Holy Shit, School Shootings!

Let me just say right off the bat that I agree, there is nothing funny or entertaining about school shootings. They are entirely tragic and horrific, and though I'm almost always going for entertainment on this blog, I called it "That's Interesting" and not "That's Entertaining" for a reason.

With that being said, recent research into the mentality of school shooters has opened up terrifying insights into why they're becoming more of a thing. Don't get me wrong. School shootings are not a completely new phenomenon. As long as there have been privately-owned guns, there have been those rare few who think it would be fun to use one in a place of learning.

But until fairly recently, the phenomenon was exceedingly rare. Thankfully, it still is relative to most other violent crime. But the numbers are starting to look disturbingly like rain in an oubliette. The water is rising and we haven't quite found a way to divert it yet.

It's a dungeon with a high hatch as the only entry point.

Very recently, a new explanation has emerged to explain why this rare tragedy is starting to look more like a trend, and it's terrifying. It has to do with riots.

Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who studied paradoxical human behaviors about 40 years ago, set out to explain why people who are otherwise rational and peaceful will participate in a riot. What he eventually determined was essentially peer pressure. Any social process, he argued, is driven by thresholds. A threshold in this case is the number of people doing something, whatever it is, that we need to see before we define it as an okay thing to do.

So how it works is that someone with a low threshold -- a particularly hotheaded person, or maybe just someone looking for an excuse to cause some damage -- starts wrecking something. Someone else with a threshold of 1 joins in, because as long as someone else is doing it, it's probably okay, right? Then a few more join, and a few more, and pretty soon there are decent people surrounded by destructive frenzy, and everyone temporarily becomes willing to redefine what is normal, what is acceptable. The more it happens, the more it becomes normal.

Normal.

If you're thinking ahead at all, a sinking dread may be creeping up on you. Because Malcolm Gladwell recently suggested that this same principle can be applied over a longer period of time to explain the school shooting epidemic. The trend started, he argues, back in 1999. With Columbine. The shooters in that case were textbook psychopaths, but the media frenzy around their messages and preparations started a threshold. Since that time, people who commit mass shootings at school have slowly begun trending away from violent mental illness.

This is the Columbine Memorial. I have no witty comments.

The more it happens the more it becomes normal. We can reassure ourselves with the knowledge that people generally don't like to hurt each other, but if Gladwell's hypothesis proves true then it's going to get worse before it gets better. As he puts it, "The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."

Holy shit.


NOTE: I avoided using any mass shooter's name in this post because it may be a contributing factor to the normalization of mass violence.


Dalibor Tower Dungeon, Prague Castle by kitonlove. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons

"Riot in Vancouver" by Elopde. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

"Columbinememorial" by Denverjeffrey. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons

Holy Shit, Fondue!

If you're a middle- to upper-class American yuppie (or are friends with one), or are just some other type of foodie I haven't met yet, you know all about fondue. It's a bucket of melted stuff that you dip other stuff into. Traditionally, it's meant to be melted cheese and bread. Either way, it's kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

Who decided that dipping bread into a communal bowl of viscous cheese was a delicacy? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for jazzing up any dish with some cheese. But how did this become fancy? The answer, shockingly, has to do with war, corruption, and a veritable cartel dedicated to Swiss cheese.

As much as I'd like it to be, the cartel was not run by literal Swiss cows

And I'm not making any of that up. The cartel was called the Swiss Cheese Union. It was founded in 1914 by Swiss dairy farmers in order to control cheese production and prices. You may recognize this as the exact principle behind OPEC. As an added bonus, the Swiss Cheese Union also decided what cheeses dairy farmers were allowed to produce. Only Gruyere, Sbrinz and Emmental were allowed, and farmers needed a license to make and sell any of them or they risked being blacklisted.

And before you ask, yes. There were cheese rebels.

