The Voice of a Neurotic from 2,700 Years Ago

When I read the Epic of Gilgamesh in college, I may have learned in that history course about when the text was discovered, but I don't remember that I did.

The most recent 99% Invisible tells the story of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Ninevah, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire, which was destroyed in 612 BCE. It was excavated in the 1840s, and that was when the first copy of Gilgamesh was found. The burning of the library had baked the soft clay of the library's many tablets and made them more durable and likely to survive the millennia.

The 99PI episode isn't so much about that, however. It's a funny and very human look at the day-to-day records that were also found in the library, recorded on behalf of the previous Assyrian king, who was — as they say in the episode — a neurotic.

Be sure to listen to the episode's 40 minutes, if you can, and don't just read the page content; there's more there than they transcribed.

Hegseth

I didn't watch the Hegseth hearings but I saw so many clips, I feel as though I did. As Chris Hayes said last night, if you had his resume in a pile, you wouldn't even consider him for an interview. It's ridiculous on its face, just based on the type of qualifications that go on a resume, let alone his overt disqualifications.

The fact that Republicans are bowing down to Trump on something they supposedly value so highly is one more example of how depraved they are, and Trump's need to demonstrate complete control of them.

Will any of them (most likely Lisa Murkowski, and maybe Susan Collins — who isn't up for reelection until 2030) vote against Hegseth in the end? Even if those two do, will it be possible to find a third vote to knock the vote in favor down to 49? Who is that third Republican vote?

Here are the BlueSky posts on the topic... Why wait until the end of the month:

i am watching clips from the hegseth hearings and it is a goddamn insult to this country that this chucklefuck was even nominated
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Trump is performing affirmative action for sex pests, and the media as a whole is failing to explain it in those terms.
Queerhawk @alwaysadorecats.bsky.social

Pete Hegseth, generously, is barely employable and there are sitting senators going "I mean hey, who doesn't show up to work drunk and get divorced for cheating on their wife, am I right fellas"
Ian Boudreau

When Trump orders Hegseth to deploy active duty troops to U.S. cities, he will comply.
When Trump orders him to authorize shooting protestors, Hegseth will comply.
When Trump orders Hegseth to jump, he will dutifully say “how high?”
Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social

Several Republicans I respect — some of whom have lectured me, at length, about the national security failings of the Democratic Party — are falling in line behind Pete Hegseth, who is so clearly unqualified to be the Secretary that it makes it very hard to ever take these people seriously again.
Andrew Exum @exum.bsky.social

Pete Hegseth is the dumber version of Brett Kavanaugh.
Mrs. Betty Bowers

The FBI failed to interview key witnesses - Hegseth's ex wives, his accuser, former employees and colleagues who publicly complained about him. And GOP chair of Armed Services not planning to share FBI report with Dems other than the ranking minority member in any case.
Don Moynihan

On the one hand, pushing Hegseth's nomination first may beat down Senators and lead them to capitulate on RFK and Tulsi, too. On the other hand, it will make it crystal clear that Senate Republicans are willing to put the US at grave risk to avoid Trump yelling at them.
emptywheel

Nothing shows the fundamental dishonesty of the “anti-DEI” folks like Hegseth getting hearings to run the nation’s largest bureaucracy. He’s an unqualified drunken defender of war criminals, credibly accused of sexual assault and reported for extremism by his military peers. He is merit’s inverse.
Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social

It's journalistic malpractice to focus solely on Hegseth's drinking and sexual abuse and completely ignore how he demonizes his ideological opponents as existential threats to the nation's identity and security. Such views should disqualify him from becoming SecDef.
msix8.bsky.social

 

Another Face

It was right there in my back hall:

I know this example of pareidolia is a bit less obvious than many of the other ones I've posted, but the sun shining through the bottle makes a smile to go with the eyes, which are the bottoms of some battery-powered tea lights. 

Both are objects waiting to go down to the basement for storage. Some day they'll get there.

