• • • an aural noise • • •
word garnish: Pushing his creativity from common boundaries, Astronaut Ape producing music as the blend of various music genres, such as Chillout, Ambient, and Downtempo, Dub, Psytrance, Progressive Trance. As a result, he mixes progressive bassline, dubstep beat, chillout melodies, sampled ethnic instruments, and synthesized cosmic sounds into immersing audial space travel.
• some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation •
Meet the Egyptian Scientists Studying ‘Ghosts’ of the Desert
The country’s extensive fossils include early ancestors of whales, the largest mammals on the planet.
Egypt is home to fossils that include a range of ancient marine animals, such as this early whale from Wadi al-Hitan, southwest of Cairo. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
A FEW YEARS AGO, ABDULLAH Gohar’s mother introduced him to a ghost. That’s how she phrased it, and at first, Gohar was confused. “What are you talking about?” he recalls asking her. But he was also intrigued: She wasn’t alluding to seances and ectoplasm, but rather prehistoric bones, toes from an ancient elephant that had trundled through their neighborhood millions of years before.
Gohar grew up near Egypt’s Fayum Depression, a basin southwest of Cairo that’s studded with the remains of prehistoric life, and the fossils got him thinking. He had long been interested in whales (“I adore them,” he says, grinning), but as a university student pursuing marine biology, he focused mainly on the observable behavior of whales today, such as spouting, breaching, and migrating across the world’s oceans. The fossil his mother showed him invited him to cast his gaze back in time—and to find a portal, he didn’t have to look far. The Fayum Depression includes the site known as Wadi al-Hitan, or “Valley of the Whales,” a sprawling, incidental burial ground where ancestors of modern whales appear to swim through yellow earth. Gohar pivoted to paleontology, studying cetacean evolution and how whales “transformed from tiny, terrestrial mammals to [the] biggest mammals in the sea now.” He’s now a graduate student at Egypt’s Mansoura University and the lead author of a recent paper that describes a new species of ancient whale, one of the fossil “ghosts” helping him trace new details in the animals’ transition from land to ocean.
Egypt’s Wadi al-Hitan, or Valley of the Whales, is a fossil-rich site southwest of Cairo. Embiggenable.
Whales had a long road to an aquatic life, and some of the stretches are hard to puzzle out. (The patchy fossil record is “awkward,” according to an Italian research team led by biologist Stefano Dominici.) Scientists do know that some of the earliest cetaceans—including Pakicetus, a four-legged landlubber that lived roughly 50 million years ago—probably looked a bit like canids. From there, it took whales millions of years to become full-time residents of the water, says paleontologist Hesham Sallam, founder of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center and one of Gohar’s coauthors. Along the way, there were “many transitional forms,” Sallam adds—species that lived amphibious lives, moving between water and land. …
THE NEW PURITANS
Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless.
“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”
So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, . As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”
We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.
Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
Yet despite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake. …
Man Either Sick Or Just At End Of Workday https://t.co/bzYVECTdyM pic.twitter.com/UhzXYHJhcY
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 24, 2021
UNRELATED: 5 Weird Secret Projects That Keep The World Running
You know how the world works. Some people sit at desks and type things, and other people stand in stores and sell things, and so it goes. But that’s just what you see. Behind the scenes, all kinds of other operations are grinding along, and these can get really weird.
5. People Fight Geese By Sabotaging Eggs
Geese are evil tricksters, always turning our yards into seas of poop and chasing small children into ponds. If they had scales and breathed fire, you could kill every goose you see and be hailed as a hero. But as it is, geese in the United States are protected by law.
Specifically, we’re talking about the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, under which you may not kill wild geese. There are exceptions for hunting season and specific situations where they’re a serious threat (like around airports, where geese in engines spell doom for all), but other than that, you can’t kill, capture, chase, or disrespect geese in any way.
So what do people do when they want to control the geese population in an area? An activity known as “egg addling.” They stalk geese to their nests and mess with the eggs when the goose isn’t looking, so the eggs don’t hatch. You cannot simply break the eggs, because then the mother goose would just lay more. In fact, you can’t let her know the eggs have been disturbed at all. Instead, the usual method is to furtively coat each egg in corn oil. This cuts off the oxygen supply and keeps the embryo inside from developing. …
Police Finally Make Breakthrough In Decades-Old Marijuana Possession Cold Case https://t.co/n6tb6e0E54 pic.twitter.com/NJOoxsSVNB
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 25, 2021
UNRELATED: A Chinese Serial Killer Sold Delicious ‘Ostrich Meat’
With a lot of serial killers, their biographies start out with some sort of look at their early life. With Zhang Yongming, the earliest bit of his backstory we have was the time he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, back in 1979. But China released him in 1997, and the reasons for that are lost to history, along with details of the original crime.
