Too Much Pig Trotter
China: Man banned from all-you-can-eat BBQ for eating too much
Mr Kang was banned after seafood and pig trotter binges (file photo) IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
A Chinese food live-streamer says he has been blacklisted from a grill buffet restaurant for eating too much.
The man, known only as Mr Kang, told Hunan TV that he was banned from the Handadi Seafood BBQ Buffet in Changsha city after a series of binges.
He ate 1.5kg of pork trotters during his first visit and 3.5kg to 4kg of prawns on another visit, he said.
Mr Kang said the restaurant is “discriminatory” against people who can eat a lot.
Mo’ Space Junk
Space Junk Spreads, Creating Risk of No-Go Zones for Satellites
by Todd Shields
(Bloomberg) — The Russian missile test that shattered a dead satellite this week highlights a growing threat of space debris just as companies such as SpaceX and Boeing Co. make plans to launch as many as 65,000 commercial spacecraft into orbit in coming years.
The anti-satellite weapon smashed a Russian orbiter into at least 1,500 pieces, forming a belt of debris hurtling around the Earth at speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour. It forced ground control to awaken the sleeping crew of the International Space Station and ask them to close hatches and scramble into docked spacecraft for safety.
It also added to the amount of junk speeding through space thanks to failed satellites, discarded rocket boosters and weapons tests. This just as technology entrepreneurs and defense companies have announced plans to deploy constellations of satellites, adding to about 4,550 from all countries currently in orbit.
Longest Lunar Eclipse in 580yrs Tonight
How you can see the nearly total lunar eclipse Friday morning
West Coast night owls and East Coast early risers will have the best view of the upcoming lunar eclipse this Friday.
Overnight, the moon will pass into the shadow of Earth cast by the sun, illuminating the gray orb with a red hue. It will be the second and final eclipse of the year.
NASA predicts the eclipse will last over 3 hours and 28 minutes. That would make it the longest partial lunar eclipse in 580 years, according to the Holcomb Observatory at Butler University.
Here’s how to see the eclipse and what you might glimpse:
How to see the eclipse
The lunar eclipse will be visible in North America, as well as parts of South America, Polynesia, eastern Australia and northeastern Asia, according to NASA.
For U.S. viewers the peak of the eclipse — when the moon is the most covered by Earth’s shadow — will be at 4:03 a.m. ET.
Earth Cosmic Park
Jeff Bezos: “The Solar System Can Support A Trillion People,” Earth Will Be Preserved Like “Yellowstone National Park”
Posted By Tim Hains
“Amazon” and “Blue Origin” founder Jeff Bezos spoke about the future of human civilization during a talk this week at the Ignatius Forum in Washington, DC. Bezos predicted that one day the majority of humans will be born off-world and the Earth may one day be treated like “Yellowstone National Park.”
“Everyone who has been to space experiences something we call the Overview Effect,” he said from personal experience. “I was expecting that, and I wanted to feel that, and I was ready for it, and what I can tell you is the magnitude of that experience was so much bigger than I could have ever anticipated. And it really is such a change in perspective that shows you, in a very powerful and emotional way, just how fragile this Earth is.”
Tree Sends Poachers To The Pokey
Trees fight back: First-ever use of tree DNA in prosecution sends poacher to prison
by Adela Suliman, Washington Post
The trees are fighting back.
They’re under threat from the effects of climate change and raging forest fires – and this week they have ensured the person behind an illegal logging operation will be imprisoned for 20 months.
A case in Washington State represents the first use of DNA evidence from trees during a prosecution in a federal criminal trial.
Justin Andrew Wilke, 39, and a crew of associates were found to have conducted an illegal logging operation in the Elk Lake area of the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, between April and August 2018. The group removed highly-prized Maple trees – used to produce musical instruments such as violins and guitars – and forged permits to sell the wood, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office Western District of Washington. Wilke was sentenced on Monday.
Bitcoin Birth Bomb
Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Could Be Unmasked at Florida Trial
Lawsuit over a $64 billion cache looks beyond the pseudonym to solve the mystery of who created the cryptocurrency
By Paul Vigna
A seemingly run-of-the-mill trial is playing out in Florida: The family of a deceased man is suing his former business partner over control of their partnership’s assets.
