internet explorers club | our statues, ourselves
By now, I think a few of you know that there are certain things in article titles that will pull me in. Cheese is one of them. Weird history things are another. So please understand how excited I was to read: How 43 Giant, Crumbling Presidential Heads Ended Up in a Virginia Field.
The busts are the remains of Virginia Presidents Park, first opened in 2004 and shuttered in 2010, when the busts were moved to private land. (If you’re wondering if I’m furious that I didn’t visit this in person when I lived in Williamsburg, know that it’s eating me up inside.) Moving these 20 foot tall busts caused quite a few issues, which resulted in their slightly battered state today:
Abraham Lincoln's bust now has an eerie hole in the back of its head that brings to mind his tragic end, and Ronald Reagan's bust bears the scar of a lightning strike. They all now sit decaying in three neat lines on the farm (except for George Washington, who stands to the side overlooking the group), where they continue to crumble, peel and crack.
INCREDIBLE.
Speaking of busts, two artists went into the Neues Museum and (clandestinely) 3D-scanned their famous bust of Nefertiti. The bust itself is fraught with controversy related to whether or not it left Egypt illegally (it’s definitely murky), and Germany has steadfastly refused to return the bust. The museum itself is particularly guarded in terms of the bust, and offers no context as to how the bust was acquired.
The artists have said with this in mind, their goal is “for museums to reassess their collections with a critical eye and consider how they present the narratives of objects from other cultures they own as a result of colonial histories,” which is frankly something more museums should take into consideration.
In case you missed this weekend's Oscars, Leo DiCaprio won an oscar, putting to rest years worth of memes (this is my personal favorite). If you’d still like to re-live the halcyon days prior, I recommend Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage.
Long Reads about Short Things: Electric Literature looks at the history of when a novel’s first sentence became A Thing.
Atlas Obscura on why scheduling octopus sex for human viewing might always be a bad idea. This article is amazing and will tell you everything you ever needed (or wanted) to know about octopus breeding and eating habits. Allow me to illustrate:
…there was a good chance this year’s event might not create the romantic atmosphere one would expect of a public octopus mating. The selected bachelor, a 70-pound giant Pacific octopus named Kong, might have decided to eat his date instead.
In 2014, researchers observed a female octopus strangling her mate with three arms, then eating him (the mating attempt was successful)
The Seattle Aquarium has had problems with hungry octopuses before. In 2006, the aquarium staff temporarily moved an octopus to a shark tank, assuming the cephalopod would opt to stay hidden. The octopus instead decided to kill and eat one of the sharks.
In more human-related love issues, Jaya Saxena writes about falling in love over AOL Instant Messenger and it is just perfect for those of us that came of age with AIM.
To go with my growing list of Los Angeles geography-based articles (again: niche), Catie Delaney wrote a piece on the geography of the new Netflix series ‘Love.’
Finally, the NYT Magazine digs deep into Neko Atsume obsession:
Etcetera: Graffiti by the Apollo 11 astronauts inside their Command Module (it’s ok, they were just tracking time). A Guide To the Pizza Styles of America, but boy is it East Coast focused. Secondary / Non-semantic meanings for emoji, analyzed.
