I used to be love drunk // What's Good: Oct. 20, 2023
Barnstormers, bitcoin, and baked goods.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Ever and Roister were tremendous. I will be at the Revolution Brewing taproom imminently for the Deth’s Tar release. This week I went to two concerts. Owl City was pretty good. Boys Like Girls and their openers were fucking awesome. A banner week.
I am optimistic for the rest of the day. Sunday is my birthday. Onward. Please enjoy this lovely foliage; this weekend is the peak of leaf colors in Chicago.
Up up and away
Being a pilot is wild enough, but then there’s these folks:
In early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the Freedom Fox, and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.
Toast and conflict
Avocados remain all the rage:
Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment, and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car. We tried to explain ourselves: we were journalists writing about the town’s war with the avocado, and had plans to meet with the local council. We finally managed to recall the first name of our point person on the council—Marcos—and after repeating it a number of times, we were let through.
Protection for whom
If you care about public society, you should support libraries:
The Campbell County Public Library is a handsome, low-slung building in the center of the small city of Gillette, Wyoming. Steps lead up to two sturdy stone columns that support an overhang, where patrons can sit on benches protected from the summer’s baking sun or the winter’s driving prairie snow. A tidy garden of wildflowers blooms to the side of the building, punctuated with life-size statues of old-timey cowboys and their horses. Out front is another statue: a pigtailed little girl with a joyful expression, sitting atop a globe perched on a stack of books. According to a plaque in front of it, the sculpture, created by an artist named Gregory Johnson and purchased in 2015 by the Mayor’s Art Council, is called “Cabin Fever.”
Holistic review
Policies that only police on-platform conduct have their pitfalls:
On Saturday, YouTuber Alia Shelesh, a reactor known as Sssniperwolf with 34 million YouTube followers, posted a series of photos on her Instagram Story of the home of John Douglass, a comedian known to his 4.9 million YouTube subscribers as JacksFilms.
“Should I go visit JacksFilms? He lives five minutes away from my shoot,” Shelesh wrote.
Though the photo was quickly deleted, it quickly spread around her five million Instagram followers and eventually to Douglass, who wrote on X that Shelesh “just doxxed me on her IG.” In follow-up posts, Shelesh claimed she had no “ill intentions,” that Douglass had been “harassing” her, and that accusing her of doxxing is “defamation.”
The edge of the dark
Have you ever wondered how bitcoin is used to facilitate crimes? No, no, not just the fraud. The other ones. Boy do I have a story for you:
For years, a gang operating in New York allegedly offered a cash-for-Bitcoin service that generated at least $30 million, with men standing on street corners with plastic shopping bags full of money, drive-by pickups, and hundreds of thousands of dollars laid out on tables, according to court records.
The records provide rare insight into an often unseen part of the criminal underworld: how hackers and drug traffickers convert their Bitcoin into cash outside of the online Bitcoin exchanges that ordinary people use. Rather than turning to sites like Coinbase, which often collaborate with and provide records to law enforcement if required, some criminals use underground, IRL Bitcoin exchanges like this gang which are allegedly criminal entities in their own right.
High comedy from the court
Please god let this happen it would be so funny:
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s $250 million civil fraud trial in New York raised the possibility on Friday of putting the former president in prison after Trump failed to comply with a partial gag order requiring him to remove a post trashing the judge's law clerk on social media.
Judge Arthur Engoron said in court on Friday morning that Trump had posted on his social media account "an untrue and disparaging post about my clerk" and that he spoke to the former president about the matter.
Listen, I get it
People who know a thing or two about baked goods are attractive, that is just true:
The Great British Baking Show has returned to Netflix, officially marking the end of summer. But for a certain demographic of Instagram and Facebook users, judge Paul Hollywood is always in season. In the tent, the silver-haired, 57-year-old bread expert strikes fear and doubt into the hearts of contestants. But online, his baking tips and advice appear to provoke a different emotion: abject horniness.
Hollywood maintains an active presence across Instagram and Facebook, where he has 585,000 and 525,000 followers respectively. On both platforms, the baker will valiantly attempt to post a recipe or an earnest update about his professional life, and someone (typically a middle-aged woman with a cartoon rabbit sipping tea as her profile picture) will comment “you can knead my biscuits any time” under her full government name.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/GatorsDaily/status/1714664225828651183
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1715405022450552998
https://twitter.com/DaniDaniii45/status/1715404835141439833
https://twitter.com/ContextBirds/status/1715403951753875612
https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/1715401577052405809
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1715359736177058148
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1715241264340172849
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1715185853188776116
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1715143443779838213
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1715129996316913953
https://twitter.com/HourlyLizards/status/1715127806277951993
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Mere Belief. Imperial Eras: A Taylor Swift Studies Reading List. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur. Cyberattacks linked to Israel-Hamas war are soaring. ‘She Should Have Taken My Side.’ Britney Spears on Her Relationship With Jamie Lynn Spears. Exclusive: Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was an FBI informant. Elon Musk Doesn’t Really Want Your Dollar. MAGA Bluey Is Stressing People Out.