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an aural noise

word salad: Roots of Creation is a 10-track masterwork of electronic dance music; vibrant, intelligent, progressive, hypnotic and invigorating. Representing the next level of the inimitable Fletric sound, his second album on Luminus, the style defies genre conventions. A skillful blend of psychedelic sonics with syncopated breakbeats, thick groovy bass and luscious dub chords, topped off with angelic female vocals and pristine state-of-the-art production.

Highly energetic and meticulously detailed, the frequencies are sweetened to perfection, each and every track is 100% pure unadulterated dance-floor fire.

some of the things I read in antisocial isolation

The Biggest Crabs In the World May Have Eaten Amelia Earhart

The colorful giants of the tropics are thieves, and they’re not picky.


Meet crabs that can span up to three feet long. Embiggenable.


CAN YOU IMAGINE A CRAB the size of a cat scuttling around your backyard, climbing up trees, and quietly sneaking away with your shiniest pots and silverware? No? Then perhaps you’ve never had the privilege of meeting a coconut crab.

Coconut crabs are the world’s largest land-based crustaceans. These mostly gentle giants can weigh as much as a small terrier and have a leg span of up to three feet (one meter). But their most impressive assets are their front claws, which grip with tremendous force. They use them to drag around objects weighing more than 60 pounds (27 kg) and to crack open coconuts, a feat few other species can pull off.

These crabs are curious and unfussy. In addition to coconut flesh, fallen fruit, nuts, and seeds, they’ll eat the remains of dead rats, seabirds, and even their own kind. This has led to speculation that these giants may be partly responsible for the disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who perished in the remote Pacific. Some researchers believe that her remains were eaten by coconut crabs, who then dragged away the bones.


Coconut crabs are also known as robber crabs due to their criminal ways. Embiggenable.

But don’t let that put you off. While they will defend themselves if provoked, coconut crabs aren’t aggressive toward people. They have, however, earned the nickname “robber crabs” for their love of human-made objects, which they often drag away to their burrows for further inspection and, when possible, degustation. …

Email from God on the Availability Poll They Sent out for the Rapture

God invented the circle and is not afraid to circle back.


Hi all,

Thanks to most of you for responding to our availability poll for the Rapture. While humans may not know the day nor the hour, for staffing reasons, it’s important that we get this set in stone (@Moses, you’re in charge of actually setting the date in stone.)

Unfortunately, we’re having trouble settling on a time, so we’re sending the survey around again.

Before you fill it out, please consider which dates you are truly unavailable versus preferring to not work. Please recognize that scheduling a large-scale event like the end of the world means that some people (all people) will be inconvenienced. Many divine beings will also have to make adjustments to harp rehearsals, apparitions, or appearance schedules to a mortal to demonstrate the wonderfulness of their lives.

We know everyone hates filling out these polls, but many saints, powers, and cherubim haven’t kept their calendars up to date. We’ve heard mumbling of shared calendars seeming overly dictatorial or micromanegerial, but managing myriads of seraphim, dominions, and principalities takes more than just an all-seeing, all knowing consciousness. It takes accountability from everyone. Like the poster in our office says, Omniscience is a Science. Shout out to the four horsemen, who consistently mark down their plagues and wars. Your responsibility does not go unnoticed! …

Unrelated…

THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY, THEY DO THINGS STUPIDLY THERE: Things I Grew Up With That Seem Weird As Fuck Now
Kids today will never experience the joy of cock-blocking semi-feral dogs.


My childhood. Image from Shutterstock AI.


I was born in 1962, and I want everyone to know that whatever rosy myths you might have ingested from Saturday Night Fever or Sixteen Candles, the seventies and eighties were a raging shitshow. The hippie counterculture had choked on its own vomit to be replaced by disco, drugs, and giant hair, and things that seem insane now were perfectly normal back then.

So gather around the rocker, young ‘uns, and listen to some terrifying tales of the wicked world when I was your age. No, I’m not shining a flashlight up into my face. Someday, you’ll look like this too.

