RNG posted:

Creepy New Yorker article I'm reading right now about a Polish murderer who more or less wrote a novel exposing himself.

Free Market Mambo posted:

I'm pretty skeptical of Fiennes claims in that one, he's very much writing in defense of Scott, and to be honest, Scott was an amateur who got Peter-principled like a mofo.

He showed bad organization, worse leadership, a sad lack of foresight, and duplicity/arrogance regarding his "right" to the South Pole. As soon as he heard Amundsen gave no fucks about his claims and was on his way, dude knew he was done for, and immediately started saying "this is not a race, seriously, please."

Amundsen was a fucker on a lot of levels, but Scott was way, way out of his element.

Fiennes has basically been pulling a proto-Bear Grylls for decades now, and should be taken with a whole bunch of salt.

Source: Polar history nerd, wilderness guide in Arctic conditions.

Also would like to plug the polar literature thread in the Book Barn, please keep us company there.

quote:

Trim was born in 1799, aboard the ship HMS Reliance on a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. The kitten fell overboard, but managed to swim back to the vessel and climb aboard by scaling a rope; taking note of his strong survival instinct and intelligence, Flinders and the crew made him their favourite.

Trim sailed with Flinders on HMS Investigator on his voyage of circumnavigation around the Australian mainland, and survived the shipwreck of the Porpoise on Wreck Reef in 1803. When Flinders was accused of spying and imprisoned by the French in Mauritius on his return voyage to England Trim shared his captivity until his unexplained disappearance, which Flinders attributed to his being stolen and eaten by hungry slaves.

Trim was black, with white paws, chin and chest. He was named after the butler in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, because Flinders considered him to be a faithful and affectionate friend. During his imprisonment Flinders wrote a biographical tribute to Trim in which he described him as "one of the finest animals I ever saw... [his] robe was a clear jet black, with the exception of his four feet, which seemed to have been dipped in snow and his under lip, which rivaled them in whiteness. He had also a white star on his breast."

In 1996 a bronze statue of Trim by sculptor John Cornwell was erected on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, directly behind a statue of his owner that was erected following the donation of Flinders' personal papers to the Library by his grandson in 1925. The popularity of the statue has since led to the development of a range of Trim merchandise by the State Library of New South Wales. The Library's cafe is also named after the cat.

The plaque under it says:

TO THE MEMORY OF
TRIM
The best and most illustrious of his race
The most affectionate of friends,
faithful of servants,
and best of creatures
He made the tour of the globe, and a voyage to Australia,
which he circumnavigated, and was ever the
delight and pleasure of his fellow voyagers
Written by Matthew Flinders in memory of his cat

Free Market Mambo posted:

I'm a cat guy, so I find myself (illogically) disagreeing with Shackleton's decision to have Mrs. Chippy euthanized. A cat doesn't really eat all that much.

Rondette posted:

It was typical British hubris

Amundsen, Dec. 14th posted:

The weather was of the best kind when we set off this morning, but at 10am, it clouded over and hid the sun. Fresh breeze from the SE. The skiing has been partly good, partly bad. The plain - King H VII’s Vidda - has had the same appearance - quite falt and without what one might call sastrugi. The sun reappeared in the afternoon, and now we much go out and take a midnight observation. Naturally we are not exactly at the point called 90°, but after all our excellent observations and dead reckoning we must be very close.

Scott, Jan. 17th posted:

To-night little Bowers is laying himself out to get sights in terrible difficult circumstances; the wind is blowing hard, T. -21°, and there is that curious damp, cold feeling in the air which chills one to the bone in no time. We have been descending again, I think, but there looks to be a rise ahead; otherwise there is very little that is different from the awful monotony of past days. Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

pookel posted:

Free Market Mambo posted:

There's a book written from the perspective of Shackleton's ship cat, Mrs. Chippy, that I've been trying to find a copy of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Chippy

I'm a cat guy, so I find myself (illogically) disagreeing with Shackleton's decision to have Mrs. Chippy euthanized. A cat doesn't really eat all that much.

quote:

Wolf Howard was one of the 13 original founder members of the Stuckists, a pro-figurative painting, anti-conceptual art group, co-founded by Childish and Charles Thomson in 1999. Howard exhibited in group shows, including The Stuckists Punk Victorian (2004) at the Walker Art Gallery for the Liverpool Biennial and Go West at Spectrum London (2006). He left the group in 2006 to pursue a solo career.

