wskent

There is a gigantic container ship that's remains run aground and is currently blocking the Suez Canal. After closer inspection of the ship's GPS tracking it seems that the route taken by the quarter-mile long vessel named MV Ever Given, drew out a dick, balls and ass in the Red Sea. — Read the rest

Ayer por la noche nos sorprendió la noticia de que un enorme barco carguero había encallado, bloqueando el Canal de Suez. Lo más raro del asunto es que está cruzado en medio del canal –no a la entrada ni la salida– en una «postura» cuando menos sorprendente. La noticia la hemos ido siguiendo a través de un magnífico hilo en la cuenta de Twitter de John Scott-Railton.

El atasco que ha montado a ambos extremos del canal de Suez, que conecta el Mediterráneo con el mar Rojo atravesando 163 km, es monumental, como puede verse en VesselFinder, con miles de otros barcos, incluyendo cargueros y petroleros, esperando para poder pasar; pérdidas de millones de dólares cada hora que pasa sin circulación. El Ever Given es uno de los cargueros más grandes del mundo –concretamente está en el puesto #13– con sus 400 metros de eslora, 60 de ancho y 220.000 toneladas de desplazamiento. Puede transportar más de 20.000 contenedores TEU.

El asunto es además altamente sorprendente por las circunstancias. Todavía no se tiene muy claro qué pasó, pero se habla de apagón eléctrico y de una racha de viento como posibles circunstancias. Por otro lado, como es sabido, cuando un barco llega a puerto o atraviesa un canal los capitanes dejan su control en manos de los prácticos del puerto, que conocen la zona y se encargan de las maniobras. Atravesar el canal requiere muchas horas, pero es suficientemente ancho para todas las embarcaciones y la posición en la que ha encallado el barco resulta altamente inusual: casi completamente de lado a lado.

De momento lo han intentado casi todo: remolcarlo con barco más pequeños, empujarlo… pero nada: es un coloso de tal tamaño que la operación resulta imposible. Al parecer el timón puede moverse pero el bulbo de proa parece que se ha clavado bajo tierra quizá 5 o 10 metros. Hay excavadoras trabajando en la zona «agrandando» el canal para que el Ever Given pueda salir.

En búsqueda de una alternativa, algunos cargueros han tenido que darse la vuelta buscando otra ruta (la más larga) sospechando que el problema puede tardar semanas o meses en resolverse.

# Enlace Permanente

There’s a giant cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I’m sure you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, welcome to the first major spectacle the internet has collectively rubbernecked to this degree since those llamas cavorted around an Arizona town in... 2015? Really? Woof.

Anyway, the whole internet loves the stuck boat, especially since it also appears to have charted a very phallic course into the canal before it drifted into its current position. Sure, it’s causing hundreds of other ships to bottleneck, and sure, that will probably inevitably cause some headaches for an already-strained global supply chain. Yes, oil prices are up, and there may be another run on toilet paper as a result, but for now, let us just have this moment, okay?

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In this lovely short film, composer and pianist Kris Bowers talks to his grandfather, Horace Bowers, about his life in the Jim Crow South and how he found a new life in California as part of the Great Migration. Horace’s move across the country set in motion events that culminated in Kris premiering a concerto he wrote with the LA Philharmonic. You can read more about Horace in this 2019 profile.

Yet, in a sign of the times, Horace encountered discrimination while building his business. At the time, mainstream financial institutions rarely gave loans to Blacks and Bank of America had already denied him. His fortunes changed after he hired a White young man as a presser.

“I gave him a job and after two days, he asked me to tell the bank that he had been working for me for 30 days. He said that he needed a loan because he had just gotten divorced and was broke and wanted to borrow money to go back to Texas,” said Horace.

“Even though I was with Bank of America, they had turned me down for a loan and I did not think he could get one. But, a few days later, his loan was approved. I wondered why, but I immediately thought of the color of my skin.”

Armed with this knowledge, Horace devised another route. He visited a different branch, picked up the loan papers, completed the forms and mailed them in.

“A few days later, my loan was approved and from then on, nobody saw us. I did mostly everything by mail,” he said.

The Flyers commissioned artist Benjamin David for this intimate portrait. He told the Philly Voice:

Davis said it was hard to tell how long it took him to complete the painting because he "kind of spaced out a little bit," but he estimated it was about 90 minutes. 

Tim Wu — the Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality” — is joining the Biden administration, where he’ll be working on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council.

Wu is a prominent voice online, as one of the most well-known advocates for a free and open internet. He’s spent years arguing for the concept of net neutrality — the idea that the internet should be free of throttling or control from the government or companies that provide it.