In this case, the assets in question are a cache of about one million bitcoins, equivalent to around $64 billion today, belonging to bitcoin’s creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The family of the dead man says he and his business partner together were Nakamoto, and thus the family is entitled to half of the fortune.
Who Satoshi Nakamoto is has been one of the financial world’s enduring mysteries. Does the name refer to one person? Or several? And why has he or she or they not touched a penny of that fortune?
The answers to those questions are at the center of the Florida dispute and of bitcoin itself. Bitcoin has become a trillion-dollar market, with tens of millions of investors. It has challenged governments trying to regulate it and has been endorsed by some. The technology behind it is seen by some as a way to rewire the global financial system. Yet, who created it and why has remained a mystery.
Walken Graffitis Banksy
Yes, Christopher Walken Personally Destroyed a Genuine Street Artwork by Banksy in the Course of Filming a BBC TV Show
The production company behind the show confirmed that the work is an original Banksy, and that Walken “destroy[ed] it.”
Although Banksy has his fair share of haters, it’s beginning to feel as if no one likes seeing the artist’s work destroyed as much as Banksy himself.
This time, instead of an artfully concealed shredder, Banksy’s weapon of choice was acting legend and beloved weirdo Christopher Walken. Walken took a paint roller to one of the anonymous street artist’s signature stenciled rats in the final episode of the BBC limited series “The Outlaws,” which aired in the U.K. Wednesday night.
The comedic crime-thriller follows a motley crew of lawbreakers sentenced to do community service in Banksy’s hometown of Bristol, where things get newly complicated after they stumble onto an illicit sack of cash wanted by even more unsavory characters. As Walken and his cohorts continue paying their debt to society in the finale by painting over graffitied walls, his character, Frank, a small-time career criminal, encounters the rat image accompanied by two cans of spray paint and Banksy’s signature.
“Diane, look at this rat I found,” he says to his probation officer. Without lifting her eyes from her novel, she instructs Walken’s character to bag and bin any vermin under 10 kilos.
Earthgrazer
Rare ‘Earthgrazer’ Meteor Flew 186 Miles Over 3 States
These spectacular fireballs hit Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle and sometimes even ‘bounce’ back into space.
Skywatchers in Georgia and Alabama were treated to a glorious light show this Tuesday when a rare earthgrazing meteor zoomed across the night sky.
The bright fireball became visible at 6:39 p.m. ET on November 9, and it was so bright that some skywatchers were still able to see it through partially overcast skies, as NASA Meteor Watch explained on its Facebook page. The object first appeared above Taylorsville, Georgia, moving northwest at 38,500 miles per hour (61,960 kilometers per hour) and at an altitude of 55 miles (89 km) above Earth.
The meteor hunters were able to calculate the object’s trajectory and orbit thanks to three NASA meteor cameras in the region, but some extra number crunching was required due to the surprising length of its journey through Earth’s atmosphere.
Something Useful Emerges From TikTok
Missing Girl Is Rescued After Using Hand Signal From TikTok
The girl flashed the hand signal from a car on a Kentucky interstate, the authorities said. It was created as a way for people to indicate that they are at risk of abuse and need help.
By Daniel Victor and Eduardo Medina
A girl reported missing from Asheville, N.C., and in distress in the passenger seat of a car traveling through Kentucky appeared to be waving through the window to passing cars on Thursday.
But one person in a nearby car recognized the signal from TikTok, and knew it was no ordinary wave.
The girl, 16, was using a new distress signal, tucking her thumb into her palm before closing her fingers over it, according to the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office. The signal, created by the Canadian Women’s Foundation for people to indicate that they are at risk of abuse and need help, has spread largely through TikTok in the past year.
Dean Stockwell Gone
Dean Stockwell Dies: ‘Quantum Leap’ Star, Oscar & Emmy Nominee Was 85
Former Quantum Leap star Dean Stockwell, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated actor whose stage, film and TV career spanned more than 70 years and 200 credits, has died. He was 85. The actor died peacefully in the early morning of November 7 at home of natural causes, a rep for the family confirmed to Deadline.
