Category: No Politics Friday

You have at least one relative who forwards you every ridiculous piece of chain email nonsense that crosses his or her (AOL/Hotmail) account, right?
buy clomiphene online gilbertroaddental.com/wp-content/languages/new/generic/clomiphene.html no prescription

Everybody needs to have at least one person like that in their life. You're really missing out if you're not seeing this stuff.
online pharmacy orlistat best drugstore for you

Whenever I see one of these things I have the same thoughts: Who wrote this? Who is actually bored enough to sit down and make up a bunch of bullshit to forward to thousands of strangers? Who wakes up and thinks, "Today I'm going to start a rumor that No More Tears baby shampoo is full of novocaine"? That just seems like such a strange thing to do, even for the millions of weirdos that litter the internet.

I don't care if this turns political even on No Politics Friday, but share with us your tales of the most ridiculous, far-fetched, and insane conspiracy theories that you've seen (or heard, because why limit the fun to email) over the years.
online pharmacy synthroid best drugstore for you

buy cymbalta online www.pharmalucence.com/wp-content/languages/new/generic/cymbalta.html no prescription

In the past month alone I've heard that Obama regularly contacts aliens, the government has purchased a billion bullets to execute us all when we are placed in FEMA camps, and genetically modified foods are made in part from fetuses and cadavers.

People believe this shit. They really do. Even the most patently ludicrous theories have a handful of supporters. Too often those supporters include the assheads from your high school graduating class who find you on Facebook, or the uncle with whom you were not allowed unsupervised interaction as a child.

I'm in a severely foul (hockey-related) mood as the Blackhawks continue to make a middling Red Wings team look like the 1977 Montreal Canadiens. Fortunately today was scheduled for Link Salad composed of a couple of strange places and something interesting to gawk at.

1. Do you enjoy peace and quiet? Then you'll love the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis. It wrested the title from the AT&T-Bell Labs "Quiet Room" in New Jersey, which was the site of many interesting tests and developments over the years. The Orfield room eliminates more than 99% of external sound, somehow producing a negative decibel rating (which I didn't know was possible) compared to the average "quiet room" with about 30 dB of background noise.

Surely this sounds pretty good to you lovers of peace and quiet. Well, it's unpleasant; the longest anyone has been able to tolerate sitting in it is 45 minutes. It is so quiet that it causes people to hallucinate. Although obviously the effect of being in the room cannot be conveyed in a video, this short clip about Orfield is interesting nonetheless.

2. Have you ever wondered what is the worst restaurant in the world? Well why not? Surely the quest to find it would be at least as interesting, if not as pleasant, as finding the best one. Vice has a nominee for this award, and it's in Los Angeles. Yes, I know. Vice is written by dicks, for dicks. No, the writer is not exactly sensitive to the plight of the homeless. But you have to admit, even if you find the author smug and condescending, that you won't be dining here anytime soon.

3. Here's an interesting little project by an artist depicting historical figures in various paintings in modern dress. Shakespeare looks pretty intimidating in most of the surviving depictions; it's interesting to think that if he was alive today he would probably look like an English graduate student. That is, like a hobo.

There's something inherently interesting, not to mention disturbing, about abandoned places. The internet agrees, as it has fueled the growth in "urban exploration" as a (white, middle class) hobby. Search around and you'll find that pictures of abandoned factories, amusement parks, and malls aplenty. Personally, my favorite type of man-made wreckage is a good old fashioned white elephant. They might not be abandoned in the strictest sense, but they have this special kind of sad, pointless emptiness that you can't find anywhere else. Imagine walking around a museum alone or being the only fan in an entire stadium. But enough about going to Miami Marlins games.

I've never been to Montreal, but it is the Graceland of giant, burdensome, staggeringly expensive, useless public works projects. There's Olympic Stadium, but that's a story for another day. Here's a good trivia question. What is the largest airport in the world by area? While this title is now disputed*, I'm going to guess that Montreal-Mirabel Airport was not on the tip of your tongue. Why? Because you can't actually book a flight into the world's biggest, and almost totally empty, airport. At a hard-to-comprehend 396 square kilometers in area, Mirabel opened in 1975 (for the 1976 Montreal Olympics) and is easily visible from space.

Are you sure it's big enough? For the planes carrying tens of millions of people to…Montreal?