The next news we have on Zhang came in 2011. People were going missing close to where he lived in Yunnan Province. A couple bodies turned up, and it definitely sounded like they had a serial killer on their hands. Police didn’t look too hard at Zhang, though. They did hear he had a criminal history, but they figured he was a “lunatic,” which they took to mean he couldn’t be killing anyone.
Zhang went on farming for a living, and playing chess. He also sold dried meat to villagers. He called this stuff “ostrich meat,” and it did taste exotic. No one knew where he got the meat from, though, as he didn’t keep ostriches. …
Ed. You really don’t want to continue reading.
Alzheimer's Disease Causing Baby Boomers To Misremember 1960s Even More https://t.co/cDkF1bMLKc pic.twitter.com/VMmbH8Ou8e
— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 25, 2021
Do You Think There’s A Safe Way To Join A Cult?
I really want to know.
You could argue that almost any group activity can turn into a cult. Members come together for some kind of healing, and the ensuing improvements feel miraculous. The urge to deify and make rigid the parameters of success could tempt anyone, right alongside the desire to monetize the process.
Having personally experienced loads of trauma — a chaotic childhood, addiction, abandonment — when I landed upon the promise of meditation, I was primed and ready. Of course, I wanted a life without anger, full of compassion, love, and goodwill.
Beyond any cultish elements, contemplative practice can have drawbacks, from exacerbating mental illness to increasing anxiety. If you want to dive deeper into that, check this out:
But the cultish elements are problematic. Particularly in spaces we enter to recover from trauma. If you’re like me for the decade after my divorce, you’re more vulnerable than you know, and for longer than you imagine is possible. Even my sacred escape of yoga was rocked by scandals. Yet there was no denying I was getting a lot of good with the “bad.” I learned to take the good and leave the rest (detailed in my forthcoming memoir, Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Surviving the Wellness Revolution), and to that end, I love these tips from writer Blair Glaser.
…
Wanted: $2,000 Reward — Finding The (Wo)man Behind the Infamous Urinal Fountain
The artist you didn’t know you knew.
Wanted: $2,000 Reward
Marcel Duchamp created a poster Wanted: $2,000 Reward in 1923 in New York. Two headshots of himself, description of physical attributes, and an eye-catching note: “Known also under name Rrose Sélavy.”
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
L.H.O.O.Q (mustachioed Mona Lisa)
Duchamp’s radical artistic skills were out and about in the world when he created the porcelain urinal Fountain but his mustachioed Mona Lisa, entitled L.H.O.O.Q (roughly translated as “she horny”) challenged the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.
He was amongst the few artists of his generation openly talking about gender fluidity and gender deception.
Fresh Widow
In 1920, he created Fresh Widow out of a French Window. Fascinated by themes of sights and perception; with the help of a carpenter, a miniature French window was created. Windows had an important place in the artist’s work. …
FINALLY . . .
A Car Park attendant who fooled everybody for over 20-years
Unbelievable but true.
Picture in public domain of the actual guy (fair usage)
This guy was the perfect Robin Hood, only he kept the proceeds for himself. As my father used to say … “charity starts at home”. He didn’t include car washes or anything special, he followed the cardinal rule of success. Keep it simple! Cheap parking.
I love this guy and can’t quite fathom if it’s the “Robin Hood ‘’ aspect, the audacity and genius of the endeavor or the fact it highlights how inept all our local governments really are from Vancouver to Vladivostok and everywhere in between . But I am somehow happy for this man who benefited from his daring.
A man at the Bristol Zoo in the United Kingdom has been collecting money off every car parked in the car park attached to the zoo. Nobody is entirely sure when (exactly) he started but it was definitely recorded as more than 20-years ago. It is thought, he has been doing this for between 20 and 25 years. He charges 3 quid per car for parking and is an institution in Bristol – everybody knew him. Or thought they did. Teenage kids who befriended him when brought by parents, introduced their children to him years later.
Such a happy fellow. Not a care in the world.
Now for most who don’t know, the Bristol Zoo has two car parks PLUS an overflow parking area that can hold a FURTHER 700 cars on public land designated for recreation. This is a busy zoo.
We are not talking about 10 or so odd parking spots here. This is parking on a massive commercial scale and operational every single day.
And the beauty of this scam is that it is because the attendant WAS NOT at his post one morning, that the scam was revealed. Like the mythical postman who delivers in any weather, for more than 20-years, come rain or shine, this attendant was at his post collecting his parking fee. In cash! He never missed a day and consequently there was no need to investigate the situation. …
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.
