It's Christmastime, and if there's anything that can unite a nation, even one that doesn't universally love the holidays, it's a collection of wonderfully weird vintage Christmas videos. And even if you don't like the holidays, you'll probably still enjoy these strange (but fun) attempts at whimsy and festivity.

The video is freakish not for the video itself, but for how freakishly progressive it was when it was made -- in 1913!

The Insects' Christmas ("Rozhdestvo obitateley lesa") (1913)

(Video link) Vladislav Starevich, born in Russia to Polish parents in 1882, started as a documentary filmmaker who worked for a natural history museum in Lithuania. He eventually developed a knack for stop-motion animation using dead animals. "The Insects' Christmas," which was originally silent (what you hear are selections from the soundtrack for Edward Scissorhands), is a classic example of Starevich's filmmaking accomplishments, along with "The Beautiful Leukanida" (1912) and "The Cameraman's Revenge" (1912). Witness the seasonal beauty as well as the horror when someone loses their head at the 5:13 mark!

Santa in Animal Land (1948)

(Video link) This short only reinforces my fear of puppets, and it could have easily gone the way of Dead Snow. But more troubling: Felix the Frog(-like creature)'s unacknowledged cocaine problem.

Black Friday 1983: What to Get a Hacker for Christmas!

(Video link) "I know it seems boring, and I know it seems pointless..." Man, technology was adorable in the '80s, wasn't it? I wonder whatever became of Wendy Woods, Computerized Pet Whisperer.

A Visit to Santa (1963)

(Video link) I'll admit that since this was featured at the 2009 RiffTrax Live Christmas Shorts-travaganza, the silly commentary may have tricked me into thinking this video was weird. But I watched it sans commentary, and it is still pretty weird, in a wonderful way. You won't believe this, but none of these people are professional actors!

The Rapture: Are You Ready For the End of the World? (1941)

(Video link) "Housework will be left undone because Christian maids have been promoted to higher realms!" And no milk. None.

Runners-up: The pleasant but racist The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives and the 1905 silent film, The Night Before Christmas, allegedly the first film adaptation of the famous poem.

A white fur-trimmed Santa hat tip to XmasFLIX for their excellent compilation!

If 3,000 years of history tell us anything, it’s that December 21st, 2012 – a date associated by some with the Mayan apocalypse – will feel a lot like any other day of the year.

Human beings have never been very good at predicting the end of the world. Though one would never know given our current surge of enthusiasm for apocalyptic scenarios. Even firearms manufacturers today are marketing real-life (and deadly) weapons as “zombie apocalypse” guns. (We all know that zombies aren’t real. Right? Right?). And just consider the last dozen years: Public interest has lurched from Y2K to 2012 to solar flares. It’s easy to make light of these attachments. But recent events reveal a contradictory and troubling attitude at the back of our fascination with The End. TV viewership, radio banter, and online surfing reveal a perverse sense of wonder toward Armageddon. Yet at the same time, we as a society evince a peculiar denial toward predictable and increasingly frequent weather emergencies, such as Hurricane Sandy, which crippled power and left thousands homeless in parts of the northeast.

Why do we often balance between this odd fascination with fictitious apocalysm and a state of unpreparedness toward authentic urgencies?

Journalists, scholars, and social scientists regularly look for geopolitical or social causes to explain our fixation on end times: Anxiety over economic conditions, the pace of technological change, or fears of natural disasters or environmental havoc are often trotted out. Of those culprits, extreme weather is the most justifiable cause for anxiety. Yet entertainment and consumption claim far more resources in our culture than safeguarding everyday people from weather emergencies. By the fourth night of the Sandy blackout, all but two of New Jersey’s Atlantic City casinos were up and running, while much of the city remained blanketed in darkness, shortages, and apprehension.

During the power outages in New York City my family – which fared better than most – lost power for about a week. We “fled” to a hotel in midtown Manhattan. We were the lucky ones. As I walked up Park Avenue looking at $25,000 wristwatches in boutique windows I wondered how much it would cost to provide better hurricane insulation at power plants; to install safer underground electrical lines; to purchase reliable generators for hospitals, nursing homes, and public housing; and to maintain a sound automated update system at our power companies. (Con Edison, which has no problem reaching us for interminable robo-calls, didn’t recognize our phone number when I tried to log into or call its automated information system).

