General Butt Naked
The Greater the Sinner
A Liberian warlord’s unlikely path to forgiveness.
BY DAMON TABOR
Blahyi’s public contrition satisfied a deep need, a reporter said. “It was only Joshua who said, ‘I am sorry, please forgive me.’ ”CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY DOMINIC NAHR FOR THE NEW YORKER
On a recent Sunday morning in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a few dozen people gathered in a tin-roofed church to hear a former warlord preach. His name is Joshua Milton Blahyi, but most Liberians still know him by his nom de guerre from the nineteen-nineties: General Butt Naked. A burly forty-five-year-old with a head shaped like a cannon shell, Blahyi took the stage wearing black dress pants and a cream-colored shirt. He has delivered sermons across West Africa about the power of forgiveness and the perfidy of Liberian politicians, but one of his favorite topics is himself. “In South Africa I was privileged to preach to parliament,” he told his congregation. “Hallelujah! It can happen to you!” A slip of paper fell from his Bible, and a worshipper hurried to pick it up. “Keep it as a souvenir,” Blahyi said.
In 1980, Samuel Doe seized the Presidency of Liberia in a coup. Blahyi claims that he later became Doe’s spiritual adviser, and that he used witchcraft to help Doe win a second term. (Doe also used more mundane methods, such as burning his opponents’ ballots.) On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor, a former Liberian government official, invaded from Ivory Coast with a hundred soldiers, and the country plunged into civil war. There was a ceasefire in 1996, and Taylor was elected the next year. Then, in 1999, another rebel group invaded from Guinea, sparking a second conflict, which lasted until Taylor was ousted, in 2003.
An Oldie But Always A Goodie
25 Years Since REN & STIMPY Weird.
Almost 25 years later, a look back atRen & Stimpy in all its gross splendor
Jumping into the wayback machine to 1991, there was a time when children’s programming bordered on the avant garde and surreal with one simple and insanely popular cartoon. Ren & Stimpy, as created by John Kricfalusi, seemed simple and sweet enough on paper: the adventures of a dog and cat who are friends and the various shenanigans the duo get into on a weekly basis. However, in practice, that simplistic premise would undergo a hideous transformation into a treatise on the absurd, a fascination with bodily fluids and functions, and a painstaking focus on the details of the animation.
As Evan Puschak, a.k.a. The Nerdwriter, points out in his latest video, Kricfalusi rejected the morality lessons of most cartoons and the formulaic plotting that had become way too common in animation at the time. Perhaps this was due to Kricfalusi’s apprenticeship under Ralph Bakshi, another animator who rejected the standards of his time.
Go Alex Go! Her best goal ever.
Real Men Will Admit It
Hulk Hogan is asked the question every man fears
By Julia Marsh and Bruce Golding
Hulk Hogan cut himself down to size on Tuesday — testifying that his real-life manhood doesn’t measure up to the boasts of his larger-than-life character.
Day Two of Hogan’s $100 million invasion-of-privacy trial against the website Gawkersaw the pro wrestling legend admit that while his professional persona claims to have a 10-inch penis, he is really more modestly endowed.
During cross-examination in a Florida courtroom, Hogan was confronted with a 2006 interview about his genitalia.
The back-and-forth between Hogan and shock-jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem featured Hogan’s former best friend claiming, “I’ve seen it before” and saying, “hard, you’re probably 7 or 8 inches.”
“Dude, I’ve got size 15 (shoes), I wear a size 15 ring … Figure it out,” answers Hogan, who says a man’s penis is “two-thirds the size of your feet and hands.”
“So, Hogan, you’re claiming, you’re claiming to maybe have a 10-inch c–k?” Bubba asked.
“I’m not claiming. Those are the facts, Jack,” Hogan replied.
A lawyer for Gawker — which posted hidden-camera video of Hogan having sex with Bubba’s then-wife, Heather Clem, in 2007 — then asked if Hogan had “any doubt … that you were discussing the length of your penis?”
