August 11
“I kept wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’”
Marset’s odyssey reads like a transnational caper, bordering on the absurd. But it is a startling window into the level of impunity at the nexus of Latin American public life and the lower rungs of professional soccer, enabling drug traffickers to wield enormous influence in both worlds. Years after a global manhunt for him began, Marset remains at large. from A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player: Part I / Part II [Washington Post; ungated Part I / Part II]
Amerrisque
The Naming of America - "To question the origin of America's name is to question the nature of not only our history lessons but our very identity as Americans." [Naming of the Americas, Origin of the name America (via 47:55 ;)]
Answers found in prehistoric cold case at 8-million-year-old fossil bed
Answers found in prehistoric cold case at 8-million-year-old fossil bed. Palaeontologists working near Alice Springs uncover for the first time a set of articulated bones and partial skeleton of Ilbandornis woodburnei, a massive bird that once roamed an evolving continent 8 million years ago.
August 10
"Without light in the darkness you cannot make movies."
'My slogan is very simple: no education, just liberation!’ – Béla Tarr on how film can fight the political right in Hungary.'
Two Films by Béla Tarr. 'Werckmeister Harmonies' (2000)
and 'The Turin Horse' (2011). [more inside]
Breaking barriers
Manizha Talash (previously) of the Refugee Olympic Team was disqualified in the first round of the Breaking competition for displaying a cape emblazoned with "FREE AFGHAN WOMEN" in the middle of her head-to-head with B-girl India.
"A new kind of slavery."
Canada’s $100-billion food-service industry, struggling with labour shortages, is leaning on a vulnerable workforce in record numbers. (slStar, but is an archive.ph link; OG link if you want it) [more inside]
Rival monkey gangs terrorise Thai city, mugging & assaulting schoolkids
Rival monkey gangs terrorise Thai city, mugging and assaulting schoolkids and tourists. Thousands of long-tail macaques are following increasingly aggressive ringleaders into attacks on tourists and schoolkids, and now they're wising up to the "Anti-Monkey Unit's" tactics, leaving the town no choice but to try and round them up before they storm another police station.
Storrowed
Massive wind turbine blade hits bridge, gets knocked off truck on Route 1 in Maine. Workers in orange and yellow safety vests admire the behemoth while making plans to get this over-over-over-sized load moving again.
each one of us is a brain and an athlete, etc.
This is the closing weekend of the Olympics, and Sally Jenkins is celebrating some of Team USA's athletic geeks in The Washington Post: So many of us, normal people, stroll through the world hoping to project nonchalance because we suppose it means effortlessness — when, really, it’s a kind of abdication. That way, we never really have to lose at anything. [more inside]
Cast members are categorized by "era" of Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live: The Game has received little attention on BoardGameGeek, and but little attention on its 2010 release. If games aren't your thing, you can collect the SNL action figures. Perhaps fine art is more your thing? Last but not least, for a view of the panoply of SNL-iana, you can visit a famed online purveyor of resold corporate schlock. [more inside]
An extravagant waste of time
From the beginning, intarsia has served as a projection of imperial singularity and superiority. According to Maurice Sven Dimand, the first specialized curator of Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum, the technique arrived in the cathedrals of Europe via Andalusia and Sicily from the mosques and minarets of North Africa, where, due to the prohibition on graven images, it was useful in effecting complex calligraphic patterns and tessellations. More than mere ornamentation, the intricate tiling served as a unifying design element, as much a part of the architecture as a pillar or qubba (dome). One can still feel transported before lonely door panels and orphaned minbars (pulpits), as one marvels at the way these features summon the ineffable through sacred geometry from the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia (ca. 836) to the Alhambra in Spain. from Exquisite Rot [Public Domain Review]
August 9
Workers carry in material by hand for manual glow-worm tunnel upgrade
Workers carry in 350 tonnes of material by hand for manual glow-worm tunnel upgrade. Tradies upgrading a glow-worm tunnel in New South Wales had to get creative to ensure the worms remained safe, but were treated to a daily light show as they worked.
"we decided on the wingnut because we thought it represented us"
Berkeley, CA now has a Wingnut Museum. "The wingnut was invented in the first half of the 19th century and quickly became an indispensable piece of hardware. It lets users fasten bolts by hand, without tools, using little wings jutting out from the nut.
