Babylon Bee: Dungeons And Dragons Introduces New 100-Sided Die For Determining Your Character’s Gender.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Sharks versus Jets in “West Side Story” (1961).

Charles C.W. Cooke, tongue firmly in cheek, has loads of fun joining Bree Newsome and Lebron James in sticking up for teenage knife fighting.

Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?

Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.

Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.

Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.

It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.

In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it.

RTWT

LithHub has a very interesting excerpt from Jonathan Meiburg’s new book on a striated caracara (Phalcoboenus australis), raptor from the Falkland Islands, off the southern tip of South America, that Meiburg contends is “the most intelligent bird in the world.”

Tina entered Geoff’s life by accident, when a talented young falconer named Ashley Smith offered her to him in trade for a goshawk. Goshawks are powerful hunters who excel at chasing prey through dense woods, but they’re rarely own for an audience because of their skittish, aggressive temperaments. Geoff, not without affection, calls them “psychotic,” and adds that there’s a saying among falconers that if you can train a goshawk to hunt for a season without becoming suicidal or getting a divorce, you’ve mastered the art.

This goshawk, however, played against type. It was utterly relaxed on public display, sitting blithely on its perch and fluffing its feathers even when it was surrounded by strangers. Ashley coveted it for his own collection, and Geoff, who wasn’t particularly attached to it, swapped it for Tina out of pure curiosity. He’d never come across a striated caracara in twenty years as a falconer, and had only recently heard of them; it was 1983, the year after the Falklands War, and soldiers were returning from the islands with stories of crow-like birds that peered into their foxholes and perched on the rotors of their helicopters.

Geoff also felt comfortable with the trade because he knew Tina’s life story. She was a little more than a year old, the offspring of a pair of captive striated caracaras who’d raised and edged Tina with minimal help from people. Geoff assumed that Tina would be an interesting but not maddening challenge—but he’ll tell you, with a touch of surprise in his voice, that it was Tina who trained him. In their first years together, he mostly left her alone, though he indulged her preference for running and walking in demonstrations, which earned chuckles from the audience instead of the gasps of wonder that greeted eagles and owls. After a job took him away for several years, Geoff expected he’d need to slowly rehabituate Tina to his presence, as he did with any captive bird he left for longer than a few months. Instead, Tina gave him the first of many surprises: she leaped onto his shoulder, calling and calling, as if to say, It’s you! It’s you! “She was all over me,” Geoff says. “Like a dog.”

Shortly after that, Tina let Geoff know she wanted more from their relationship. He dropped his keys one morning while cleaning her aviary, and before he could retrieve them she jumped down from her perch, grabbed the keys in her beak, and ran to the other side of the enclosure, where she turned and looked Geoff squarely in the eye. Geoff was stunned: no bird in his care had ever done anything like this. He took a step toward her, and she leaned forward, poised to run. This is a game, he thought. She wants to play. For the next few minutes, Tina ran around the perimeter of the aviary with the keys in her beak, deftly evading his grasp, until she finally traded them for food. From then on, this was how each morning began.

As they played together, Tina began to defy nearly all of falconry’s conventions. She didn’t ignore Geoff or try to mate with him: she simply wanted to interact with him, whether she was hungry or not. She loved inedible objects and would study, carry, and manipulate anything Geoff brought her, from plush toys to rubber balls and lengths of rope, and she called for him if he didn’t turn up on schedule. On quiet afternoons she sometimes fell asleep on his shoulder.

Months passed, and their daily games evolved: keep-away became fetch, then the shell game, then tasks that seemed to require abstract thought. Geoff built a device out of PVC pipes to test Tina’s ability to distinguish objects by color and to associate colors with spoken words— and she could. He also bought a set of rubber balls and blocks to see if she could distinguish between objects by shape—and she did. Then he modified Tina’s public performances to reflect her new skills, combining his passions for tinkering and falconry into something approaching behavioral science. Tina went from comic relief to the star of the show, and Geoff began calling her the most intelligent bird in the world.

RTWT

———————-

This interview with Meiburg has a video showing two striated caracaras exhibiting very impressive curiosity and enterprise.

Video 3 (Two young Striated Caracaras investigating unfamiliar objects) from Jonathan Meiburg on Vimeo.

Oxford University researchers have discovered the densest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years.

It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.

— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) April 21, 2021

Killed in combat 21 April 1918.

King Harv steps on Mars.

King Harv’s offers “coffee from absolutely everywhere,” including one surprising venue.

There are many things mankind is not meant to know about. One of these is the fact that Mars has been settled since 2002, specifically for the purposes of coffee cultivation. King Harv’s Imperial Coffees Mars to be precise.

It started long, long ago. I am the son of King Harv, well known coffee tycoon and millionaire philanthropist. I was just a recent Chemistry graduate and Software engineer who had been tinkering for years on the topic of space travel. Specifically with the use of the metal wires steaming out of the Army’s Hellfire missiles being used not for destruction, but as a dynamic bridge to the planets. Now each missile has a wire capacity of about 2.5 miles. The closest Mars would appear would be 34.8 million miles. Hence with only 13.92 million Hellfire missiles, with the wires spliced together, they could make it to Mars. Now, removing the explosive shaped charge of each missile, and extending the wire length accordingly, I figured we could get by with only 9 million Hellfire’s. The next step was where to acquire or manufacture them. Or something similar to them.