The uptick of extreme weather events – Sandy was the northeast’s second hurricane in two years running – presents us with a “new normal” for which we’re not quite prepared. It is neither unreasonable, nor a side effect from too many apocalyptic-themed cable TV documentaries, for people to question whether industrialized civilization is like an inverted pyramid, balancing on a tip, with too many of our priorities and resources loaded at the wrong end. Some observers claim that we sublimate and vent these fears through our diet of zombie TV shows, apocalyptic video games, and day-after novels and movies. But look again. The screen entertainment that best captures our current mood consists of movies like The Truman Show, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, and Groundhog Day. Each of these films suggests that we not living the lives we think we are: that we are not making independent, thoughtful choices, but rather are following a conformist pattern of consumption and unawareness.

And that aspect of human nature exposes the real impetus behind our childlike fascination with end times. People everywhere yearn for inner change – for a way to detach from the cycle of routine daily existence, with its conflicts, habits, addictions, worries, and boredoms. We’re surrounded by therapeutic and religious ideas – yet the wish for change and personal fulfillment is almost always unfulfilled. So, in our frustration, we look without. We hope that some kind of seismic shift will rescue us from the inability to alter ourselves. Scary as it may be, the end of what we know promises to rupture old patterns and push us toward something new.

Consider the much-hyped Y2K, when the calendar turnover to the new millennium was supposed to wreak havoc on our computer systems. A highly accomplished parenting author told me at the time that his wife insisted on their purchasing a gas-powered generator. As he related the story I detected no fear at all in him; rather he sounded like a guy planning for a vacation. The same attitude appeared in other adults: they sounded like kids who were hoping for a “snow day” to get out of school. The routine of work, the obligations to family, the anxieties of day-in-day-out existence – all of it can seem to grow lighter for people when they think, as some do every few years, that the end is near. Many people indulge in a semi-believable image of a future that, if nothing else, represents a radical departure from the present.

But neither fantasy nor denial will work anymore. We need to better understand what it is in ourselves that is so bored or disaffected with the present that we enjoy musing over imagined disasters – even while we as a society fail to sensibly prepare for altogether real and predictable ones. In the coming year – and there will be one – we must trade “The End Is Near” for an older and more productive principle: “Know Thyself.” ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/21/mitch-horowitz-once-more-awai.html/feed 35 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/the-apocalypse-will-be-a-lot-l.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/the-apocalypse-will-be-a-lot-l.html#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:53:16 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=149281

What could possibly make a 1960s-era nuclear war worse than you'd already assumed it would be? How about being packed like sardines into a fallout shelter with 13 of your soon-to-be-closest friends?

Frank Munger is a senior reporter with the Knoxville News Sentinel, where he covers Oak Ridge National Laboratory—a nearby energy research facility that previously did a lot of civil defense research. Munger turned up this, and several other photos, of mockup nuclear shelter arrangements tested out in the basement at ORNL when the facility was trying to establish best practice scenarios for surviving the Apocalypse.

They look ... less than pleasant.

That said, though, they may not have been meant as long-term arrangements. Munger linked to an Atlantic article that makes an interesting case related to these photos: If what you're talking about is one relatively small nuclear bomb (as opposed to massive, hydrogen bomb, mutually assured destruction scenarios), the idea of "Duck and Cover" isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. If you could get these 14 people out of the way of the fallout for a couple weeks, their chances of survival would rise exponentially. Fallout shelters were not meant to be "the place you and your people live for the next 50 years."

The radiation from fallout can be severe -- the bigger the bomb, and the closer it is the the ground, the worse the fallout, generally -- but it decays according to a straightforward rule, called the 7/10 rule: Seven hours after the explosion, the radiation is 1/10 the original level; seven times that interval (49 hours, or two days) it is 1/10 of that, or 1/100 the original, and seven times that interval (roughly two weeks) it is 1/1000 the original intensity.

