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Dan comments on this instagram reel from pinknews!

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop. With just an internet connection, these phones can make calls anywhere in the U.S. or Canada — no coins required. And Schlott covers all the operating costs himself.

When's the last time you saw a working payphone?

His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny. 

“ Bob Simon: What do you think this Max Ernst would be worth? Wolfgang Beltracchi: This one? Simon: Yeah. Beltracchi: $5 million, I think. Simon: $5 million.  And you can do it in three days? Beltracchi: Yeah, oh yes, yes, sure, or quicker” -From a 60 minutes interview with Bob Simon

In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.

“Beltracchi estimates he has done 25 Max Ernsts. He is not copying an existing work. He’s painting something he thinks Ernst might have done if he’d had the time or felt like it.”  -  The Con Artist: A multi-million dollar art scam

His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.

Keating painted more than 2,000 forgeries by over 100 different artists in his sixty-six years. Many had fraudulently sold at auctions with the total profits estimated at over 10 million dollars. “I flooded the market with the work of Palmer and many others,” the artist said. “Not for gain (I hope I am no materialist) but simply as a protest against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead. It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty,” he defended in The Fake’s Progress, his autobiography. “All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death.” […] Keating had a great respect and understanding of all the artists he imitated but was always reckless in his handling of the materials. He often used house paint and poster paint to mix in with his acrylics as a cheaper way to achieve the impasto works. At times he wouldn’t bother preparing his antique canvases he found at the junk shops out of laziness, so that in just a few years the paint would peel right off to reveal what was originally underneath. Keating often planted what he called “time bombs” like this in his paintings. Because of his understanding of the chemicals used in art restoration, Keating would purposely paint with layers of glycerin, which would destroy the painting once it was cleaned by a restorer, proving it was a fake. He often wrote obscenities under his paintings, like “Bollocks!”, in lead white so that it could be seen by the experts who x-rayed the painting to check its authenticity.

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

Gendered expectations sort of create doubles of children. There's the real child with their actual personality, interests and behaviors, and then there's the Gender Child.

My real brother hated soccer and team sports. The Gender Child that existed only the minds of the adults in his life needed to play soccer because that's what a Boy Child does.

Growing up, I always felt like adults didn't actually know me as a person and they weren't interested in getting to know me. Because they felt they'd already learned everything there was to know about me when they were told "it's a girl".

"This woman has a beard, thats not-" eat them.

"That man has a baby face, that's not" - eat them with barbecue sauce.

You can download Firefox here.

And you can down an adblocker add-on for it, which works on YouTube, right here.

There are versions for desktop and mobile, and it's completely within your rights to use them. Don't use the YouTube app again - all of the functionality is preserved in Firefox. You can even create themes for the browser!

And the best bit? You can transfer all of your login details, bookmarks, and history over from your current browser. It takes about 10 minutes, including the download time. You might as well do it now; you were only going to mindlessly scroll Tumblr in that time anyway.