The gargantuan airport hasn't had passenger service for over a decade, handling only cargo traffic. The city has spent 30 years trying to find alternate uses for it – it has been used variously as a Formula 1 racetrack, a Bombardier airplane factory, a movie set, warehouse space, and more. For a while they were even talking about turning into an amusement park.
buy temovate online buy temovate no prescription

So how does a city build the world's biggest airport and it ends up totally empty?

After Expo 67 (the spiritual successor of the great World Fairs of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries) and their winning bid to host the Summer Olympics of 1976, the city fathers in Montreal were making some boldly optimistic projections of the city's future (and possibly doing a lot of blow as well). Along with the Canadian federal government they began planning massive new infrastructure projects. Montreal was served by a relatively small city airport, Dorval (now – because god has a sense of humor – named Pierre Trudeau International) which was handling an unplanned amount of international traffic. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, airliners did not have the range we're accustomed to today. So west coast flights to Europe, Africa, the Mideast, etc commonly stopped in Montreal to re-fuel before crossing the Atlantic. So they hatched a brilliant plan.

Projecting that Montreal's airports would be handling a staggering 20 million passengers annually, they drew up plans for Mirabel to handle all international flights. Domestic flights would continue to use Dorval.
online pharmacy neurontin best drugstore for you

When Mirabel opened, though, the floods of passengers never came. First, technological advances made it unnecessary for newer airliners to make refueling stops. Second, nobody within or outside of Montreal wanted to use the damn thing. It was built more than an hour's drive from the city (Dorval is much closer) and the promised high-speed rail line to connect the city and airport never materialized. It was expensive, so the airlines hated it. And because it could offer the size of a major airport with the convenience of domestic connections, airlines decided to avoid Montreal altogether and just fly to Pearson International in Toronto (the one Rush wrote a song about). After twenty years the governments collectively gave up on Mirabel and…expanded Dorval to accommodate 20 million passengers, which I guess they kinda could have done in the first place. At its peak, Mirabel handled 3 million passengers in one year. This is the amount of passengers handled in 2012 by the 52nd busiest airport in the U.S. – Port Columbus International in lovely Columbus, Ohio. Check out the bustling terminal at Mirabel today!
online pharmacy cytotec best drugstore for you

Let's just say things didn't pan out. And it's still standing to remind everyone of its failure.
buy furosemide online buy furosemide no prescription

We've all made bad predictions and worse plans, but a literal concrete-and-steel monument has never been built to your bad ideas. Whoever finds this planet in a few thousand years after we're long gone will be baffled by it. Fittingly, they will probably land at Dorval. "Why would you land at the one that's farther away?" they will ask in their strange, alien tongue. Good question. Good question.

There is a new – and I mean brand-spanking new – Tumblr called The Worst Room dedicated to one person's online search for decent and affordable (by NYC standards) accommodations in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Granted, s/he is looking in what is likely the most expensive market for rental quarters in the United States, but it is nonetheless staggering to see how substandard some of these places are – and at what price.
online pharmacy albuterol best drugstore for you

If you doubt that these would-be landlords will find eventual takers for these hovels even at these inflated prices, befriend some young, marginally employed New York folks and they will set you straight. Sure, perhaps the guy asking $1900/month for a loft bed in Lower Manhattan might be overreaching, but I wouldn't put it past any of my New York comedy friends to live in these places. Hell, they'd probably try to fit multiple people in the $300/month breakfast nook.

There are many, many advantages to living in NYC, including nearly unlimited access to entertainment and cultural opportunities.

The rest of us miss out by comparison. That said, it's pretty nice to pay under $800/month for a giant two-story house built in 1911 rather than $1200/month to share a third floor walk-up with two weirdos I met on Craigslist. I know, I know, the costs are low here for a good reason, namely that there is no demand. Nonetheless, every time I've looked at the costs of living in places like New York I've been floored to say the least.

Two quick anecdotes. First, I was once shown an apartment in Madison, WI in the attic of a house with a sharply angled roof.
online pharmacy symbicort best drugstore for you

The ceiling was approximately 5'10", or approximately 4" shorter than me.