See the rest of Frank Munger's photos of ORNL fallout shelter mockups.Read the rest of The Atlantic article on "duck and cover". ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/the-apocalypse-will-be-a-lot-l.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/science-fiction-apocalypses-li.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/science-fiction-apocalypses-li.html#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:07:59 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=144773
John Herman sez, "I am producing 'An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre' in Portsmouth, NH. Nine plays, nine visions of the end -- including new works by Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction author James Patrick Kelly and best selling author of The Great Typo Hunt, Jeff Deck. A couple argues in a bomb shelter over a dog puzzle. A man gets an unexpected visit from Intergalactic Salvage. CERN scientists experience the romance of multi-verses. PLUS: Not only is the money raised going to three local charities, but I will also shave my head halfway through the show’s run to raise money for St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a group that funds childhood cancer research grants"

An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre (Thanks, John!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/science-fiction-apocalypses-li.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/the-last-thing-i-will-post-abo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/the-last-thing-i-will-post-abo.html#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:18:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=136748 Please read this excellent FAQ, written by actual archaeologist (and my former professor) John Hoopes. I did an interview with Dr. Hoopes last year about the 2012 as a phenomenon, but the new FAQ covers, in detail, why a 2012 apocalypse is bunk, and what sources you can check out to find further accurate information about the confluence of ancient Mayan mythology and modern Western mythology. And that is all I have to say about this for the rest of the year. Coming in 2013, though: Lots of stories about Mayan archaeology. Just to mess with you.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/the-last-thing-i-will-post-abo.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/13/the-annotated-apocalypse-anthropologists-tackle-2012.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/13/the-annotated-apocalypse-anthropologists-tackle-2012.html#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:00:38 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=113240

It's August of 2011, do you know when your Apocalypse is?

There are 1000s of people who think that something important—if not the end or the world, then something—will happen on December 21, 2012. These speculations spring from a well-seasoned cultural melting pot, but a key ingredient is the writings and beliefs of both ancient and modern Maya people. In fact, the folks promoting the 2012 movement often frame themselves as experts in Maya traditions.

Here's the thing, though: There are actual experts in ancient Maya traditions, and actual experts who study the culture and religion of modern Maya living today. These archaeologists and anthropologists have, inadvertently, created some of the pop culture legends that spawned the 2012 movement. But, until very recently, they've largely ignored that movement. This is starting to change, however. Last January, archaeo-astronomers held a symposium on the 2012 phenomenon and those papers were recently published in The Proceedings of the International Astronomy Union. Meanwhile, a new scholarly book, collecting essays on the 2012 phenomenon by Mayanist researchers, is set to be published soon.

One of the researchers featured in that book is John Hoopes, an archaeologist and one of my former professors when I was an anthropology student at The University of Kansas.

Hoopes does field research, digging at archaeological sites in Costa Rica and other parts of Central and South America. But, as a side project, he's also developed some expertise in the way archaeology—and, particularly, pseudo-archaeology—influences pop culture in the United States and Europe. I spoke with him about where 2012 myths come from, why scientists need to study and address pseudo-science movements, and why he thinks the 2012 phenomenon owes as much to H.P. Lovecraft and Aldous Huxley as it does to the ancient Maya.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: I know that you are an archaeologist, but you also have this very meta offshoot of your research that I sort of think of as the cultural anthropology of archeo-mythology. How did you get into that?

John Hoopes: That’s one way to put it. I usually think about it as the ethnography of contemporary culture. It goes a long way back. I was an avid consumer of pseudo-archaeology in high school. I was a sci-fi and fantasy fan. My very first research paper, in 10th grade, was a critical evaluation of the Lost Continent of Atlantis.

JH:The real stuff behind it, it comes in several flavors. The main real stuff are prophecies in The Books of Chilam Balam, the Books of the Jaguar Priest. That's really a set of different manuscripts from colonial Yucatan and it was published in the 1700s. But they recount stories that were collected much earlier, including ones from the time of Spanish arrival. Chilam Balam is a legendary prophet who made various pronouncements that are collected in these books. That's what's referred to as "Mayan prophecies." The scholarly discussion of them goes back to the 1930s.