Stockwell was born on March 5, 1936, in North Hollywood. By the time he was 7, he was on Broadway, launching a career as a child actor. He appeared in Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly; Kim with Errol Flynn; Gentleman’s Agreement, which landed him a Golden Globe Award; and, most notably, in the controversial 1948 movie The Boy with the Green Hair.
“Big Bucks John”
The controversial sale of ‘Big John,’ the world’s largest Triceratops
The fossil’s $7.7-million sale has some experts worried that ancient bones’ rising prices will put more scientifically valuable fossils out of reach.
BY MICHAEL GRESHKO
Walter Stein was exploring a ranch in Perkins County, South Dakota, in 2014 when he stumbled across a root-covered set of bones that had tumbled out of an eroding hillside. Stein realized he was looking at the horns of a Triceratops, and despite the horns’ weathered condition, he could tell that they belonged to a big one.
The founder of a South Dakotan firm called PaleoAdventures, which digs up fossils for commercial sale, Stein nicknamed the fossil “Big John” after the owner of the ranch where he found it. For six years, he held on to the Triceratops in hopes that a U.S. museum would purchase it—but none came forward. Then, in 2020, he sold the fossil to an Italian firm that prepared it for auction. With much fanfare and a jaw-dropping sale price of $7.7 million (6.65 million euros) to an anonymous buyer last month, Big John became a big deal—and added fuel to an ongoing, thorny debate among scientists, auctioneers, commercial paleontologists, and private landowners.
Big John is just the latest high-profile fossil to sell for millions of dollars. A little more than a year ago, a scientifically important T. rex skeleton called Stan sold to an anonymous buyer in a court-mandated auction for $31.8 million—the most ever paid for a fossil. Some scientists are worried that the growing prices for ancient bones could drive future fossils into private collections, preventing researchers from studying the irreplaceable remains. (Venture inside the homes—and minds—of private fossil collectors in National Geographic magazine.)
Burning Big Book
“TOO LATE TO STAND UP AGAINST AMAZON”: BOOK-INDUSTRY INSIDERS BACK THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S BID TO STOP A PUBLISHING MEGA-MERGER
The Department of Justice’s attempt to halt Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster finds support within an industry already burned by bad trends. “Obviously every agent is thrilled that the wheels might be grinding to a halt on this,” one insider says.
BY JOE POMPEO
The news this week that the Biden administration is headed to court to stop Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon & Schuster added a new ripple of drama to the already feverish climate of media M&A. Biden’s Department of Justice, which is taking a more aggressive approach to corporate consolidation, says that the proposed $2.18 billion merger would give Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher, “unprecedented control” over the book-publishing industry, and that it would result in “lower advances for authors and ultimately fewer books and less variety for consumers.” PRH and S&S argue that the merger would not reduce “the number of books acquired” or the “amounts paid for those acquisitions,” and that the two publishing houses, both members of the so-called “Big Five,” would still be permitted to bid against each other in auctions “up to an advance level well in excess of $1 million.” PRH has its boxing gloves on: The company has retained Daniel Petrocelli, the same man who litigated AT&T and Time Warner’s successful battle with the Trump administration in 2018. (Pass the popcorn.)
Fine Boom
Art Is Among the Hottest Markets on Earth
Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips get ready to sell off at least $1.6 billion worth of art, including works that could sell for 15 times their asking prices
By Kelly Crow | Photographs by Bess Adler
Collectors know exactly what they want from art: more. A lot more.
Starting Tuesday, the world’s chief auction houses—Sotheby’s, Christie’s and boutique house Phillips—will seek to sell at least $1.6 billion worth of art during a two-week series of sales, setting an expectation they haven’t met in the past three years.
The houses estimate at least 15 pieces will sell for over $20 million, including examples by Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh. Recent discoveries such as Reggie Burrows Hodges are also poised to fly to records. How to tell? Last month in London, Mr. Hodges’s auction debut, “For the Greater Good,” sold for $606,685—nearly 15 times its estimate.