He’s also been a prominent voice in...

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Khoi Vinh and his 11-year-old daughter designed a family cookbook together. "It was a blast talking about these fairly esoteric topics...to have it come alive for her, demystifying the act of what it takes to create a 'real' book." [subtraction.com]

The automatic Covid-19 exposure-detection apps didn't work in the US because many states didn't offer apps and no one used them anyway. [daringfireball.net]

Dolly Parton gets her first Covid-19 shot (she helped fund Moderna's research) and sings a little song to the tune of Jolene. "Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, 'cause once you're dead, that's a bit too late." [youtube.com]

This is a hell of a job opening: working on the woolly mammoth de-extinction project. [reviverestore.org]

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2016 Limited Edition Yankee Candle Scents: Candle Store, Sunless Void

The rhetorical highlight of the Biden/Harris inauguration was Amanda Gorman reciting her poem, The Hill We Climb — I thought it was fantastic. It begins:

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one

Here’s a transcript courtesy of CNN. You can read about how Gorman composed the poem in the NY Times:

“I had this huge thing, probably one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my career,” she said in an interview. “It was like, if I try to climb this mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.”

Gorman managed to write a few lines a day and was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day.

The Times also has a lesson for students about Gorman and her poem. And from NPR:

Gorman is no stranger to having to change her work midstream. Like Biden, who has spoken openly about having stuttered as a child, Gorman grew up with a childhood speech impediment of her own. She had difficulty saying certain letters of the alphabet — the letter R was especially tough — which caused her to have to constantly “self-edit and self-police.”

Her delivery was amazing — powerful and lyrical. Brava!

Update: I included a link to a transcript of the poem above. I also wanted to include this illustration by Samantha Dion Baker because art inspires art.

Update: A book version of Gorman’s inaugural poem will be out in April and is available for preorder.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover touched down last weekend. Above is a panorama stitched together from six images captured by the rover's navigation cameras. Perseverance is equipped with a microphone and below are the first audio recordings of Mars. The wooshing sound is wind. — Read the rest

This is a fun guessing game. You're shown video of a city (taken by someone on foot) and you have to click on a map where you think the video was recorded. I did a lot worse than I thought I would (and learned that palm trees are grow in more places than I realized).

I still don't think most ppl appreciate how miraculously good & safe the Covid-19 vaccines are. 66 cases of anaphylaxis out of 18 million US vaccinations, no deaths. Will prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. [twitter.com]

Good on LastPass for charging for their excellent service. The flack they're getting for this is ridiculous – if good password management is so important to people, they can pay $3/mo. Why do we keep having this bad-faith conversation? [blog.lastpass.com]

Good thread from @zeynep about blocking people on social media who generate noise so you can hear the signal of actual feedback & real criticism. [twitter.com]

A history and discussion of people organizing their bookshelves by color, which people get all judgy about for some reason? I did this once and had to switch back because I could never find anything. But: "My bookshelves, my rules." [bookhistoria.com]

Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo from Fair Fight Action on How to Turn Your Red State Blue: "Understand your weaknesses, organize with your allies, shore up your political infrastructure and focus on the long game." [nytimes.com]

Cool thing from @pca2: an auto-updated YouTube playlist of videos (currently 2100+!) that are posted to @kottke. Click that "shuffle play" button, sit back, and have yourself an experience. [youtube.com]

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Nike is pushing the envelope of shoe technology further with today’s announcement of the Go FlyEase, a contact-less $120 shoe for both athletic and everyday use.

The core innovation here is a so-called bistable hinge that lets the shoe move between two positions: an upright one in which the inner sole of the shoe sits at a roughly 30-degree angle so you can easily slip your foot in, and the collapsed position in which the outer layer sits snugly around the inner one while you walk or run. It is effectively two shoes in one, with the inner shoe popping out as needed.

The concept comes from the standard motion most people make when taking off slip-on shoes like Crocs, slippers, or plain old loose sneakers that involves using one foot to...

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For the NY Times, Jamelle Bouie writes about the history of the filibuster in the Senate and how it (unsurprisingly) differs from Mitch McConnell’s comments about it.

The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.

Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.

In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power.

