• • • an aural noise • • •
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
This ‘Cryptically Carnivorous’ Plant Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight, Waiting for Flesh
The western false asphodel has an appetite for insects, but it’s not a great time to be a meat-eating plant.
Insects, like these, which met their death in Washington’s North Cascades National Park, can find themselves trapped on the plant’s stem. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IT’S A GREAT PLACE FOR a flesh-eater to hide out, unnoticed. British Columbia’s Cypress Provincial Park, overlooking West Vancouver to the south, has beautifully droopy yellow cypresses, with mountain hemlock and silvery fir for neighbors. Warblers, ravens, hawks, and woodpeckers fly above heathers, huckleberries, and ferns, where black bears, weasels, and coyotes pad past. Amid this profusion of life, a plant called Triantha occidentalis, or the western false asphodel, quietly waits to feast—though humans didn’t know what it was up to until now.
A few years ago, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and other institutions began to suspect that there was something up with T. occidentalis, which lives throughout the Pacific Northwest and has been documented for well over a century. The spindly thing—topped with a spray of little white flowers—thrives in damp environments, often in the company of confirmed carnivores such as sundews and butterworts. The team had a clue something was up when they found that T. occidentalis was missing some genes that aid in photosynthesis. It’s rare to see such an elision in a plant—outside of heterotrophic ones, that is, plants that don’t use the sun alone as an energy source. Other members of the same lab decided to pick up the question of what, exactly, was fueling T. occidentalis. Now, in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from UBC and the University of Wisconsin-Madison confirm that T. occidentalis has an appetite for meat.
In portions of North America, at least, flesh-eating plants tend to congregate in bogs or deep, rain-fed kettle lakes carved by glaciers. In these water bodies, nutrients often sink to the bottom—or, without much runoff, may not be plentiful to begin with. Carnivory is a tough life, and only worth it when the tactic is a plant’s best option, says Iza Redlinski, a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. “From the plant’s perspective, it’s a lot of effort to lure an insect, capture it, digest it, [and] absorb those nutrients, while still probably photosynthesizing,” she says. Boggy Cypress Provincial Park is the kind of place where the trade-off makes sense. The patchwork of water and forest is “a perfect place for carnivorous plants,” says Qianshi Lin, lead author of the new study.
At Cypress Provincial Park, T. occidentalis has sundews for neighbors.
To figure out whether the park’s T. occidentalis plants really were feasting on creatures, Lin went out into the field to feed them, with a smorgasbord of lab-grown fruit flies. …
Norheimsund, Norway: Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter (Hardanger Maritime Museum)
A living museum working to keep the traditions of building and repairing handmade wooden boats, ropemaking, and blacksmithing alive.
Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter and the Mathilde. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
THE HARDANGER FARTØYVERNSENTER (HARDANGER MARITIME Center) is a living museum. They build and repair wooden boats that range from smaller row boats up to larger wooden fishing boats. In addition, they have a blacksmith and one of the few rope-making facilities in Northern Europe.
The center, which is located in a former furniture factory in Norheimsund, was established in 1984. Visitors can see ropes being made, blacksmiths at work in the forge, and boats being built and repaired. There are around 20 skilled craftspeople working to restore ships as well as a number of apprentices. Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter is one of just three ship-preservation facilities recognized by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage.
The first boat that was restored at Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter was the Mathilde, a large sailboat built in 1884 for the transport of klippfish (dried cod) from the Lofoten Islands to Bergen. It took five years to get the 76-ton ship in sailing shape, but starting in 1989 the Mathilde was put into operation for museum visitors and school trips.
The personnel are knowledgeable and willing to share their insight. They know their crafts. While they are often working on specific projects, e.g. the restoration of a veteran wooden boat, they take the time to discuss the project, their tools and the materials with visitors. The museum actively trains people to become boat builders, rope makes and smiths through their apprentice program. They also have courses in, for example rope making, wooden oar making and other related themes. Visitors to the museum also have a chance to take a small wooden boat out to row in the nearby fjord. …
When Wall Street came to coal country: how a big-money gamble scarred Appalachia
Around the turn of the millennium, hedge fund investors put an audacious bet on coal mining in the US. The bet failed – but it was the workers and the environment that paid the price.
Mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia.
Once or twice a generation, Americans rediscover Appalachia. Sometimes, they come to it through caricature – the cartoon strip Li’l Abner or the child beauty pageant star Honey Boo Boo or, more recently, Buckwild, a reality show about West Virginia teenagers, which MTV broadcast with subtitles. Occasionally, the encounter is more compassionate. In 1962, the social critic Michael Harrington published The Other America, which called attention to what he described as a “vicious circle of poverty” that “twists and deforms the spirit”.
Around the turn of this century, hedge funds in New York and its environs took a growing interest in coalmines. Coal never had huge appeal to Wall Street investors – mines were dirty, old-fashioned and bound up by union contracts that made them difficult to buy and sell. But in the late 1990s, the growing economies of Asia began to consume more and more energy, which investors predicted would drive up demand halfway around the world, in Appalachia. In 1997, the Hobet mine, a 25-year-old operation in rural West Virginia, was acquired for the first time by a public company, Arch Coal. It embarked on a major expansion, dynamiting mountaintops and dumping the debris into rivers and streams. As the Hobet mine grew, it consumed the ridges and communities around it. Seen from the air, the mine came to resemble a giant grey amoeba – 22 miles from end to end – eating its way across the mountains.
Up close, the effects were far more intimate. When Wall Street came to coal country, it triggered a cascade of repercussions that were largely invisible to the outside world but of existential importance to people nearby.
Down a hillside from the Hobet mine, the Caudill family had lived and hunted and farmed for a century. Their homeplace, as they called it, was 30 hectares (75 acres) of woods and water. The Caudills were hardly critics of mining; many were miners themselves. John Caudill was an explosives expert until one day, in the 30s, a blast went off early and left him blind. His mining days were over, but his land was abundant, and John and his wife went on to have 10 children. They grew potatoes, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, beets and beans; they hunted game in the forests and foraged for berries and ginseng. Behind the house, a hill was dense with hemlocks, ferns and peach trees.
One by one, the Caudill kids grew up and left for school and work. They settled into the surrounding towns, but stayed close enough to return to the homeplace on weekends. John’s grandson, Jerry Thompson, grew up a half-hour down a dirt road. “I could probably count on one hand the number of Sundays I missed,” he said. His grandmother’s menu never changed: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn and cake. “You’d just wander the property for hours. I would have a lot of cousins there, and we would ramble through the barns and climb up the mountains and wade in the creek and hunt for crawdads.”
Before long, the Hobet mine surrounded the land on three sides, and Arch Coal wanted to buy the Caudills out. Some were eager to sell. “We’re not wealthy people, and some of us are better off than others,” Thompson said. One cousin told him, “I’ve got two boys I got to put through college. I can’t pass this up because I’ll never see $50,000 again.” He thought, “He’s right; it was a good decision for him.”
In the end, nine family members agreed to sell, but six refused, and Jerry was one of them. Arch sued all of them, arguing that storing coalmine debris constituted, in legal terms, “the highest and best use of the property”. The case reached the West Virginia supreme court, where a justice asked, sceptically, “The highest and best use of the land is dumping?” …
PREPARE TO spend a while; it’s The Long Read.
The Big Blue Eyes & The Sexy Black Box: How Elizabeth Holmes Exposed America
Here is my personal confession right off the top: I am fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes, perhaps even to the point of obsession. But not for the reasons that so many American men of mature age, experience and education are. We learned about a decade ago that the root causes for their fascination run so deep that they appraised at about ten billion dollars. I am firmly positioned in the minority. While I have nothing against women with blonde hair and blue eyes, I am entirely unmoved by them, notwithstanding the cultural norm of favoring such women at every imaginable turn. My capacities for discernment do not skeet out of my brain when I see big blue eyes gazing at me. My fascination with the story of Elizabeth Holmes is based on the fact that it exposes so much of what is amiss in American social, political, media and financial circles. Each one played a critical role in this debacle.