Thom Higgins

When news came out earlier this week that Anita Bryant had died, I learned that the young man who threw the first pie at her, in 1977 in Des Moines, was from the Twin Cities. His name was Thom Higgins.

(I was still in high school at the time, and on the East Coast, so I excuse myself for not knowing about him, or remembering where it happened.)

Higgins died in 1994 at the age of 44.

This morning my state rep., Leigh Finke, posted to BlueSky that she and another person had found Higgins' gravesite, not far from her house in the Midway neighborhood of Saint Paul:

We made pilgrimage, dug it out from snow and overgrown grass. Thom was buried with his parents, who clearly loved him.

She posted several photos, including a close-up of his individual stone:

Thanks to Leigh for sharing this.

Apologizing for Discovering Racism

The Star Tribune has been teasing an upcoming special feature for a few weeks called "Ghost of a Chance." Their first podcast series, it's about the house in Southwest Minneapolis where one of their writers lives, and where a Black couple named Robinson lived a hundred years ago.

The writer, Eric Roper, started researching the Robinsons shortly after moving into the house five years ago. He dug into various archives to find out about them and what happened when "200 of their neighbors gathered in 1920 to rid that corner of the city of about nine Black families."

I was looking forward to the series, and I think I will still listen to the podcasts. However, in the intro to the series, which ran on the front age of today's Sunday paper, I was taken aback by the "I'm not woke" disclaimer Roper included:

I had not spent much time talking or thinking about race, perhaps because my social circle is largely white. I actually bristle at elements of today’s culture that reduce people’s identity to their race, gender or sexual orientation.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remained quiet as the world scrutinized Minneapolis. The message seemed to be that something was rotten here that had left Black people behind. Police brutality, racial covenants, destructive freeways — a lot had happened in the city. But it also felt like I was being asked to accept an oversimplified narrative about the past.

My curiosity about the Robinsons provided a path for me to investigate the history on my own terms and really dig into the details.

Well, duh, Eric. Perhaps! All the other things you're still ignorant of because you're a white guy also have those details — you just don't know them. Those "oversimplified narratives" have lots of details you haven't looked for.

It was embarrassing to read those paragraphs. I wondered if including them was Roper's idea, or his editors' — required to make the article palatable to suburban white readers, the Strib's core audience. They're an apologetic for even covering a "race" topic in the first place, especially in the latest age of Trump.

The paragraphs made me distrust what the podcast will contain. So if I do listen, it will be with a critical ear. Already the use of the word race, as in "the history of race in Minneapolis" irritates me, when clearly what he's talking about is the history of racism in Minneapolis.

So we'll see.

__

Here's the location of the podcasts. The first one will be posted on Monday, January 13, and then weekly on Mondays through February 10.

What I Did Today

I spent a good chunk of the day at a community brainstorming session focused on neighborhood-scale climate solutions. When we planned the event for this date, many months ago, we had no idea major parts of Los Angeles would be on fire or that Trump would have won the presidency. 

Those circumstances certainly made the need to think about resiliency and to keep our ideas local all the more necessary.

Now it's late and I've spent all my brain power sorting and assessing more than a hundred ideas, so I don't have much more to say. But it was good to work with neighbors on something real and positive.

More Escapism

Seems like another day for not-the-news.

I saw this early this week on BlueSky from Emma Mitchell, who is a U.K. Sunday Times author who specializes in "how nature and craft improve mental health":

She included this with the photo:

The first posy in a thimble I made, to lift my mood during the pandemic. The flowers are all real.

When humans look at plants (even on a screen as here) we recover from stress 60% more quickly & the relaxation response is triggered in our brains.

Zoom in if you're strung out

I don't know about you, but it made my day better for a while.

Escapism

It seems like a good day to ignore that the world is on fire, both literally and metaphorically, and post this cartoon by Adam Douglas Thomas from the New Yorker:

I personally don't have that much tea, but I have aspirations.

