Let it come down.

I guess it would be weird to watch everything unravel while it was bright and sunny outside, so in a way you’ve got to appreciate the weather right now. Someone somewhere will tell you it could be worse, and I agree. In fact, I would take it a step further: It will be worse. And soon! Maybe we should all just go back to bed.

Here’s something comforting from Yumi Zouma, from Yoncalla, their terrific debut of last year. Enjoy. [Via]

★ Outside the window was near-blank fog, with only the vague outline of the apartment slab across the avenue showing. The gray smothered morning plans and left most of the family torpid in their beds. For a while the fog lifted and there was a strengthening brightness. It was pleasant enough to duck out to the hot-dog place, with children hopping and darting around, past a shrub full of shrieking little birds. A new gray came on soon, though, not as solid as the fog but insinuating and darkening. People got into one another’s way. An errand meant to beat the rain led out into an intensifying drizzle, strengthening smoothly into a shower, dappling the blue shoulders of the younger boy’s blue coat.

If I don’t think about the implications too hard.

Like twice a year I fantasize about buying a Roomba and then end up not going through with it. Something always seems to come up that justifies my ducking out of owning an expensive self-driving vacuum and setting it free in my home. One time my friend Rebecca’s Roomba bumped into her full-length mirror while she was out of the house and shattered it*—that quieted the fantasy for a few months. But invariably time will pass and I’ll suddenly find myself on Amazon again, gazing at pics. How cute, I think. How fun to have.

The thing that’s always held me back is that we’re assigning all this powerful technology to one niche purpose. Here, we have an appliance that can propel itself around my house, detect when it’s near a wall or a piece of furniture and adjust its route, and then plug itself back into its own charger when it’s done. And all we’re using it for is vacuuming? Seems like a missed opportunity tbh. Maybe if I wait a year it will also be an Alexa, or have Seamless functionality, or be a stereo. I’ve had no such luck so far. Year after year they roll out improvements and it’s the same song and dance: this is a vacuum. It vacuums your house. iRobot, the parent company, introduced a sister product that mops called the Braava, but that leap hasn’t been quite enough for me to throw down triple-digits dollars.

So imagine my delight when I read today that a Chinese company that makes laser navigation tools for home robots is starting to make mosquito-zapping laser tanks. As in: it rolls around looking for mosquitoes and then zaps them like a bug zapper. Finally! Some new features!

According to Shephard Media’s Max Rotor:

They’ve essentially taken their 2D LIDAR technology, commonly seen on home cleaning robots, integrated it on a small UGV and stuck a mosquito killing laser on the top. A LeiShen Intelligent representative said while they had yet to make a sale, the company was pitching the idea to hospitals, schools or other public buildings in areas blighted by diseases such as malaria or zika. Through an object recognition and tracking algorithm, the killer robot recognises a mosquito and ‘instantly’ lasers it. The company claims the laser is capable of killing an impressive ’30 to 40 mosquitoes in one second’, a fact I double-checked had not been mistranslated.

This Robotic Tank Wants To Kill Mosquitoes With A Laser

While that laser sounds… powerful, I’m more interested in the fact that we’re starting to get more bang for our buck here. If this tank and a Roomba got together, you’d have an appliance that kills the bugs in your house and then vacuums them up for you. Two birds, one stone! Add one more feautre—like a cup holder, some mints, or a little face—and suddenly you’re describing a product crappy and convoluted enough to be sold at Bed Bath & Beyond, where I would certainly buy it.

Could this also be pioneering technology that would be misused for bodily harm to non-bugs? Perhaps. But for the time being I’m happy to imagine a future where every home has a Roomba and every Roomba is laden with apps and add-ons specific to your lifestyle. Why not start with a mosquito laser?

_______

*It also produced my one of my favorite conversation types, which goes something like:

Christine [expecting a regular answer]: Omg what happened to your mirror?
Rebecca [proving the universe is vast and generous]: I left the Roomba home alone and he knocked it over.

Male Strippers and Norman Rockwell

“Anyone kill Trump today?” asked a customer as he stepped foot in Raw II, a local bar, during Friday’s ceremonies.

“I give him one year,” responded a patron at the bar.

“They didn’t kill Obama,” said Trish, the bartender, “they’re not going to kill Trump.”