“Well, it’s not mine, because mine isn’t that size, but we were discussing the length of Hulk Hogan’s,” the former wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, replied.
“Seriously?” Gawker lawyer Michael Sullivan asked.
“No, seriously, I do not have a 10-inch penis. No, I do not. Seriously. Believe that. Seriously,” Hogan said.
Sullivan then asked if Hogan was “discussing Hulk Hogan’s penis.”
“Yeah, because Terry Bollea’s penis is not 10 inches, like you’re trying to say,” Hogan responded.
Who Needs Bob Barker, anyway?
It’s here? TX68
THREE DAYS LEFT: Freak supermoon, eclipse and asteroid on SAME DAY ‘signal end of world’
CONSPIRACY theorists are stocking up on food supplies amid fears the world could end in just THREE days when a total eclipse of the sun, super full moon and staggeringly close asteroid pass of earth are set to happen within 24 hours.
By JON AUSTIN
GETTY
Some conspiracy theorists claim the three events in the same day are a warning
On March 8 asteroid TX 68, a 30-metre long lump of space rock, is due to whistle past Earth as close as 19,000 miles away.
But doom mongers are not convinced it will miss us with fears we won’t be able to see it because it will be obscured by the sun.
The looming event has sent online doomsday predictors into a frenzy, particularly as NASA admits it is uncertain of the orbital path and has given estimates as close as 19,000 miles away to as far as 11 million miles.
The US space agency has also changed the DAY of the pass with the initial date being given as TODAY, March 5.
Now NASA says it will be on Tuesday, March 8.
The uncertainty over the pass coupled with the fact some online doom mongers were predicting an asteroid would smash into earth in March 2016 several months ago, has fuelled the latest fears.
Some self-styled internet prophets released videos several months ago warning an asteroid, or even a mythological rogue planet called Nibiru or Planet X, would strike Earth in March 2016, and could spell the end of the word.
Express.co.uk found several YouTube videos released six months or more ago, before there was any widespread talk of asteroid TX68’s cosmic close shave.
Bud Collins Gone
Legendary tennis commentator Bud Collins dies at 86
By Kelyn Soong
Tennis commentator Bud Collins, seen here in 1993, has died at age 86. (AP photo/Gill Allen)
Bud Collins, a passionate advocate for tennis whose relationship with the sport began more than a half-century ago, died Friday in his home in Brookline, Mass., according to the Boston Globe. Collins was 86.
Collins was an influential tennis writer and historian and revolutionized sports journalism when he began to offer commentary on camera in the early 1960s. Despite his failing health, Collins traveled last September to New York for the U.S. Open, where the media center was dedicated and named in his honor.
Born Arthur Worth Collins, he was simply known as “Bud” to those in the tennis community and his TV audience. A native of Berea, Ohio, Collins’s first love was baseball and the newspaper business. He didn’t know much about tennis growing up, but began covering the sport for the Boston Herald in the late 1950s, starting at the Massachusetts Women’s Championship at Longwood Cricket Club. It was then that Collins acquired a true appreciation for the sport.
Thanks, Ricki Hall
World Book Day: What are the stars reading?
Ricki Hall recommended James Frey’s novel
From a biography of a Second World War hero to a literary thriller about a man born out of wedlock to a feminist leader – the favourite reads of Black Country stars are revealed as World Book Day is celebrated around the globe.
Today is the 19th year of World Book Day, a celebration of authors, illustrators and books, which aims to inspire youngsters to explore the pleasures of reading by providing them with the chance to own a book of their very own.
Wolverhampton mechanic turned model Ricki Hall, aged 28, said A Million Little Pieces by James Frey was his favourite book.
Originally sold as a memoir and later marketed as a semi-fictional novel following accusations of literary forgery, it tells how a 23-year-old alcoholic and drug abuser copes with rehabilitation in a twelve steps-orientated treatment centre.
He said: “Hope you’ve read the sequel, My Friend Leonard!”