The incredible story of the now defunct medical technology startup company Theranos has been back in the news lately. Miss Holmes is finally going to stand trial on charges that she defrauded investors during her short and dramatic rise through Silicon Valley circles to international fame and fortune. We should all pay close attention to the details of how this trial plays out. The 10-billion-dollar fraud that was Theranos is the best microcosm of American culture since the O.J. Simpson trials. Both of these irresistible flashpoints in contemporary American life exposed design defects in our culture that we love to pretend are not there, but far too often rise up and bite us in the ass because we have failed to deal with them.
In the curious case of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the problem literally started with blood. Not the droplets of blood that she collected from the pricked fingertips of hundreds of thousands of people and pretended to test for diseases with her invention that looked like a sexy little black box. The problem was the blood that runs through her veins.
Evidently, famous billionaire investors like Don Lucas and Tim Draper were inspired to sink millions of dollars into Ms. Holmes’ start-up blood diagnostics company because, and this is a direct quote: “Her great-great grandfather was an entrepreneur. And- as it turns out- the local hospital in her hometown was named for her great-uncle- so there you have medicine in her blood as well. So you see you have both things that you need and she came about them both quite naturally.”
Don Lucas spoke those utterly ridiculous words about half-way through the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley. When Lucas made those blithely ignorant comments he gleefully exposed the first of three huge defects in American culture that we are taking on herein: Lineage equates to opportunity. Even a fairy-tale, patchwork lineage like the one presented by Elizabeth Holmes. …
Look around you. How did you get here? Where did this all come from? You are trapped in a dream realm from which you will never escape. Be calm. Don’t panic. https://t.co/99yjzmdrvM pic.twitter.com/m7lbXWgXKZ
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 17, 2021
The First Banned Performance-Enhancing Substance? Beer.
The Olympics took quite a while to get around banning athletes from using drugs. Decades passed, with competitors freely using amphetamines and strychnine, before the committee finally got together in 1967 and said, “Okay, we need to do something.” They compiled a bunch of types of drugs, most of which we won’t concern ourselves with today, since no one in the following year’s games used any of them. The list also included alcohol.
The 1968 games played out. Among the many events was the pentathlon, during which each athlete faces the vastly different sports of riding, swimming, running, fencing, and shooting. You might best know the event from this past Olympics, when one German coach was kicked out for punching a horse.
Braving the pentathlon for Sweden in 1968 was Olympic veteran Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall. He performed well in the riding and fencing segments, then the night before the shooting competition, he was so anxious, he couldn’t sleep. He drank two beers before shooting, to calm his nerves. Then he submitted to a drug test, apparently fearing nothing. He did well enough in later events to win his team the bronze.
Only later did officials announce that Liljenwall’s blood had clocked in at over the limit for alcohol. Sweden had to return their medals, and though Liljenwall came back for the next games in 1972, he never won again. …
One Out Of Every 500 Americans Have Died From Covid Since Beginning Of Pandemic https://t.co/XAgzSFWehC #WhatDoYouThink? pic.twitter.com/42Kdw9qJh4
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 17, 2021
UNRELATED: Remembering 1980: The Year Cocaine Nazis Conquered Bolivia
1980 was a wild year. The Empire Strikes Back dominated the box office, proving once and for all that movies are better when one of the characters unexpectedly turns out to be a full-blown muppet. Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for the US presidency, the cocaine Nazis conquered Bolivia, and Pac-Man debuted in Japan. Meanwhile, in London, a little band called Bananarama held their first … whoa, whoa, hold on a minute. What was that thing about the cocaine Nazis? That seems worth digging into a little further.
As it turned out, 1980 was the year of the “Cocaine Coup,” when the government of Bolivia was overthrown by a jerkass alliance of fugitive Nazis and cocaine traffickers. It was as if everyone James Bond ever kicked into their own shark tank suddenly came back to life and decided to take over a country.