This turned out to be much easier than expected. By substituting strong fishing line for the wires, and utilizing solar wind for additional acceleration, we were able to construct a single shot fire and forget missile for under $87.00. (We utilized used fishing line). The budget did not allow for any testing, but we were confident. We just aimed that sucker at Mars one night and “boom”, you could see the giant spool of line flying out faster than you can eat a bag of habanero Doritos. Yeah, that fast. So anyway, it turned out we “forgot” that little bit about celestial mechanics and planetary movement, so we were bound to miss mars by a by millions of miles… had we not fortunately got tagged by one of them there pieces of space junk from the top secret Mercury Blue missions of the 1960s. Anyway, it hit us just right and targeted our little rocket straight to Mars, where it landed with a dignified womf and implanted its space anchor. And the American flag.

So there we were, with a strong fishing line connecting Mars to Earth, and just King Harv’s Imperial Coffees knowing about it. (it was a transparent fishing line.) Well, our plan was for us to get some decent Harbor Freight line grippers and foot by foot pull up the used Russian submarine we had purchased and converted to a space habitat. Seemed like a straight forward idea at first, but you always know something’ll come up, and it did. Our Russian friends were all for us using their old submarine, and at a killer price, but at the last minute demanded a “nuclear royalty” due to us using one of their famously reliable nuclear power plants in the sub/ ship. Now by this time I was about broke, but realized that Russians like a few things in the world besides Rubles and Vodka. A dang good cup of coffee. So we settled on giving them a perpetual 5% of our Martian coffee harvest. Fair enough. It is the red planet after all.

RTWT

HT: Sarah Hoyt (and William Jacobson) via Karen L. Myers.

This is my idea of a great photo.

British Museum photo.

Atlas Obscura:

If cookies go a few weeks without getting eaten, they turn weirdly soft or dissolve into fine dust. If cookies go 1,300 years without getting eaten, they get carefully preserved in a case at the British Museum.

In the winter of 1915, the British-Hungarian archeologist Marc Aurel Stein opened a tomb in Xinjiang. Known as the Astana cemetery, these gravesites were where residents of the nearby oasis city of Gaochang buried their dead, roughly between the 3rd and 9th centuries. As the membrane between Central Asia and China, and the path to the Middle East, Xinjiang has been fought over for centuries (a fight that continues today, as China uses an iron fist to control it as an autonomous province). Gaochang, meanwhile, lies in ruins. But the Astana cemetery, with more than a thousand tombs preserved in the dry heat of the Turpan Basin, tells the story of the once-prosperous ancient city.

The Astana cemetery shows how Gaochang was once a prominent stop on the Silk Road, especially for Sogdians, a people from Eastern Iran who often traveled across Eurasia as merchants. Opening the tombs, Stein found heaps of evidence pointing to Gaochang’s role as a place of “trade exchange between West Asia and China.” Though the vast majority of the dead at Astana were Han Chinese, Stein saw corpses with Byzantine coins in their mouths and Persian textiles included as grave goods.

But inside one tomb, Stein found neither of these things. Grave robbers had emptied it of everything, “except [for] a large number of remarkably preserved fancy pastry scattered over the platform meant to accommodate the coffin with the dead,” he recalled later. Stein was taken aback by the beauty of the cookies and their wide variety of shapes—flat wafers with elaborate designs, delicate, lace-like cookies, and “flower-shaped tartlets … with neatly made petal borders, some retaining traces of jam or some similar substance placed in the [center].” In the arid earth of the cemetery, the sweets managed to survive to modern day.

Today, the pastries are owned by the British Museum, as part of what Stein described as his “haul” of artifacts sent back to the United Kingdom. During his expeditions, Stein also helped himself to priceless cultural objects, such as the first-known printed book. Stein’s plundering of the Diamond Sutra caused vociferous protests in China. In 1961, the National Library of China released a statement saying that Stein’s book theft was enough to cause “people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred.” The cookies, in comparison, are regarded more as curiosities. A 1925 article in The Times of Mumbai, describing an exhibition of Aurel Stein’s finds in New Delhi, noted how “the most remarkable of all the objects are the actual pastries deposited with the dead as food objects,” with the author writing that they closely resembled “the ‘fancies’ of a modern confectioner’s shop window.”

RTWT

A Yale classmate recently sent me a link to this book coming up for auction at Swann: Lot 0021: Richard Brathwait (1588?-1673) The English Gentleman.

We both thought the frontispiece, showing the English Gentleman in Youth, during his Education, his Recreations, Vocation, Disposition, &c., His “Hope in Heaven, but His Feet on the Ground” attired in Carolingian fashion delightful.

I would certainly have purchased this curiosity if it were not horribly expensive. Alas! it went for $1700, with Buyer Premium: $2210. The book is quarto sized, and I fear a lot of people like framing and hanging that amusing and evocative frontispiece.

I looked for a free ebook, but was disappointed. There isn’t one.

HT: Tom Weil.