France's 'Benalla Affair' - the scandal Macron can't shake. Noting this because I have a coworker who has an inexplicably interest with how bad Macron fucked up & how the yellow vest protests are proceeding. What's funny is that last weekend, it turned out he'd never heard of the Benella video.
It's also interesting to me because of the Russian oligarch angle- not in the exhausting Putin! sense, but in the worldwide corruption that is capitalism. Seeing Iskander Makhmudov paying Macron's allies in what seems a a mining deal is fun in contrast with all of Macron's austerity policies. Throw in a petty thug in their service beating protesters to get his jollies fleshes out that picture better.
Over an exhausting 10 years, Schulz Paulson created a "megalith evolution" using radiocarbon dating of more than 2,000 historic sites across Europe. "We have thus been able to demonstrate that the earliest megaliths originated in northwest France and spread along the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in three successive principal phases," she wrote in the study.
Huh. How would the stone circles of Western Sahara fit into this?
Blackwater Mercenary Prince Has a New $1 Trillion Chinese Boss. One of those things that's unfashionable to mention on Twitter is how China fits into the Trump puzzle. Russiagate never worked for me because it's too simple. There was no one power responsible for what happened. Erik Prince is how China ties into it.
Neanderthals and Denisovans Lived (and Mated) in This Siberian Cave. Overview of a few recent studies, creating a timeline of the habitation of the Denisova Cave. Artifacts dating 50,000 to 35,000 years ago hint at habitation by modern humans. There's no evidence yet of cohabitation.
The canal, dug in 600 A.D., once ran south from Oyster Bay to the northern shore of Little Lagoon in Gulf Shores. It would have served as a sort of prehistoric super highway, facilitating travel by dugout canoe from Mobile Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.
Firing up one of the backup blogs out of spite seems healthy. A blog i still read on the rare occasion I'm not glued to Twitter mentioned that the Vulture wrote a piece on the ending of the Millions, a book blog that never covered much I cared about. It wasn't indie.
I finally read this week's Warren Ellis newsletter too. He riffs on something someone else coined with Elder Blogging. It sounds bullshit to me. It's only a framing of what happened before by how those who once immersed themselves in that medium now see it. It's blogging.
My first website was in 1994 & it was half-assed reviews of albums I loved & hated and promoting local bands. It went from the university site to Geocities years later. It took years beyond that to admit what I was doing was blogging & do it properly, with internal links & such. The database of that site is still on some flashdrives haunting me.
I've been toying with doing zines again, but when I reached out to contribute something to one of the Street Fight zines, following through with even a secondary contact was too much to muster. One of my friends at work does zines down in New Orleans these days, with positive response. There are even release parties. Writing another Fugue would be fun,but would it be fun to worrying if anyone would read it? Probably not. Sending missives into the void is more my style. Blogging.
Twitter is okay for gathering news, but my once-eclectic timeline is muddied with extremely political material. That's not a bad thing, but my focus on the world has narrowed immensely & my memory of recent events is regularly lost to the new big story. Making connections without the help of others is tricky. I ache more physically & i've broken my brain with Twitter's ephemeral perpetual outrage & mockery, but blogging always gave more satisfaction.
I'm one of the few weirdos who still believes that Hillary Clinton should have been charged for her use of a private email server to evade her records being subject to FOIA. (Karl Rove should have been charged too. Also, the whle Bush administration should have been charged for war crimes & the banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis should have been dismantled & their executives punished.) However, she should have been charged early and removed from the presidential race. That didn't happen.
When the FBI chose not to recommend charging her (too late in the race. Hillary should have been cleared earlier,) it should have been dropped and never discussed again. It was obvious that Trump was an existential threat to the country. His prima donna bullshit on the eve of the election is unforgivable. Everything Comey did demonstrates his only concerned with appearances, not substance. His support of torture and discriminatory immigration shows that Comey is in no way moral.
Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall. I avoid Russia stories because I don't want to fall prey to the "Putin is behind everything!" disease. However, Maxim Borodin was assassinated. He's the journalist who recently wrote about the Russian mercenaries in Syria, the Wagner Group.
Huckster. Elon Musk is worthless. A few months ago, he was down in Chile fooling around with the lithium market down there. Guess who's actually cornering that lithium market? Musk is a dilettante and a distraction to how the future is unfolding.
"For example, one officer told a supervisor that as a single mother, she needed a couple of days to arrange for child care before being assigned to a new post. She was charged with “failing to comply with an order” and was suspended for 122 days and forced to give up more than a month of pay.
Cleaned up Feedly a lot, but might be switching to Inoreader for RSS reading.
listened to Chapo Trap House talk about Ready Player One. It's surprising for them to be as generous to it as they are. I probably won't see the movie, as I read the book years ago, enjoyed it for the trash it was, and want it buried & forgotten. They mention a scene in which people are dancing to New Order "Blue Monday" only to have someone go "old school" to dancing to Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive." Those two songs were released were released six years apart, 1977 & 1983.
This Cat Power confused the hell out of me. I know I never saw it before and became convinced it was recreation. Her illness in 2012 when Sun was released was also news I missed until now. Damn. I've been deep in my peculiar ruts for quite some time, although I made a good stab at blogging in 2016-17.
Waking up to listen to early Mekons & the Gang of Four. I never connected to the Mekons when i was exploring early punk, an arbitrary miss on my part. Superior Viaduct is reissuing their first singles, which challenged me to re-explore what I was missing. Youtube keeps slipping Gang of Four into autoplay & they're too good to swap tabs to force it back to the Mekons.