He paints bold figurative images in a simple, vigorous, impasto style. This has incurred criticism for its apparent naivety. Howard has stated that his finished result only comes about after hard work, which can involve scraping the paint back to the canvas up to ten times.

He has explained a particular painting, Mrs Chippy:

"People have said do me, 'What’s the point in painting a cat? My five-year-old daughter could do that.' Yes, she could, but would it be a cat that had the look in its eyes that conveyed to you that it was about to be shot? That’s the fate that befell Mrs. Chippy during one of the greatest survival adventures ever—Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to the Antarctic in 1914 on the ship Endurance—shown in the background of the painting , stuck in the ice, as the crew drag the small open boat which later accomplished an 850-mile rescue journey through sixty-foot waves.That’s the difference between my cat and a five-year-old’s."
He then added on the comment, "I also paint cats where there is no difference."

quote:

"Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser and brawler, and the moody, hypochondriac genius Kreisler. In his exuberant and bizarre novel, Hoffmann brilliantly evokes the fantastic, the ridiculous and the sublime within the humdrum bustle of daily life, making The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1820–22) one of the funniest and strangest novels of the nineteenth century."

Sarcopenia posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/04/jacob-wetterling-remains-of-boy-missing-for-27-years-are-found-in-minnesota

The remains of Jacob Wetterling have been found

Your Gay Uncle posted:

FYI there's a pretty solid nonfiction book called The Terror where the stranded ships are attacked by a crazy snow monster

Cumslut1895 posted:

Here's a fun reddit thread: [Serious] People who have experienced school shootings, what was it like to come back to school after the shooting?

Alereon posted:

Somewhat related, there's an article in New York Magazine called The Sandy Hook Hoax, about a father who lost his son and his fight against Internet trolls convinced he is a paid "crisis actor" whose son never existed.

It comes up frequently but Longform is an awesome website.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

They're digging up Cal Poly to find Kristin Smart. The guy who saw her last is being described as a "person of interest".

WickedHate posted:

It seems like a dick move to publicly label people suspects before at least officially charging them.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Yup. It's standard practice, but it's a bad one. Just like bringing suspects through a herd of reporters to be charged.

quote:

Between 1999 and 2001, after a tip, a US investigation was conducted into Landslide Productions Inc., a Texas-based online pornography portal operated by Thomas and Janice Reedy. The portal was found to have provided access to child pornography and the Reedys were both convicted of trafficking child pornography in August 2001.

quote:

In May 2002, Operation Ore was implemented in the UK to investigate and prosecute the Landslide users whose names were provided by the FBI. In the UK standard operating procedure dictates that all alleged paedophiles must be arrested quickly and thoroughly due to the high risk posed by paedophiles to children.

quote:

After 2003 Operation Ore came under closer scrutiny, with police forces in the UK being criticised for their handling of the operation. The most common criticism was that they failed to determine whether or not the owners of credit cards in Landslide's database actually accessed any sites containing child porn, unlike in the US where it was determined in advance whether or not credit card subscribers had purchased child porn. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell exposed these flaws in a series of articles in 2005 and 2007.[12][13][14]

Many of the charges at the Landslide affiliated sites were made using stolen credit card information, and the police arrested the real owners of the credit cards, not the viewers. Thousands of credit card charges were made where there was no access to a site, or access only to a dummy site. When the police checked, seven years after Operation Ore commenced, they found 54,348 occurrences of stolen credit card information in the Landslide database. The British police failed to provide this information to the defendants, and in some cases implied that they had checked and found no evidence of credit card fraud when no such check had been done. Because of the nature of the charges, children were removed from homes immediately. In the two years it took the police to determine that thousands had been falsely accused, over 100 children had been removed from their homes and denied any unsupervised time with their fathers.[15] The arrests also led to an estimated 33 suicides by 2007.[3]

WickedHate posted:

It seems like a dick move to publicly label people suspects before at least officially charging them.

willus posted:

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/

A bizarre story of an imagined sleight spiraling into something much, much crazier.

TotalLossBrain posted:

Intensively talked about on the last couple pages.

TotalLossBrain posted:

Intensively talked about on the last couple pages.

A Pinball Wizard posted:

Oh it was?

willus posted:

that's embarrassing and i can't believe i missed it.

Human Tornada posted:

Another one was a story about a murder that (I think) occurred in SW Ohio. The story was that a woman who worked at some sort of facility was locked in a tank or something and left to drown. There were only a few of her coworkers that it could have possibly been, but they were never able to figure out which one it was.

TotalLossBrain posted:

Look at this idiot here not paying attention to what thread he's in. Sorry guys.