The realtor continued to make her pitch, as if I would be renting this apartment in which I could not stand. Second, an old acquaintance moved to Brooklyn in the early 2000s and ended up paying a couple hundred bucks per month to live (illegally, of course) on the roof of an apartment building under a tarp. I mean, at that point I'd probably forgo the NYC dream and settle for Chicago.

First off, sorry for the erratic posting this week. End of semester. Lots of balls (*giggle*) in the air.

On Tuesday I wrote about how poorly students are taught about recent history – the past 50-75 years – in K-12 in the United States. It's particularly damaging that many students past and present have concluded their high school history courses without getting to World War II, which I argued is essential to understand if one hopes to make sense of the world since 1950. On that note, today seemed an appropriate time to share a couple of my favorite trivial facts about ol' WWII. Well, several iterations of one fact, I guess.

One of the funny things about the Nazis (And really, who can pick just one?) was how important the concept of racial purity and Aryan supremacy was to them when the war was going well and how quickly it became a secondary concern when the tide turned in 1943. For a group of people who considered almost every other ethnic group and nation in Europe to be composed solely of degenerates, the Nazis sure did have a lot of foreigners in their midst.

True fact: The last Nazi SS troops defending Berlin were…French. The SS "Charlemagne" Division was composed of French volunteers who had greeted the Nazis with enthusiasm when they took Paris. By May of 1945, German troops had surrendered in droves to the advancing American and (if they had no other option) Soviet armies. But not the Charlemagne Division. So it transpired that the last holdouts, the people defending the bunker as Hitler and Goebbels were writing out wills and killing themselves, were Frenchmen. We might assume that the French Nazis preferred death in battle to whatever awaited them if they returned to France.

Speaking of, I'm sure the Red Army had a forgive-and-forget attitude toward members of the Russian Liberation Army – Russian expatriates and POWs who volunteered to fight for the Third Reich. What do you suppose was the life expectancy of a Russian in a Nazi uniform who fell into Soviet hands?

And the Russians weren't the only Degenerate Slavs welcomed into the SS and Wermacht with open arms. There were dozens of Croatian units (no one remembers the Ustase, who were actually more fascist than the Nazis and largely responsible for the "ratlines" through which Nazi war criminals escaped to Argentina after the war) as well as the British Free Forces (which was mostly for propaganda purposes), Danish, Belgian, Serbian, Turkish, Dutch, Estonian, and Ukranian units fighting in the German Army and SS.

Oh, and a bunch of dark-skinned, swarthy Indians. Yes, the "Indische Legion" was composed of Indians who so hated the British colonialists that they fled to Berlin and took up with the Nazis. Most were followers of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Nazis thought enough of these decidedly non-Aryan troops that they were heavily represented in the Atlantic Wall defenses that opposed the Normandy landings on D-Day. So contrary to what Saving Private Ryan would have you believe, a lot of the "Germans" defending those beaches were Indians (and Russians).

Must have made for some awkward moment, though, to have so many foreigners in the ranks of such a thoroughly xenophobic population. I mean, not that the Indische Division was disliked by any of its German colleagues or anything…

Early in the evening on July 23, 1984, five year-old Ed was in the driveway with one of the neighbor kids learning the basics of tactical warfare with GI Joe action figures. Our moms were sitting in cheap folding lawn chairs. The day had been unbelievably hot, and by about 6 PM the sun had gone down enough to offer some shade and bring the temperature down under 90. Shortly after 6:00, with no warning we were all shocked by the loudest explosion I've ever heard before or since. It knocked one of the neighbor kids off of his bike. Crappy 1980s car alarms went off.

It was the kind of loud that you could feel; the ground actually wobbled a little.

We hadn't a clue what happened. Earthquake? (Midwesterners have no idea what those actually are. It seemed plausible to us.) Russian nuclear strike? Plane crash? After a few minutes we decided that the nuclear plant in Braidwood, IL – about 30 miles away – had blown up. We didn't exactly know a lot about nuclear power as a group, so we figured it would just blow up like a giant bomb.

Well, we were close. Turns out that the Union Oil Refinery in Romeoville, IL (about 20 miles away) had been leaking gas into one of its tanks for days.

A small fire broke out. As they began trying to extinguish it, the whole structure detonated in an explosion heard as far away as Indiana. A thirty-four ton tank was thrown over 500 feet through the air.

