You may see the number 8645 or 86/45 around for another couple years and I’m here to tell you what it means.
Well before Trump became a household name, an American slang term existed called “86” or “eighty-sixing”. When used as a verb, 86 means getting rid of something, ejecting someone, or refusing service. While no definitive origin for the term is known, there are several possible origins.
When paired with 45, the number of Donald Trump’s presidency, 8645 or 86/45 indicates support for getting rid of President Trump.
A 34-year old man named Justin Schneider picked up a hitchhiking 25-year old Native American woman from a gas station in Alaska. After driving a ways, he stops on the side of the road and asks her to get out of the car to help him with something. He then proceeds to strangle her into unconsciousness while saying that he is killing her. Once the woman is unconscious, Schneider masturbates and ejaculates over the woman. Eventually the woman regains consciousness and calls 9-1-1 to report the attack.
Following Schneider’s arrest, he accepted a plea deal where pleaded guilty to a single count of second-degree felony assault. This came with a sentence of two years in prison “with one year suspended”, meaning he only gets one year in prison. However, between Schneider’s arrest in 2017 and now, he has been confined to his home under house arrest. Therefore, the judge considered Schneider’s house arrest time served, declaring that Schneider would not have to serve time in prison.
The prosecutor, Anchorage Assistant District Attorney Andrew Grannik, emphasized that he made the plea deal because Schneider had no prior criminal record and seemed amenable to rehabilitation…
“That’s the reason why I made the deal that I made, because I have reasonable expectations that it will not happen [again],” Grannik said. “But I would like the gentleman to be on notice that that is his one pass. It’s not really a pass, but given the conduct, one might consider that it is.”
Where is the charge of attempted murder? Where is the charge of sexual assault? How is a single count of assault and a sentence of one year under house arrest adequate punishment? I fear that stories such as this one are why my generation has grown up with a lack of faith in the American legal system.
I discovered Slothrust thanks to Spotify’s Discovery Weekly playlist. They are an American trio from Boston. Originally, I thought their name was a combination of “slow” and “thrust”. Turns out I was wrong. The intended pronunciation is “sloth rust”.
Seeing that the temperature in Portola Valley was breaking 80° today, I thought it would be fun to catch the sunset in my hammock from the top of Windy Hill.
Any time I hear a song from the album Carnavas by Silversun Pickups, I’m transported back to the Summer of 2007 living in Los Angeles while interning at a video production studio in Santa Monica. While it was easily one of the worst Summers I have experienced, I feel an odd sense of nostalgia for that time.
I decided to make a map of the public beaches on the southwest side of Maui, Hawaii because no one else has made a usable map of all the beaches paired with information about each beach.
Sticking with the EDM theme of last week’s post, here is some music from the alliteratively named Tommy Trash and Madison Mars. Coincidentally, like Mord Fustang Madison Mars is another DJ hailing from Estonia. Tommy Trash on the other hand comes from the opposite side of the planet: Australia.
I spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts. In the past, I suspected the amount of time was immense, but I never knew exactly what the number was. Now, thanks to the listening statistics in Pocket Casts I know exactly how much time I spend listening to podcasts.
I captured the image below on June 16, 2018, exactly 365 days after switching over to the Pocket Casts app:
Sixty seven days is 1,608 hours or 96,480 minutes. If I did absolutely nothing except listen to podcasts 24 hours a day beginning on January 1st, I would have to keep my headphones on until March 18th to equal the amount of listening I do over the course of a year.
However, 67 days is not a truly accurate representation of the amount of podcasts I have listened to because I do not listen to most podcasts at their regular speed. Given that my subscription count stands at 249 podcasts, it is not humanly possible to listen in realtime to all of the content they produce. Instead, I listen to most podcasts at two times their realtime speed. Additionally, I use Pocket Casts features such as silence trimming and intro skipping to further increase the amount of podcasts I can consume. This means that in reality, I actually listen to well over 120 days worth of podcasts every year.
The piece of this situation that strikes me as remarkable is not my total listening time or the amount of time I save by speeding up audio. Rather, what I find remarkable is that every single second of every podcast is 100% completely free. I did not need to spend even a single penny to obtain any of the programming I listened to. Try to do that with television, movies, or even books. In most mediums, it is not possible to consume content for free. Yet, with podcasts I can stay up-to-date with current events, explore various facets of the designed world, study important events in history, gain understandings of viewpoints which are not my own, follow local stories about the SF Bay Area, listen to music from bands across the musical spectrum, and a whole lot more without opening my wallet.
