Category: No Politics Friday

With the recent news that US Postal Service losses in 2011 have been far greater than expected – They're now losing more than $3 billion per fiscal quarter – and with the continued decline in mail volume, it seems only a matter of time until Congress takes the austerity stick uses it to beat the agency half to death. Your anecdotal experience is probably enough to explain why; try to think of the last time you received mail that wasn't garbage. If I didn't occasionally buy something off eBay that arrived by mail, credit card junk mail is the only thing I would ever receive. The Postal Service is unlikely to disappear, but it is highly likely that we won't recognize it in a few more years. Post offices will be closed and consolidated, delivery will be limited to a few times per week in some areas, and the agency will devote even more of its resources to shipping packages as opposed to carrying letters.

In honor of the long history of the USPS (and its predecessor, the Post Office Department originally headed by Ben Franklin, here is a random, hopefully entertaining list of interesting postal trivia and oddities I've amassed over the years.

– As of 2011, the USPS still delivers mail regularly via mule train on one route. An 8-mile trip to the bottom of a canyon to deliver mail to Havasupi Indians in Arizona occurs weekly. Mules, people.

– Although it has been a source of controversy, the most expensive mail route in the U.S. continues as the only one with delivery solely by air. Once per week a subcontractor, who is paid over $50,000 annually in the contract, flies mail to 20 cabins and ranches in the Frank Church Wilderness Area in Idaho. (The cuts referenced in this NPR story were later overturned by the Postmaster General).

– The Zip Code 48222 is a boat on the Detroit River called the J.

W. Westcott, which deliver mail to passing ships without either vessel docking. WTF. I have never understood this. But it exists.

– The longest daily rural mail route is 148 miles long and snakes through rural northwestern North Dakota. It serves less than 100 addresses over that vast distance. North Dakota is not a very exciting place, is it? And I bet the letter carriers draw straws to avoid this route.

– The very first daily, day-and-night transcontinental air mail route – from NYC to San Francisco – was established in 1924. The plane stopped between 12 and 16 times for fuel. Air travel has changed a lot, hasn't it.

– Zip Codes rise as one travels west. The highest, 99950, belongs to Ketchikan, Alaska, home of the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" that became an issue in the 2008 election. The lowest, 00501, serves a single IRS office building in New York.

– The Pentagon has six Zip Codes. For a single building. The World Trade Center had one as well. Until 2008, Chicago's Merchandise Mart also had its own (60654).

– Marc Chagall's painting "Study for Over Vitebsk" was stolen the Jewish Museum in New York in 2001 and found in a Topeka, Kansas dead letter office. Legally, dead letters are the only kind of mail that can be opened by the Postal Service in an attempt to determine the intended recipient. Or to discover priceless art.

– Loma Linda, CA has no Saturday delivery but is the only municipality with regular Sunday delivery. The town has a large percentage of Seventh Day Adventists, including among its postal workers, who will not work on Saturday.

– The Post Office Department, forerunner of the USPS, had a seriously awesome logo:

– In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, mail was delivered several times per day. In major cities like New York, deliveries in business districts took place almost continuously during the day. Wall Street and Lower Manhattan were the last areas with two-per-day delivery, which ended in 1990.

– For the last 20 years, new USPS employees have seen a training video starring one of the most famous fictional mailmen, Cliff Clavin of Cheers.

– Mail delivery to and in Alaska is a major drain on the USPS. With a poor road network and low population density, it has hundreds of towns to which mail must be flown daily.

– The largest USPS facility in the country by far is Chicago's main post office / sorting facility. It is so large that Interstate 290 travels underneath it at one point. Most of the complex has been abandoned for years. Daley wanted to turn it into a casino.

– A little girl was mailed from Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents in Lewiston in 1914. A cooperative postmaster invoiced the child as a "48 pound baby chicken", two pounds under the 50 limit on mailing live poultry. Rather than being sealed in a box, the address was pinned to her dress and she rode with the mail carrier in the cab of the delivery vehicle.