Mueller has evidence that Trump supporter's meeting with Putin ally may not have been a chance encounter. The Mueller investigations leave me cold except when it veers into what Erik Prince being involved. He met with George Nader in New York prior to Prince's trip to the Seychelles, meeting with Kirill Dmitriev there. Once again, it's all about Putin & Russia, but no mention of China. Dmitriev has interests in China, as does Erik Prince. It shouldn't be about a "stolen" election, but a worldwide network of billionaire oligarchs operating outside any normal understanding of nations.
Simon Pegg Said J.J. Abrams Had A Different Plan for Rey’s Parents in Star Wars. Abrams would be a fool to mess that up. Rey being outside of any dyanastic line in Star Wars is one of the best things to come out of the new movies. It's more important that having a female protagonist unto itself. A woman who is no one.
Revisiting the Raincoats now. I heard the Raincoats many times back in the '90s, liked them well enough, but no matter how many times i come back to them, I feel that I underestimated them previously.
Massive Ancient Drawings Found in Peruvian Desert. "...archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D." 50 new glyphs, many of which depict human figures.
Still writing posts for my future self, who rarely recalls what his previous self wrote or why.
For the past few years, I narrowed most of my internet activity to how it centered Twitter. I swapped it for an RSS feed because it was easier to use with a baby to care for, then a young child. Twitter remains far easier to steal glances at while i'm at work. Twitter had already tweaked its algorithms so badly that its usefulness for catching breaking news on subjects other than Trump or mass shootings is diminished. I've been keeping three notebooks next to computer to take notes on different subjects for a few months, but it feels less than efficient.
Scrubbing Feedly of dead & boring RSS feeds. Several old bloggers have called for the return to blogging. I waste most of that effort on trying to get the old blog archives back up so I can search my old posts for opportunities for self-loathing. It's wasted effort obviously. I need to keep better track of my consumption of music and keep tabs on the anthropology & archaeology stories right now. Obvious, mainstream records & stories have been slipping through the cracks for years.
Still undecided on the new King Tuff material. He was stuck, lost his muse, & apparently got mired in depression, so it's cool to see him writing & recording again. It all owes to '70s material that I never much connected to. The same problem arose for me with Foxygen, although Hang is a step back towards my comfort zone.
There's also a new Guided by Voices record & they're coming to One-Eyed Jack's too. Probably skipping that. It feels too safe. Listenable, but I crave novelty. ("See My Field" is more interesting song anyway.)
It's the Yo La Tengo record, There's a Riot Going On that's more useful. It's harder to perceive the loss of youthful energy when the band has always been subdued.
Started the morning listening to the Cut Worms. They're opening for King Tuff at One-Eyed Jacks on May 11th, but I'm already recoiling at the thought of leaving the house.
Dino Buzzati's Catastrophe showed up in the mail the other day. Witkacy's Narcotics has yet to ship, despite it being ordered February 2nd. Odd. No plans to start Catastrophe. I'm a lazy shit who'd rather read just comic books & history for awhile longer.
Realized yesterday that I never finished Pierre Senges' The Major Refutation when i saw a tweet in which a translator has been unsuccessfully submitting another book of his. Damn it.
Almost skipped this Vice piece surveying Drag City albums because the label now streams on Spotify, because I don't use Spotify. I only had a revelation on how much i underappreciated Flying Saucer Attack at the time this past weekend. Still mad at myself for not buying Hey Drag City on vinyl from either Parasol mail order or from Tower Records back in the day. Deep into Edith Frost's Telescopic now- a neglected classic.
(It's odd to see Frost compared to Alex G. I'd never heard of Alex G until relatively recently. One of my coworkers at the bookstore has been unsuccessfully attempting to turn me onto him for months. He plans to go on a pilgrimage to see him in Vermont & New York in May.)
Someone spotted that Rick & Morty lifts from Venture Bros. TBH, i missed that bit, but knew that Ventures Bros was owed. The piece that more deeply explores the differences between the shows, why one is a relatively obscure cult hit, while the other a pop culture phenomenon has yet to be written. That Venture Bros never deviates from self-loathing failure & accepting it while Rick & Morty focuses on celebrating narcissistic misanthropy is the key.
Silver Jews American Water now. I've tried this album so many damned times.
Still don't have the real site back up. Floating paycheck to paycheck. Other shit keeps taking priority. It's completely broken my habit of tracking cool stories, while I've been wallowing in my worst instincts on Twitter.
Throwing some links here until the blog goes back up. I let the blog die out a couple of weeks ago out mostly out of brokeness, partly out of depression. I've since deactivated Facebook as well. Only Twitter is running for the moment, but I've wrecked my timeline's algorithm thoroughly with liking too many anti-capitalist tweets. It's nearly impossible to spot anything else of interest outside that topic now. However, links to fun stories still keep accumulating. The absence of Orbis Quintus is eating at me. That searchable database has been far too useful. It's almost certain it'll go back up next payday.
In saliva, clues to a 'ghost' species of ancient human. Archaic humans in sub-Saharan Africa. Mucin protein called MUC7. The split would have happened 1.5 to 2 million years ago and the introgression as recently 150,000 thousand years ago.
Dog domestication happened just once. Split would have happened after domesitcation. Domestication could have occurred early, 20,000 to 40,000 years.
Archaeology shows there's more to millet than birdseed. The best bit is how Chinese farmers gave insight on how domestication of crops happened, with more thought to adapting to changing environmental conditions than to producing the greatest yields.