Over time the term became slang, applied pejoratively to mentally unsound people, to political extremists, to freaks, eccentrics and weirdos. But in the Bay Area especially, it’s come to take on a more positive connotation, describing a certain type of creative tinkerer with a DIY, outsider ethos.
The wingnut, in all its many guises, is being celebrated at the Wingnut Museum, which opened in July at Grand Opening, the art salon in Berkeley’s Gilman District that is also home to the Illusion Room. " [more inside]
The Travellers' Tour Through the United States
Matthew Wynn Sivils (The Conversation, 05/08/2024), "What America's first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation": "'The Travellers' Tour' first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S. But for almost a century another game held that honor ... 'The Mansion of Happiness,' an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843 ... Announcing itself as a 'pleasing and instructive pastime,' 'The Travellers' Tour' consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities." Scan available at the LOC. [more inside]
Well, it was 2016 all over again today.
Lawrence O'Donnell delivers a scathing rebuke of the media's failure to hold Trump accountable for his lies and non-answers given throughout his recent hour-long press conference at Mar-A-Lago. [more inside]
Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services
New Consumer Reports study on getting your address, phone number, etc. removed from sites like Spokeo: "Data Defense: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services". "a group of companies offers to remove people’s personal data from people-search sites for fees ranging from $19.99 per year to more than $1,000 per year..." They tested 7 removal services to try to delete participant info from 13 people-search sites. While the study's authors "do not consider the results statistically significant or nationally representative", they found that "As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective." and "Manual opt-outs were more effective than people-search removal services but were also far from perfect." (19-page PDF including Methodology and Limitations sections.)
Avoid the 512 Bit RSA Keys
200 MW of Power (sorry Doc) This article was interesting to me, as it took me back to the days when I finished my math degree with some study of crypto, and their explanation of how the 512 bit key ended up in use.
Also: be extremely wary of the research mentioned in the article, without approval from the company and maybe some legal advice.
Also Also: not quite 1.2 “jigga” watts.
Also: be extremely wary of the research mentioned in the article, without approval from the company and maybe some legal advice.
Also Also: not quite 1.2 “jigga” watts.
Better than the free chocolate muffins
The Olympic Village has free healthcare. The United States, of course, does not:
In the days following her victory, US rugby player Ariana Ramsey made appointments with the Village gynecologist, dentist and ophthalmologist. “Like, what?” she said in a post on TikTok describing her new discovery. The Village also offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and, of course, sports medicine—all at no cost to the athletes. Ramsey came to Paris as a rugby player, she is leaving as a universal free healthcare advocate.
Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!
The trailer for director Jason Reitman's "thriller-comedy" about the beginnings of SNL has landed. [more inside]
The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies
A weird, whimsical game is hiding in the bookshelves at Los Angeles Public Library LA Times: "Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old." [more inside]
poetry in motion
How Lego builds a new Lego set
Each project moving through the Lego Ideas program starts the same way: a Lego designer tries to replicate the original fan creation in the real world to see what works and what doesn’t.
Furiosa is Australia's biggest, most expensive movie ever
Eight months and 3000 people: Furiosa is Australia's biggest, most expensive movie ever.
Director George Miller reveals how the latest Mad Max came to be, and why Anya Talyor-Joy was the right actor to take over from Charlize Theron.
‘I bet Ben did that.’
A former AdVon employee told The Verge that the content that AdVon says is created by humans is nearly identical to the AI-generated content they created while working there. Freelancers who were initially hired as writers were reassigned to roles of editors and tasked with making AI-generated writing sound human. The tool AdVon used — called MEL internally — generated hundreds of words on products using bare-bones prompts like “best televisions,” spitting out links to product pages on Amazon. from Chum King Express [The Verge; ungated]
August 8
A Compassionate Spy
The Boy Who Gave Away The Bomb [ungated] - "Drawing on intelligence sources in Russia and the United States, we had identified [Ted] Hall as an atomic spy, the long-rumored third spy at America's Los Alamos bomb laboratory." [more inside]
Insta-fake
(CW: Suicide) The only thing as fascinating as opulent wealth is its sudden disintegration Candice and Brandon Miller showed the public a world of glittering parties and vacations. The money to sustain it did not exist. [more inside]
"The Homeric poems, especially the Iliad, are full of big emotions."