Feel free to add your own trivia or relay some amusing anecdotes. Before we forget all of this stuff.

Lord knows I don't want to add to the mountain of material in our culture glorifying war, and particularly the Second World War, but I find this non-combat related tale irresistible for some reason.

That reason may be that it is awesome.

Most westerners, and certainly Brits and Americans, are familiar with the tale of the "D-Day" landings at Normandy, the focal point of Operation Overlord.

Briefly, the strategic importance of Overlord cannot be overstated. It was the Allies' all-in effort to establish a foothold on the continent, the success of which directly precipitated the defeat of Nazi Germany. Had the landings failed on June 6, 1944, the war in Europe could have been prolonged by as much as a year as the Allies regrouped, rearmed, chose a new landing site, and so on. In those additional months/years, hundreds of thousands of additional civilians, Nazi death camp inmates, and combatants who survived the war might have ended up dead.

One crucial element of war that historians and popular consciousness never seem to appreciate is the weather. It's a wild card, and the history of war is a history of good or bad fortune with weather; anyone familiar with the American Revolution, for example, knows the number of occasions on which the tiny Continental Army was saved by "divine providence" – particularly at the Battle of Long Island, where a miraculous, dense fog allowed Washington's 9000 man army to escape siege and eventual destruction by a large, concentrated British force. Yep, we basically won that war because of fog (and the massive balls of pre-treason Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Valcour Island, but that's a story for another day).

The D-Day landings needed specific weather conditions to succeed. First, a low tide was essential. In deep water, men and vehicles would be drowned before they even reached the beaches. Second, clear skies were required to permit air cover, shelling of German defenses, and so on. Finally, and coincidental to the low tides/clear skies, a full moon was needed for night operation. OK? OK.

The moon/tide schedule in June 1944 allowed for a brief window from June 4-6. Weather on June 4 was rough and stormy. June 5 was not much better. The massive movement of ships, men, and supplies toward Normandy was already underway, and Eisenhower needed to decide if they should be turned back (no small feat) or proceed with the invasion – which, again, would probably fail spectacularly if the weather was adverse. So he turned to his meteorologist, Group Captain J.M. Stagg, a cantankerous Scotsman whose uniform included specially made pants to house his balls.

A few points.

First, weather forecasting over the English Channel today, using computers, radar, and satellites, is dead wrong 50% of the time. Not "a little off" but completely wrong. Stagg didn't have satellites and radar.

Meteorologists of that era drew pressure maps by hand, searched their archives to find similar looking maps from past dates, and then predicted that whatever weather followed that pattern previously would happen again.

It was…not a great system. It was what they had. They made the best of it. But it wasn't exactly a science.

Not pictured: giant balls

As Group Captain Stagg (side note: use any "Group Captain!" quote from Dr. Strangelove here) surveyed the nasty weather on June 4 and 5, he looked at his crude data and came upon the idea that there would be "a break" in the violent seas and thunderstorms on June 6. Stagg has stated, as most meteorologists of his era no doubt knew in their hearts, that this was based on "a hunch" and experience. Basically, the fate of the largest invasion force ever assembled was subject to the hunches of a Scotsman with a hand-drawn map of weather fronts. Eisenhower had grown to trust Stagg and accepted his forecast. So it was a hunch about someone else's hunch; Ike went with his gut and went with Stagg's gut. It really is a miracle that the invasion force was not consumed by a hurricane and the Kraken.

I have to wonder what, aside from liquor, was going through the Group Captain's mind as he put his balls on the table and said, "No worries, this weather will clear up by the time they reach Normandy." Surely he knew what a disaster awaited them if he was wrong. Thousands of men could have died. The Allied war effort could have been set back months or years. And if that happened, he would have been the goat for all of it. Stagg recalled one General Morgan telling him, "Good luck Stagg. May all your depressions be nice little ones. But remember, we'll string you up from the nearest lamp post if you don't read the omens right." That may have been putting it kindly.

Salut, Group Captain Stagg! Salut, giant balls!

Just a reminder: No Politics doesn't always mean fun.