Up until my early manhood, smoking in public was legal and ubiquitous. Restaurants, offices, elevators, grocery stores — just stub your cig out on the kale, dear, no one eats that shit anyway. Airplanes had non-smoking rows, but the pervasive smoke refused to honour them. Our clothes were yellowed beyond repair from any bleach and everything smelled like French existentialists. People started smoking at the age of eight, and the world echoed with the roar of hyper-phlegmy coughing.

Safety my ass, we didn’t need no stinking seatbelts. My parents would toss four of us kids into the back of the station wagon before driving six hundred miles across the continent to see my grandparents (my grandfather continued driving until he was essentially blind, which added to the daredevil appeal of automotive travel.) Cars were also rolling death traps, so even a minor collision might see you hurled through the windshield or trapped inside waiting for the explosion. …

5 Epic Quests Finished by One Guy Working Alone

This job requires wearing a 200-pound suit, underwater, in total darkness, for five years. Interested?


Sometimes, you must leave your friends behind. A task falls to you, and there is no time to assemble a crack team. You have to handle it singlehandedly.

Will you succeed? Yes. Will you go down in history as a result? Absolutely. And will you leave the world better off? Um, well, sometimes you will; sometimes you won’t. But it will be an epic accomplishment either way, such as happened with the case of…

5. The Underwater Church Mission

In 1905, Winchester Cathedral was in danger of collapsing. That was surprising because in those days, before TV or air hockey, people didn’t have much to do other than look after the local church. The people of Winchester originally spent some 500 years building this cathedral, but then rot sneaked up on them, and it seemed that the building was going to collapse.

Someone, take up a collection, quick!

They had a plan to fix the place up. They could dig around the cathedral so they could replace the old logs down there with concrete. But when they built a tunnel to do this, it filled up with groundwater, and they didn’t have a way to complete the construction work through all that water.

William Walker did, though. Walker was a professional diver, which was a more hardcore job back then because it meant wearing a diving suit that weighed 200 pounds. He could go down in the water and drop solid concrete there, creating a space they could pump free of water so a bigger team could then sweep in. Of course, since this was one diver taking an armful of material at a time, this job wasn’t going to finish up very quickly.

Luckily, no one was in a hurry. Again, the world was very boring back then.

It took him five years. He moved down 25,000 bags of concrete, 115,000 concrete blocks and 900,000 bricks. Because of him, Winchester Cathedral still stands, and it’s now the last bastion protecting our plane from the legions of hell. …

How the Modern World Changed Your Body

Crooked teeth, bad eyes, and a broken brain — thanks, technology!


You have many advantages over your distant ancestors. You’ll almost certainly live longer, you enjoy heating and air conditioning, you’ve got access to a world of information on your phone, and you can fly from one part of the world to another. You’d be a fool to envy the people who lived a couple of hundred years ago.

But there is one thing that your great-great-great-grandparents had that you probably don’t: a strong, healthy jaw. Your jaw is weak compared to the people of the past, and your teeth are probably more crooked than theirs were, as well.

When I was in 8th grade, wearing my headgear to bed and picking food out of my braces, I often wondered why my mouth had been so poorly designed. Why did I get cavities in my teeth? Why did I need my wisdom teeth removed? Why did I have to endure a mouth full of metal for two years? And why did my dog — who literally chewed on sticks and ate poop — have such a maintenance-free mouth? Her teeth weren’t crooked, and, though her breath left something to be desired, she never had a cavity in her life.

It turns out that the human mouth isn’t designed poorly. Instead, modern living has warped our mouths. A 2020 study published in BioScience argued that modern lifestyles shrunk our jaws and made our teeth crooked. Scientists who have studied skulls from preindustrial populations find that their teeth are straighter, they have few cavities, and their wisdom teeth haven’t caused problems. Why? It seems that the culprit is softness: our modern industrialized diet — high in soft and high-calorie foods — doesn’t require us to chew very much, while our soft beds and pillows encourage bad “oral posture” and mouth breathing.

While these changes are good news for the orthodontists, who bring in $3 billion annually, and dentists, who make $5 billion just from wisdom tooth extraction every year, they’re not great for the rest of us. Not only do they waste our money and prompt unnecessary oral surgery, but they lead to larger problems like sleep apnea. …

LA Neighborhoods: North Hollywood


Circus Liquor at the corner of Vineland Avenue and Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood. I used to buy cigarettes here.