Emily Wilson has translated the Iliad and Odyssey, and teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, she was interviewed ...by the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. [more inside]
Tim Walz Would Fix Your Bicycle
With Kamala Harris' Vice President pick Tim Walz rapidly becoming everyone's favorite dad and Mr. Rogers substitute, Jason Cosper's Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle -- a rif on Mat Honan's 2008 Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle (yes, you are that old now) -- has collected a singularity's worth of wholesome male role model positivity. [more inside]
Three young boys find a T Rex fossil
Three young boys, the most famous dinosaur in history, and a prehistoric discovery that left them speechless.
Two young brothers and their cousin made the discovery of a lifetime whilst hiking in North Dakota — a T-rex fossil poking out of the ground.
They are the artists
Spiders of Paradise is an upcoming exhibit of large scale portraits of tiny colorful Peacock Spiders (Genus Maratus) by artist Maria Fernanda Cardosa. Here's a short video about the project.
"The only issue was, Eric couldn't swim."
"You probably know the start of this Olympic story, but do you know how it finished?"
Before coming to the Olympics, Equatorial Guinea's Eric Moussambani had never seen a 50m pool. Aaron Smith tells us an incredible story that starts with 'Eric the Eel' answering a call for volunteers, and ends in a way you might not expect.
♫ This morning I answered the door with a boob out ♫
"With a Boob Out" is the new music video from Australian folk music singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alana Wilkinson.
[Despite the title and the use of the word "boob" this post is entirely SFW] [more inside]
307 days; Israel's Torture Regime
Israel Accused of Running "Torture Camps" as Video Emerges of Soldiers Raping Palestinian Prisoner - Democracy Now covers the days-old story that's still not quite got any significant coverage in Western media: 'The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has published a major new report documenting how the Israeli prison system has become "a network of torture camps," where physical, psychological and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is normalized and routine. The report, titled "Welcome to Hell," collects the testimony of 55 Palestinians who were detained by Israeli authorities since October 7 and later released, almost all without charges. This comes as a group of U.N. experts condemned the widespread torture of Palestinians and as Israel's Channel 12 News aired shocking footage of Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a prisoner at the Sde Teiman army base, where thousands of detainees from Gaza are held. Sarit Michaeli, the international advocacy lead for B'Tselem, says the abuse in Israeli prisons is "systemic, ongoing and state-sanctioned," reflecting the cruelty and thirst for revenge among a growing number of Israelis. "They would like to have a completely open field in terms of what they can do to Palestinians," says Michaeli.' [more inside]
Why Can’t Anyone in My Family Manage to Change the Dang Toilet Paper
NYT: Wirecutter takes on the perennial question "Frankly, some people are just monsters. And those monsters are our loved ones." [more inside]
Was Ozempic Right For Me?
“What is the charge? Eating a meal?! A succulent Chinese meal?”
YouTube: Democracy Manifest. Jack Karlson (may be an alias) has passed away, aged 82. BBC: A man responsible for one of the most viral clips in Australian history has died at the age of 82. The prison escapee and on-again off-again petty criminal ... shot to fame in 2009, after a clip of his dramatic 1991 arrest outside a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane was uploaded to the internet and enthralled the world. TV report. Guardian: "As a final send off, we gave uncle a last taste of red wine through his drip just before it was removed" she said. Metro: Yet despite his viral fame, Karlson was not tech-savvy and shunned the internet, never truly understanding the true impact of his role in popular culture. ‘He is folklore and doesn’t even know it,’ Davis said.
The strange, secretive world of North Korean science fiction
Unusual and often breathtaking, the genre is relatively unknown in the West. Lovely article introducing and situating North Korean science fiction as its own genre
Healing through Heeling
The transformative power of a northern Canadian wrestling tour. Sonya Ballantyne and Stephan Peterson directed The Death Tour, about a Northern Manitoba indie wrestling circuit.
The great cloud built form of the Giant
"The Giant by N. C. Wyeth (1882 – 1945) has hung in the Dining Room of Westtown School since 1923, a memorial from members of the Westtown Class of 1910 to their deceased classmate, William Clothier Engle (1891 – 1916). Commissioned by the class, the painting pays tribute to an artistic young man lost in the prime of his life." A short film was recently released to explore the painting and its significance further. "Headmaster James Walker and his wife picked up the painting at Wyeth’s studio and carried it back to the school in an orchard truck." At the Brandywine Museum of Art.