I keep a fairly regular schedule during the work week, including going to the gym at basically the same time every day. As a result I tend to see many of the same people every day, at least those who keep similarly regular schedules. Over the past year there is one girl in particular that I've seen nearly every single time I've gone to the gym on campus. If she isn't thrashing away on an elliptical machine when I arrive she's inevitably there when I'm leaving.

I just realized that the opening paragraph sounds like the intro to a 1970s Penthouse Letter, which it is not.

About a year ago when I first noticed her she was an unremarkable undergraduate, perhaps slightly overweight depending on one's definition. As the months passed she exercised herself down to a point that I think would please most people who started going to the gym with the goal of losing weight. I'd say she lost about 20 pounds. Eventually she was Thin. Then she lost more and got down to Sorority Girl Thin. Then she got to a point at which even sorority girls would say "You're too thin." Then over the last month or so she has become truly horrifying. By now she looks like a skeleton, and I mean that in the most literal sense. Her thighs and calves are the same diameter, and her knees are the thickest part of her legs. Her collarbone juts out a good inch or two from her shoulders. Bones that aren't visible on anyone like the humerus and femur are clearly visible on her when she moves. Her skin is yellow and her eyes have that dark, sunken look of a famine victim.

In short, one would have to be rather ignorant to fail to notice that this girl has an active eating disorder, and quite a severe one from the looks of it. Being a generally nosy and outspoken person, it's rare that I see her without wondering If I Should Say Something. Of course I never do. The excuses for avoiding it are so numerous. It's none of my business. She wouldn't care what a stranger says anyway. She might have some rare disease that causes weight loss. I wouldn't tell a large person "You're fat!" so I shouldn't tell this person she's too thin.
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Her friends and family are probably already intervening. I'm being paternalistic and sexist. And so on.

I don't know about you, but I struggle with this all the time. It bothers me that we all walk around seeing and hearing these…
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signs and we almost always look the other way. The woman with the black eye. The guy who "likes to party" but clearly drinks too much.
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The person with track marks on the arm. The friend who's obviously seriously depressed.
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The dozens of other people with whom we interact regularly and realize that something isn't right.

What do you do, though? Sure, a lot of us suffer from bystander apathy and blissfully live out the Kitty Genovese Effect. But when you do notice and you do think, "I should say something," there's still not much to say or do. It's not like Emily Post has a chapter about how to suggest to a stranger that she might seek help for an eating disorder. This isn't the kind of post that goes anywhere or arrives at a resolution; I don't have an answer, and a lot of things I notice might not be as they appear. But I tend toward hyper-awareness in public spaces and it never fails to bother me when I see things and can't figure out what (if anything) a reasonable person might do about it.

I am lucky enough to live in a place with a large community of fellow comedians (relative to the city size) as well as proximity to Atlanta, one of the top three or four comedy cities in the country.

There's been a bit of drama recently mirroring some of the controversy on the national stage in the past few months regarding "the line" over which comedians cannot cross.

Briefly, a group of people in town are organizing a comedy show that purports to be "anti-sexist" and "inclusive". This is no doubt a response to the fact that the average amateur comedy show / open mic night is filled to bursting with borderline (or worse) jokes about race, gender, sexual orientation, rape, masturbation, and so on.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First, it's easy. Budding comedians learn quickly that "bathroom" humor and playing to stereotypes is like a crutch. Why? Because second, people laugh at it. Remember the kind of crap that is popular in this country; whether we're talking about books, music, movies, or comedy, people tend to like lowbrow, hacky crap. Third, one of the pillars of comedy (of which there are four, and that's a post for another day) is transgressing boundaries. People expect to be shocked a little, to have a few "Oh my, he did NOT just say that!" moments. Fifty years ago when married couples on TV slept in separate beds it was easy to shock people. Lenny Bruce was thrown in jail for saying "fuck". Today, with regular network TV laden with people murdering, swearing, and blowing each other for drugs, it takes quite a lot to shock people. This is directly responsible, I believe, for the recent explosion in jokes about abortion, rape, and other similar subjects. It's just so hard to shock people these days, comedians keep going farther and farther trying to do it…