The cheese cartel gained significant prominence after World War I, owing largely to the fact that the infrastructure of other European nations had recently and literally been burned and blasted to bits. Which meant most cheese in Europe was coming out of more-neutral-than-beige Switzerland. That gave the Swiss Cheese Union an enormous amount of power, because it turns out people can get pretty serious about their cheese. With some bribes and favors, the Union was able to get a few politicians in their pockets, leading to huge subsidies for their industry.

Still, the cartel was unsatisfied. They had the supply side of the cheese market pretty much cornered, but their marketing arm decided they could do something about the demand side as well. Luckily, there was a regional dish in certain Alpine areas known as fondue that could literally have people eating bucket loads of their product. The Swiss Cheese Union successfully lobbied to have fondue made a national dish of Switzerland, and pounded the ever-loving cheese curds out of their marketing efforts. Your knowledge of fondue, whoever you are, is very likely a result of this marketing effort.

Pictured: Corruption.

Eventually, the people of Switzerland got wise to the corruption involved in the cheese cartel, largely because what government spends so much money on talking about fondue? Dirty laundry was aired, people were jailed, and by the 1990s the Swiss Cheese Union was a shadow of its former glory. By 1999, it was completely dissolved, and a new era of freedom dawned for Swiss dairy farmers. But the legacy of the Swiss Cheese Union lives on today in every pot of melted cheese you stick your comically long fork into.

I'm suspicious of dishes that require a unique utensil to be eaten.

So next time you visit your local quirky, atmospheric little hole-in-the-wall fondue place, just remember the enormous and corrupt cartel that brought it to your attention.

Holy shit.

"Swiss fondue 2" by JHG (Julien29) - Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

"Mozzarella cheese" by Jon Sullivan - http://pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=pdef&pg=8553. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

"Fondue2" by -jkb- Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons

"Fondue fork" by Vearthy - based on the shape in the PONS Picture Dictionary - Polish-German + free wood pattern from http://mayang.com/textures/Wood/images/Flat%20Wood%20Textures/wood_1163214.JPG. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

Holy Dog Shit!

In the Fall of 2000, a group of four buddies decided to make a quick buck by robbing an upscale house in Lakeville, Indiana. What they didn't realize (until they were spotted) was that the property wasn't quite abandoned. There were three construction workers in a barn on the property. The jig was pretty much up...or it would have been if one of the burglars hadn't decided to do what is customarily referred to in Hollywood as "tying up loose ends."

Picture unrelated.

So he shot all three of the witnesses in the head, killing them all. The four criminals were apprehended, and their conviction on armed robbery was more or less in the bag. The trickier part for investigators was figuring out which of the four were involved in the actual murder. Juries like to take that sort of thing into account when deciding whether individual members of a criminal conspiracy should be locked up without parole and whatnot.

One of the four was a 21-year-old youngster named Phillip Stroud. He solemnly swore to the police that he was a mere lookout. That he had never left the car. That his involvement was minimal, and he would never have wanted anyone killed. Investigators may have believed him if it weren't for his shoes. Or, to be more accurate, the thing they found on his shoes.

Guess what it was?

That thing was shit. Dog shit. The police sent a tiny scrape of dog shit from Stroud's shoes to a Veterinary Genetics Lab at UC Davis, which is a thing that exists in our world (thank god). They also sent a fresh poo from the dog who lived in the house where the whole thing went down. Turns out, they were a perfect match. And outside the crime scene, close enough to the barn for it to be suspicious, there was a nicely flattened turd that someone had stepped in.

Stepping in dog poo is enough to ruin anyone's day. For Phillip Stroud, stepping in dog poo led to his conviction, which led to his being sentenced to death. A few years later, the sentence was overturned and commuted to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. So if you're planning to murder anyone...well, first of all, don't. But watch for the telltale poo.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Hessy Taft!

The baby above is Hessy Taft. Cute little bugger, isn't she?

Well, the Nazis certainly thought so. In 1935, the Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus (The Sun in the House) had their own version of the "cutest baby contest" that magazines often have. Except they called theirs "The Most Beautiful Aryan Baby" contest. The chief judge was none other than Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbles.

A considerably less handsome specimen.

