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some of the things I read while eating breakfast in antisocial isolation


Giant Sequoias Are Thriving in an Unexpected Place: the U.K.

There are now more of the world’s biggest trees in Britain than California.


The U.K.’s giant trees are growing as fast as their California counterparts. Embiggenable.


WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT GIANT TREES—particularly ones you can’t remotely hug the circumference of, and in some cases, ones where you can drive through the trunks—you probably picture those standing tall and strong in northern California’s redwood groves. But according to a new study in the Royal Society Open Science journal, there’s a batch of redwoods and sequoias taking root in an unexpected place: the United Kingdom.

Though often confused, sequoias and redwoods are not the same species of tree, as Joanna Nelson, director of science and conservation planning for the Save the Redwoods League (STRL) reminds us.

“The giant sequoia are the world’s largest trees; the coast redwoods are the world’s tallest,” Nelson says. “It’s easy to mix them up but important to distinguish, as they grow in different locations and have different attributes.”


California is the only place where giant sequoias and redwoods grow wild. Embiggenable.

California is known for being the home of both, and the U.K. study mentions both, but focuses on giant sequoias. The trees are native to northern California and do not grow naturally in the U.K.—but they’re not invasive, either. A Scottish grain merchant named Patrick Matthew first introduced giant sequoias to the U.K. in 1853; Victorians planted them as small collections in gardens and along avenues to make them look more imposing. The initially small number in the U.K. has now grown to half a million (including both redwoods and sequoias), compared to California’s less than 80,000, says Mathias Disney, one of the authors of the study and a professor in the Department of Geography at University College London.


America’s Magical Thinking About Housing

The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.


If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling.

In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S.3metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled.

This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have gotten used to over the past few decades, especially if they live in a coastal blue state. California and New York, anchored by “superstar” clusters in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street, have pulled in some of the nation’s most creative workers, who have pushed price levels up. But a combination of stifling construction regulations, eternal permitting processes, legal tools to block new development, and NIMBY neighbors restricted the addition of more housing units. Rent and ownership costs rose in America’s richest cities, until families started giving up and moving out. As the economics writer Noah Smith has argued, California and New York are practically driving people out of the state “by refusing to build enough housing.”

But Austin—and Texas more generally—has defied the narrative that skyrocketing housing costs are a problem from hell that people just have to accept. In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.


Ed. Ah, the places you’ll go on 48-Hour Weekend Getaway Ambien!


11 Jokes from the Soviet Union the CIA Declassified Decades Later


In 2017, 13 million pages of sensitive Soviet-era intelligence were declassified and published by the CIA. Researchers found two of those pages that whipped absolute ass: jokes the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had picked up from Russian citizens. They collected them partly to monitor sentiment among the Russian working class, but intelligence workers also just thought it was fun as hell to make a yearly joke book. Here are 11 jokes from Soviet Russia that the CIA found noteworthy for one reason or another…

11. And Then Everyone Clapped


A worker standing in a liquor line says, “I have had enough, save my place, I am going to shoot Gorbachev.” Two hours later he returns to claim his place in line. His friends ask, “Did you get him?” “No, the line there was even longer than the line here.”

10. Crucial Context: People Think Alexander Dubcek Was Murdered by the KGB


What’s the difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek? Nothing, but Gorbachev doesn’t know it yet.

9. The Teacher Becomes the Teached


Sentence from a schoolboy’s weekly composition class essay: “My cat just had seven kittens. They are all communists.” Sentence from the same boy’s composition the following week: “My cat’s seven kittens are all capitalists.” The teacher reminds the boy that the previous week he had said the kittens were communists. “But now they’ve opened their eyes,” replies the child.

8. Maybe This Guy Just Really Wants to Climb a Tree


A Chukchi is asked what he would do if the Soviet borders were opened. “I’d climb the highest tree,” he replies. Asked why, he responds: “So I wouldn’t get trampled in the stampede out!” Then he is asked what he would do if the U.S. border is opened. “I’d climb the highest tree,” he responds, “so I can see the first person crazy enough to come here!”

7. The People Evidently Didn’t Like the KGB




Experience: I discovered a mass grave under my house

There were many bones. We had no idea how they had got there.