Then, beginning in the 1970s you also have discussion of a monument called Tortuguero Monument #6. It appears in Linda Schele's work in 1982 [Schele was one of the key researchers in the story of how modern scientists learned to decipher ancient Maya hieroglyphics—MKB] and discussed at the Maya Workshops in late 1990s. As we got closer to 2012, David Stuart published the new translation. [Stuart is a student of Schele's and another key figure in the translation of Mayan writing.—MKB]

It's the only monument known to have the date 13.0.0.0.0—the Mayan date that corresponds to December 21, 2012—on it. The monument is damaged. So it's hard to read and it takes a lot of cleverness to decipher what the text actually says. The preliminary translation came out in the late 1990s. However, the inscription isn't at all clear. There's some discussion about whether it's even a prophecy, but I think it is. It refers to celebration of a god called Bolon Yok'te K'uh. This deity seems to be associated with warfare and with the king of Tortuguero. The most recent translation suggests that whatever they said would happen then was really just the dressing and honoring of this deity, nothing more.

The date 13.0.0.0.0 is a logical extrapolation of how the Mayan Long Count Calendar works. The first published mention of that date was in the 1800s, came from the work of Joseph Goodman. But it wasn't actually written anywhere other than the Tortuguero monument, which was discovered in the 1970s.

JH: It had been something on the edge of my consciousness for a while. The Mayan Factor by Jose Arguelles is a book was part of the New Age Harmonic Convergence of 1987. That came out right as I finished my dissertation. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because everybody had just written it off. By that point, people were joking about New Age and not taking it seriously. But at that time, Arquelles was writing about December 21, 2012. And it just grew from there. I didn’t pay much attention until 1995, which is when I noticed two things.

First, that was the year that the first interactive, graphic Maya calendar orientation program came out on the web and it gave December 21, 2012 as the date that corresponded to the Mayan date of 13.0.0.0.0. Then I got an email from Daniel Pinchbeck. We had a common interest in Burning Man and he contacted me saying that he was writing about Jose Arquelles and 2012 for Rolling Stone. That’s when I realized that this had taken on a life of its own. But I hadn’t really realized until early 2003 that it was something people were still paying any attention to.

JH: He’s made informal statements in email and in conversation with colleagues. And he did write an introduction to a book that's coming out soon, which I have contributed to, called 2012: Decoding the Counterculture Apocalypse. In that, he discusses his inadvertent role in fostering this myth.

It really started with his 1966 book, The Maya. He did two things. First, he was the first Maya specialist to correlate a long count date to a date in the future, rather than in the past. He was trying to figure out what that 13.0.0.0.0 date would be, and he turned out to be wrong. He thought December 24, 2011 and that was later corrected. But he was also the first person to link that date—13.0.0.0.0—to the concept of Armageddon and say that the Maya would have associated that date with the end of the world. I’ve been in pretty regular communication with him over the last several years, and he’s repeated that paragraph in all 8 editions of The Maya. He really thinks the ancient Maya would have thought about it that way. But that’s not everyone’s interpretation. And it’s not mine. That’s just what he thinks.

JH: I think that people are beginning to think that way, but it’s not how they thought before. I don’t think any of the Mayanists saw this coming. They’re taken aback by it. They’re surprised that the statements they make are taken as seriously as this and treated as real beliefs, absolute fact. What they’re really doing is throwing out ideas to make the books interesting. I don’t think Coe was asserting a scientific discovery about Maya prophecies. He was just talking in an informal way about what he thought the ancient Maya might have thought. In the past, those books were intended for academic audiences that understood that, but with the web new audiences have read these books and interpreted them in different ways.

JH: Oh, absolutely. I have a class called Archaeological Myths and Realities and we devote a whole semester to looking at myths that have come out of archaeology and how those play out in popular culture. We also discuss the phenomenon of how people learn about the past. I think a lot of the current generation of high school and college kids learn about archaeology through video gaming. They learn about it through Civilization and Tomb Raider. There are lots and lots of allusions in games to ancient cultures and civilizations, and through science fiction movies. Many people learn about the past through pop culture. And pop culture has popularized some really spurious theories. Think about the History Channel and their series on ancient aliens, for example.