Baby Hessy was taken to a photographer when she was a mere six months old. Without telling the parents, the photographer submitted the picture to the magazine, confident that he had found the prettiest baby in all the Third Reich. Goebbles agreed with him, and soon little Hessy's face was on the cover of the Nazi Magazine and plastered all over shop windows, magazine ads, and postcards throughout Germany.

You may already see where this is going. See, Taft is actually Hessy's married name. She was born Hessy Levinsons, and despite being renowned as a beautiful Aryan baby, she was, in fact, quite Jewish. The photographer explained to the family that he was ordered to submit his 10 favorite baby pictures to the contest, and he submitted the one he thought was most beautiful partly because he wanted to make the Nazi philosophy look ridiculous.

Which, as you might imagine, was not as easy back then.

Luckily for the Levinsons, the Nazi Party never realized they picked a Jewish baby as an example of what all good Aryan babies should look like. Even luckier, they escaped Germany after Hessy's father was captured by the Gestapo then released thanks to a good word from a Nazi he knew.

The cover photo of Hessy Taft is one of the most delicious pieces of irony I've ever seen. The Nazis were so authoritative, so certain of the pseudoscience behind their horrific racism...and yet here they were, failing at so basic a test of said pseudoscience as picking out a non-Jewish baby as a mascot.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Third Punic War!

 The Third Punic War started in 149 BC, and by 146 BC, Cato the Elder saw his dream of a dead Carthage fulfilled. If you were a Carthaginian at the time, the whole thing was just...such bullshit. You're sitting here in your utterly defeated country, doing whatever the Romans tell you to do because they could burn you and everything you love as easily as you could punch a rock.

Not that I'd recommend it. Rocks just aren't very good at dodging.

Then some foreign tribes started raiding Carthaginian territory. Carthage was bound by treaty to arbitrate all conflicts through the Roman Senate, but at this point they had paid off the war indemnity and considered the treaty dissolved. The Romans saw things differently.

More importantly, the Romans were facing a huge increase in population and a huge staying-the-same of farm yields. So the Third Punic War, essentially, was Rome looking at Carthage and saying, "Hey, guys, we need your food...so..." then lighting North Africa on fire.

Not the farms, though. Boy, would that have ever been awkward!

Carthage was destroyed. Utterly. It's buildings were burned and its people put to the sword or sold into slavery. Its territories were annexed by Rome, and the city itself would only be rebuilt (as a Roman city) a century later. Then it became a Vandal Kingdom for a while until it was conquered by an Islamic Caliphate.

But here's the thing: when you completely obliterate a city, there's no one around to sign a peace treaty. In a weird but arguably (technically) legal way, the cities of Rome and Carthage remained at war after Carthage ceased to be part of the Empire. At least, that's how officials from both cities saw it in 1985, when the mayors of both cities signed a peace treaty and symbolic declaration of friendship.

If you take that technicality at face value, the Third Punic War was the longest conflict in history, lasting over 2,130 years.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Gamergate!

If only.

For as long as I can remember, "gamer" has been one of the main points of my identity. Gaming was a constant companion for most of my youth. Several of my strongest and most enduring friendships were formulated on the foundation of shared interest in games. Games were a comfort and a release when I was a morose teenager.

Recently, I've started to shy away from calling myself a gamer. There are several reasons for the change. I have newer, more important ways to identify myself these days -- like husband, and more recently, father. But it's not like I don't still play. I do. Every chance I get, even if said chances are few and far between.

The bigger reason is Gamergate. Gamergate is a movement that is ostensibly about corruption in the games journalism industry. That's a very real problem. There have been instances of journalists being fired for writing honest reviews of games whose publishers were providing advertising revenue to the host site. That is all kinds of unethical, and it's not an isolated problem.

But we got these guys out of it. They're cool I guess.

But that's not what sparked Gamergate. Gamergate started when the jilted ex-boyfriend of an indie game developer posted a video manifesto that aired all of their dirty laundry, including accusations that she had cheated on him and exchanged sexual favors for positive coverage of her game. The Internet exploded in the way it only does when there's a new woman to harass. Of all people, Adam "Jayne from Firefly" Baldwin coined the movement's title...in the midst of one of his bat-shit, right-wing Twitter rants. 