So it went in Sissonville, West Virginia, a close-knit town of 4,000 people about twenty minutes north of Charleston. Four years ago, Trish watched former President Obama’s second inaugural address at her old watering hole down the street. She had lamented her sexual inactivity — “I leave the door unlocked and the lights on, and I still can’t get anyone to come in and rape me” — and the nation’s economic inequality — “The people who are raising this country, making it what it is, are the people making the least.”

Now, as the newly sworn-in President promised to “make America great again,” Trish praised the outgoing administration and heaped scorn on the new one.

On Barack: “I ended up liking him as much as the next person.”

On Michelle: “A fine representative for the United States.”

On Trump: “Did anyone else see that hand motion at the end of the speech? It was Hitleristic.”

On Pence: “That motherfucker is crazy.”

Yet Trish voted for Trump. With two children in the military, Trish votes Republican since they’re the party less likely to reduce military spending, she says.

Trish isn’t alone — West Virginia was tied with Wyoming for having the greatest percentage of its vote go to Trump, adding that superlative to the state’s long list: lowest percentage of residents with bachelor’s degree or advanced degrees, second-lowest median household income, one of the five lowest rates of passport possession, highest rate of hypertension, second-highest rate of diabetes, third-highest rate of obesity. The number of miners working in the state is at its lowest point in a century.

Neither candidate inspired Trish, 54. “I’m so tired of having to pick between the lesser of two evils.”

But the main thing that makes Trish tired is working seventeen-hour days. She frequently works double shifts — 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. — and spends those days smoking two packs of cigarillos and alternating between Henry’s Hard Soda, hard alcohol, and frozen pizza.

She also talks, a lot. Trish says she knows “ninety-nine percent” of the people who drop in to the bar, and she talks to all of them. One customer compared Trish’s mouth to a laxative.

For example, when a male customer complained after she beat him five consecutive times in pool, Trish said, “His vagina is hurting today. He’s bloating and puffy from his period.”

In response to an accusation of sacrilege at the bar’s Halloween party for wearing a nun costume while pregnant (she went in to labor during the party): “My God has a sense of humor.”

On her wholesome childhood: “I grew up so Norman Rockwell, it’d kill you.”

On the death of her husband eight years ago: “Life goes on. At least for me it does.”

Down the street at Trish’s old bar, the Village Café, Donald J. Trump had been president for forty-five minutes when two women walked in. They sidled up to the bar, alone except for Bear, a regular who’d watched an episode of Columbo throughout Trump’s inaugural address. They ordered two Jägerbombs and, focusing intently on the smartphone in front of them, and began comparing photos of different male strippers.

Eventually talk turned to Prince, and then 1999 came up, which was the year one of the women was pregnant with her son. She recalled drinking champagne during her pregnancy. “That’s probably why he’s dyslexic.

“I saw him at the Dollar Store the other day, after he bought 32-gallon trash bags instead of 13-gallon trash bags, and I looked at him and said, ‘You dyslexic fuck.’” Their conversation hurdled forward, with momentary pauses for the inauguration scenes captured on the TV, which was perched above a confederate flag. The mother of the dyslexic teenager said she voted. “That’s the price of bitching. You don’t vote, you can’t bitch.” She chose Trump over Clinton.

“Call me prejudiced,” she continued, “but I think there are some things women shouldn’t do. Women shouldn’t be preachers, and they shouldn’t be president. And there are some things men shouldn’t do. They shouldn’t be shaving hoo-has.”

The current bartender at Village Café, Carmela, felt cautiously optimistic about the election results. After being born in West Virginia, she’d grown up in Detroit. Her father worked for General Motors, as did her eventual father-in-law. After her husband, a machinist for the Big Three auto companies, was laid off, the couple moved to West Virginia, where their taxes are just $350 a year. Even so, Carmela works a second job at McDonald’s. At home, her husband and her have neither TV nor Internet access. During the inaugural address, Trump’s line about how the Washington establishment’s “triumphs were not our triumphs” felt particularly resonant. “Hopefully he does what he says,” she said.

At Rollin Smoke BBQ down the street, a West Virginia Department of Highway employee had more cosmetic concerns. “The only thing that concerns me about [Trump] is that it takes him three hours to get his hair done,” said the burly man who did not appear to have trimmed his beard since Obama’s first term. “There’s gonna be an emergency at 3:00 a.m., and he’s not going to come on TV to talk to us about it until 6:00 a.m. because he’s gonna be getting his hair done.”