Mini-Vanimus Prime
Fast Radio Bursts
from International Business Times
FRBs: Mystery repeating radio signals discovered emanating from unknown cosmic source
Arecibo telescope / Danielle Futselaar
Repeating radio signals coming from a mystery source far beyond the Milky Way have been discovered by scientists. While one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple signals have been detected coming from the same place in space.
FRBs are radio signals from deep space that last for just a few milliseconds. Since their discovery over a decade ago, scientists have been searching for more to try to understand their origin. At present, there are several theories as to what they could be, with most involving some cataclysmic event like a supernova or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole.
All of the events seen so far appear to have been one-offs, with subsequent observations failing to find follow-up bursts coming from the same position as the original. However, an international team of researchers has now discovered an additional 10 bursts coming from the same direction as FRB 121102, using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
Publishing their findings in the journal Nature, the researchers report the subsequent bursts have the same dispersion measures and sky positions as the original FRB. This, they say, means the source must have survived whatever event caused the FRB to be produced in the first place – i.e. it cannot have been a cataclysmic one-off event. They also found the bursts differed in brightness from other FRBs, suggesting a different source.
Morricone Finally Scores
Italy Cheers Ennio Morricone’s Oscar Win for ‘The Hateful Eight’ Score
A.M.P.A.S./REX SHUTTERSTOCK
ROME – Italy on Monday cheered Ennio Morricone’s Oscar victory for composing the original score for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” which marks the first competitive Oscar won by the 87-year old maestro with more than 500 movie credits to this name.
“After an almost 60-year-long career, and five nominations which had left him empty-handed, Ennio Morricone finally brings an Oscar for best score home,” trumpeted daily La Republica on its website.
“Superb Maestro, finally!” tweeted Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi at dawn, Italian time. Also on Twitter Italo Culture Czar Dario Franceschini enthused that “an all-time movie giant has triumphed.”
Morricone, who received an honorary Oscar in 2007, had been nominated five previous times, for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy” and “Malena.”
But international accolades for Morricone came after what is now considered his most groundbreaking work, on scores for Sergio Leone’s so-called “Dollars Trilogy” – “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” And also on Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” They revolutionized the way Westerns, and movies at large, are scored.
George Kennedy Gone
George Kennedy Dies: ‘Cool Hand Luke’ Oscar Winner Was 91
Warner Bros.
George Kennedy, a versatile actor whose long list of credits includes the Airport and Naked Gun films and an Oscar for his supporting role in Cool Hand Luke, has died in Middleton, ID. He was 91. Canyon County Coroner Vicki DeGeus-Morris told the Idaho Statesman Kennedy died at 4:35 AM Sunday. The cause of death isn’t known, but DeGeus-Morris says the actor had a history of heart problems.
The burly Kennedy would star alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names — including Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster and Charlton Heston — and was equally adept at broad comedy and heavy drama. He began his career on The Phil Silvers Show in the mid-1950s and guested on numerous TV shows. Specializing in the Western and war genres, he racked up TV credits including Maverick, Gunsmoke, Route 66, The Untouchables and Rawhide. By the early 1960s, he started landing roles on the big screen in such films as Lonely Are the Brave, Charade and In Harm’s Way.
He cemented his Hollywood cred with a pair of film classics in the late ’60s: playing a mild-mannered Army major in the star-studded war drama The Dirty Dozen and chain-gang leader Dragline in Cool Hand Luke. The latter role won Kennedy an Oscar in his only nomination.
Cleveland Avengers
Russo brothers ignite rumors about next “Avengers” effort to film in CLE
by Tom Tenant
Didn’t Fresh Water just report on the benefits of the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit? Why, yes, we did. And then this pops into our feed from MoviePilot:
“They didn’t share any ‘Captain America: Civil War’ spoilers, but directors Joe and Anthony Russo told fans that ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ could land in Cleveland.
‘It’s on the list,’ said Anthony.