4. Jewel Thieves, Cold Fusion, And America’s Secret Nazi Barbie
To understand what happened in Bolivia, we first have to jump back four decades to Nazi-occupied France, where a captain named Klaus Barbie was appointed head of the Gestapo secret police in Lyon. Barbie was a vicious little creep sadly born slightly too early for people to find his name funny (he did resemble the doll a bit, in the sense that they both had alarmingly lifeless eyes). He set up his headquarters in Lyon’s luxury Hotel Terminus, where he quickly became notorious for inflicting brutal tortures on suspected resistance fighters, often while stroking a cat and grinning. In one of his most notorious cases, Barbie extracted the location of 44 Jewish children, who had been hidden in the small town of Izieu, then sent them all to Auschwitz. He was ultimately held responsible for the deaths of up to 25,000 people.
After the war, US intelligence heard about the “Butcher of Lyon” and were like “wow, we’ve gotta get that guy!” Barbie was promptly signed up as an informer by the Army Counterintelligence Corps, receiving the princely salary of $1,700 a month (in comparison, US army privates started out at $50 a month, although they were allowed to keep any shrapnel they could pry out of their kneecaps). Barbie worked for the US until 1951, when French intelligence suddenly noticed that the creepy guy who kept poking around asking about communists was one of their most wanted criminals. They promptly issued an arrest warrant, at which point the Americans realized that hiring a literal child-murderer was going to make them look very, very bad. So they quietly arranged for Barbie to escape to South America.
The Army’s role in all of this might have escaped notice if Barbie hadn’t bumped into an international jewel thief named Bobby Wilson, who was also lying low in Bolivia. The pair hit it off and Barbie told Wilson about his wartime experiences, including his work for the Americans. In the 1980s, Wilson shared tapes of these conversations with ABC News, sparking an investigation by the Department of Justice, which concluded that “officers of the United States government were directly responsible for … arranging his escape from the law.” The US subsequently issued a formal apology to the French government (we assume there’s a special Hallmark store in Washington selling little “whoops, our bad!” cards for these occasions).
Barbie wasn’t alone in heading for South America. As many as 9,000 suspected Nazi war criminals are believed to have fled via the “Ratlines” to South America. The majority headed for Argentina, where President Juan Peron believed that German expertise could help develop the country’s economy—a fiction that he was only disabused of after a former Nazi rocket scientist tricked him into spending quite a lot of Argentina’s GDP developing a phony cold fusion reactor in an isolated mountain fortress. But Barbie ended up settling in Bolivia, where he set himself up as a freelance “security consultant.” And that’s when things got weird. …
Antidepressant Medication Label Reminds Users That Pill Should Never Be Mixed With Long Look In Mirror https://t.co/GFaT5evZGj pic.twitter.com/hNB6sbdFJX
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 18, 2021
The Tragic End Of The Pharaohs
How a 3000 year old tradition was shattered in a single month.
The Battle of Actium. Embiggenable.
After the death of Julius Cesar, the Roman Republic was plunged into a series of civil wars fought to determine who would rule. The conflicts were expansive and complicated but largely pitted the political forces under Mark Antony against the armies of Octavian, Cesar’s heir and protege. As the war for Rome unfolded, Mark Antony saw an opportunity to gain a powerful ally in Ptolemaic Egypt in the form of Cleopatra.
Mark Antony struck up a relationship with the female pharaoh and in return Egypt threw their lot behind Mark Antony’s faction in opposition to Octavian. Antony hoped that with Egypt’s backing, he would have enough political and military clout to turn the tides against Octavian who had been gaining strength as the years passed on. It quickly became apparent that a final showdown between the two sides was inevitable and now Egypt appeared to feature prominently in the coming battle.
Mark Antony, Egyptian
Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
In the year 32BCE Octavian was tipped off to the location of Mark Antony’s secret will. He moved in and seized the document which detailed a plan to divide up Rome and leave it to his sons to rule in his stead. It also gave elaborate plans for a grand tomb to be built in Alexandria for Mark Antony and Cleopatra. These revelations gave Octavian the political power needed to convince the Senate that Mark Antony was not acting in Rome’s best interest but in the interest of Egypt. It wasn’t a hard sell.
The publishing of Mark Antony’s will enraged many of the citizens of Rome and prompted the Senate to declare war on Egypt and Mark Antony. Octavian saw his opportunity to strike a final decisive blow against his rivals after years of plotting and pulling. …
Will “South Park” creators remake Colorado’s legendary Casa Bonita?