There's definitely a line. People cross it. Tracy Morgan (who, according to the tales I hear from touring performers, really is the biggest asshole on the planet) did. Michael Richards did. Lots of people you've never heard of (and never will) cross it on a nightly basis. In the past few months in my small city alone I've seen:

1) A 10 minute act about how Asian people talk funny consisting of…a man imitating the way Asians talk
2) Entire sets of rape jokes
3) A half-dozen frat boys in backward baseball caps doing whole sets of frat boy humor, i.e., women are stupid bitches, and it is funny what stupid bitches they are.

4) Gratuitous on-stage use of words like "fag", sometimes by people who use such language regularly and sometimes by people who would never speak that way offstage but want to be "edgy".

I don't have the slightest doubt that people walk away from these shows offended. All of the preceding said, I think having a night of PC Comedy is just about the worst idea ever.

I have no way to reconcile the opposing realities that, A) people have a right to be in public spaces without being belittled, singled out, or demeaned, and B) comedy doesn't work if you give people a list of things not to talk about. The only way to push the boundaries and come up with something new is to push the boundaries. Performers have to use their own common sense in doing so.

I try to do that by asking myself why, not merely if, things are funny. If you say "fag" on stage, is it funny because "Hah! He said 'fag'!" or because the audience is supposed to realize how idiotic people who say things like that are? Be honest with yourself when you think about what kind of laughs you're getting. Sometimes I worry about this. When I say that I love the War on Drugs because it's so good at filling prisons with brown people, 90% of the crowd will laugh because it's sarcasm pointing out an uncomfortable reality and social problem, 8% will be offended, and 2% will laugh because, yeah, brown people are all gang members. I can't control that. And I'd rather accept the downside than tell a bunch of jokes about airport security and TV dinners.

From the audience's perspective, when performers cross the line don't get cranky about it if you're not willing to let them know. Boo them. Tell them after the show "Your 10 minutes of rape jokes were horribly offensive, you hack. Too bad you can't make people laugh without going there." Live performance is a process of elimination – don't feel bad about pushing people who suck at it toward the exit (or, more optimistically, pushing them to think harder and come up with better material). Alternatively, you could decide that you're not going to get offended over comedy. That's not easy for everyone to do, of course, because "It's just a joke!" is the Tucker Max Defense, which is to say it isn't a valid defense when people cross the line. Being offended is a risk we accept when we agree to interact with the world, though. Don't let it keep you home. On balance you're better off being offended at Open Mic Night than sitting at home watching G-rated comedy from, I don't know, Sinbad.

Note that I did not give this the "skip this if you hate sports" tag. Because this is something everyone can enjoy.

If you enjoy sports – or maybe even if you don't – there are moments in which you realize that you've seen perfection. I'm talking about things you see and immediately know you'll never see anything like it again. Tiger Woods winning the Masters by 12 strokes. Nadia Comaneci in Montreal. Bob Beamon's long jump. Jordan scoring 63 over 4 Hall of Famers in the Boston Garden. Vince Young in the Rose Bowl. Usain Bolt leaving a vapor trail. McEnroe vs. Connors at Wimbledon. Kerry Wood's 20 K's. Lemieux scores 5 goals in a game…5 different ways. Some feats are so amazing that they become legends as soon as they happen.

Records are made to be broken. But I know one feat that will never be repeated, and it stands as the single most impressive thing ever accomplished on an athletic field: Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates throwing a no-hitter whacked out of his mind on acid. Some versions of this story are bowdlerized to suggest that he was "hung over" but make no mistake, the man was tripping balls. Check out this award-winning animated short (seriously, it made the film festival rounds) depicting the event while a recording of an interview with Ellis (who passed away a few years ago) as narration:

Click through to watch in HD.