“People don’t care if they have to pay $1 million for a piece that’s priced to sell for $60,000,” said Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s 20/21 art departments. “They’re making up their own rules.”
747
How the Boeing 747 Changed the Way Airplanes Are Designed
On the anniversary of its first test flight in February 1969, AD looks back on how the “Queen of the Skies” became the most famous plane in the world
If you ask Sir Norman Foster what his favorite building is, you’ll find that it’s not a building at all, but an airplane. And it’s not just any airplane, but the Boeing 747, the pinnacle of commercial aviation. “The fact that we call this an aeroplane rather than a building—or engineering rather than architecture—is really a historical hangover, because for me, much of what we have here is genuinely architectural both in its design and its thinking,” he once said in an episode of the BBC show Building Sights.
Known as the Queen of the Skies, the 747 revolutionized air travel when it made its commercial debut in 1970, allowing travelers to globe-trot farther than ever before, faster than ever before, and perhaps with more flair than ever before. And more than 50 years later, its design legacy lives on in contemporary aircraft—and in the hearts of aviation lovers around the world.
Between 1903 and 1939, aviation escalated from the Wright Brothers’ spruce plane to the very first jet, an astonishing engineering achievement. From there, commercial travel took off, entering the Golden Age of Flight, when passengers donned their finest suits and dresses to board a plane, then wined and dined on white tablecloths at cruising altitude. The era culminated in the largest, most impressive plane of them all: the 225-foot-long, 60-foot-tall 747, the world’s first jumbo jet.
“The main thing that really captured everybody’s attention and their imagination at the time that the airplane came out is its incredible size,” says Boeing’s senior corporate historian Michael J. Lombardi. “When you put it next to the 707, which was the biggest jetliner of its time in the 1960s, the 747 is twice the size.”
Beware Sanitizing Gel
Man burst into flames after Taser used on him, police say
Authorities say an upstate New York man is in grave condition at a hospital after police used a Taser to subdue him and he burst into flames
ByThe Associated Press
CATSKILL, N.Y. — An upstate New York man was in grave condition at a hospital after police used a Taser to subdue him and he burst into flames, authorities said Friday.
The Times Union of Albany reported that 29-year-old man walked into the Catskill village police department last weekend and got into a confrontation with officers. Chief Dave Darling confirmed to the newspaper that officers deployed a Taser to subdue the man, who had just doused himself with hand sanitizer, and the man then burst into flames.
AEW
from The Washington Post via Greenwich Time
AEW is WWE’s first real fight in decades. It may change the face of pro wrestling in the U.S.
Timothy Bella, The Washington Post
Pac (center) throws Andrade El Idolo from the ladder in the Casino Ladder Match at the AEW Dynamite show in Philadelphia. Photo for The Washington Post by Rachel Wisniewski
QUEENS, N.Y. — On a Wednesday night in New York City, wrestler Bryan Danielson has a slight grin as he kicks Kenny Omega in the head, drawing a collective “Yes!” from the more than 20,000 fans in attendance. The primal yells inside Arthur Ashe Stadium only get louder with every kick: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Soon enough, Omega rebounds and proceeds to knife-edge chop Danielson in the chest so many times that his upper body now resembles a lump of raw, unseasoned ground beef. Both men eventually take to the top rope and throw their bodies at each other, much to the delight of a crowd that knows the fight has only just begun.
If this seems like an ordinarily violent fight in the world of professional wrestling – part athletics, part entertainment – it is also part of a broader battle playing out between World Wrestling Entertainment, the company that brought America legends like “The Rock” and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and an upstart challenger, All Elite Wrestling.
It’s all about the chassis.
from medium
I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End
I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis:
Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America?
No ‘expert’ will answer this question.
I’m a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry.
Let’s start with understanding some things about ports. Outside of dedicated port trucking companies, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers. There is a reason for that.
Obviously.
People who sleep naked twice as likely to have a good night’s rest!