The reveal took place Saturday during a Wizard World Comic-Con Cleveland panel titled ‘Let’s Shut Down Some Streets: Bringing the Avengers, Captain America and the Russo Brothers to Cleveland.’
The Russos, who grew up in Cleveland and graduated from Case Western Reserve University, were joined by Ivan Schwarz, director of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission.
Big Wave Year
SURFERS GET ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME 60 FOOT SWELLS OFF HAWAII
HALIEWA, Hawaii (AP) — There are two sayings that come along with the Eddie Aikau big-wave surfing invitational: “The bay calls the day” and “Eddie would go.”
For the first time in six years, the bay – and event organizers – gave the nod Thursday as a powerful and sustained swell produced huge surf on Oahu’s North Shore. Eddie, a famed lifeguard and big-wave surfer who once protected these shores, most certainly would have gone.
Before the sun came up over the horseshoe-shaped Waimea Bay, organizers huddled together to make the final call on the event, which has only run nine times in its 31-year history.
Eddie Aikua’s brother, Clyde, announced to a large crowd early Thursday morning that his brother’s namesake surfing contest was on.
“I’ve been riding Waimea Bay for over 40 years, and today has to be one of the best days I’ve ever seen,” Aikau said. “It is a go!” he added as the crowd came alive with whistles, cheers and applause.
They got what they hoped for as huge sets of monster waves crashed onto the outer reef of the bay, producing some waves that organizers estimate were 60 feet tall.
Razorsaurus Rex
Alex Morgan Rocks
Soccer star Alex Morgan offers lessons in leadership for young girls
by Beth Kassab
Alex Morgan is a powerhouse on the pitch.
She’s put the ball into the back of the net six times since January for the U.S. Women’s National Team.
One of those goals, as Sports Illustrated noted, was the fastest in U.S. soccer history. She scored on Costa Rica earlier this month just 12 seconds after kickoff.
Morgan, who is set to start training next month for the Orlando Pride, is also half of Central Florida’s newest and most internationally known power couple. Her husband, Servando Carrasco, is a midfielder for Orlando City.
But Morgan isn’t just about stats. She is channeling all of that power — on and off the field — into feeding the minds of girls hungry for someone to look up to.
Soccer is one of the most popular youth sports in the country.
“But there wasn’t really anything out there for young girls to watch or to read or to follow other than the women’s national team,” said Morgan, 26.
So when an author she knows approached her a few years ago with the idea to create her own series, she said it was a “no brainer.”
The result was “The Kicks,” now a series of six books Morgan created that are centered on fictional 12-year-old Devin Burke, who had to move cross-country with her family only to find that her new school’s soccer team was lousy.
The book revolves around themes like leadership, friendship and perseverance.
Last year Amazon Prime picked up “The Kicks” as one of its original series.
Real Fake Baby Mom Artists
These moms love babies that never throw up or grow up
It’s 1 a.m. and the baby’s fussing. Stephanie Ortiz rises from bed, groggy, tired. Royal needs his diaper changed. Methodically, and like a good mom, Ortiz takes off her baby’s onesie and diaper. As she lifts Royal’s leg — pop! It comes clean off his body. “You don’t see that every day!” she laughs joyfully into the camera, holding the leg in her hand.
Welcome to the world of Reborn dolls.
The Reborn community is a tight-knit, creative class of mostly women who create, collect and role-play with dolls that look so much like real babies, they’re spooky and beautiful all at once.
Go to YouTube and search “Reborn doll” and you’ll find more than 90,000 videos from people of all ages showing off their incredibly realistic, hand-painted dolls and role-playing with them in ways that feel both playful and intensely intimate.
Death Valley Alive
Death Valley Is Experiencing a Colorful ‘Superbloom’
By
Credit: National Park Service
Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, is currently a riot of color: More than 20 different kinds of desert wildflowers are in bloom there after record-breaking rains last October.
It’s the best bloom there since 2005, according to Abby Wines, a spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park, and “it just keeps getting better and better.”