Baseball aficionados use the phrase "effectively wild" to describe a pitching performance where the batters are baffled because the pitcher himself doesn't have much of an idea where the ball is going. Ellis threw one of the strangest no-hitters ever, walking eight batters, hitting two, and throwing over 150 pitches. I imagine the batters were less concerned with hitting and more concerned with defending themselves from the rocket-armed, bedraggled wildman with unfocused pupils hurling a rock hard object at them at 99 mph.

Salut, Dock Ellis. If they gave out gold medals for being the best possible kind of crazy, they might have to name it after you.

Earlier this week a friend-of-friend very nearly died. My ex-bandmate Rob was playing with his new band Waxeater at a venue in Austin, TX when his bandmate Elliott was electrocuted on stage, presumably due to an ungrounded electrical supply. Fortunately a nurse in the audience was able to re-start his heart and after a week in an induced coma, it looks like he is going to be OK.

To the average person that would seem like a terrible way to go – not merely the electrocution part, which I think we can all agree is undesirable, but to die while playing in a dive bar with bands that few people will ever hear of or care about for what I can only assume was very little if any money. That's the crux of what an excellent writer and friend (who previously brought us the Ballad of Johnny D) argues in his thoughts about the incident. In short, he asks what possesses grown-ups to devote so much time to a creative pursuit like being in a band. Is it worth the strain touring puts on relationships? The inability to hold down a normal job? The constant financial hardships? The risk of being electrocuted in some dive bar or punk shithouse? To most of us it isn't apparent why anyone would put up with the relentless grind of going on the road for the privilege of…well, playing in front of a handful of drunks at a bar in Topeka, KS while the local cadre of scumbags plots a way to steal all of your equipment when you fall asleep at 7 AM on the puke-stained carpet of someone you barely know. It isn't glamorous.

DJ ultimately concludes that people do this to find a community of like-minded people; you'll only win a few hearts wherever you play, but they'll be worth it. They'll have your back. They'll hold benefits and fund-raisers when your uninsured ass ends up with a potentially fatal illness. They'll let you borrow when your shit breaks or gets stolen. They'll feed you and give you a place to sleep. They'll help you out when you're unemployed and the last dollar is gone. All of this is true in my experience (which admittedly is not as extensive as that of people like DJ or Rob).

That said, I have a different take on it. Since I'm no longer actively in a band, I'll use blogging and comedy as examples here. From a rational perspective I shouldn't do either. It could get me fired. It could give people who want to make my life difficult all the ammunition they'd ever need. It diverts time I could spend advancing my career (in theory) or enhancing relationships. The last thing that is going to help me with the necessities of life is to get on a stage or the interwebs and express myself voluminously and without a filter.

So why do I do it? Yes, both have introduced me to some interesting people. But I do it primarily for another reason. Academia is incredibly destructive to self-esteem. It is a continuous and near endless process of accepting rejection and hearing people tell you how much you suck. I've applied for 130 jobs over the last three years and been rejected from all of them. Journals have rejection rates exceeding 90% in most cases. It is very important for me to do something that does not result in complete failure and rejection. When I hear people laugh or see a post cross 50,000 hits it's a subtle reminder that not everything I do results in rejection.

Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It's a good observation, and in my opinion it's the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It's OK to remind yourself that you're not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved.

By now you have probably seen the trailer for the latest installment in the "Hollywood ran out of ideas 25 years ago so here's the 917351st comic book superhero movie but hey, at least it isn't a remake" series, better known as Green Lantern. If you haven't had the pleasure, here you go:

OK.

Look at how stupid that looks.

No, I don't mean the acting, the plot, or the idea of making a film out of a B-squad comic book hero from the 1950s. I mean look at it. The cartoon-meets-Sega Genesis visual effects. The green screened everything. It is all clearly the product of the finest technology available to visual artists and filmmakers. And it's terrible. It's completely awful – fake, sterile, and desperate to make up for its fake sterility by jamming as much crap and kabloom-y effects as possible into every single frame of the film. Now contrast that with another film about people in outer space, one made without the benefits of quad core Mac G5s: 2001: A Space Odyssey (embedding disabled, so click through to see the Blue Danube docking sequence).