NEW YORK — If you’re still awake when the clock hits 2:48 a.m., then there’s no point in trying to get a good night’s sleep, a new study finds. A new survey of 2,000 Americans delved into respondents’ struggles with falling asleep.
Results show that just before 3 a.m. is the cut-off point for good sleep. Past that, respondents agree they won’t be getting any sleep. The poll also looked into Americans’ nighttime habits and revealed it’s not uncommon for respondents to have a poor night’s rest.
The survey also delved into the different ways people sleep, looking at what might contribute to them getting high-quality rest. Interestingly enough, respondents who sleep naked (vs. sleeping in pajamas) were more likely to report high-quality sleep (53% vs. 27%). Those who prefer a warm room reported better sleep than those who like sleeping in a cold room (46% vs. 23%).
THE THE Redux
The The’s Matt Johnson on The Comeback Special and Finding a Way Forward
By Tom Lanham
Sorry for the slight delay, apologizes British composer/conceptualist Matt Johnson. But by all accounts, the ephemeral 2018 reunion tour of his classic The The project was truly something to behold for all fans fortunate enough to attend. The short run of dates marked the first time in 16 years that the vocalist/guitarist had performed live with old cohorts James Eller (Bass), D.C. Collard (keyboards) and Earl Harvin (drums), augmented by new co-guitarist Barrie Cadogan, and it reframed in a more modern context dark, moody classics like “Infected,” “The Beat(en) Generation,” and the signature “This is the Day” and “I’ve Been Waiting For Tomorrow (For All My Life).” Yet it’s only now, three years later, that his recording/publishing company Cineola is releasing a Royal Albert Hall-filmed document of the affair—humorously dubbed, a la a leather-clad Elvis Presley in his own ’68 return, The Comeback Special—in separate video, album and 136-page art book forms. “It should have come out sooner, but the pandemic slowed everything down,” sighs Johnson, who just turned 60.
30 Days of Dead
Halloween Flare
Halloween solar flare headed for Earth could trigger Northern Lights this weekend – and disrupt power grid
by Harry Pettit Charlotte Edwards
THE SUN launched a massive solar flare yesterday that’s headed in Earth’s direction – the strongest storm seen in the current weather cycle.
The volley of radiation may trigger the northern lights if it collides with our atmosphere, and could cause major issues for power grids, experts suggest.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which tracks the Sun’s activity, captured an image of the event at 11:35 a.m. EST (4:35 p.m. BST) on Thursday.
It has already caused a temporary, but strong, radio blackout in parts of South America, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
The flare is the result of a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a huge expulsion of plasma from the Sun’s outer layer, called the corona.
Smart Forest Management
For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people
By JOHN FLESHER
WEITCHPEC, Calif. (AP) — Elizabeth Azzuz stood in prayer on a Northern California mountainside, arms outstretched, grasping a handmade torch of dried wormwood branches, the fuel her Native American ancestors used for generations to burn underbrush in thick forest.
“Guide our hands as we bring fire back to the land,” she intoned before crouching and igniting dead leaves and needles carpeting the ground.
Others joined her. And soon dancing flames and pungent smoke rose from the slope high above the distant Klamath River.
Over several days in early October, about 80 acres (32.4 hectares) on the Yurok reservation would be set aflame. The burning was monitored by crews wearing protective helmets and clothing — firefighting gear and water trucks ready. They were part of a program that teaches Yurok and other tribes the ancient skills of treating land with fire.
Such an act could have meant jail a century ago. But state and federal agencies that long banned “cultural burns” in the U.S. West are coming to terms with them — and even collaborating — as the wildfire crisis worsens.
Cosmic Pit Stops
The Military is Preparing for a ‘Space Superhighway,’ Complete with Pit Stops
Those hubs would do more than refuel spaceships; they are seen as key to staying ahead of China.
Like any family road trip, future missions to the moon and beyond may require a few pit stops.
U.S. Transportation Command and the U.S. Space Force see a future space superhighway system where the United States, commercial partners, and allies would be able to make repeat, regular trips to the moon or beyond by using multiple hubs where they could gas up, have maintenance done, and even throw out their trash.
