The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut
this isn’t the usual thing I’d share on my stupid nerd blog, but this is SO important.
I was nearly crushed in a crowd like this once. It was terrifying because you have NO control over the panicking mass of humans around you. you are just at the mercy of all this chaotic force. this is a real thing that can happen very suddenly! it did happen in the news recently!
My situation was, the olympics was happening in my city, I was on my way home from school, and a crowd of people suddenly flooded into the street around me. in seconds it went from, busy-city-street-crowded, to, wtf I can’t even move crowded.
I was so pressed against the backpack of the man in front of me, my feet lifted off the ground a moment. People were climbing lamp posts, signs, bus shelters, trees, everything to get up out of it. it was like the street became an ocean of people, and all the people’s survival instincts were making them dumber. everyone was yelling. no one knew how to solve it.
police, fire fighters and medics saved us by breaking the locks on the inside of the mall we were trapped next to. a huge group flooded into the building, releasing a bit of the pressure on the people outside. I was in that group that got in.
We were trapped in the mall awhile. Because the olympics was on, they had big screens in a few sitting areas of the mall that would normally be showing the games. but now the coverage was focused on this crowd surge. They showed a helicopter shot of the building we were now in, totally surrounded by colorful dots. a solid mass of humans with no space between.
I know someone was partially trampled and needed medics, because I saw that, but i don’t know the statistics on who else was hurt, hopefully no one killed!
I don’t know if these methods can definitely save you, but they might give you a better chance. so watch and share!
Sharing to my own stupid nerd blog for the same reason, this is SO IMPORTANT. Human crushes are one of the most unexpected ways to die. People go out to a show or a sports game, and make it there, but they never come back.
Other strategies include staying away from large obstacles (like fences) that you could get crushed against, and doing your best to stay above the crowd. Try to climb onto something if you can.
And also — not to get nitpicky with deadly tragedies, but they’re called “human crushes,” not “stampedes.” It’s an important difference in description and also in respect. The deaths usually happen because the victims are pinned together in a tight space, they can’t breathe (as in the video) and they suffocate. “Stampede” doesn’t convey what actually happened to those people. The crush that happened in Seoul recently wasn’t because people “stampeded,” it was because they couldn’t move at all and they suffocated. But calling it a “stampede,” you’d think it was the people themselves that ran over each other, like wild animals. It’s disrespectful and untrue.
Horrifyingly, the victims of many human crushes have been blamed for their own deaths, which are usually purely accidental or due to criminal mismanagement from authorities. If you’re in a mental place to read about tragedies and police corruption, check out the Hillsborough Disaster, in which 97 people died due to the incompetence of the police, who then blamed everything on the victims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster
from the article linked above:
“Many uninjured fans assisted the injured; several attempted CPR and others tore down advertising hoardings to use as stretchers.
Chief Superintendent John Nesbit of South Yorkshire Police later briefed Michael Shersby MP that leaving the rescue to the fans was a deliberate strategy, and is quoted as saying “We let the fans help so that they would not take out their frustration on the police” at a Police Federation conference.“
In Japan, radiation creates monsters (Godzilla) and in America radiation creates superheroes
Shockingly, it’s almost like Japan and America have very different narratives surrounding nuclear fallout. Now, if we all think very very hard, maybe someone could think of why this might be.
MYTH: Americans set off fireworks on the 4th of July, in honor of our Independence Day
FACT: Americans set off fireworks from approximately June 20th—July 20th, for no reason other than this is the time of year that you can literally buy them at any grocery store
Turns out, 2000 was 20 years ago. Which is odd, since 1980 was also.
The thing Gen-Z really needs to understand is that no one older than them is ever going to be able to estimate time correctly because the Millennium.
The Millennium will always be Not That Long Ago. Everything since the Millennium will always be, in some sense, ‘new’.
It just broke us, OK? It was too big and we’ll never quite be able to deal.
Was the real millennium bug inside us all along?
yep.
I think at least part of this is that pop culture has gotten such a longer shelf life over the past 20 years.
You can listen to a Top 40 station now and hear a song from 10 years ago easily, even songs from the 80s or 90s on special occasions (which might just be the Nineties at Noon or whatever every single day).