Everything in the immediate vicinity was flattened. Seventeen people, including ten members of the fire department, died in the explosion. OSHA fined Union Oil, although a promise to prosecute company officials for safety violations (of course) never materialized.

I had an immediate and unusually vivid flashback to all of this when I saw the video from the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas.

An explosion of that magnitude is the kind of thing that you can't explain but, if you experience it (from a safe distance, fortunately) you never forget it.

No, I'm not referring to the classic 1970s Sidney Lumet film. I mean the kind of "networking" that is essential to success in…essentially every profession. I can't decide if it's a terrible thing or the absolute worst of all things.
buy levaquin online buy levaquin no prescription

Certainly I would hate it less if I were better at it, but I have a very low tolerance for people who are full of themselves and the painfully socially awkward. Since that covers about 94% of people in academia, I find this process to be painful in the extreme.
online pharmacy zithromax best drugstore for you

Hi! I noticed that your life is infinitely better than mine because you went to the Correct grad school. May I pretend that you're interesting for a few minutes in the hopes that you'll throw me a few crumbs at some point?
buy grifulvin online buy grifulvin no prescription

Fantastic! Gee, where's a carbon monoxide leak when you really need one?
online pharmacy furosemide best drugstore for you

About a year ago I was in a bar with a friend and a bunch of his friends, who were strangers to me. One of them immediately struck me as the kind of person I would not associate with voluntarily. He was nice enough to broadcast the fact that he was an an insufferable asshead by being incredibly rude to the bar staff.

If you're in any kind of social setting with someone who is a dick toward service industry employees, you may safely leap to the conclusion that this person is terrible. In every way. Without fail.

Let's call him Chad. Chad was the typical ex-fratboy in his late twenties, all spray tanner and tacky Ed Hardy shirts covering his now-ample gut. A few years out of some undoubtedly expensive MBA program, Chad carried himself like a Very Important Person. But he clearly wasn't one. The conversation (he loved talking about himself, naturally) indicated that he had some sort of low-level, demeaning job that he considered beneath him. His manner of speaking to the bartender and waitress was a combination of how you'd picture Mitt Romney speaking to his lawn maintenance workers and how Maxim magazine would recommend sizing up one's next rape victim. When the bartender suggested he knock it off, does anyone care to guess what Chad did next?

Yes, he loudly demanded to see "the manager."

He complained to this gentleman for several minutes about the staff's failure to meet his high personal standards, and the manager, clearly used to this sort of thing, politely mollified him with soothing words that made him feel important. He turned to our group, many of whom he did not even know, and said, "You see? That's how you get the kind of service you deserve."

Mind you, we're just in some hotel bar. This isn't the Waldorf-Astoria or Windsor Castle or any other place where one might expect, however unfairly, hand-and-foot service from staff. This was just a bar/restaurant with a bartender and a couple of servers who probably had day jobs and a hundred other things going on in their life of more significance than Chad's drink order.
buy lariam generic buy lariam online over the counter

I've never worked in the service industry. I got a job doing janitorial work at the park district when I was 15 and skipped the McDonald's/Chili's/Fast Food rite of passage. Accordingly, I have no first hand experience with how awful people can be in that environment. Watching Chad was an important revelation for me. I saw him and understood immediately all of the stories I've heard from service industry employees over the years. I realized how many Chads there are in this country – self-styled Important people who aren't important at all. He's spent his whole life envisioning himself as one of the big shots, one of the people who hires and fires and takes orders from no one.

But now that he has entered the real world he's not hiring or firing anyone, and he takes orders from everyone. He's nobody and nothing.

The service industry becomes the outlet for his own frustration and impotence; here are some people he can boss around for a while. Here are some people who are beneath him, whom he expects to be kissing his ass. There certainly isn't anyone else doing it. He even gets to reward and punish them with a tip. It's almost like he's the boss! But not really at all. He's just a supreme d-bag basking in the momentary thrill of bossing someone around.

Every time I have been in a tipping situation since then I've thought about Chad. Putting up with people like that is worth at least 17%.

On April 18, 1930 the BBC opened its radio broadcast by stating, "There is no news today" followed by piano music for a few hours.

buy singulair online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/languages/new/us/singulair.html no prescription

Sometimes silence is better than adding to the cacophony.