Jayne, your mouth is talking. You might want to look to that.

It could have been a decent movement, to be honest. But from its inception, the people who were saying, "If that's true, it really says something about the state of games journalism" were instantly drowned out by the hordes of ignorant shits screaming, "It must be true! What reason would a jilted ex-boyfriend have to lie about his ex-girlfriend to her peers? Our only reasonable course is to threaten to rape and murder her."

They're like this, but with death threats.

And I am not fucking kidding about that. Zoe Quinn was driven from her home by threats of sexual violence and death, from people who had found and published all of her personal information, including her address. Anyone of any standing in the industry who spoke in her defense was given the same treatment, including Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic who had already seen her share of death threats because of her video series that asks the question, "Do the games industry and gaming culture maybe treat women poorly?"

GEE I WONDER

The movement is completely out of control at this point, and it might be the biggest threat to gaming since the industry crashed in 1983. A largely falsified rumor about a woman's sex life has started a horrific campaign of harassment against women who are interested in games and want them to be a more inclusive medium. I mean, Jesus Christ, when I was a teenager my heart would have burst with joy if I learned that games were considered "art" enough where they could be subject to feminist critiques. I've always insisted that video games could be more than toys, and now that people outside of the traditional gaming demographic are acknowledging that, a bunch of children are trying to drive them away with death threats.

So as much as I'm not done with gaming, I'm done being a gamer. I know from the responses within the industry to Anita Sarkeesian and to the Gamergate lunacy that I can look forward to a richer, more diverse culture surrounding games. But gamers? I won't be a part of that world anymore.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Mentoring Biases!

#heforshe because I want my daughter to live in a world without the below scenario

Lately there's been a lot going on in the realm of gender politics. One of the big rallying cries for the Women's Rights movement of late has been the fact that women make about 77 cents for every dollar men make in the work force. One of the big answers to that cry has been that women tend to choose lower-paying jobs, so it's your own fault for not joining the STEM collective.

...and adding your biological and technological distinctiveness to their own

Well, not so fast.

It's generally accepted that, in order to really excel in any discipline, you need a good mentor. Academic mentoring is a time-honored tradition that dates back to probably around the time humans realized that they could use specific noises to pass their knowledge on to another person. It's an essential part of the learning experience.

With this in mind, researchers sent thousands of letters to professors asking if they'd be willing to be a mentor to the letter-writer. These requests were 100% identical, but were signed with different names. In the STEM fields, if the letters were signed by a female-sounding name (or what we'll politely call an "ethnic" name), not only were they less likely to get a willing mentor -- they hardly ever even got an answer.

These mentors are essentially the gatekeepers of lucrative career fields, and the sign they're currently hanging on the gate looks like this:

Wherein Brother Bear is kind of an asshole

This sort of thing has always bothered me, but now that I have a daughter?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Dracula!

When you get one of the most infamous monsters in all of storytelling named after you, you know you've done something right. Or wrong. Depends on how you respond to the whole "No such thing as bad publicity" adage. Posthumously. Very posthumously.

ANYWAY.

I shouldn't be getting off track this early.

Vlad III "Motherfucking" Țepeș was a Voivode (warlord) of Wallachia back around the time when the Byzantine Empire finally had enough with being the legacy of old Rome and rebelled via being utterly vanquished by the Ottomans. Wallachia, being a nearby neighbor of Constantinople, had its own problems with potential Ottoman invasion. Vlad's father, Vlad II, dealt with this threat pragmatically.

That is to say, he allied himself with Ottoman Empire, paid them tribute, sent his sons to them as hostages, and in return was installed as Voivode of Wallachia.This is after he joined a chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, which was dedicated to fighting the "enemies of Christianity" -- chief among which were the Turks themselves.

The best defense is a good mewling surrender.

