An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for April 21, 2020

Here’s some things I’ve found that you may be interested in checking out:

• “Lyrid meteor shower 2020: how to watch the Lyrids from the UK tonight, and when the meteors will peak. The ancient Chinese are said to have watched Lyrid meteors falling ‘like rain’ in the year 687 BC.”—”The Lyrid meteor shower takes place between 16 and 25 April, but will peak – be at their most dramatic – on the evening of 22 April. […] Relative to other meteor showers on the astronomical calendar, the Lyrids are one of the less dramatic displays, but they can still offer up an average of 20 meteors per hour.”
• “As mafia delivers essentials in Italy, cartels distribute food in Mexico. Last week, reports first circulated of several Mexican cartels deploying members to dole out aid packages to help cash-strapped residents ride out the coronavirus pandemic.”
• “We Are Living in a Failed State. The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”—”We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.”
• “Museums hold Twitter showdown to find world’s creepiest exhibit. Locked-down institutions go online for Yorkshire Museum’s weekly ‘curator battles’”
• The Wiccan Mystic: Exploring a Magickal Spiritual Path By Ben Gruagach. “Use the code AG100 at checkout to get this book for free (Offer good through May 31, 2020)”
• Subscriber Lectures—”Treadwell’s has built an international reputation for its exceptional lecture series, which since 2003 has brought together academics, authors, practitioners and curious learners. For the first time we are now making a few of these lectures available on subscription.”
• The scarlet C: Coronavirus survivors face the stigma and discrimination
• Howling into the Void whilst in Isolation? (And, marking your territory!) Like this one: “A very rare capture of a snow leopard calling in the wild.”
• “Second African locust swarm of the year 20 times bigger than the first. COVID-19 outbreak complicates efforts to fight the swarms.” See also. And, then comes drought.
• “Rick Steves Is Learning to Cook and Enjoying Every Sunset. Talking to the travel guru about his life in isolation, which includes piano playing and stocking up on weed.”
• “How a 5G coronavirus conspiracy spread across Europe. Spate of arson attacks on cell towers fueled by disinformation over pandemic origins.”
• “How the anti-vaccine community is responding to COVID-19. It’s the old, familiar path of conspiratorial thinking and government mistrust.”
• Contact! Contact! Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash Metaverse close in with banana gun at 270! “Silicon Valley is racing to build the next version of the Internet. Fortnite might get there first.—”The next version of the Internet is often described as the Metaverse, a term borne from science fiction, describing a shared, virtual space that’s persistently online and active, even without people logging in. It will have its own economy, complete with jobs, shopping areas and media to consume. The Metaverse is inevitable, many believe, and the Silicon Valley C-suite has been obsessed with the idea — as has a video game company in Cary, North Carolina.”
• Aleister Crowley’s ashes cameo in The Magicians s04e07, traded for a Bag of Holding.
• No Longer Longer by Carl Abrahamsson
• Being Broken In Half (But Wanting To Be Whole)
• Thinking about this again: Celestial Mechanical Calendar and Orrery
• ‘That’s not art it’s Victorian porn!’ – how one small Barbie doll took on the art world
• Plague Poems – The Fourth Week
• “Signs You May Be Burning Out—and What to Do About It. Now’s not the time to be a perfectionist, experts say.”
• Tweet—”it seems likely that this specimen is the largest ever recorded, and in strange UFO-like feeding posture.” Also, also, and watch
• Kaktovik Inupiaq numerals—”As the Inuit languages use a base-20 counting system, Arabic numeral notation (which is best used for a base-10 counting system) is rendered as inefficient. Students from Kaktovik, Alaska invented a new numbering notation in 1994 to rectify this issue, which has gained wide use among Alaskan Iñupiat, and has been considered in other countries where dialects of the Inuit language are spoken.”
• STALKING CHERNOBYL: exploration after apocalypse.—”a film that will examine the underground culture of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where–three decades after the world’s most infamous nuclear disaster— illegal hiking adventurers aka “stalkers”, extreme sports afficionados, artists, tour companies have begun to explore anew the mysterious, ghostly, post-apocalyptic landscape.” Also: Interview with filmmaker Iara Lee
• “What to read to stay sane during the coronavirus pandemic. Our books columnist Ceri Radford has found a healthy and wholesome sense of perspective in revisiting authors who ask big questions about how people endure hardship.”
• The IAD Build Your Own Monument Challenge Has Begun
• “I Saw Goody Proctor Jogging Without A Face Mask”
• Tweet—”working on some last-minute updates to our haggadah”
• Tweet—”Stuck this to the window and now the world makes more sense.”
• Tweet—”Using a Rosicrucian cypher system favoured by Francis Bacon and Henry Neville, I’ve discovered the following hidden message in the first folio: ‘I was not writ by W. Shakespurt or Kit Marlew, but writ by consumer affairs journo Dom Littlewood.’ #Shakespeare #AuthorshipDebate”
• Awake Under Anesthesia—”Anesthesiologists speak of patients descending through “the planes of anesthesia”—from the “plane of disorientation” through the “plane of delirium” toward the “surgical plane.””
• Paper: “The Satanic Temple: Secularist Activism and Occulture in the American Political Landscape” by Manon Hedenborg White and Fredrik Gregorius
• History serves to give us sense of place and tradition
• Courtney Marie Andrews’ Quarantine Recommendations: Gardening And Poetry
• “Have Austin’s Magicians Vanished for Good? With the coronavirus shutdown, it’s now you see ’em, now you don’t.”—”We can’t just wave a magic wand – hey presto! or avada kedavra! – and this whole coronavirus situation we’re struggling through just vanishes. None of us is Harry Potter. None of us is an actual magician, except possibly in that Aleister Crowley/Alan Moore influencing-our-cultural-environment way.”
• VIDEO: Clean-up reveals hidden secrets of Boleskine House—”A historic Highland landmark devastated by fire could be older than originally thought, according to its owners.”

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