Now they’re thinking about getting those orbiting pit stops up and running sooner rather than later. Because it’s not just about making the 238,855-mile lunar journey a little more comfortable. It’s about preventing China from building the hubs first.
Long before Christopher…
In tree rings and radioactive carbon, signs of the Vikings in North America
Wood at a settlement in Canada’s Newfoundland that was cut with metal tools helped researchers pinpoint when the Norse first reached the continent — well before Columbus.
By Tom Metcalfe
Vikings from Greenland — the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas — lived in a village in Canada’s Newfoundland exactly 1,000 years ago, according to research published Wednesday.
Scientists have known for many years that Vikings — a name given to the Norse by the English they raided — built a village at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the turn of the millennium. But a study published in Nature is the first to pinpoint the date of the Norse occupation.
The explorers — up to 100 people, both women and men — felled trees to build the village and to repair their ships, and the new study fixes a date they were there by showing they cut down at least three trees in the year 1021 — at least 470 years before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492.
VHS Wins Again
Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes?
Despite the rise of streaming, there is still a vast library of moving images that are categorically unavailable anywhere else. Also a big nostalgia factor.
By Hannah Selinger
The last VCR, according to Dave Rodriguez, 33, a digital repository librarian at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., was produced in 2016, by the Funai Electric in Osaka, Japan. But the VHS tape itself may be immortal. Today, a robust marketplace exists, both virtually and in real life, for this ephemera.
On Instagram, sellers tout videos for sale, like the 2003 Jerry Bruckheimer film “Kangaroo Jack,” a comedy involving a beauty salon owner — played by Jerry O’Connell — and a kangaroo. Asking price? $190. (Mr. O’Connell commented on the post from his personal account, writing, “Hold steady. Price seems fair. It is a Classic.”)
If $190 feels outrageous for a film about a kangaroo accidentally coming into money, consider the price of a limited-edition copy of the 1989 Disney film “The Little Mermaid,” which is listed on Etsy for $45,000. The cover art for this hard-to-find copy is said to contain a male anatomical part drawn into a sea castle.
There is, it turns out, much demand for these old VHS tapes, price tags notwithstanding, and despite post-2006 advancements in technology. Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.
Mort Sahl Gone
Mort Sahl Dies: Groundbreaking Contrarian Comedian Was 94
Mort Sahl, the acerbic comic whose pioneering style paved the way for such boundary-breaking comedians as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin, died Tuesday at his home in Mill Valley, CA. He was 94.
A friend confirmed his death to The New York Times.
Showbiz & Media Figures We’ve Lost In 2021 – Photo Gallery
Known for his topical social commentary, he boldly skewered politicians and others in a harsh but clean stand-up act. He hosted the first Grammy Awards in 1959, co-hosted the 1959 Academy Awards and a year later became the first comedian featured to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. He also guest-hosted The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson multiple times during the 1960s.
WPKN
On Air with the Greatest Radio Station in the World
WPKN-FM—on which you can hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing—moves to a new location in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut.
By David Owen
WPKN-FM is a free-form radio station in Bridgeport, Connecticut; it is, to be honest, the greatest radio station in the world. Its broadcast signal, at 89.5, can be picked up in parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York State, including almost all of Long Island, and it can be streamed by anyone who has an Internet connection.
The station’s programming is the work of roughly a hundred volunteer hosts, who typically spend hours researching and assembling their shows. “Some are on weekly, some are on once a month, some are on the first and third weeks of the month, some are on the second and fourth weeks, and some are on the fifth week,” Valerie Richardson, WPKN’s (volunteer) program director, said not long ago. Depending on when you tune in, you might hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet, or a dozen different covers of the same Bob Marley song, or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing, or a totally addictive cut by the group that the founder of Morphine founded before he founded Morphine. (As Richardson spoke, another host, in the adjacent studio, played “Turtles All the Way Down,” by Sturgill Simpson.) Because the shifts are staggered and the playlists are not generated by a corporate algorithm, you can be reasonably certain that, if you hear a song you don’t like, you’ll never have to hear it again. The station also has talk shows that no one would mistake for “Fox & Friends.”
