Nothing much just chilling!

Single-operator HTML sites, stuff I want to buy, etc

The world is full of abominable horrors. However, there are also divine wonders! Such as this Airbnb in Idaho that is a potato, and the cat paw prints in the medieval floor tiles at Wormleighton St Mary’s in England, this collection of historic animal obituaries, and this 2016 Toronto Sun article about a cafe in Paris where the wifi password was “Macaulay Culkin.” When Macaulay Culkin happened to stop by, the owner came out to say “I knew you would be here someday.” 

There is a single NYC garbageman who spent decades building a collection of trash that was so beautiful that the city preserved it as a museum. Someone named Bob tirelessly maintains an online museum dedicated to vacuum cleaners, a guy called Alex curates a New England cider donut map, and a nameless hero made officemuseum.com, an HTML site about antique typewriters.

Gift guide

It is not Christmas yet, but here are some things to buy if you want a head start.

• Lego iconic yellow hand gloves ($12.99)

• Rosetta Stone shower curtain (~$40)

• William Howard Taft headphone stand ($53)

Wikipedia things I like

• Curse of the Colonel: on this day in 1985, Japanese baseball fans celebrated a win by throwing a Colonel Sanders statue in the river, prompting an 18-year-long losing streak

• I was recently in Sacramento where I happened to drive past the former home of serial killer Dorthea Puente, the little old lady who murdered nine people and buried them in her garden. I was delighted to discover that the house’s new owners have plastered the yard with campy signs like “KEEP OUT FROM UNDER THE GRASS”

• Some fun lists include the longest lived organisms (there are fish swimming around right now who lived in a world before Beethoven's ninth symphony!), list of people who disappeared (spooky), English obsolete terms (torchecul was a word for asswipe, and woggin might be an old term for penguin, but no one really knows!)

• I wrote an article called On Wikipedia, Anyone Can Be A Model about the Wikipedia editors whose real, living bodies appear in photos on the site!

• I finally met legendary Wikipedia administrator “Orange Mike” who only wears orange and has blocked 23,000 disruptive accounts! Another monochromatic Wikipedian is bluerasberry who only wears blue and writes extensively about things like HIV and hamsters (but not HIV in hamsters, which is not a thing, thank God, the world has enough pain already)

  

Complaining about the sound of trains for 600 words

I live underneath one of Brooklyn’s elevated trains, and when my dumb little ass moved into the apartment, I had naive thoughts like “this won’t be that bad” and “it’ll be so nice to be close to transit.” I was shocked to discover that hearing thunderous industrial clanging noises every eight minutes ruins your (my) sanity! I have been getting face fucked by Satan. Even with my ears plugged, I used to awake late into the night trying desperately to turn off my sense of hearing. My dreams consisted of clanging industrial disasters. Each morning, I’d wake up in panic as a 400-ton locomotive careened outside my window. My neighbors, who’d all gone numb to the eternal sonic horror, did not offer any practical advice, just flippant assurances that I’d “get used to it.” The problem got significantly worse in summer (it was too hot to leave the window closed). As I was reaching rock bottom in June, the New York Times released an article soothingly titled “Noise Pollution Could Take Years Off Your Life”, which didn’t worry me much because at least death would be relief.

To my surprise, the problem gradually went away. I could go hours without noticing the barreling steel tank even though it was still chugging past every 480 seconds! I still had to pause the TV every eight minutes, but I didn’t bolt up from sleep with fight-or-flight urgency. My brain had overcome my pesky evolutionary instincts to pay attention to quickly-approaching 100 decibel tumult. Life was beautiful again, anything was possible, I felt like Princess Diana might spring back to life, there are cathedrals everywhere for all who have eyes to see, etc.

Maybe you think you are, in the parlance of internet users, “built different,” and that you could tune out the chronic assault to the ears. Maybe you could. But for what it’s worth, loud periodic rumbling sounds have ruined many dreams, not just mine! In the fifties and sixties, people were like “we should build a supersonic jet,” which is a pretty exciting prospect for anyone who wants to get from New York to LA so fast that you land with an entire hour left in that new Scorsese movie. But there was a big problem! Even though supersonic jets seemed feasible from an engineering standpoint, they would be very loud.

Concerned executives were like, “people will go insane if they have to constantly hear sonic booms echoing from the heavens all the time!” and others were like “no it’ll be fine” and so before the US government to fork over hundreds of millions to make the supersonic jet, it decided to test it out with a six-month-long noise trial in Oklahoma City. The US Air Force subjected residents to eight sonic booms per day and sure enough, people lost their minds. A full 15,000 people complained. A hearing specialist said that by subjecting people to noise, the government workers were “executing their brethren,” that “with their thunder, the sonic boom, they were punishing all living creatures on earth." The testing was halted early. All practical hope for a supersonic jet died. (I learned this from a great book about Oklahoma City called Boom Town!)

There were elevated trains in Manhattan starting in the mid 1800s that operated until the landlords got pissed about how much the clamor had lowered property values and lobbied to put trains underground and demolish the elevated tracks (really good long article in Curbed about this, also a shorter one in Bloomberg). It’s not just me, living next to the train makes you insane!

I’m trying to spend the rest of my lease romanticizing the M train, so I’ve been reading up on its history on nycsubway.org. When the stretch near me debuted in 1889, Bushwick was so rural that the only crowds were “fields of waving corn” and tomatoes! That’s pretty much as far as I got in the research. Last month, when it was down for repairs, my best friend Hajin uploaded a 7-hour YouTube video of the train sounds with the title “Gentle sounds for sleep.” I hate that someday when I’m old and gray, it’ll make me very nostalgic!

Anyway, I hope you are having a good Monday. Let me know what is making you happy — or furious!

Annie