Should you keep drinking from an increasingly contaminated stream?
Why I Finally Quit Spotify The platform interface has gradually made it harder to find the music I want to listen to. With the latest app updates, I’d had enough. [Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker, ungated] [more inside]
There is something hopeful about writing a review
Criticism is an act of autobiography. The work of making an argument, coming to a judgment, or simply choosing which books or objects to give time and attention to is inevitably, helplessly, an expression of values—and an expression of self. Our tastes tell on us as much as our syntax and tone; that mysterious compound called sensibility is formed by some strange alchemy of innate tendencies, life experiences, and material circumstances. In the pursuit of explicating a text, observing its patterns and structure, how it works, what it means, I also explicate myself—revealing what catches my interest, where my attention lingers. I might do this more, or less, intentionally, but I always do it. from A Reviewer’s Life by Christine Smallwood [The Yale Review]
August 7
Thousands of frog eggs being released into National Park
Only 50 of these tiny frogs are left in the wild, but a drop of thousands of eggs in Kosciuszko National Park may change that. More than 3400 southern corroboree frog eggs have been released into their natural habitat in the NSW Snowy Mountains in the hope of bringing the iconic species back from the brink of extinction.
Couch Gag
The fact that so many people across the political spectrum appeared to believe his post to be true hasn't bolstered his faith in the critical-thinking skills of the electorate, Rick said — though he accepts that blame for the misapprehension starts with him. "In terms of media literacy, and those kinds of things, I guess I was already in the mud rolling around," he said. from The author of the viral joke post about JD Vance having sex with a couch breaks his silence
leftists..."progressives"...we will call them the unhumans.
"[U]nhumans oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely....they rob and they kill...They don't believe what they say. They don't care about winning debates. They don't even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you." So begins Unhumans, an Amazon best-seller by Jack Posobiec. Cover blurbs lauding the book are by J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Jr. and Michael T. Flynn. [more inside]
The Art Forger Had Fooled Thousands. Then He Met Doug.
When a man obsessed with woodblocks began to do business with a man obsessed with medical antiques, their relationship flowered — until it soured. By Christopher Kuo for the NYT. For decades, beginning in the late 1990s, Washington, 62, created thousands of ornate woodblocks and used them to make intricate prints of all kinds of things: biblical imagery, erotica, anatomical illustrations, the stark motifs of German expressionism.
Mastery was never enough for him, though. To profitably sell woodblocks — which can be an oddity in the art market — Washington decided he also needed myth. So he created elaborate origin stories for his pieces.
One word to break the fascist fever.
‘Weird’ And The Breaking of The Fascist Fever “I hate when people laugh at me,” he said somberly at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I hate it. Hate it. It’s so disrespectful.” This wasn’t a bit, or some practiced schtick he does for his adoring crowds. The Big Boy meant what he said: Don’t laugh at me. I don’t like it.
The End of an Era for Furaffinity
The owner of Furaffinity for most of its existence, the central hub for the Furry community, Dragoneer, has passed away. He has passed at 44 after struggling with an unknown unusual lung condition, possibly caused by A recalled CPAP machine known to cause deaths. He documented his months-long struggle to get medical treatment, Highlighting the financial burden and difficulty of coverage.
The global War on Terror was based on a mistake
For more than two decades, through two wars and domestic upheaval, the idea that al-Qaeda acted alone on 9/11 has been the basis of U.S. policy. A blue-ribbon commission concluded that Osama bin Laden had pioneered a new kind of terrorist group—combining superior technological know-how, extensive resources, and a worldwide network so well coordinated that it could carry out operations of unprecedented magnitude. This vanguard of jihad, it seemed, was the first nonstate actor that rivaled nation-states in the damage it could wreak. That assessment now appears wrong. from New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity [The Atlantic; ungated]
August 6
White-tailed eagles spend a year caring for injured chick
HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU
You ever try making a sourdough starter, but around day three, it starts to smell super pukey, like the Devil's Own Cheese? Apparently that's due to pH levels letting the wrong bacteria thrive before the right ones settle in. Turns out you can skip that foul-smelling phase by simply using pineapple juice rather than water for your initial starter (and part two) to get the pH just right from the start.