As an aside: the Romanian word for "Dragon" is "Drac." Vlad II's association with The Order of the Dragon earned him the name "Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the Dragon." I think you know where this is headed. Adding an "-a" to the end of a name makes it patronymic in this context. So Vlad III was also known as "Son of the Dragon," or "Dracula."

Vlad III's younger brother Radu got along famously with the Ottomans, and ended up converting to Islam. Vlad...not so much. He was constantly at odds with his captors, which meant he was constantly punished. This did nothing to improve the relationship. Eventually, his father and older brother were both killed, and Wallachia was taken over by a rival faction. The Ottomans' solution to this little problem was to install Dracula as Voivode.

Which went thusly.

This didn't work out so well. First, because he was immediately overthrown. Then he came back and described to the usurpers all the vicious fantasies he had about just...straight up destroying Turks. And that pleased them enough to make him Voivode again. When Sultan Mehmed II sent envoys to his childhood playmate, Dracula responded by saying, "Hey, envoys, you didn't tip your hats to me when you came in. You must really like those turbans." Then he had their turbans nailed into their heads.

The Sultan was understandably a bit miffed by this turn of events. He sent an army under Hamza Bey to "make peace" with Wallachia and "remove" Vlad III if necessary. Vlad apparently caught Bey sleepin', though, and launched a surprise attack that killed or captured almost every single man under Hamza Bey's command. Then Vlad went to work earning the epithet Țepeș, or "the Impaler."

And boy howdy, did he ever work hard to earn it. The more squeamish readers might want to go ahead and stop here. It's about to get graphic up in this blog.

See, impalement is one of those execution methods that isn't meant to just kill you. It's meant to keep you alive until you really, really want to die. They'd grease a stake, stick you on it (and I'm gonna let you use your imagination as to where exactly they put you), and try to avoid rupturing any of your internal organs. In that way, you could live up to eight excruciating days in blinding, horrific pain before you finally died.

Vlad did this to about 1,000 of Hamza Bey's men, and to Hamza Bey himself. Then he brought small bands with him and, using the fluent Turkish language and customs he learned in his youth, waltzed into various Ottoman camps and put everyone within them to the sword. Or the stake.

While Vlad treated himself to the steak.

Mehmed was displeased. He sent an army of almost 100,000 men in retribution, which Vlad the Impaler proceeded to dismantle and impale little by little over a series of stunning victories. Finally, it became too much. He was out of money, his mercenaries abandoned him, and he fled to Hungary where a rival imprisoned him.

For about a dozen years. Then he went back to Wallachia and took over again. Can't keep Dracula down. Or rather, you can. You just have to finally defeat him in battle to do it. Which is what happened about two months into his reign. The Turks brought his head back to Constantinople and everyone in the Ottoman empire changed their underpants and hoped no one like that would rise to power in the Balkans again.

Several hundred years later, an old writer named Bram Stoker was working on a vampire novel and came upon a tome that detailed some of the nastier figures in history. Vlad III Dracula turned out to be a perfect fit for the main villain, and the rest is pop culture history.

He's missing some of that Wallachian charm.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Turing!

I briefly mentioned Alan Turing in his capacity as a code breaker during World War II, but I didn't really elaborate. How about I do that now?

Turing was a goddamn genius. He had a mind that handled intricate logic the way most of us handle tying our shoes. During World War II, he helped build the framework for what would eventually become computers, and he did so in an effort to decode the German Enigma Machine. When his efforts paid off, he moved on to a more difficult version used by the Nazi navy, and he did that part himself. Because he felt like it.

How hard could it be?

When the war ended, he decided to continue working on this newfangled "computer" idea, and it's largely because of that decision that you're reading this post today. At one point during his research, a strange question arose. He and his team were creating machines with stored memory. Machines that employed logic with relatively little input from users. The question was, "At what point can these machines be considered intelligent?"

And so the concept of realistic artificial intelligence was born. Turing even gave us a way to determine when we were approaching or crossing that threshold. He got the idea from a party game where two people would go out of sight and type answers to a series of questions, trying to imitate each other so that the rest of the group can't tell who's who.