Andrew Novick, “possibly Casa Bonita’s No. 1 fan,” has been leading a campaign to save the legendary restaurant, which filed for bankruptcy in April 2021. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
In a strip mall in Lakewood, Colorado, between a Dollar Tree and an art supply store, there’s a pink stucco palace topped with a gold dome and a statue of an Aztec emperor. This is Casa Bonita, a Mexican-themed wonderland that occupies 52,000 square feet of suburban Denver real estate, and a special place in the hearts of generations of Colorado kids — like me.
I grew up in Colorado Springs, about an hour south of Denver, and a trip to Casa Bonita was like going to Disneyland. There were cliff divers plunging from a 30-foot waterfall, an arcade and puppet theater. You could get an old-timey picture taken in a fake jail, and crawl through a scary pirate’s cave. The place was so magical, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who also grew up in Colorado, devoted a whole episode to Casa Bonita in 2003.
Some of us have never outgrown it.
With its 85-foot tower, Casa Bonita stands out among the other businesses in its suburban shopping center.
Andrew Novick, 52, is an electrical engineer, artist and “possibly Casa Bonita’s No. 1 fan,” he said. “I’ve been here 306 times.”
Novick started racking up those visits when he was little. His mom worked at a medical lab around the corner from Casa Bonita. On Saturdays she’d bring the kids with her.
“My brother and I would, like, look through the microscopes at blood samples, and she’d give us the counter to count cells and stuff, and kind of put us to work,” he said.
As a reward, they’d go to Casa Bonita.
I met Novick outside for visit #307. The restaurant has been closed since the start of the pandemic. While other businesses survived doing takeout, that wasn’t really an option for Casa Bonita. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Immediately after 9/11, Congress rewrote the rules of U.S. surveillance by passing the Patriot Act. Fmr. Sen. Russ Feingold voted against it partly because he feared it gave the feds too much power. Soon enough, a lot more people began to see where he was coming from.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE NEWS for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top issues of the week, including Gavin Newsom’s victory in the California recall election and shocking revelations from Bob Woodward’s latest book.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Being a tattletale used to be a bad thing, but now America is “Snitchlandia,” where you can’t trust your neighbors and you’re always looking over your shoulder.
The Daily Show returns from hiatus, Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s swollen balls, and crazy Met Gala outfits. What the hell happened this week?
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
絵画の巨匠まる。Master painter Maru.
（筆の持ち手の部分には、庭で収穫したキャットニップの匂いがついてます） (The handle of the brush has the smell of cat nip harvested in the garden.)
FINALLY . . .
Go for a Walk
What I learned about transcendence from a very boring 100-mile trek.
Embiggenable.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
LAST MONTH, A SURVEY BY THE travel industry found that a majority of Americans changed their vacation plans this summer because of the continuing coronavirus pandemic. But not everyone canceled their vacations entirely; travel spending has been almost as high this summer as it was in the summer of 2019. Some would-be adventurers simply found ways to do the exotic things they’d planned to do overseas in less exotic places. One of my friends, for instance, went bungee jumping in North Carolina instead of Costa Rica.
For my vacation, I did the opposite: I went with my family to a fairly exotic place to do a distinctly unexotic thing. I went to Spain and took a very quiet 100-mile walk.
To be more precise, I walked the Camino de Santiago, an ancient network of routes that leads to Galicia in the North of Spain, which has attracted travelers from around the world for more than a thousand years. It was the second time I’d made the weeklong pilgrimage, navigating through rural villages and over Roman roads to the famous Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James the Apostle are believed to be held.
Many religious traditions involve pilgrimages, which are, according to the scholar Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, “the physical traversing of some distance from home to the holy place,” motivated by sentiment or belief and undertaken as an act of devotion. In northern India, tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims (yatri in Sanskrit) walk from their homes to the holy city of Mathura each year. In Japan, people walk the 70-kilometer Kumano Kodō across the Kii Peninsula to three sacred Shinto temples. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.