JH: Mainly because I think it gives us an opportunity to see how religious movements begin.

There’s a lot in that mythology that people are referring to as if it is real or as something they want to believe in. It’s been tied together with the Age of Aquarius, the legitimacy of prophecy, and visionary experiences. There’s a lot there that’s similar to the beginnings of other religious traditions. Christianity, for instance, began in the context of messianic prophecies. The LDS church began in the context of speculation about Native Americans and concerns about the end of the world. And the Millerite movement of the 1840s is another one. That gave rise to today’s Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. William Miller prophesied the second coming for October 1844. And even though it didn’t happen, it still had a lasting legacy because so many people believed. Publications started by Millerites are still the publications of the Jehovah’s Witnesses today. I really think there will be some religious or spiritual movements that come out of the 2012 mythology. If you go into Barnes and Noble and look in the metaphysics or spirituality sections, you’ll find tons of books about 2012. It’s not treated as historical or scientific, but as spiritual.

JH: There’s only three books that represent scholarly critiques, and two scholarly articles. Anthony Aveni is an archeo-astronomer interested in the intersection of astronomy and culture. In his book, The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012, he’s talking about what the real science behind this is. There’s also another book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, by Mark Van Stone, which looks at what the hieroglyphic texts do and don’t say about 2012.

Like I told you, there’s actually only one text that even mentions it. And it’s not complete and not easily interpreted. All the prophecies don’t come from the pre-Columbian texts, but from post-contact documents that are heavily influenced by Christianity. There’s another paper about that contact period that has focused on the role of missionaries in the Yucatan shortly after Spanish conquest. Basically, it’s framing Millenarianism in the context of that post-contact era. Many of those people came to Mexico precisely because they were on the extreme end of ideology and were obsessed with the end of the world. And we know that one of the first things they said to the Indians they found was that the world is ending soon and Jesus is coming. It was a very important part of Spanish colonization. When we hear end of the world prophecies, what they are is synchronistic prophecies where Mayan beliefs and Catholic Millenarian beliefs combined.

JH: I think that scholars in general are very uncomfortable with contemporary belief systems. They’re laden with a lot of emotional baggage. It’s not the purpose of science to generate or support ideology, and so scientists are reasonably cautious and don’t want to contribute to that growth. They’re also just not familiar with it. They won’t touch fringe literature with a 10 foot pole and so they’re completely unaware of how big this phenomenon is. A student of mine has just written an article called “2012 by 2012.” He’s been keeping tabs on the number of books published about this topic and he thinks there will be more than 2000 books out by the time 2012 comes around. It’s been a huge publishing phenomenon.

JH: I think that they’re prepared to take it on in terms of the knowledge that they have. But they’re not well prepared in terms of how it is that we talk to people who are interested in the spiritual aspects of this. I think that actually polarizes the dialogue sometimes. Scientists and academics end up being seen as the bad guys. A lot of this mythology falls into anti-authoritarian mythology. “What the official sources tell you isn’t true. There’s a conspiracy to hide the truth.” The trailer for the 2012 movie said something along the lines of, “If governments knew about a world wide catastrophe, would they tell you?” It raises suspicion of authority. And I don’t think many academics are prepared to deal with people who are hostile to authority and who have made up their minds that scholars are lying or are part of the conspiracy.

JH: I try to be fairly diplomatic about it. I try to realize that these myths play a very important role in people’s lives. They make them feel comfortable, help them feel better. I try to help people develop critical thinking skills, and help them understand that you can’t educate yourself simply by reading the web and watching the History Channel. That it requires a lot of scholarship and reading, and you have to look at the original academic literature. You can’t rely on popular magazines. You have to evaluate the primary information itself. Lots of people can’t afford the academic training they want and so they try to do it themselves and wind up with an autodidactic education that includes a lot of bizarre and totally wrong speculative literature. In fact, a lot of people writing about this are self taught in the same way.