The flowers started poking up in November, but the particularly colorful display emerged late last month in the park, which is mainly in California but stretches across the Nevada border. On Twitter and Instagram, park visitors have taken to calling it a “superbloom.”
The park gets about two inches of rain annually, so it always sees some wildflowers, though not as many or as varied. But it doesn’t take much more rain than that to completely dye the desert, Ms. Wines said, making last fall’s unusually heavy rains particularly effective.
Sorta Hilarious
A New York Politician Is Using Spiteful Street Names to Get Revenge on Developers
Earlier this month, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that the Staten Island Borough President James Oddo could go ahead with plans to give a section of the island some fairly unpleasant street names. A few very lucky New York City residents will now live on Cupidity Drive (“cupidity” meaning “greed”), Fourberie Lane (“fourberie” is “trickery” in French), or “Avidita Place” (from the Latin avidus, which means “eager,” or, you know, “greed”).
If you’re wondering why a public official would saddle residents with such sad addresses, know that this is Oddo’s very official revenge against a housing development he has opposed for some time. In 2013, the Savo Brothers development firm purchased a 15-acre retreat from the Society of Jesus. The land had served as the first laymen’s retreat in the United States. The developers wanted to build 250 condominiums on the $15 million parcel, knocking down the Jesuits’s 1920s-era chapel and some 400-year-old trees in the process. Community efforts to preserve the site or reach a satisfying compromise failed. So when the development company finally submitted potential street names for Oddo’s approval (e.g. Lazy Bird Lane, Rabbit Ridge Road, Timber Lane, or Lamb Run), Oddo got the last word—and picked three names very obviously not on the list.
They’re Coming
from The San Jose Mercury News
100-foot asteroid to zoom past Earth in two weeks, and ‘it’s gonna be close’
By Paul Rogers
In this frame grab made from a video done with a dashboard camera a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more. (AP Photo/AP Video)
An asteroid roughly 100 feet long and moving at more than 34,000 mph is scheduled to make a close pass by Earth in two weeks.>
But don’t worry, scientists say. It has no chance of hitting us, and may instead help draw public attention to growing efforts at tracking the thousands of asteroids zooming around space that could one day wipe out a city — or worse — if they ever hit our planet.
This one, known as 2016 TX68, is larger than an 18-wheel tractor trailer truck, and is expected to fly as close as 19,245 miles to Earth at 4:06 pm Pacific time on Monday, March 7. For comparison, that’s less than one-tenth as far as the moon is from Earth, or 238,900 miles.
Umberto Eco Gone
Italian Author And Philosopher Umberto Eco Dead At 84
Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Internationally acclaimed Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco has died at age 84. His death was confirmed by his American publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Born in a small Italian town in 1932, Eco is perhaps best known for his 1980 mystery novel The Name of the Rose, which is set in a monastery in the 14th century. It was an unexpected international bestseller, launching his career as an author.
Eco didn’t publish his first novel until he was 48, when a friend suggested he write a detective story. Before that, his focus was medieval studies and semiotics. And even after he published novels, he said “I am a philosopher … I write novels only on the weekends,” the BBC reported.
Here’s how Eco described his transition into fiction in an interview with The Paris Review:
“I have long thought that what most philosophical books are really doing at the core is telling the story of their research, just as scientists will explain how they came to make their major discoveries. So I feel that I was telling stories all along, just in a slightly different style.”
He told NPR’s Scott Simon last October that several of his novels like Foucault’s Pendulum and Numero Zero focused on characters that he affectionately termed “losers” — because “they are more interesting than the winners.”
“They have a more complicated philosophy,” Eco told Scott. “And then in the world, there are more losers than winners, and so my readers can identify themselves with the characters.”
Harper Lee Gone
Harper Lee, elusive author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is dead
By Emily Langer
Harper Lee at the White House in 2007. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, in one of the most memorable passages of the classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” — “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Few people in the world could claim to really understand Harper Lee, the novel’s elusive author, who has died at 89 in Monroeville, Ala.
