an aural noise
word salad: Timeless Sky, a collaboration between AstroPilot and innovative ambient bass guitar soundscaper Crows Labyrinth. The unique and organic ambience is perfect for chilling & relaxation.
one of the things I read in antisocial isolation
Found: Records of Pompeii’s Survivors
New evidence shows how citizens rebuilt their lives in the aftermath of the historic eruption.
The major eruption of Mount Vesuvius over Pompeii is often known for the lives it took, but new research details the stories of the event’s survivors. Embiggenable.
ON AUGUST 24, IN THE year 79, , shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air. As the ash and rock fell to Earth, it buried the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
According to most modern accounts, the story pretty much ends there: Both cities were wiped out, their people frozen in time.
It only picks up with the rediscovery of the cities and the excavations that started in earnest in the 1740s.
But recent research has shifted the narrative. The story of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is no longer one about annihilation; it also includes the stories of those who survived the eruption and went on to rebuild their lives. …
America is Dying the Death it Deserves
R.I.P. United States, July 4, 1776 — July 1, 2024
“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad.” — Malcolm X
In the late 1400s, a bumbling journeyman sailor named Christopher Columbus took a very wrong turn. In a delirium of rye liquor, opium, and mid-stage syphilis, Columbus set sail for India and somehow wound up docking his ship on the other side other planet.
Despite this foreign “new” world already being populated by a vibrant society of indigenous people, Columbus and his European financiers deemed the land mass their “discovery.” For the monarchs of Europe to claim the newly “discovered” land, the humanity of the indigenous had to be erased.
Their skin color, religion, and language served as pretext to exclude them from European conceptions of civilization and humanity itself. By branding the indigenous as “other,” “savages,” and therefore less than, Europe’s empires could square the theft of their land with the “Christian” values endemic (epidemic?) to the West. Colonizers could slaughter the natives en masse in the same way a builder might clear brush before constructing a farm house.
Out of this tradition, the British colonized the territory north of Columbus’s landing spot, killing, raping, and displacing its natives. To transform their new colonies into industrial and agricultural strongholds, settlers kidnapped and enslaved millions of Africans. Once again, to reconcile chattel slavery with Christianity, the Africans were presumed subhuman.
As if to continually reinforce the inherently incongruous idea of the inhumanity of beings clearly human, slave owners brutalized their slaves in the most inhumane of ways. Sometimes, it was to browbeat the last ounce of labor out of physically and mentally exhausted people. Just as often, if not more so, they did it simply because they could. The lowest white men of England — discarded prisoners and psychiatric patients, and misfits unable to fit into Britain’s polite society — whipped, burned, castrated, raped, and murdered African slaves simply to assert their superiority over something.
On July 4th, 1776 the 13 colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring their sovereignty from Great Britain:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Many of the Declaration’s writers, and hundreds of thousands of other proud champions of American freedom continued to exploit and torture slaves for the next century. Even after slavery’s end, it was another century before Black Americans were granted key measurers of equality under the law. Until the 1960s, Black Americans were systemically excluded from employment, education, and housing opportunities.
While technically not legal, crimes committed against Black Americans by their white countrymen were rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, a law enforcement complex grown out of antebellum slave patrols continued to over police Black communities. Even today, the practice generates a steady supply of Black bodies for unpaid labor in prisons — the one institution where, per the 13th Amendment, slavery is still legal. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: All too often parents will tell me they don’t want their children exposed to something that might make them feel sad.
5 First Days at Work That Went Right Off the Rails
First day goals: 1) Don’t get arrested, and 2) Don’t die
Your first day at work could go very well or very poorly. Best-case scenario: The computer has an error, and suddenly, the entire company belongs to you. Worst-case scenario: Two planes fly into the World Trade Center, and you’re the brand-new Chief of ATC Operations for the FAA. The following first days aren’t quite as bad as that last one, but they’re pretty bad.
5. A Teacher Was Immediately Arrested, Drunk and Pantsless
As soon as you read that headline, you started picturing exactly what sort of debauched classes this Oklahoma high school teacher hosted. But when Lorie Hill was found drunk at school in August 2014, classes were still a week from starting. She showed up anyway — and also decided to ditch her pants.
When you find a woman in a building drunk and without pants, there’s often the possibility that’s she’s a victim of a crime. The teachers who entered the classroom and spoke to Hill quickly concluded that she was instead the perpetrator of a crime. While there is no specific law against shedding lower garments in a school zone, police booked her on public intoxication.
Her arrest meant she’d miss the first week of class, which really sounds like a blessing. …
Maru leaves with grumbling in search of the perfect place to knead udon. And Maru melts and shrinks in the transparent container.
Ed. マルは、ウドンをこねるのに最適な場所を探して不平を言って去ります。マルは透明な容器で溶けて収縮します。
THE LAST TAB . . .
The fact he understands the rules is crazy pic.twitter.com/VBmeGWrXqB
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) July 8, 2024
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.
