
… it seems one hipste — sorry, A24 superfan, has taken it upon themselves to create a chart of the entertainment company’s leading men, divided by which actors they could personally pummel. “Here’s my tier list of A24 actors i can probably beat up in a fight,” read the post first appearing on the private Facebook page, A24 Film Group, according to The Cut. “I do think Chalamet has a height advantage over me but I can still snap him like a twig. Great actor.”
Since appearing on the page earlier this month, the categorization has since gone viral in reposts on Twitter and Instagram, with fans sharing their very strong opinions on the matter, dissecting why The Naked Brothers Band superstar turned horror film staple, Alex Wolff, (who is likely inadvertently referenced by his older sibling’s name in the post) is no one to eff with …
I wouldn't want to fight Nat Wolff for two reasons: 1. He was in 'Hereditary' and I don't want to mess with anyone involved in the making of that movie, they've seen horrors that give them advantages. 2. He'd get the other members of the Naked Brothers Band to back him up.
— Tucker_Shuff (@TuckerShuff) May 11, 2021
… remaking the chart from scratch …
First Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Released In U.S. #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/iwXmhYjiQc pic.twitter.com/rm9Cy0Knjo
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 13, 2021
RELATED: Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home
When people share a space, their collective experience can sprout its own vocabulary, known as a familect.
I celebrated my second pandemic birthday recently. Many things were weird about it: opening presents on Zoom, my phone’s insistent photo reminders from “one year ago today” that could be mistaken for last month, my partner brightly wishing me “iki domuz,” a Turkish phrase that literally means “two pigs.”
Well, that last one is actually quite normal in our house. Long ago, I took my first steps into adult language lessons and tried to impress my Turkish American boyfriend on his special day. My younger self nervously bungled through new vocabulary—The numbers! The animals! The months!—to wish him “iki domuz” instead of “happy birthday” (İyi ki doğdun) while we drank like pigs in his tiny apartment outside of UCLA. Now, more than a decade later, that slipup is immortalized as our own peculiar greeting to each other twice a year.
Many of us have a secret language, the private lexicon of our home life. Perhaps you have a nickname from a parent that followed you into adulthood. Maybe you have an old joke or a shared reference to a song. Sometimes known as familects, these invented words, pet names, in-jokes, and personal memes swirl and emerge from the mess of lives spent in close quarters. During the pandemic, we’ve spent dramatically more time in those quarters, and our in-group slang has changed accordingly.
Cynthia Gordon, an associate linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of Making Meanings, Creating Family (you’re welcome), has spent much of her working life in the strange land of family discourse. “Any group of people that has extended contact over time and sees itself as distinctive is going to have some specialized uses of language,” Gordon told me. “Listening to recordings of other families is like being immersed in a different world.” …
RELATED: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over
It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
MANY YEARS AGO, I met a woman who had had the kind of experience you ordinarily only find in fiction. As a young adult, she was in a serious car accident, resulting in a head injury. She suffered a period of total amnesia, followed by months of convalescence. When she recovered, she was never the same: Her family relationships weakened; she cut out former friends and found new ones; she moved halfway across the world; her interests and tastes changed; she became more outgoing and less self-conscious; she no longer cared much what other people thought about her.
Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no—the injury had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life.
Today, many of us have an opportunity to do something similar. Americans might be entering the waning days of the year-plus coronavirus pandemic, during which life’s ordinary patterns have paused for millions of people. In these last weeks and months before something resembling normality returns, we might ask ourselves, “What do I want ‘normal’ to look like?” Then, we can start preparing for a new and better normal than what we took for granted until a year ago. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
After a ransomware hack devastated the east coast’s gasoline supply, let’s take a look at what ransomware is, how it works, and why the only solution is to go on airplane mode.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the Republican Party refusing to move on from Trump after he lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
ブランコに乗るのに手こずっちゃったのはキウイフルーツのせい！The kiwi fruit was the reason Maru had trouble getting on the swing!
FINALLY . . .
JUST OVER A CENTURY AGO, THE United States government – in the midst of World War I – undertook unprecedented efforts to control and restrict what it saw as “unpatriotic” speech through passage of the Sedition Act of 1918, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on May 16 of that year.
The restrictions – and the courts’ reactions to them – mark an important landmark in testing the limits of the First Amendment, and the beginnings of the current understanding of free speech in the U.S.
As a scholar and lawyer focused on freedom of speech in the U.S., I have studied the federal government’s attempts to restrict speech, including during World War I, and the legal cases that challenged them. These cases helped form the modern idea of the First Amendment right of free speech. But the conflict between patriotism and free expression continues to be an issue a century later.
Anarchist, political activist and writer Emma Goldman.
Government’s pursuit of ‘radicals’
The onset of war led to a patriotic fervor, fed by an intense government propaganda campaign. It also led to new challenges to the concept of free speech.
Within a few weeks of declaring war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act.
This law, which is still largely in effect, makes it a crime to do three things. First, to convey false information in order to interfere with the American military, or promote the success of America’s enemies. Second, to cause or attempt to cause insubordination within the military. Third, to willfully obstruct military recruitment or enlistment. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
Overthrow your memory with Insurrectigone! https://t.co/6S5rRVgXFu
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 14, 2021