A Top 40 station in the 80s? Played the current fucking Top 40 and that was it. You were lucky if you heard a song that was one year old, definitely never ten. I was born in 1979 and heard almost no music from before I was born until high school or college. If you wanted to hear anything older than a year, you had to listen to a classic rock (late 60s to 70s) or oldies (50s to early 60s) station. There was nothing earlier than that on the radio.
A restaurant was playing What a Feeling, from 1983. 28 years before my son was born. That’s the equivalent of hearing a song from 1951 in the late 80s, which just did not happen. Even for an oldies station, it was hard to find anything that old.
VCRs were just getting big in the mid-80s, but there was a limited selection of videos you could buy (or even rent) for them. Most video rental stores didn’t bother to stock TV shows, it just wasn’t worth it. (Few shows were even released on VHS.)
So you could generally watch recent movies and “classics” but if you were looking for some random movie from the mid-70s - that’s only ten years previous - you were mostly out of luck. Imagine looking for a movie from 2006 right now, and you can find maybe the top-grossing ones and a few that won Oscars, but Night at the Museum? The Devil Wears Prada? You’re shit outta luck. That’s what it would have been like looking for movies from 1976 in 1989.
So for those of us who grew up in the 80s and early 90s, pop culture had a hard limit of about a decade, if that. By the late 90s, the internet was good enough that music was starting to stretch that, but you still couldn’t really get video through the internet and DVDs were still catching up in terms of what was available. You didn’t really get entire seasons of TV on DVD until the early 00s - the first season of The Simpsons, which aired in 1989, wasn’t released on DVD until 2001.
Anyhow, I think that’s why a lot of older millennials and Gen Xers are having trouble wrapping our heads around the idea that the year 2000 was almost 20 years ago. Because we grew up in a world where if you heard a song regularly, or watched a movie or a TV show that wasn’t late-night reruns, it had probably been released within the past 5 years, and almost definitely within the past 20. Our brains haven’t quite gotten used to hearing a new song followed by a 30-year-old song on the radio and not just being able to find any decade-old movie at will but seeing gifs of decade-old movies almost daily. Our brains think that means those things must still be new.
I have never heard anyone explain it so clearly before. And I LIVED it.
Ok, but there’s definitely more than that to this temporal foreshortening. Because I’m early Gen Z, and I grew up with all these lingering cultural things (old music has always been available to me, my parents had VHS movies from before I was born, and the Internet full of flash games and whatnot was available to me pretty much as soon as I was old enough to use it). But I still experience the foreshortening; some one recently used the fact that they were born in 2002 to prove they were a legal adult, and I LITERALLY had to do the math to verify.
So I don’t know what causes the temporal foreshortening, but it’s not just the abrupt changeover in media longevity
My husband’s job primarily employs adult men but there is one (1) teenage girl and my husband said originally he worried she might be a bit of an outcast but instead every man on the crew was like “huh guess I am a dad/older brother now.”
She was in a car crash on the way to work one morning and called my husband to let him know she’d be late and he was like wtf guess I’m gonna be late too because I’m coming to pick you up and then he told his team and they were like I think you mean WE are coming.
Imagine you are a teenage girl probably rushing to get to work and you crash your probably new car and feel absolutely miserable and now you’ll be late to work but then suddenly in the distance a car full of all the adult men you work with just pulls up and is like “we came all the way here to pick you up” the mental image right now is fr.
Apparently she tried to call her dad but it was 3am and he was obviously sleeping so she called my husband and he not only came to find her but fished her glasses out of the hood of the car (she’d dropped them while looking inside), drove her to the hospital, and told her to take the day off. She insisted on coming back to work so he used his lunch break to watch TV with her to make sure she didn’t doze off (concussion risk).
You’ve heard of the Mom friend but my husband is very much the Dad friend. He said when he answered the phone she said “hey please don’t be mad” and he’s never felt such powerful Fatherhood energy in his life.
Girl: *calls for aid*
Every single dad packed into the car:
This is possibly my favorite response to this post
This girls father: Thanks for helping my daughter out guys
