running commentary

Atlas Fredonyer 2024 Oct 5
Doctor Atlas Fredonyer was a California pioneer who was the first to "discover" what is now known to be the northern limit of the Sierra Nevada mountains and has been named after him – Fredonyer Pass. But he was a much more "colorful" character than this basic historical geographic biography would imply.

Convicted and then pardoned (by Governor Leland Stanford) for raping his 15-year-old stepdaughter, he died around 48 years old from a failed surgery to remove a bottle he shoved up his ass. No, really.

While nobody is quite sure what Fredonyer was a "doctor" of, the citizens of Rooptown so loved him (briefly) they named their town Fredonyer City, before deciding a year later to retract such honor and name it Susanville after Susan Roop, daughter of founder and first governor of Nevada Territory Isaac Roop, who mistakenly believed his town to be in Nevada (and staged a minor war over this belief).

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My Auschwitz Vacation – On Holocaust Tourism 2024 Oct 4
The experience Harper's author Tanya Gold relates in this article is very different than my visit to Auschwitz in 2008. But then my experience was on a March of the Living trip sponsored by my local JCC, so perhaps that shielded me from the worst parts of Holocaust kitsch. But it doesn't surprise me to learn that this is happening. It's not dissimilar from the many other plights of people turned into tourism, such as Native Americans.

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Too Old To Die Young 2024 Sep 27
In 2019, Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker created a beautiful, beautifully long and drawn out, enigmatic, brutal, horrific 13-hour neo-noir masterpiece. I just found out it existed two weeks ago, and finished watching it two days ago. Now I'm struggling to understand what I saw, to tie together the threads that the narrative does not make explicit. Linked is my rambling thought process; it is not a review; there are massive spoilers.

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Refried beans are only fried once 2024 Sep 27
This is doubtless common knowledge to any of the hundreds of millions of people who make refried beans, so I'm a little embarrassed I'm only learning this now, but "refried" beans are only fried once. The "refried" In the name comes from a mistranslation of the Spanish word "refrito." "Refrito" uses the prefix "re-" which unlike English, in Spanish doesn't mean "twice" but "very" – meaning the actual translation is "well fried beans."

Still tasty as all get-out, though.

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Nuclear waste no-go zone 2024 Sep 25
Lest you think Chernobyl-ish zones of nuclear radiation-emitting contamination are only the trappings of the Soviet Union, be aware that there's a few thousand acres just northeast of Denver, Colorado that are similarly forbidden territory. The site of a factory under control of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, they so mishandled the facility that it was eventually raided and then shut down by fellow government agency FBI. Of course this came only after numerous, numerous whistleblowers and public protests lasting decades. No accident, though, Rocky Flats contamination was criminally negligent or just straight-up deliberate, all done in the service of the Cold War and forever expanding America's arsenal of nuclear weapons. So, a real lose-lose situation.

Now it's a "nature reserve." Though, seeing as it's not safe for humans to visit, what the hell else would it be?

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Uber Greyball Conspiracy 2024 Sep 25
That time that Uber's app would use your behaviors and habits and location data and whatever else they can get their hands on to determine whether or not you were a government regulator and, if so, show you only fake cars with no available rides, therefore preventing you from investigating the company. Oh wait, that's still happening now. And yes, Uber actually openly admits to doing this conspiracy bullshit.

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eBay stalking scandal 2024 Sep 25
That time in 2019 that eBay staff literally gangstalked and gaslit a couple of people critical of their policies. This really happened. eBay staff were really arrested for this unbelievable shit, including a senior director.

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What do bureaucrats actually do? 2024 Sep 23
Linked is a long and interactive Washington Post article written by Michael Lewis (yes, that Michael Lewis) exploring the often-overlooked work of the massive United States federal bureaucracy. He digs deep into one particular bureaucrat, Chris Mark in the Department of Labor, who this year was up for a recognition award for work he'd done preventing fatalities in underground mining. What did Chris Mark actually do to earn this ignored award? Who is he? How does he feel about his work? What other secret superheroes lurk deep in the catacombs of bureaucracy?

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What Treason Looks Like 2024 Sep 23
Los Angeles Times photographer Kent Nishimura was covering the Jan 6 protests on the ground around the Capitol building when the protests turned to riot and the rioters became insurrectionists attempting to overthrow our government. In the link is nearly 30 minutes of barely-edited GoPro footage from his helmet where you can see Nishimura working and watch the events as they unfold.

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The worst place in California? 2024 Sep 20
Is the tiny city of Trona, California the worst place in the state? Well, according to the description on Tobias Zielony's photography book about the place, it is "possibly the worst place in America, if not the world." Enter the link, a 2019 "Anomalous Phenomena Investigation" free Wordpress site article by Cindy Nunn talking about a possibly haunted home in the town. The haunting isn't terribly interesting on the surface – it's all circumspect speculation and 'bad energy' – but keep reading until you get to the article's post-script, because this is one of those situations where the post-script overwhelms the original text.

Apparently, after posting her Trona ghost-hunting piece, Nunn received a wealth of hate for her article's description of the town's destitution (although the blog's comments do not reflect this, maybe she deleted them?), and here in the post-script she responds by citing many, many source texts which don't pull punches in their disgust with Trona, and then she's wholesome enough to ask the haters for an apology. But these quotes she finds are amazingly bleak, describing a town ignored by law enforcement, with meth usage in abundance accompanied as it always is by petty theft and assault and burned buildings. And the cherry on top is that "dominating the landscape [is] the Mosaic Company chemical plant, which spew[s] noxious white smoke into the air. There [is] a sulfur-like aroma." Ahh, paradise.

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