Despite its name, North Hollywood is not adjacent to Hollywood. It’s a small suburb in the San Fernando Valley north of Studio City and west of Burbank. The area is largely working-class with more than half the residents of Latino heritage. The region is dense with multi-level apartment buildings and small homes interspersed among car repair shops, dental offices and taco bars.

North Hollywood has a retro feel reminiscent of the 70s. The LA River criss-crosses the area as well as large fields of electrical towers. The main road through North Hollywood is Lankershim Boulevard. Here you’ll find antiquated stores stocking typewriter ribbons and vintage clothes emporiums selling gowns from American movies. You’ll also find gun shops, strip joints and storefront psychics.

North Hollywood is home to more than a dozen recording studios. The Alley on Lankershim is where Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac and Jimi Hendrix recorded albums. Barris Kustom Auto on Riverside Drive is where the late George Barris stored his television car creations including the original Batmobile, the Munster Koach Car, the Beverly Hillbillies truck and the Monkeemobile.

Like much of the San Fernando Valley, North Hollywood has hard to find gems on dark streets and hidden alleyways. The Tonga Hut on Victory Boulevard is LA’s oldest tiki bar (open since 1958). The Iliad, on the corner of Chandler & Cahuenga, is the best used bookstore in the city. Kulak’s Woodshed on Laurel Canyon is a humble music venue where artists like Katy Perry and Jason Mraz played before they were stars.

For most LA residents, North Hollywood is a place to drive through on the way to somewhere else. It’s a great shortcut to Burbank Airport or Universal Studios. New LA transplants often settle in North Hollywood due to cheaper rents. First time home buyers target the area then immediately begin saving to move somewhere else. …

Much ado about nothing: world’s most relaxed people gather in Seoul for ‘space-out’ competition

Participant with the lowest resting heart rate wins contest aimed at reminding workers to stop and take a breather.


Participants join the International Space Out Competition, an annual event to pick who is the best at doing nothing, in central Seoul.


In downtown Seoul, in front of the iconic Gyeongbokgung palace, dozens of people of all ages sit on wet yoga mats, staring into space. Some are dressed in doctors’ and dentists’ uniforms, while others wear the attire of office workers and students. Welcome to the international “space-out competition”.

The rules are simple: do absolutely nothing. Falling asleep, however, leads to disqualification. Organisers monitor the participants’ heart rates; the contestant with the most stable heart rate wins.

Started in 2014 by local artist Woopsyang, the space-out competition has grown in popularity over the years. Described as visual art, the performance aims to create a mini-city of people doing nothing amid those busy at work, driving home the message that doing nothing is not a waste of time. …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “Korean society is very competitive, so sometimes doing nothing is essential. I think we’ve forgotten how to do that.” ~ Kim Ki-kyung

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Here’s me commentary on the 2024 Cheese Rolling Festival. Go PERTH!

Maru was compact in the box while Miri was on the swing. And Maru high-fives on the swing!

Ed. ミリがスイングしている間、マルは箱の中でコンパクトでした。そして、スイングでマルハイファイブ！

THE LAST TAB . . .

Congrats on Buying a New Car and Good Luck Leaving Our Parking Lot!

Would it cheer you up to know that the inflatable tube men dancing in the air are cheering you on?


Embiggenable.


Congratulations! After extensive research and intense negotiations over extended warranties, you’re the owner of a new car. The sales team at Hometown Auto Group wishes you luck as you attempt to leave our parking lot.

As a courtesy, we parked your car in a narrow spot between a 2024 Maserati Levante and a Ford F-150. Be careful: Both drivers will explode if you so much as breathe on their cars.

After you get into your car, simply spend a quick forty minutes adjusting the rear view mirror, side mirrors, and seat height, and you’re good to go. The only thing standing between you and the open road is our poorly designed parking lot.

Take a deep breath and inhale the manufactured new car smell. But don’t breathe deeply or you’ll be too light headed to navigate the lot, which is full of puddles, potholes, and orange traffic cones blocking off the obvious exit routes.

Maybe crack a window open to get rid of the smell? Nope, that’s the windshield wiper. That’s the turn signal. And that’s how you pop the hood. …

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.

ONE MORE THING:

Assimilation Complete