She withdrew from public life shortly after her book was published in 1960, only to reappear in old age with the sensational release of “Go Set a Watchman,” a manuscript identified as a long-lost early draft of the book that decades earlier had vaulted her to literary renown.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” a coming-of-age story set in the Depression-era South where Ms. Lee grew up, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and sold more than 40 million copies, becoming one of the most cherished novels in modern American literature. One oft-cited survey asked respondents to name the book that most profoundly affected their lives. Ms. Lee’s novel ranked near the top, not far behind the Bible.
Thank you, Sun, for protecting us from the evil space-rocks.
How the Sun Protects Earth From Getting Clobbered By an Asteroid
by Jeffrey Kluger @jeffreykluger
Marat Ahmetvaleev / Duck: The Chelyabinsk meteor lights up the Russian sky, in 2013
A trick of heat and light makes space rocks self-destruct
The Earth grew up in an awfully rough neighborhood and it’s always needed the help of powerful friends. This was specially true in the early days of the solar system, during the so-called heavy bombardment phase, when asteroids and comets turned the region near the sun into something of a free-fire zone.
One of the things that prevented us from getting blown to smithereens was the fortuitous location of Jupiter which, with its powerful gravity, intercepts some of the incoming ordnance before it can reach us. That still leaves a lot of debris on the loose—witness the 66-ft (20 m) meteor that exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. All the same, according to a new study in Nature, it appears that we’re more protected than we knew—thanks to the powers of the sun.
Astronomers around the world keep a close watch on what they call near-Earth objects (NEOs)—asteroids that orbit through the solar system within 121 million miles (224 million km) of the sun, which brings them dangerously close to the Earth’s own 93 million mile (172 million km) orbit. Much of that census-taking is done by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program conducted principally by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona.
Recently, a team of investigators led by research scientist Mikael Granvik of the University of Helsinki began looking at the population of known NEOs and noticed something strange: While the mix of dark asteroids and brighter, more reflective ones is more or less even throughout the solar system, in the vicinity of the sun, many of the dark ones go missing. What’s more, in this case, the solar “vicinity” can be pretty huge. Smaller bodies often get torn apart gravitationally as they approach what’s known as the Roche limit of a larger body like the sun or a planet—a distance of about 2.5 times the radius of that body. But the dark asteroids start falling apart at about ten times the solar radius, or about 4.3 million miles from the sun.
These guys are f†cking awesome.
Protect Your Assets
HOW (NOT) TO LOSE A MILLION DOLLARS
You’ll need: One of these travel bags + one Faraday cage
We recently told you how to spend $344,511.
Now, we’re going to tell you how to hide it.
With a little assist from SDR Traveller, makers of “ultra light, ultra strong, discreet luggage for the global traveller.”
Meaning: durable, lightweight bags that can transport up to $1 million in U.S. currency without leaving a trace, thanks to some ingenious tech and a magical material called “Cuben Fiber.”
Cuben Fiber is a waterproof, lightweight and ripstop laminate four times stronger than kevlar at half the weight (as well as resistant to UV light and 100% waterproof).
A stiff material, it gets a bit crinkly over time, offering the bags an interesting, well, patina. But also safety.
This fiber makes up all the stealthy duffels and carry-ons offered by SDR, a company run by Studio D, aka Studio Dradiodurans, an SF-based international research institute named after Deinococcus Radiodurans, an “extremophilic bacteria that can survive acid, drought and has extraordinary tolerance to radiation.”
Global Warming
Upstate New York mountain reaches minus 114 wind chill at its summit
BY ALFRED NG
THE WILD CENTER
While New York City had its coldest start to Valentine’s Day in 100 years on Sunday, it would seem balmy compared with the wicked wind chill at upstate Whiteface Mountain.
As temperatures dropped across the Northeast from the blast of a polar vortex, the wind chill at Whiteface, near Lake Placid, made it feel like a body- and mind-numbing minus 114 degrees late Saturday and into Sunday. Central Park could only muster a minus 1 degree.