I’d like to highlight something else from the article’s title and reiterated in the text by Bouie: “I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy.” Yes, exactly. I see a lot of calling-out of the hypocrisies of “the other side”¹ on social media and it just seems worthless to me at this point. This sort of thing just doesn’t work when you’re dealing with people who are cynical and without shame in a very polarized media environment. Like, if you’ve read anything about McConnell at all, you know that he cares about power and he’s going to say what he needs to say to get it or keep it, regardless of self-contradiction. Pointing out his flip-flops doesn’t accomplish anything because he’s not actually switching his position! He didn’t really believe the thing he said before and he doesn’t really believe the thing he’s saying now. He just wants what he wants. Focusing on the facts and historical context of the issue, as Bouie does here (and in his explanation of the Electoral College on You’re Wrong About), is the way to go.

1. Examples: “The ‘pro life’ party did nothing while 400,000 people died from the pandemic.” and “If you’re ‘pro choice’, why do you want to limit the 2nd amendment right of people to carry guns?” Etc. etc.↩

From the Amazon.com description for the vinyl reissue of Takashi Kokubo's Get at the Wave:

Recorded in 1987 as promotion for a luxury air conditioning line, Takashi Kokubo's Balearic gem "A Dream Sails Out To Sea" gets first ever official release from Lag Records, complete with previously unheard music.

Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek | Art Sponge #advertising #photography #forest #trees #billboard

Some unsettling/weird/funny photos from @thundergirl_xtal on Instagram. They have a separate account just for nails/hands. (via swissmiss)

"If you had one shot… one opportunity… would you read everything in a transatlantic accent?" (Elise Roth)

I have many fond childhood memories of playing Commander Keen on my friends' early computers. We were a strictly Mac household starting in 1991, so I rarely got to indulge in the pleasures of cool video games at home (the Mac gaming market was severely lacking back then). — Read the rest

On the first Friday of every month, the music distribution site Bandcamp waives its personal cut of music purchases, so 100% of the profits (minus credit card processing fees) go to the artist. That's because Bandcamp is a good company. — Read the rest

Nepal and China have announced the results of a new official measurement: Mount Everest is officially 29,031 feet tall. "According to Nepal's Department of Survey, the measurement is within centimeters of accuracy." [kathmandupost.com]

The FDA's analysis of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is looking really good. "This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine." [nytimes.com]

Apple calling their new $550 over-the-ear headphones "AirPods Max" seems...weird? [apple.com]

Saying goodbye to 500 places that have closed in NYC during the pandemic. "It is difficult to locate the right perspective from which to mourn the death of a favorite business when we are also surrounded by sickness and death." [curbed.com]

My Pal Adam Kuban is teaching a virtual class on "the recipe and techniques for his bar-style pizza". [slowrisepizza.com]

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The National Science Foundation released a video that shows the 60-year-old Arecibo Radio Observatory's collapse.

From Ars Technica:

As you can see from the video, the drone was examining the area where the cables looped over the support towers. Specifically, it was examining the tower that had supported the one main cable that had failed earlier—note that one of the gaps that the cables pass through is unoccupied.

Bandcamp launched a ticketed live stream service for virtual concerts yesterday called Bandcamp Live. The streaming service lets artists make money from live performances online, and may help some of the independent musicians who favor Bandcamp recoup money lost in canceled tours.

Artists will be able to set prices for tickets, notify followers when they go on sale, and offer a virtual merch table. There’s also an optional chat for fans while they watch the show. Any time a purchase is made, it will be announced in the chat.

Artists have shifted to live streams to recoup lost ticket sales during the pandemic. Bandcamp is using its existing store as a jumping-off point, by making it easier for artists to set up shows someplace they’re...

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It won't be over soon, but it will be done.

Beneath the platinum largesse, the ’90s were an ethical turning point for the pop music business. This was the decade where capital-A Authenticity became one of pop’s biggest artistic crises, a long-simmering culmination of the arguments around the distorting tropes of MTV, the legal and artistic arguments around sampling, and the underground scenes battling over the price of selling out. And while the story of Martha Wash and the lawsuits she filed 20 years ago don’t neatly overlap every one of these categories, they do help point out just how complicated the subjects of attribution and creative input can be when so many people have a vested interest in keeping it all under wraps. It’s not an unfamiliar story, but it’s a revealing one.

Dance music’s recovery from the disco backlash was never really close to 100% by the time the ’80s played out the clock, but when it came to notching pop crossover hits, 1990 wasn’t too far away from 1977. Madonna and Janet Jackson were as big in clubland as they were on the Top 40, Latin freestyle had significantly shaped the contemporary sound of pop, and the dance charts that year were an embarrassment of riches: Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around The World,” Snap’s “The Power,” Beats International’s “Dub Be Good To Me,” Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart,” C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” and Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” all hit #1 that year.