That was made with plastic models, a camera, and moving objects held in place with wires. Which one looks more "realistic" to you? Which one allows you to suspend your disbelief and feel like you're watching something that's really happening? Which one looks like what it is supposed to look like?

Sometimes I feel like CGI is killing movies. And sometimes it's so obvious that it ceases to be subjective.

I understand that there's a line between filmmaking as a skill and as a craft. Skill allows you to churn out a product that meets the prevailing contemporary standards, makes a buttload of money, and is immediately forgotten. Five years later it looks painfully, even embarrassingly dated. Craftsmanship produces something that holds up over time. Return of the Jedi was the product of craftsmen. The prequel trilogy is crass, mass produced garbage filmed in an empty warehouse.

Talented directors can do great things with CGI and other visual effects technology. Even in a bad movie, someone who knows how to use it can create a distinctive visual style immediately identified with the film (i.e., 300). It can also be used to seamlessly blend the real world with the director's imagination (Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sin City, Harry Potter, etc). Or it can be used to make Avatar and The Phantom Menace.

The fundamental problem is that CGI, rather that being a tool that allows directors to explore new creative possibilities, just enables laziness. The original Star Wars films were made with thousands of man-hours of tiny models. The scenes in 2001 took months to shoot to create the desired look. The original King Kong relied on the laborious stop-motion technique with its models (and rear screen projections for city skylines, another Golden Era technique that is now all but lost). Why bother now? Just click some buttons, hire some graphic designers, and make the entire movie inside a computer.

The other problem with CGI is that it's too easy. Consider the original King Kong compared to the christawful 2005 remake. In the first film every frame of the ape required hours of labor working with delicate sets and models, which in turn required dozens of hours of work to make. It encouraged the filmmakers to use the titular creature sparingly. If it's all digital, then why not have King Kong in every damn scene? Why not have him knock a few buildings down? Hell, it's all just clicks on a mouse. Another example, of course, is the new-vs-old Star Wars trilogies. If you have to build an enormous Imperial Cruiser model, you're probably going to shoot the scene with ONE Imperial Cruiser…because you don't want to build a second one unless it's absolutely necessary. So the original trilogy had a sense of economy. It was sparse. In the prequels, why have one ship when you could have…(*click click click*)…a hundred ships??? Isn't that way better? See how much it improves the experience to jam as much blinking, exploding shit as humanly possible into the frame?

I understand that a movie like Green Lantern is not intended to be a great work of art. It's a product churned out for the purpose of being merchandised to death. But the annual summer blockbusters are symptoms of the continuous dumbing down of the visual aspects of filmmaking. Twenty years ago even the summer blockbusters required some actual imagination and craftsmanship. Now "special effects" is synonymous with digital effects, and moviemaking treats the human actors as an inconvenience to be dealt with as quickly as possible and plugged into the laughably unbelievable, visually insulting movie that exists only inside someone's PC. The result is ugly. Very, very ugly. As film is a visual medium, producing something this ugly is counterproductive at best.

Since the future is so depressing, let's spend a day enjoying the whimsical charms of the past.

1. The best thing about the dawning of the Atomic Age was the belief that Science was going to save us and Progress would lead us to a better, brighter future. Now Progress is a nice way of explaining layoffs and the industrial revolution is as likely to end up killing us all as saving us. But let us set that aside for the moment in honor of NPF and enjoy this (click to embiggen):

Not a day goes by that I don't wish I had attended Plastics Industries Technical Institute rather than getting a Ph.D. Not even close to kidding.

2. Hey, now that we're all aboard the Fuck Libraries train – pure socialism, and they're like, what, 90% of the federal budget? – take a look at this interesting time capsule. My, how the times have changed.

Early-1971, in an effort to attract as many youngsters to the premises as possible, Marguerite Hart — children's librarian at the newly-opened public library in Troy, Michigan — wrote to a number of notable people with a request: to reply with a congratulatory letter, addressed to the children of Troy, in which the benefits of visiting such a library were explained in some form. It's heartening to know that an impressive 97 people did exactly that, and below are just four of those replies, all from authors: Isaac Asimov; Hardie Gramatky; Theodore Geisel; and E. B. White.