Jill, whose family owns Rollin Smoke, knows the mayor of the nearby town who resigned recently after posting Facebook messages that agreed with a resident who referred to Michelle Obama as an “ape in heels.” Jill reluctantly supported the mayor’s resignation. “I think she took the high road on that one.”

Over at Raw Bar II, where the jukebox ranged from Chingy to Dean Martin, Trish was less amused by the incident, which garnered international coverage. “There’s nothing worse in this world than idiots going online and letting everyone know that they’re idiots,” she said.

At that point, Trish’s daughter, Brook, piped up. Trish and Brook are close — Trish said she “had the honor and the privilege to stay home with my kids.” “We moved in to a lesser house and drove used cars. Kids don’t remember what you had; they remember if you were there.”

But they also remember which candidates you support. Brook rolled her eyes when she heard her mom’s remark about idiots online.

Said Brook, “Ask her who she voted for.”

Brendan Lowe is a freelance journalist. He has previously written for Time magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Baltimore Sun.

Who Among Us Could Possibly Say What’s Happening In The Sky?

And should we be worried about it?

I’m not sure what region you’re accessing this blog post from, but here in New York we’ve been having an unseasonably mild winter, with temperatures reaching the 60s as recently as a week and a half ago. “What a beautiful Spring day!” we joked to each other recently. “I wore a coat, but I didn’t need to!” Even for the Women’s March over the weekend, temperatures hovered around an accommodating 50 degrees. A friend of mine wore a sweatshirt and jeans all afternoon and was fine. How novel!

But that was then, and this is forty-eight hours later. Today it’s cold again and we have winds projected to reach as high as 60 miles per hour. The National Weather Service issued a high wind warning that lasts until 1 A.M., when hopefully the wind will stop moving as fast as a car on a highway. And until then, outside is probably not the most comfortable place to stand or be if you have the choice.

High Wind Warning in NYC and Southern NY State

Call me crazy, but the intensity of these erratic weather patterns seems… severe. Maybe even… atypical. As though… how we have come to understand winter as a season may no longer match up with the reality of what living through winter as a season actually entails. It’s almost as if the earth’s climate isn’t acting how it used to, and we can observe it with our own five senses.

What would we call something like that, though? Hard to say.

What to expect when you’re expecting to turn into Russia.

Want a sneak preview of what your country could be like after a few years of the new administration? (This an alternative to the “charred wreckage” sneak preview.) Michael Idov offers one possibility:

One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it.

It’s here:

Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America

Related:

My Two Days as a Russian Tabloid Sensation

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck made it big in the art scene in the ’70s. She was demoralized after she realized that the art world was (gasp!) deeply sexist and capitalist, and went to live reclusively in an old house in New Mexico, with her dogs and simple-minded but rugged and kind-hearted and very tall husband, Carl. This is the first piece she’s made public in forty years.

Choose your own adventure.

A couple of things happened this weekend. One was amazing and one was appalling. It is not a stretch to think, given what we are up against, that every week for the foreseeable future will persistently present something appalling, so it seems like the only way we will save ourselves is by making sure it is continually countered with something amazing. Of course that is easier said than done, but now that I’ve said it I am counting on you to do it. Godspeed.

Here’s something new from Goldfrapp, who have a new album out at end of March. That is not the exact kind of amazing I am looking for in the larger scheme of things, but as far as day-to-day existence goes it certainly won’t hurt. (Here’s a great interview with Allison Goldfrapp.) Enjoy.

★★★ The early sunbeams slipped briefly behind some cloud, then relented and shone full-on. The shattered glass of a door, still standing in the frame, glinted; so did the bulbs of an unlit strand of festive lights, and the coils of a hair tie lying curbside with the garbage. The light spread over everything as thoroughly as the gloom had the day before, clear and without pity.

We get requests.

What’s that? It’s rainy and dark and your soul feels low and you wish there were somewhere the anguish would go? You want a mid-tempo beat that lopes into itself until you just sort of forget everything and drift off for a few minutes? Also, you yearn for the world to turn back to the way it was yesterday? Well, I’ve got you covered on the music part. Otherwise you’re still pretty fucked. Sorry/enjoy.