Martha Wash’s voice appears on those latter two songs — and there’s a reason I’m using the phrase “Wash’s voice appears on” instead of “Wash had a guest spot on.” Detractors like to refer to the (usually Black women) divas who sing dance record hooks as “anonymous,” but for Wash, that’s what actually happened to her — at least on paper. It’s hard to consider anyone who’d been singing on hits for as long as she did to be anonymous in a vocal sense: a backup singer for Sylvester as one half of Two Tons O’ Fun alongside Izora Armstead, she notched her first Dance/Disco #1 with him for “Dance (Disco Heat),” then another in ’82 when TTOF rebranded as the Weather Girls and had a smash dance hit with the camp-done-sincerely “It’s Raining Men.” While the Weather Girls’ success was comparatively sporadic after that, Wash’s presence as a session singer graced Aretha Franklin’s ’85 #3 pop hit “Freeway Of Love,” Bob Seger’s 1986 future truck-commercial mainstay “Like A Rock,” and Grace Jones’ #1 Billboard Hot Club Dance Play hit “Love On Top Of Love,” the second-to-last #1 on that chart for the ’80s. She was pretty hard not to hear.

So Wash had connections, at least if you dug deep enough. But when there’s artists to be jerked around, the record industry will happily oblige. And Wash’s popularity as a vocalist in the late ’80s and early ’90s came with a price: Those two #1 dance hits, and an earlier Top 40 single — Seduction’s “(You’re My One And Only) True Love” — were built from her vocal work in ways that were integral to the songs, but were otherwise largely treated like uncleared samples. The Seduction song came from a 1989 session where she recorded it as a demo — one that was produced by David Cole, who co-founded C+C Music Factory with Robert Clivillés that same year. When Cole and Clivillés gave the song to Seduction, still something of a work-in-progress studio project, they kept Wash’s vocals at the forefront, albeit pitch-tweaked in an attempt to obscure their true origins, and kept the ostensible headliners as backup singers.

This was dicey enough — but it was a pattern. That same summer, a house music group from Italy called Black Box pulled the same stunt: get Wash to cut a demo, but keep her vocals and leave her uncredited, scoring a two-fer under this method with “Everybody Everybody” and earlier hit “I Don’t Know Anybody Else.” Black Box gave it all a particularly noticeable twist, though: Concurrent with the rise and eventual fall of Milli Vanilli, the group hired a ringer, a French model named Katrin Quinol, to lip-sync Wash’s vocals in both videos and live performances. The implication was clear: Whether it was due to her size, her age, or some other factor, Wash wasn’t considered a good public face for her own voice.

And then, even as Wash had started the proceedings for a lawsuit against Black Box in the fall of 1990 for failure to credit her on their songs, C+C Music Factory put out their debut single “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” and did it again: the same production braintrust as Seduction, the same video lip-sync shtick as Black Box (this time, with Zelma Davis as the ringer, though she could actually sing in her own right). Again, it lifted pieces of Wash’s demo-song vocals for its lead vocal, and while just out-and-out stating that Wash was the featured singer doesn’t seem like it would have stifled the single’s clear hit potential — given her chops, it might’ve boosted it — C+C cut her out of the credits entirely.

Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is a potential industry standard — what else could Wash do but agitate to get her own? When your voice appears on a bunch of big hits but nothing else about you does, that’s not a good way to get paid, much less recognized — even when there’s something distinct about the gospel-hewn virtuoso fervor Wash brought to her performances. And in fighting for her share, Wash broke the firmament between the old showbiz of anonymous session players and the contemporary state of guest-artist attributions.

For one thing, Wash was paid a flat rate to cut her demos, ones that were intended to be used as examples or guide tracks for other singers. Instead, Wash’s vocals being used as leads or major components meant they were able to pay a cut-rate price for a top-notch singer — less than $1,000 for “Gonna Make You Sweat,” for instance. And there was a precedent that it was no big deal to get caught: When Black Box tried using an uncleared sample of Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” for their ’89 single “Ride On Time” and incurred a big dispute with Holloway’s label Salsoul, they simply re-recorded Holloway’s vocals with another singer, future M People lead Heather Small. The idea was that eventually something would get worked out between Salsoul, Holloway, and Black Box’s label BMG. It didn’t, and Holloway earned jack shit from a #1 single that, for at least a brief moment, featured her voice.

