{"id":2601,"date":"2020-12-25T14:30:44","date_gmt":"2020-12-25T14:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/?p=2601"},"modified":"2020-12-25T14:49:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T14:49:00","slug":"mother-jones-our-2020-time-capsule-is-full-of-stuff-we-didnt-know-we-needed-until-we-needed-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/?p=2601","title":{"rendered":"Mother Jones: Our 2020 Time Capsule Is Full of Stuff We Didn\u2019t Know We Needed \u2014 Until We Needed It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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The saddest, silliest, and most useful things from a largely unbearable year.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mother Jones Staff<\/strong>
December 22, 2020<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March 2015, as part of the town\u2019s 350th anniversary celebration, local officials in Smithtown, New York, opened up a time capsule that had been buried near the town hall 50 years earlier. According to Newsday, when they pried open the unearthed milk can, they found:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a proclamation of [the] beard-growing group Brothers of the Brush, papers and paraphernalia from the town\u2019s 300th anniversary events, a phone book, and edition of The Smithtown News, pennies from the 1950s and \u201960s, a man\u2019s black hat and a white bonnet.<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe most interesting thing that came out of the time capsule,\u201d said the executive director of the Smithtown Historical Society, \u201cwas the smell. It was horrible. I have smelled history before; history does not smell like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Time capsules often stink. At their worst, they\u2019re full of boring documents, moldy knickknacks, and (shudder) the occasional business card. They\u2019re generic, flat versions of a place\u2019s official story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But at their best, they can give future generations a sense of what it was like to live in a particular era\u2014or to live through a particularly horrible moment in time. What delighted when everything else dispirited? What were our rituals? Our talismans? Our griefs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s the spirit of our Mother Jones pandemic time capsule. We got through 2020\u2014barely. These things, though we never expected we would need them, helped. The year may have been a complete shitshow, but maybe, if we\u2019re lucky, the stench will wear off soon enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A meat thermometer<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
March 2020: I had lived my entire adult life without owning a thermometer. Correction, there was a meat thermometer in the kitchen drawer, there to help a pork roast emerge beautifully from the oven\u2014not so much to gauge the onset of my partner\u2019s COVID infection. It didn\u2019t have the decimal accuracy I was craving, but it did display a big \u201c100,\u201d useful when I stuck him like a slab of meat several times a day. It goes in the capsule as a reminder of those panicky early days, when getting an accurate read on anything, let alone body temperature, felt impossible, and time was measured in the intervals between bouts of fever and fatigue. \u2014 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
James West<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lire la Suite:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Tiens, en passant, l’idee du thermometre (voir ci-haut) etait un des sujets,pour la production des nouvelles toiles, eventuellement… et il y a quelques autres objets du meme genre dont les images ont ete preparees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The saddest, silliest, and most useful things from a largely unbearable year. Mother Jones StaffDecember 22, 2020 Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters. In March 2015, as part of the town\u2019sContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-alexandriaaoc","post-2601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-diversites-culturelles","category-news-politics","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2605,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions\/2605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.comandantetchao.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}