February 19
You literally cannot mess this up
How we Lost our Ability to Mend [clothes] from Die, Workwear!, "A semi-daily blog about classic men's tailoring and semi-casual attire."
“The split between countryside and city...”
“I’ll take the example of the Rond-point des vaches, since it’s here in Rouen. The folks occupying it have spontaneously formed themselves into two teams or shifts. A daytime team arrives around 6 a.m. and stay all day. They don’t block traffic per se, but they only allow a slow trickle through at a time, like three or four cars a minute. This filtering effect ends up being fairly disruptive. At the same time, people eat, talk, and spend time together. Probably 40 percent of this shift is retired folks. They have this kind of time to spend and decide to throw themselves into the struggle. Normally, these are people who don’t talk to one another, who live their separate existences. Through the roundabouts, these people have discovered that they share the same miseries, have the same trouble paying bills, and share a similar hatred of elected officials.” The Counter-Insurrection Is Failing - As the largest uprising in France since 1968 continues to gain momentum, participants in Paris and Rouen speak to Adrian Wohlleben about the unfolding dynamic. (Commune)
Best read after breathing in some helium
Steampunk fans and climate hawks alike want to know: what about airships? After investigating the subject for a time, I've come to a tentative conclusion that airships could indeed play an important role in a zero-carbon transportation infrastructure — but probably not in the form of romantic luxury travel. Big and weird cargo shipping might just be where the airship does best. The return of the airship (slTheWeek)
In Case of Emergency, Print Money
In 1914, as Germany entered into World War I, the Imperial government suspended the gold standard. As a result, the values of paper and hard currencies diverged, hoarding started, and towns, employers, and banks started to print their own emergency notes [Colin Dickey, Topic]. This notgeld or emergency money, continued into their Weimar Era, and varied, from plain to ornate, from single-color to colorful, from few pfennigs to fifty million marks or more, and reflected [flicker album, previously] the people and the times: the towns and their history, commentary on politics and hunger, and meta-commentary on the notgeld themselves.
Some of the images of the notes are anti-semitic. [more inside]
The story of banta in a Codd neck bottle
Banta is the colloquial term for a peculiar kind of lemon soda sold in the city—packed in distinctive, green-tinged, Codd-neck bottles locked in place by a marble, and embellished with ice of dubious origin and generous quantities of black salt. [Follow the fascinating story behind the scenes by Mefi's Own beijingbrown]
Etsy stealing money from shop owners
Etsy has taken hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars out of sellers' bank accounts on Friday. They were supposed to put the money back today, the Tuesday after that Friday, but so far they've been making deposits and then withdrawing them. The link I posted seems to have the most current information.
If you're going to infringe someone's copyright, choose more wisely
Courtney Milan -- aka Heidi Bond, former professor of Intellectual Property Law and first accuser of Alex Kozinski -- has uncovered another "author" plagiarizing from one of her books. I use "author" loosely, because Christiane Serruya's defence is that the Fiverr ghostwriter she hired to actually write her books did the copying.
"Complete the Revolution"
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has ended months of speculation, starting his 2020 campaign for the presidency in an already-energetic Democratic field. [more inside]
February 18
I wrote it because I got fired from my fucking spy-themed restaurant job
Sir Babygirl - Haunted House, Sir Babygirl - Everyone is a Bad Friend
Sir Babygirl, born Kelsie Hogue, has an evil plan. It starts with memes: Her Instagram [insta] is a mood board of early 2000s nostalgia and bisexuality – a grinning Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove joking about period blood, Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blonde reading a textbook labeled “Flirting W/ Girls: 101.” “I was like, I’m going to get a following that way, and then it will cross over to my music,” she says. “I’m very calculated.” MTV[more inside]
Preferential Treatment
Dennis the Election Koala gives Ken the Voting Dingo an important lesson in civics!
Patrick Alexander explains Australia's electoral system for the House of Representatives, instant-runoff voting, in cartoon form.
Winner Winner Tetris Dinner!