On Fire

There's a section of Stephen Markley's book The Deluge where one of the point-of-view characters flies to Los Angeles to try to rescue his adult kid from a wildfire that has spread through the whole metropolitan area.

I didn't mention that in my 2023 write-up of the book because there was too much to say about it, but it's one of the more indelible parts of the story. 

The images from Pacific Palisades and other places since yesterday look just the way I imagined it. 

What are we doing, rebuilding — let alone widening highways — for "mobility." What do we think the future is?

Kentucky Fried Chicken from Utah

I saw this map of the origins of our many and various fast food chains today:

There are a few I'm not familiar with, and some origin locations I didn't know, but there was only one surprise: KFC is shown as coming from Utah.

Utah? What about the Colonel?

Well... it sounds as though this may a bit about definitions. The map label says "original location," and I guess that's accurate. According to the KFC Wikipedia page, after Colonel Sanders had worked out his recipe — in Kentucky — he franchised it to some friends who had a restaurant in Salt Lake City. It spread from there.

That restaurant owner is also the one who came up with "Finger Lickin' Good" and the idea of selling a whole meal in a bucket.

The things you never knew...

Inspiration on January 6

Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift had a particularly astute essay today, called A Meditation on American Greatness. The main point is that MAGA folk think of greatness as a state of being, while what it can only be is an act of (partial) doing:

The problem with framing “greatness” as a state of being and pinning it to America in some past era is that [the] downsides either go away or become insignificant. Worse, saying America was great then, but is not great now, implicitly promotes the idea of going back. And none of those eras is a time we should want to go back to. Jim Crow America is nothing to be nostalgic about, even if that’s who we were on D-Day.

Idealizing past greatness also makes an unfair connection between our great and terrible deeds. We created unprecedented economic growth in spite of our social injustices, not because of them. Forcing gays back into the closet or women back into the kitchen won’t end inflation or bring back well-paid working class jobs.

I think anyone, no matter how critical of the United States, would acknowledge this country or its people have done some good, even great things. It's the Right's inability to allow for admission of the many wrongs that shuts down discussion.

And he's correct that it's the Right that believes in a zero-sum world:

Believing that the goodness in the world is a limited pile of pirate treasure, and then seizing more than your share of it, is a very shallow conception of greatness. Our greatness needs to be greater than that.

It's a dark day to look for the light, so I appreciated Muder's commitment to do great things again for more people than we ever have before.

A Photo of What Was Destroyed

Attentive readers may have noticed that I listed Robert Caro's The Power Broker among the books I was currently reading for most of 2024, and that was true. 

It's about 1,200 pages long, and I read it off and on until I finished it about a month ago. I was keeping ahead of the 99% Invisible podcast, which has been featuring the book periodically to run down the action of a chapter or two, and talk with a guest about the book. It was a great year and I'm glad I read it. I think my earlier encounter with the book — in a college class my freshman year — was only some of the chapters. 

One of those chapters, though, is the one called "One Mile." It tells the story of Moses's decision to build the Cross Bronx Expressway through the East Tremont neighborhood, and particularly to wipe out a series of working class apartment buildings that housed people who had formerly lived on the Lower East Side.

It's a chapter that makes the reader want to cry and scream in frustration, because the people of East Tremont figured out how to fight back, despite having no political know-how or connections. And they should have won, but like everyone who fought Moses until he finally loses power when he was nearing 80… they lost.

Today, Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a 1939–1941 tax photo of two of the buildings that Robert Moses destroyed, as well as the surrounding area. These are among the 159 buildings Moses destroyed on a whim, which housed 1,530 families. 

All so people in cars could get somewhere faster, in theory…but as soon as anything Moses built was done, it became jammed full and nothing moved, because the iron law of induced demand meant "just one more lane would fix it."

Destroying a community in the city to build the suburbs, while making the city's residents pay for it.