Stay safe tonight.
Category: Life
2020: Overachiever (The Monoliths)
November 23: Helicopter pilot finds “strange” monolith in remote part of Utah.
November 25: Using Google Earth to look for the Utah monolith site. One candidate that matches the landscape seems to have something vertical that appeared between the 2015 and 2016 images.
No coordinates in the article. Attempt no landings there.
December 7: After the Utah Monolith was found, everyone was making comments about 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as more have popped up, I’m starting to think about The Chronoliths. It’s a novel by Robert Charles Wilson in which obelisks appear out of nowhere, commemorating future military victories by someone no one has heard of – yet.
The monolith in Atascadero, California, was installed by a group of local artists who, on hearing about the one in Romania, figured, someone’s going to make a third one, so why not us?
It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with
After a group traveled five hours to tear it down on video, the town rallied around rebuilding the obelisk and putting it back up on the mountain.
December 27: I…what????? Gingerbread monolith appears — then collapses — on San Francisco hilltop
In true pop-up-art fashion, a nearly 7-foot-tall monolith made of gingerbread mysteriously appeared on a San Francisco hilltop on Christmas Day and collapsed the next day.
Patch the Electoral System
Whatever you think of the electoral system, the fact that we have to wait for people to copy down those electoral votes is no longer helpful, and the fact that they can choose (or be pressured) to vote for someone else is a vulnerability in our democracy that should be patched.
You want to keep using electoral votes instead of the national popular vote? We can argue about that later. But we don’t need electors any more. Once each state certifies its election’s results, assigning its electoral votes should be automatic. It’s just math.
Virus protection down the drain (photo)
I’ve mostly gotten tired of the discarded-mask theme, but I saw this today and it seemed like an appropriate metaphor with a new wave of cases surging and so many people refusing to take precautions.
An Expression
Overheard during Zoom Mad Libs:
Teacher: “I need an expression.”
Student: (unintelligible)
Teacher: “An appropriate expression.”