Tetris 99 [YouTube][Game Trailer] “The goal is simple: 99 people are playing Tetris simultaneously, and the last surviving player wins. It’s ridiculous and hectic, and it’s also kind of amazing. At its core, the game is still Tetris as you know it. Tetrominoes of various shapes fall from the top, and it’s your job to line them up and clear away complete lines. The blocks are even the same color as usual, and the familiar Tetris theme hums along in the background. The difference, though, is that your ultimate goal isn’t a high score. It’s to be the last surviving player. As columns overflow and players get knocked out, the number of participants steadily dwindles.” [via: The Verge] [more inside]
Dance Your PhD
Dance Your PhD winners are in for 2019. Overall winner: Superconductivity, The Musical. Biology winner, and audience favourite: The (un)conscious brain. Chemistry winner: Percolation Theory - Conducting Plastics. Social Science winner: Movements as a Door for Learning Physics Concepts - Integrating Embodied Pedagogy in Teaching.
Life as a monotropic person in a polytropic world
Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism: "In a nutshell, monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us [autistic people] in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel."
okay babies let's fix the scare floor
“first, to introduce the work conducted in the Monsters, Inc power plant: a two-person scare team consists of a scarer and an assistant. the scarer walks through a door portal to the human world, scares the child inside, and walks out..” [Threadreader version]
You can't show tampons at the Palace of Versailles
An interview (~13min video, in English, alt link) with Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos recounts her 2012 exhibit as the first female artist to be invited to present her work at the annual contemporary art exhibition of the Palace of Versailles. Also discussed is her current installation Simone at Le Bon Marché in Paris and other works.
The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles
“You don’t have to [start an Etsy shop],” I assured her. “You can do something you love, just because you love it.” And suddenly the sentence that both of us needed to hear came out of my mouth: “You don’t have to monetize your joy.”
Shopping in Pyongyang
Too weird a specimen to belong to any canon
"At one time or another, Willeford played half the deck of familiar American archetypes but was too exquisitely weird to ever fully cash in on any of them." Jacob Siegel on the writer Charles Willeford. [more inside]
The state of the roads, throughout the US and Canada
If you're traveling around the US and you'd like to know if there's construction, or a crash, congestion or bad weather, each state Department of Transportation (DOT) has the map for you! You can call 5-1-1 for transportation and traffic information in many states (Wikipedia), and all state DOTs maintain online traveler information maps, if you want to find individual maps. But what if you want to travel between states? Highway Conditions (dot com) provides links to Canadian provinces and territories, and the United States plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, but there's a bit of link-chasing, and only some state maps link to their neighbors, but not all, so here's a list of all 50 states, from Alabama to Wyoming, Maine to California, sea to shining sea. [more inside]
Hey Porter
Cecil Foster, author of They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, in an essay entitled "Hey Porter": "...the porters were simply known as “George” or “George’s Boy”—a double-barrel blast of deprecation since the possessive George’s smacked of slave-era ownership and boy to the paternalism of a white society where Black men were perceived as childlike and incapable of becoming responsible men. [Stanley] Grizzle and his colleagues resented, indeed bristled at such demeaning labels." [more inside]
Honey, I autotuned the cat
This tweet is one of the strangest things I've heard in some time. I have no idea how he tuned his cat, or why.
I wanna write a song...oh baby is that so wrong?
All The President's Meals
A History of State Dinners Foreign Policy examines the history of American food, American Presidents, and the image the U.S. wants to project to the world. And yes, Truman served Winston Churchill Fritos. [more inside]
No Heat. No Power. No Accountability.
“ACCOUNTS FROM INCARCERATED people, their family members, and lawyers sketch a picture of widespread protests at the Sunset Park detention facility. People across multiple housing units undertook coordinated acts of nonviolent disobedience and at least three hunger strikes. Retaliation by Metropolitan Detention Center staff ranged from pepper spray and solitary confinement to shutting off toilets across entire units. All told, men on at least four housing units inside the jail say they took part in some sort of collective protest of their conditions. In each instance, they say their actions were met with official retaliation.” Locked inside a freezing federal jail they united to protest thier conditions - only to face reprisals An account of the Brooklyn MDC protests.