Then there’s the whole insult-to-(royalties)-injury factor. Having her very appearance concealed and her voice transposed into someone younger, skinnier, and more MTV-friendly cut deep to Wash, who’d spent most of her career deeply aware of how rare it was for women who looked like her to be pop stars in an image-conscious industry. It was one thing to put a bikini-clad model in the video to Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” pantomiming the sax that was actually sampled from Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s “Darkest Light,” but this was something more drastic. While C+C rapper Freedom Williams insinuated as much — “I’d rather look at Zelma onstage,” he told A Current Affair — Wash never fully confirmed that her appearance was a significant reason her contributions were downplayed.

A 1992 Greg Kot piece for the Chicago Tribune — which euphemistically calls her “robust” — gives David Cole’s side of the story: Wash suing over Cole’s other project with Seduction, and not some supposed lack of photogenic appeal, was what led him to decide that her image and name couldn’t be associated with C+C. Clivillés also later told Rolling Stone that he invited Wash to become a full member of the group, but she declined because she was “pursuing her R&B career and wanted to be taken seriously in the R&B market at that time,” which is why they brought Zelma Davis in to take her place. To Davis’ credit, when she did the video for “Gonna Make You Sweat,” she was initially skeptical over what she was doing pantomiming lyrics that weren’t sung by her — at which point the higher-ups told her to keep her mouth shut. Tellingly, Wash was never thanked when C+C won a 1991 MTV Video Music Award for the video that would be legally forced to add her name to the credits in 1994. (Davis was, cryptically, re-credited for “visualization.”)

The problem, at least for Seduction and Black Box and C+C, was that more than enough people in the industry recognized Wash’s voice when they heard it that word got around anyways. People started asking questions, and soon enough Wash realized that those demo tracks she’d recorded for other singers weren’t actually using those other singers. The ensuing lawsuits covered the aforementioned songs by Seduction, Black Box, and C+C Music Factory, as well as a number of other Black Box singles that pulled the same stunt, with the most prominent case being Wash’s $500,000 fraud suit against Cole, Clivillés, and CBS/Sony that was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. That’s also how she settled her suits with Seduction’s label A&M and Black Box’s label RCA — the latter of whom didn’t even know it was Wash providing the vocals on the album in the first place.

But more than the settlements, Wash made it clear that not only was the Milli Vanilli charade not an isolated incident, it was the kind of regular practice that could screw over artists — and if someone as experienced as Wash had to deal with it, who knows how younger, more aspiring singers could’ve been screwed over. In the end, it was another case where the wronged artist saw more wrongdoing on the part of the labels than her erstwhile musical collaborators, since it was the record companies who had the bottom-line tunnel vision necessary to overlook these kinds of affronts to artist autonomy. Maybe that’s why the money is the less salient result of the lawsuits: What really matters is her getting the proper credit for … getting the proper credit.

Of course, one other direct result was that RCA’s parent company BMG Records not only settled the suit, but signed Wash to an eight-year, eight-album contract. The first album she released with them, a self-titled ’93 release, notched two more #1 Billboard Dance Chart hits and her first as a solo artist (“Carry On” and “Give It To You”). The following year, C+C Music Factory finally brought Wash into the fold for second album Anything Goes!, touring with her and giving her a couple feature spots, including a co-billed turn with Zelma Davis and Latin freestyle group Trilogy on #1 Dance hit “Do You Wanna Get Funky.” Not that there would be mistaking her voice for any other’s at this point, but at least Martha Wash’s status as one of the biggest hitmakers in dance music was official.

From there on out it was, at least for Wash, water under the bridge: She made her peace with the producers who went behind her back, and might have been a long-running part of C+C Music Factory’s history along with her own solo career if David Cole hadn’t passed away from AIDS-related spinal meningitis less than six months after the release of Anything Goes! The RCA/BMG deal didn’t actually extend the whole eight albums, but she did keep notching solo hits and guest spots — including an “It’s Raining Men” redux with RuPaul — and formed her own indie label, Purple Rose Records, which released her album Love & Conflict earlier this year.

And C+C Music Factory? They’re embroiled in their own internal conflict, with Freedom Williams attempting to claim an ownership over the group’s identity and Clivillés battling him all the way. (That this happened at the same time Williams, suffering from a non-starter solo career, scored a coup by appearing on the album version of Chris Rock’s Puff Daddy spoof “Champagne” might be questionably relevant, but I bring it up because, weirdly enough, he was replaced in the video version by Kool Rock-Ski from the Fat Boys.) So who knows who’s getting all that Pringles commercial money now.

Stereogum’s launch week is presented with limited advertising thanks to support from POLLEN, Spotify’s genre-less playlist that aims to expose curious listeners to all types of great new music. Check out Pollen here and look for brand new playlists from Stereogum’s editorial team throughout this week here.