The game was adapted into film in 1997

The Turing Test is like that, except one of the two players is not a human. The best way to go about it, Turing argued, would be to create a child-like computer then subject it to an education of sorts. And that's what people did. Chatter bots are all based on the principle of the Turing Test. They learn new tricks by talking to people. None of them have quite gotten the hang of it, though.

Well, until last week. At the University of Reading, a chatter bot named Eugene managed to convince a third of a panel of judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. Granted, there are some concerns about the methods, the judges, and the parameters. But the test itself was never a dichotomy so much as a general idea of where the fine line is between a machine and a mind. What Eugene tells us is that, while we might not have created a mind yet, we're very close.

And it doesn't at all resemble the terrifying love child of Macauley Culkin and Heinrich Himmler

As for Turing, he became the victim of archaic moral legislation. Alan Turing was a gay man, which was not something you wanted to be in the United Kingdom back in his day. It was illegal for him to be who he was. One day, his house was robbed, so he called the police. It came out while they were interviewing him that he was in a relationship with a man. He was promptly arrested and convicted of "indecency." His punishment was a combination of probation and chemical castration, as well as the revocation of his security clearance. This effectively ended his career.

Two years later, Alan Turing imitated his favorite fairy tale (Snow White) by lacing an apple with cyanide and eating it, killing himself. And that's how Britain showed its appreciation for one of the greatest minds their country had ever produced. A mind that not only laid the groundwork for modern computer science, but saved countless lives by taking the enigma out of the Enigma machine. It only took them 55 years to apologize for the way they treated him. Then 4 more for the Queen to give him a pardon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Birthday Song!

This is my 100th post on this here blog. To celebrate, I'd like to lead a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday to You." But I can't. And it's not because a blog is an inanimate series of 1s and 0s hosted on a data server and transferred via a series of tubes to your monitor. Nor is it because a chorus requires people to be in the same room, and Internet communication requires no such thing.

That would affect the logistics a little bit, though. And make it lonelier.

It's because "Happy Birthday to You" is copyrighted, and it has been since 1935. If you've ever wondered why family restaurants all have their own terrible, awkward birthday songs, this is why. Warner/Chappell Music owns the rights to the song, and they absolutely insist that anyone who sings it in a way that can be construed as "for profit" must send them a generous royalty check. Almost like a...birthday present?

OH COME ON, GUYS, I'M PRACTICING MY DAD JOKES

This is one of those things you're going to start noticing all the time now that you know it. Whenever it's someone's birthday in a film or on television, they'll typically either cut the song off after a few words so that they can claim fair use, invent their own song a la family restaurants, or resort to the archaic but public domain "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

Don't worry, there's hope. Warner/Chappell Music is facing a class-action lawsuit that, if the plaintiffs prevail, will set "Happy Birthday to You" squarely in the public domain beside its older, British-er companion. Until then, you might want to avoid singing it unless most of the people around you are family or friends. Because they absolutely will sue your pants off. And why wouldn't they? The company rakes in $5,000 per day just by enforcing their copyright.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

I was, maybe, a bit too kind to Erwin Rommel when I wrote about him. He did some great deeds for a Nazi, but in the end he was, after all, a Nazi. Maybe he wasn't a model citizen in the modern, not-complicit-in-a-brutal-dictatorship sense of the word.

If you want an example of what a bold and decent person does against the rise of National Socialism, maybe a better choice would be Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow-Vorbeck was a hero to the German people after World War I. He led the only successful invasion of Imperial British soil during that conflict, and he did so by waging what has been described as the greatest guerrilla operation in history.

There are other contenders.

He led about 14,000 men in East Africa on a campaign that was meant solely to divert as much resources as possible away from the Allies on the Western Front. That way, he reasoned, the folks in the thick of the war could get the important fighting done. There was essentially no hope of success, and Lettow-Vorbeck proved it by surrendering entirely undefeated under orders from high command after the Armistice.