I was as curious about them as they were about lesbian sex
There’s a new party on the scene, specifically catering to the straight-but-curious woman: Skirt Club, an international circuit of underground parties for “girls who play with girls.” Skirt Club promoters hired me, a queer woman and professional Dominatrix, to attend and bring my submissive, Chloe, who is also my girlfriend. I may be accustomed to doing straight-for-pay sex work, but I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to entertaining women with boyfriends. So, despite the lesbian sex show I was hired to put on for a bunch of straight (or perhaps closeted) women, I was determined to have a good time for myself.
What CTA Workers Know
Chicago Magazine interviewed a dozen CTA workers anonymously about their jobs. Here are their responses on everything from acting as a de facto shelters to suicides to the weirdest things they've seen people take on the train. Related: What Teachers Know.
Satmar Hasidic sect in NY continues to evolve
Since this 2011 post on the green asking about lowest median ages of human population groups, the community of Kiryas Joel, NY has undergone some fascinating developments. Originally part of the town of Monroe, voters approved independence for the 20,000+ Hasidic Jews living there. New York's first new town in 35 years is called Palm Tree, an English translation of the group's first rebbe’s surname, Teitelbaum. Since that vote, frictions amongst the locals have become more apparent.
The Secret History of Women in Coding
Happy Anniversary, Huck Finn!
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) By Mark Twain Complete [Gutenberg Project link, with illustrations] is a story that one more often encounters in movies or musicals. The text [Adobe.com .pdf link without illustrations] is most often read in middle grade school, and seldom after that. Perhaps it's time to revisit the novel [Genius user-annotated text] as Twain wrote it, as an adult for adults. [more inside]
“We’re just going to wing it really; there’s not much more we can do.”
As captain May eats jam, ignores charts and monsters, and steers the 'good ship Brexit' downriver, a few Labour MPs might jump ship, possibly copied by a few Conservatives. Airbus, via Politico: “...we will have to look at future investments” and the Bank of America and German companies also paddle away (not on FlyBMI), as does Ratcliffe but not the wannabe captain. But people coming aboard may include expats with complex healthcare needs needing the NHS. A national humbling? Back on the high and ferry-free seas, Gavin's latest has displeased China and Gibralter is tense. Choppy waters, no investigation, only storm forecasts for Northern Ireland, and for Porsche-desiring MeFites. Irish Times: “...we can also glimpse an image of ourselves no longer ruling the waves.” (title) [more inside]
February 17
Remember - Good Satire Punches Up Like The Bubbles in Beer
In a time of a worrisome craft beer market, a worse niche beer publication market and the recent accusations of sexual assault against the CEO of Ohio's Actual Brewing, Bill Metzger, the longtime owner and publisher of the Buffalo based Brewing News chain of monthly brewing newspapers wrote an article on Scottish Cask Ale for the Great Lake's Brewing News (not to be confused with Great Lakes Brewing and their flagship Edmund Fitzgerald Porter ). After "promotion" from Worst Beer Blog (dedicated to calling out asinine and crappy behavior in the brewing world), the article was not well received to say the least even by the Scottish (with many advertisers/breweries pulling ads and at least one employee resigning in protest) . With cries of satire being rejected after an "apology" (and some questionable history being dug up), papers in the chain are going independent and Metzger is divesting himself of the remaining properties. (And the annual IPA Competition is cancelled because of breweries pulling entries) Is this another step for a maturing industry to move away from it's troubling past, even for a field that's been said to be 99% asshole free? (and don't look now - unionization, too!)
February 18th is Fart Out Loud Day!
Written by two sisters, Samantha (age 11) and Ali (age 9) from Colorado, “Fart Out Loud Day” is a funkalicious body-positivity anthem that gives everyone permission to let it out. (Farts previously) [more inside]
All The Things You Are
The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Volume Eight is an album by Art Tatum and Ben Webster, with Red Callender on double bass and Bill Douglass on drums. The 1956 session was originally released in 1958 on a Verve Records album produced by Norman Granz. He reissued the material as one of a series of eight Group Masterpieces featuring Tatum in collaboration with other artists, also issuing it as part of a boxed set, The Complete Pablo Group Masterpieces.