JH: I think it is, but I don’t know of any cultural anthropologists who pursue it. There’s a lot of excellent religious studies work on new religious movements, though. One of my favorite books is The Invention of Sacred Tradition. What they talk about is how people will invent things that they then say have been happening forever. I think it helps us understand the production of culture, how culture is generated. There’s a lot of richness out there that we can see in the creation of new mythologies.

Jesus Potter Harry Christ is another book you should look at. It’s a detailed comparison of Christian myth and the Harry Potter stories, and it comes to the conclusion that, except for the fact that Christian myth has been sanctioned for 2000 years, there’s no difference. Essentially, one could base a whole theology on Harry Potter. And, in fact, I suspect that in the future somebody will. That’s how culture gets created. Myth cycles become the way that people teach morality, values, and behavior. That’s what the Bible does, but Star Trek has that function, too.

JH: Something else covered in that 2012 book I’m in that hasn’t really been talked about in mainstream media … the reality is that this mythology came out of the psychedelic subculture. You can’t ignore that influence. I was talking about this with a TV presenter and her reaction was that they couldn’t say that because they do family programming. A lot of people won’t talk about it because it’s a taboo topic. But we do discuss that in this book. If some of the 2012 theories seem like they were made up by people on drugs, it’s because they were. There’s this huge psychedelic subculture that still exists and that the media doesn’t really report on except to demonize it. But it’s important.

Also, the most recent research I’ve been doing, and I haven’t published on this yet, but I’m finding links between the work of H.P. Lovecraft and influence of that on 2012. Michael Coe was a huge Lovecraft fan, even. I’m working on a manuscript on that right now. But Lovecraft is at the root of a lot of the ideas here, like the cycles of destruction, for instance. That’s not Mayan, that’s Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself had a lot of skepticism and felt that spiritualism was appropriate for fiction but didn’t believe any of it in everyday reality, and he kind of used his fiction as a way to mock those beliefs a little. But now that’s being used as reality.

JH: I hope that that work is happening. In fact, I’ve encouraged some of my students who work with modern Maya to be doing just that. Because what’s happening now is a very active synchretism of the religions of living Maya groups with New Age thought.

Mayan belief has long been synchronistic. In the pre-Columbian era they were influenced by the cultures and beliefs of Teotihuacan, the Toltecs, the Olmecs, and then you get the Spanish and Catholicism, then evangelical Protestantism, and since the 1970s there’s been this influence of the New Age and that’s really intensified now with the 2012 thing.

Essentially, some very enthusiastic hippies have gone into remote Maya villages, bringing their ideas about the New Age, Buddhism, and theosophy. They are introducing them to the Maya themselves, who are in turn producing a new synchretism. I think there are a lot of places that are reinterpreting shamanism along the lines of what Western academics think shamanism to be. That makes it really hard to understand what those people originally believed. The religous studies scholars call it “The Pizza Effect,” it refers to what happens when a culture reflects back to a foreign influence as though it had always been there. The Hare Krishnas, for instance, were an American interpretation of Hinduism and were exported to India, where it became a religious movement in India that hadn’t been there all along.

The name comes from the history of the pizza, which is that the pizza was invented by Italian immigrants in New England creating a quick lunch. But as American tourists went to Italy in search of authentic pizza the restaurateurs were happy to oblige by inventing a history of the pizza in Italy. And now you have this “authentic” Italian pizza coming back to the U.S. I think that’s happening with 2012 as well. You have modern Maya talking about New Age secrets as if those were original parts of Maya culture, but those were things that were learned in the 60s and 70s.

It is authentic. Synchretic beliefs are absolutely authentic. You know, the authenticity argument is really one of, “Do these people authentically believe this,” and the reality is that many, many Maya are authentically evangelical Protestants. Yes, it’s recent. But it doesn’t mean it’s any less authentic. But there’s a difference between authenticity and tradition. And the arbiters of truth and what is tradition are changing. Ironically, this is happening at a point where we know more than we ever did before about ancient texts because we can actually read them so much better. And there’s nothing in there about aliens.