Check out Dr. Seuss. And all the others (including authors, elected officials, etc.) on the Troy Public Library Flickr site. Before they close the library.

3. I have a cellphone from the dark ages. OK, not really, but it predates smartphones by several years. Hand me an iPhone or Android and I stare at it like the apes finding the monolith in 2001. Then I randomly stab my finger at the screen until the owner says, "Here, I'll do it." To smartphone users like you this is comical; it's so obvious that the idea of someone being unable to figure it out is silly. With that in mind, please enjoy this 10-minute video, Now You Can Dial, produced by AT&T in 1954 to…explain using a rotary dial telephone.

Its advice seems ludicrous ("Wait for the dial tone!", the difference between the ring tone and busy signal, how to work the dial) but to people who were used to the operator making connections for them it probably needed to be said.

Also, 1950s corporate film. Win.

The late Cold War – say, 1980 until the Wall fell – was a depressing time for the Soviet Union. The end of their crumbling system seemed inevitable, with Moscow run by aging party hardliners, an economy socked by the collapse of oil prices, and the entire country in a seemingly terminal torpor. Paired with the rebirth of American triumphalism and irrational exuberance under Reagan during that same time period, tensions between superpowers remained dangerously high. It needed some comic relief.

Almost exactly 24 years ago today, 18 year old West German (remember when that was a separate country?) Mathias Rust boarded a tiny Cessna not unlike the kind you see at small, rural airports everywhere in the U.S. As of May 28, 1987 Rust had exactly 49 hours of experience as a pilot. After a brief flight to Helsinki, Finland he refueled and took off with an announced destination of Stockholm, Sweden. Once airborne, the teenager turned his fabric-skinned plane toward the most hostile, heavily defended airspace on Earth, the Korean DMZ notwithstanding. Yes, Mathias Rust decided it would be fun to fly his Cessna to the Kremlin.

Soviet air defense officials began a Keystone Kops routine that, ahem, exposed some potential flaws in military preparedness. Three AA missile batteries tracked him but Soviet officers could not get an order to fire from a disorganized chain of command and balky communications system. Fighter jets were scrambled only to discover that a Mach 1.3 jet has a remarkably hard time engaging a plane the size of a Ford Fiesta (and traveling about as fast).
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Several other air defense posts even assumed he was a Russian, given the similarity of his plane to a popular Soviet model used by farmers.

At 7:00 that evening, Rust circled Moscow.
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Abandoning his plan to land in the Kremlin he decided to go for maximum visibility – a landing in Red Square that Soviet leaders would not be able to pretend didn't happen. So he landed in front of St. Basil's Cathedral, calmly stepped out of his plane, and lit up a goddamn cigarette.

What Mathias Rust accomplished, aside from going for one hell of a joyride and giving himself the greatest "When I was your age, guess what I did?" story of all time, was to cut like a hilarious knife through one of the tension of the Cold War. Americans and Soviets alike expected the mighty Russian military colossus to be prepared for American bombers to come charging toward Moscow, yet in practice they reacted comically while some dork in a prop trainer flew for hundreds of miles over what was supposed to be impregnable airspace. Rust made the Cold War and the massive military apparatuses it produced on both sides look…
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well, silly. It also accelerated the collapse of the USSR (according to the CIA) by giving Gorbachev an excuse to fire many of his hardliner opponents in the military.

Rust was convicted of, I shit you not, "hooliganism" and sentenced to four years of hard labor that he never served.
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He was released in 1988 after being detained in regular ol' prison sans hard labor. Ironically he ended up in German prison almost immediately – not for his stunt, but because he stabbed a nurse who rejected his request for a date. Upon release he became a Hindu "holy man" and was arrested repeatedly for shoplifting before resurfacing in 2009 as a professional poker player.

His later life sheds a little more light on the motives behind his daring flight…namely that he's a nut bar. When the tension gets dangerously high, sometimes a nut is exactly what the situation needs.