Kevlar and Crises Training: The perils of Modern Teaching
Many teachers are leaving the field within the first five years now, due to escalating violence in the classroom, and the exhaustion and burnout associated with this, according to a recent Canadian article. It's hard to pinpoint what factors are contributing to the more aggressive norms, but social factors are certainly a stress for many right now, including most adults responsible for modelling and teaching emotional regulation to the younger members of our population. Knowing that it is in the proper education of our children that society's true values are expressed, how might the public school system effectively address this growing social concern?
Fries Fries Fries
No matter what John Oliver says.
✨ It's full of stars ✨
After the Cultural Revolution
Beijing Silvermine is an archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the last seven years from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing. 📷[instagram] [more inside]
“Serious About Snacks”
Q: What is Taquitos.net?
A: Taquitos.net is the most comprehensive snack food site on the Interweb, featuring independent reviews of more than 8000 snacks from more than 1500 companies. (Ed. note: 97 brands! 195 types! 74 countries!) We’ve also write about other non-snack foods that pique our interest. [more inside]
A: Taquitos.net is the most comprehensive snack food site on the Interweb, featuring independent reviews of more than 8000 snacks from more than 1500 companies. (Ed. note: 97 brands! 195 types! 74 countries!) We’ve also write about other non-snack foods that pique our interest. [more inside]
Watching the watchmen: a best-practices guide
An Honest Living
Steven Salaita (previously), who can no longer find work in academia due to his past comments on Israel, is now a school bus driver. In a long essay on his website, he reflects on the transition.
130 environmental activists have been murdered in the past decade
France24 Reporters Plus—“A life of exile: How drought is forcing Hondurans to flee to US” (~25min video, in English, alt link) While members of a diaspora community in Durham, North Carolina send their support, Honduran people of the indigenous Lenca deal with drought and fight against environmental destruction and exploitation on the Petacón River. [more inside]
Show me what democracy looks like
Since Feb 6, 2019, massive protests have paralyzed Haiti.
At issue: corruption. Specifically the PetroCaribe scandal. Under this program, begun by Chavez under former president René Préval, Haiti has received approximately $4.6 billion dollars of aid from Venezuela, but with very little to show for it. A January report from the Superior Court of Auditors suggested that nearly $2 billion of the funds had been diverted. [more inside]
At issue: corruption. Specifically the PetroCaribe scandal. Under this program, begun by Chavez under former president René Préval, Haiti has received approximately $4.6 billion dollars of aid from Venezuela, but with very little to show for it. A January report from the Superior Court of Auditors suggested that nearly $2 billion of the funds had been diverted. [more inside]
My Life at 47 Is Back to What It Was Like at 27
Deferred Scandal Agreement
Between 2001 and 2011, Canadian engineering giant SNC Lavalin spent a lot of money on bribes in Libya, which resulted in criminal charges in Canada. As the charges slowly made their way through the courts, SNC Lavalin lobbied hard to have Canada introduce the same sort of deferred prosecution agreements which allow companies avoid prosecution in the U.K. and U.S. The lobbying effort succeeded in changing the law, but SNC Lavalin hadn't counted on Jody Wilson-Raybould. [more inside]
How to tune a bell
An interview with Benjamin Kipling, former Bell Tuner at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry (where Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were made) about how church bells are tuned.
Somebody alert Blinovich!
An amusing SLYT trifle from 2001. Tom Baker (impressionist Jon Culshaw) interviews Tom Baker (actor Tom Baker).
February 16
2 guys catching a flight
A door in the sky: 2 wingsuit flyers BASE jump into a plane in mid-air
"crowded congregations could be unpleasant to unbearably irritating"
There are moths that drink tears from sleeping birds' eyes. There are butterflies that feed on turtle tears. And then there are the wild bees that drink from human eyes. [CW: literally closeup photos of bees drinking from a person's eyes.] [more inside]
Ken Nordine (1920 - 2019)
"The Voice of God," Ken Nordine, passed away today at age 98 Ken Nordine was one of the greatest voice artists of all time. You may not know his name, but assuredly you know his voice. [more inside]