While he was in command, more than half of his men were native Africans. He lived in a different time -- when the White Man's Burden was considered progressive -- and yet, he showed a remarkable amount of tolerance and even respect for other races. He spoke fluent Swahili and named black soldiers as officers, a rarity at the time. When questioned, he firmly stated, "We are all Africans here."

A bunch of white kids would say the same thing years later in the Book of Mormon. The musical. Not the book.

After the war, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck became involved in politics. He is chiefly known today as a vehement opponent of Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. He was one of Hitler's chief adversaries, and when the Führer offered him an ambassadorship as an olive branch in 1938, rumor has it that his response was, "Go fuck yourself." Imagine saying that to Hitler near the peak of his power. Even better, Lettow-Vorbeck's nephew was asked about the incident decades later, he said, "I don't think he put it that politely."

And everybody was like "OOOOOH YOU GOT SERVED MEIN FÜHRER!"

Pretty cool guy, right? Well, here's the thing: the guy was a major warhawk. He disobeyed direct orders by the governor of German East Africa in order to engage the British. The governor wanted to remain neutral in the war, because he rightly feared that war would destroy any positive change Germany brought to the region in favor of starvation and violence. That's exactly what happened, and Lettow-Vorbeck shrugged it off as an unfortunate fact of war. Add to that the fact that he regularly (albeit strategically) denied food to civilians so that his army could stay in the fight and he doesn't seem all that terrific.

That's the problem with heroes. They're all so human, and they all have to live in the real world.

Still, he told Hitler to go fuck himself. Major props for that one, right?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Frank Slide!

The town of Frank in Alberta, Canada was founded in 1901 as part of the ever-growing network of railroad towns in the Pacific Northwest. The Canadian Pacific Railway, coupled with a nearby coal mine, made it a lucrative option for anyone who wanted to have...you know...work. And food. Those things were pretty important back then, as they are today.

Although this was always an option. (I went pretty obscure on that joke)

This particular frontier town was located in the shadow of Turtle Mountain. I say was not only because the town was eventually moved, but also because so did the goddamn mountain. Very quickly, in fact. In less than two minutes in 1903, more than 90 million tons of the mountain moved...right on top of poor Frank. The event is known as the Frank Slide, and it was one of the costliest and deadliest landslides in recorded history.

In the months leading up to the Slide, coal miners reported seeing unusual fissures in the mines. The limestone inside the mountain was cracked, and the fissures allowed water through to further erode the rock, which led to a dangerously top-heavy mountain. Stir in a bunch of mining activities and you've got yourself a disaster brewing. It got to the point where the coal was practically mining itself when the mountain finally collapsed.

Everyone agreed that it kind of took some of the reward out of the whole process

Somewhere around 600 people lived in Frank at the time of the landslide, and of them somewhere between 70 and 90 were killed. We don't know for sure, because only 18 bodies were ever found, and 6 of those were discovered years later by a crew building a road in what was probably the most terrifying manual labor they would ever perform. The actual number is probably a lot higher - there were about 50 people camping near the base of the mountain hoping to find work in the mines who weren't listed among the population of the town.

In the aftermath of the Slide, Sid Choquette got to thinking. Being a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he had a pretty good idea of the train schedule. Checking his pocket watch and twirling his handlebar moustache worriedly (I assume), he realized that the Spokane Flyer a passenger train goddamn full of people, was overdue to arrive and had no way of knowing what had happened in Frank. The rails that were supposed to speed it along were, at this point, hindered by a two mile long pile of rubble. This is what can be referred to in layman's terms as really shitty conditions for a train ride.

The only worse conditions would be "anywhere near Sabin."

So, ignoring the rubble and choking cloud of dust, Choquette ran over a mile without stopping and got the message to the approaching at literally the last possible second. His actions saved the lives of everyone on board the train, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad was so grateful they gave him...a kindly worded letter. And $25.

CANADIAN.

You can see the results of the Frank Slide to this day:

That's mountain guts. That's what you're looking at. The guts of a mountain.

Holy shit.