WPKN began, in 1963, as an extracurricular activity for students at the University of Bridgeport. It has survived disco, a roof fire that briefly threatened to turn its immense LP library into a lake of molten vinyl, and the takeover of the university, between 1992 and 2002, by the Professors World Peace Academy, an affiliate of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The station became independent in 1989, although the university continued to give it free studio space, on the second floor of the student center. That relationship ended a couple of weeks ago, largely because the university grounds had been acquired by two other institutions.
Superdiver
The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver
With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.
BY DANIEL RILEY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAAN VERHOEVEN
1. Rhapsody in Blue
For all the complex techniques required to succeed, the objective is remarkably simple: Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying.
This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down.
The competition, Vertical Blue, is the Wimbledon of freediving, summoning the planet’s best to battle in perhaps the most amenable freediving waters in the world. As the event’s founder, William Trubridge, who’s spent a lifetime scouring the earth’s surface for conducive spots to go deep, put it to me: “You could not design a better place for freediving if you sat down with pen and paper.”
But this is more than the pinnacle competition of a sport. Yes, the divers here devote their lives to the pursuit of record depths, but they also dedicate themselves to a novel way of interacting with this world and its oceans—and of being alive, of breathing. They come from Italy and Japan and New Zealand and Peru. They live and train in Sardinia and Okinawa and Cyprus and Tulum. They compete in the glorious depths off of Egypt and Turkey and Honduras and Greece. They prepare together, rent group houses on the road, often fall into bed with one another, and occasionally marry. They are specialized professionals but don’t really make any money; their sport hasn’t yet hit the big time. But no matter: To spend time in their midst is to begin to comprehend that they are after something greater, something sublime.
Thick As A Trick
Jethro Tull: the story behind Thick As A Brick
In 1971, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson set out with tongue-in-cheek to make “the mother of all concept albums”. With Thick As A Brick, he ended up fulfilling his ambition – and then some
By Malcolm Dome
Monty Python. It might seem a little odd to mention the influential British comedy troupe as we begin a journey through the story of the groundbreaking album Thick As A Brick. But Jethro Tull mainman Ian Anderson believes there’s a common thread.
“Monty Python lampooned the British way of life,” says Anderson. “Yet did it in such a way that made us all laugh while celebrating it. To me, that’s what we as a band did on Thick As A Brick. We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it.”
It’s often been said that the seeds for 1972’s Thick As A Brick (the band’s fifth album) were sown when its predecessor, ’71’s Aqualung, was wrongly perceived as a fully-blown conceptual piece. Myth has it that Anderson was angry about this misconception.
“Not angry, no,” explains the man nearly four decades on. “I was actually mildly irritated and wryly amused. However much I insisted that Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, the media still persisted in treating it as such. They seemed to believe the whole record was a major religious story. The truth was that three or four songs were linked by questioning the nature of religion. But the rest were stand-alone tracks. So, after this whole scenario, I thought, ‘OK, we’ll not only now do a real concept album, but we’re going to make it the mother of all concept albums!’.”
Barefoot In The Past
Ancient Footprints Yield Surprising New Clues About the First Americans
Unearthed in New Mexico along what was once a lakefront, the tracks show generations living in the area thousands of years before many scientists believed
By Robert Lee Hotz
At the height of the last Ice Age, generations of children and teenagers ambled barefoot along a muddy lakefront in what is now New Mexico, crossing paths with mammoths, giant ground sloths and an extinct canine species known as dire wolves.
Now, some 23,000 years later, the young people’s fossilized footprints are yielding new insights into when humans first populated the Americas. Unearthed in White Sands National Park by a research team that began its work in 2016, the tracks are about 10,000 years older and about 1,600 miles farther south than any other human footprints known in America, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.
“It is, in my view, the first unequivocal evidence of human presence in the Americas” during the last Ice Age, Daniel Odess, chief of science and research at the U.S. National Park Service and a senior author of the report, said of the discovery. “The footprints are inarguably human.”