The Wild Center, which works with the Atmospheric Science Research Center at SUNY Albany, recorded the frigid temperature from a research station at the mountain’s summit.
How The West Was Won
How a Basket on Wheels Revolutionized Grocery Shopping
by Zachary Crockett, Priceonomics
The shopping cart leads a sad, under-appreciated existence.
He is pushed around. He is battered by cart collectors, and mauled by unattentive parking lot drivers. He is left for dead in dark alleyways, drowned in the sludgy tides of levees and bays. Occasionally, small children poop on him.
We take him for granted. After all, how would we pull off our Thanksgiving shopping, or buy a 16-pound bag of jumbo shrimp at Costco without the assistance of his sinewy, steel arms? How would we keep our children from wreaking havoc on the soup can aisle without his handy baby seat? More broadly, how would we — as over-consuming, gluttonous Americans — manage to carry our selections from the 44,000 items that typically line a supermarket shelf?
Few inventions have so profoundly shaped consumer habits. With the exception of the automobile, the shopping cart is the most commonly used “vehicle” in the world: some 25 million grace grocery stores across the U.S. alone. It has played a major role in enriching the forces of capitalism, increasing our buying output, and transforming the nature of the supermarket — and for its role, it has been dubbed the “greatest development in the history of merchandising.”
Rarely comes the time when we sit back and consider the history of the shopping cart. But gather, friends: that time has come.
By the late 1930s, major changes were happening in the way that food was consumed: Freon, synthesized in 1930, led to the spread of the commercial refrigerator (by the late 1930s, more than 50% of Americans had one in their home). At the same time, preservatives increased the number of canned goods in grocery stores. As a result, consumers were not only buying more food per shopping trip, but bulkier, heavier items.
There was one big problem with this: at the time, self-serve grocery stores (including Goldman’s) only provided small wire-woven baskets to put groceries in. “When the housewife got her basket full, it was too heavy for her to carry and she stopped shopping,” Goldman recalled in a 1970 interview. “I thought if there was some way we could give the customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop, we could do considerably more business.”
Goldman came to the realization that “[his] problem as an entrepreneur was no different than the problem [his] customers faced while shopping”: in order to sell more food, he’d have to figure out a way for his customers to carry less food.
At first, the solution didn’t come so easily. “When a clerk would see a customer’s basket practically full, he would hand them another basket and tell them they could find their first basket by the checkout stand,” wrote Goldman — but this required clerks who were constantly alert, and it wasn’t exactly scalable. Next, he considered re-arranging the goods into an “M” shape, attaching baskets to a tiny, parallel railroad track, and having customers shuffle along in an assembly line as their carts moved automatically. This proved to be a bit too complex.
Cascadia Coming To Kill Us
The quake-maker you’ve never heard of: Cascadia
By Michael Martinez, Stephanie Elam, and Rosalina Nieves, CNN
Mother Earth slowly reveals her secrets, and this time, it’s a fault line deep in the belly of the planet.
Its name is a whopper: The Cascadia subduction zone.
Its gargantuan size and potential power amaze earthquake experts, who say it could cause the worst natural disaster in the history of North America — if it ruptures entirely.
This quake-maker sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where the seabed meets the North American tectonic plate. In all, it stretches 700 miles along the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia’s Vancouver Island to Washington to Oregon to northern California’s Cape Mendocino.
In fact, “the Cascadia” already has made history, causing the largest earthquake in the continental United States on January 26, 1700. That’s when the Cascadia unleashed one of the world’s biggest quakes, causing a tsunami so big that it rampaged across the Pacific and damaged coastal villages in Japan.
Now it’s a question of when the Cascadia will strike again, scientists say.
That big one could “hit at any time,” and there’s even a website called Aftershock that allows Oregonians to enter their address for a custom report on seismic risks. If the Cascadia were to experience a large-magnitude earthquake, the temblor and resulting tsunami could kill more than 11,000 people and injure more than 26,000, according to one FEMA model.