‘My daughters were scared’: Merced Guimarães outside the house where the mass grave was found.


In 1966, when I was 10 years old, my mother and I moved to Gamboa, a neighbourhood by the waterfront in the Port Zone of Rio de Janeiro. When I got married in 1977, we stayed in the area, had three kids and set up a pest control company.

In 1990, we bought our first house there. It had a strange layout: when you entered, you had to go down a very long corridor. It was also very old, so we knew we would have to do some building work. We had dreams of adding a second floor, so each of our children could have their own room.

The work finally began in 1996. We closed off half of the house so construction workers could start digging holes in the back for the pillars needed to support the extension.

It was a hot, sunny day in January when, over lunch, one of the workers told me about finding animal bones in the holes they were digging. He wondered if the previous owners had had a lot of animals. After lunch, I rummaged through the piles of debris he had dug up and, to my shock, found pieces of skulls. I told the construction worker that these weren’t animal bones – they were human.

Terror came over his face and he refused to go back to work. All the other workers also left early – nobody wanted to disturb the people who were laid to rest there. My daughters no longer wanted to live in the house either – they were scared that it was haunted.

I just wanted to know what to do next. There were so many bones, and we had no idea how they had got there – did a serial killer bury his victims under our house? I remember feeling particularly shocked when I found some teeth that looked as if they had belonged to a child.


Artist Crushes Tesla With Colossal Olmec Head Sculpture

Chavis Mármol told Hyperallergic that he wanted to “crush an object that represents a sinister figure like Elon Mollusk.”


Last Monday, March 11, artist Chavis Mármol dropped a nine-ton Olmec head made of quarry stone onto a blue Tesla Model 3. Embiggenable.


Sculptor Chavis Mármol has never owned a car, but that’s never inhibited his drive. Earlier this month, the 42-year-old Mexico City-based artist (who travels largely by bicycle) dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3 in a crushing display posted to Instagram on March 11. Mármol told Hyperallergic that his intention was “to satirize the Tesla brand and its creator.”

Made of quarry stone, the large-scale sculpture is a copy of the ancient Olmec Colossal Heads — distinct archaeological remnants of the Olmec civilization that once flourished along Mexico’s gulf coastline around 3,000 years ago. Mármol’s untitled destruction performance, which took place on March 5, was the third and final part of a series called Neo-Tameme involving the stone replicas and contemporary objects.

The car was donated by Colima 71, a boutique hotel in Mexico City, although the artist said that he was “unaware of the conditions under which they obtained it.”

“My job was to work on the stone while they looked for the car, which I emphasized should be a Tesla; otherwise, the work wouldn’t function,” Mármol said, adding that the sculpture required around six months of carving with the assistance of artists from around the country. In total, he said, the project took two years to complete.

Mármol posted photos of the destructive performance-sculpture work on Instagram.


When Maru is not near her, these days, without waiting for the evening, Hana begins to meow.

Ed. マルが彼女の近くにいないとき、最近、夕方を待つことなく、ハナは鳴き始めます。


THE LAST TAB . . .

FOLLOW-UP: Banksy’s urban tree artwork defaced with white paint


The artwork appeared over the weekend in Finsbury Park – but it has been defaced with white paint.


A MURAL PAINTED BY STREET ARTIST Banksy on a residential building in north London has been defaced.

The artwork appeared over the weekend featuring swathes of green paint on a wall behind a nearby tree to give the appearance of leaves.

But by Wednesday morning, the artwork, surrounded by a protective metal fence, had been strewn with white paint.

Islington Council said it was installing CCTV cameras and looking at other ways to protect the work.

A spokesperson said the authority welcomed the piece, adding: “We very much want it to stay.”


The tree before and after it was cut back, and the Banksy mural before it was apparently daubed with white paint. Ebiggenable.

They added: “This is a really powerful piece, which highlights the vital role that trees play in our communities and in tackling the climate emergency. It’s sad to see the piece has been defaced.”

When the mural first appeared, “we moved quickly to put in place temporary measures to protect it and manage the crowds, such as installing fencing and having visits from park patrol officers”.

The council was discussing “future solutions” with the homeowner “to enable everyone to enjoy the artwork”.


Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.

Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.


ONE MORE THING:


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