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 Shit, Moon Landings!

Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: we put human beings into a small capsule attached to several enormous machines that create aimed and sustained explosions which carried them off of the goddamn planet all the way to the goddamn moon, both of which are in constant motion. They landed and walked on the surface of the moon, then came back home and survived re-entry. We did this six times, and for some reason we haven't even really tried to do it again in over 40 years.

Look at her face. She misses us.

Holy shit.

There is no part of the concept of people walking the surface of the moon that is not profoundly incredible. Literally incredible to a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn't have the conspiracy theories about it being a hoax. Which are just plain wrong.

Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to bring human beings to the moon, had less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. It traveled through 238,900 miles of pure nothing to deposit people onto the lunar surface. Imagine what we could do with the power we have today?

Astronauts could pipe in some tunes!

And have you paid attention to rockets? Do you know what they are? They're pretty much the same thing as missiles. NASA managed to point one of those things at a moving target (albeit a big and predictable one) with enough accuracy and controlled chaos that they could not only fling astronauts to the moon, but do it safely.

Don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke...

Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing module and he was, by most definitions, an alien. Then he flubbed his line (no really, it was supposed to be "one small step for a man," which makes more sense), planted a flag too close to the landing site, picked up some rocks, and went back to Earth. And they made it. Safely. After knocking over the flag during takeoff. Don't worry, even the ones that weren't knocked over have been bleached white by the untempered radiation of the sun by now.

The real kicker for me, though, is the fact that the United States, the only country to have ever put human beings onto the surface of another celestial body, did so six times within a three year period, then never did it again. The entire time we were at it, the public, half awed by the monumental accomplishment they were witnessing, were clamoring about "more important problems back home." You hear the same argument today.

How is this not worthy of attention?

To which I like to say, "Are you fucking kidding me? Look at that shit. Look at what we did, America. Jesus. The moon. We went there." Saying that we shouldn't try exploring space until we've solved all of the problems on Earth is like saying you shouldn't try to get a job until you've figured out how to stop needing to eat. It's pure bullshit.

And seriously, look at that. It's a man on the moon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Tommy Westphall!

What if I told you that almost all of your favorite television shows and most of your least favorite ones take place in the mind of an autistic teenager? I suspect you'd call bullshit and tell me that's just lazy writing. It sort of is, which the "in his head all along" plot twist isn't used very often anymore.

But when St. Elsewhere ended its six year run in 1988, it was groundbreaking. The whole series, as it turned out, was a day dream of Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of one of the main characters. Instead of everything taking place in a hospital, we find out that it was actually in a construction worker's apartment, in his son's mysterious imagination.



Here's where it gets weird. Weirder.

Fourteen years after the series ended, a writer named Dwayne McDuffie publicly wondered what the implications of that bizarro ending where for the greater TV universe. Any show worth its salt, after all, has a crossover with another show worth a comparable amount of salt.

Ever think about the troubling socioeconomic implications of this?

St. Elsewhere had one of these with Homicide: Life on the Street. Two doctors from the former appeared in episodes of the latter. McDuffie's theory holds that this crossover means both shows are figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination. Do you know what other shows had crossovers with Homicide?

Lots of them.

Like this one.

Homicide turns out to be something of a nexus for little Tommy's mind. Through it, literally hundreds of other television shows are connected in degrees that would make Kevin Bacon blush. According to one of the St. Elsewhere writers, "Someone did the math once... and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall's mind. God love him."

Here's my personal favorite: through Homicide, Tommy imagined The X-Files, which leads to Veronica Mars, then Lost, Diagnosis: Murder, Mission: Impossible, The Jeffersons, The Fresh Prince of Bel goddamn Air, Diff'rent Strokes, the legendarily bad Hello, Larry, then Hi Honey, I'm Home, The Brady Bunch (!!!), Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hogan's Heroes, and finally....

Booya. Or bat-ya. Whatever.

Fucking BATMAN.

That's right. Batman. The Dark Knight was invented by an autistic kid staring at a snow globe.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Robert Ballard!

In the summer of 1985, Robert Ballard set off on an expedition to find the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. Using side-scan sonar to map the ocean floor, his team noticed some irregular terrain which, upon further inspection, turned out to be debris from the infamous shipwreck. The following year, he returned with DSV Alvin (the same Alvin that explored the Marianas Trench) and got a detailed photographic record of the site.

Old age and the weight of the entire goddamn ocean have not been kind to her.

Here's the thing, though: part of that first paragraph is not, strictly speaking, true. Robert Ballard did not, in fact, set off on an expedition to find the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. That was his cover story. In reality, he was working as a US naval intelligence officer and searching for the wreckage of two nuclear powered submarines.

To be fair, Ballard himself really was in it for the Titanic. The Navy was his benefactor, and they set the priorities. Priority one was the missing potential doomsday devices, and priority two was the monument to man's hubris and graveyard of the humble peasants and crew who paid the price for it. Seriously, though. Take a look at the numbers.

No no no, rich women and children first!

Ballard's mission was a success, and he had 12 days leftover to actually look for the Titanic. Against the odds, he found it. The Navy, as it turns out, was less than pleased with the latter success. When the discovery came out, Robert Ballard was an instant celebrity. That meant a lot of attention on something they'd rather keep on the DL. Whatever choice words they shared in private, they let Ballard go ahead and take his discovery public.

Which ultimately led to James Cameron drawing Kate Winslet naked and blaming it on Leonardo DiCaprio

Now we have artifacts, films, books, and a much better understanding of the design flaws that let a sideswiping iceberg sink the unsinkable. And it's all thanks to two more tragic and terrifying shipwrecks in the same area. Shipwrecks that may or may not have poisoned nearby ocean depths with radiation. That part's not unclassified yet.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Streetcars!

If you're roughly my age and you have similar taste, it's possible that you grew up loving the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In it, hard-boiled, noir-style private investigator Eddie Valiant gets caught up in a conspiracy by the evil Judge Doom and his associates to buy up all the public transportation of Los Angeles and demolish Toon Town to make way for interstate highways and create a massive demand for cars. Also, there's a cartoon rabbit.

Funny thing is, that actually happened. In real life.

Not this part. The conspiracy part.

From the late 1930s into the '50s, several companies with a vested interest in the rise of automobiles, led by General Motors, started buying up streetcar companies in major cities across America. Once acquired, the streetcars were systematically dismantled and then either replaced with good old combustible engine buses or left to languish, leaving locals in dire need of a new means of transportation.

Pictured: A new means of transportation

After public transportation languished, cars took off and the conspiring companies made a mint. Before we all grab our pitchforks, though, there are a couple of important caveats. Most importantly: most streetcar systems were dying already. The Great Depression, poor labor relations, urban sprawl, and poor planning were already taking their toll on the industry. When the conspirators swept in to deliver the killing blow, it was almost a coup de grâce. Almost.

Second, several companies and individuals were actually convicted and fined for their roles in the scandal. Justice was done. Partially. Kind of. In fact, they were convicted on about half of the charges. And one of the chief conspirators, H.C. Grossman, treasurer of GM, was fined a grand total of one goddamn dollar. So maybe justice was done in a sort of "playfully shoving your buddy a little" kind of way.

I choose to believe this is how Grossman celebrated his good fortune.

Despite those caveats, the fact remains that an honest-to-god conspiracy of nefarious capitalists bought out a popular service and, despite being in a position to rescue it, decided instead to drive it into the ground in favor of a less-environmentally friendly, more expensive (to consumers), and more profitable (for them) route.

Today, public transportation in America is about as popular and widespread as the Charleston is in modern night clubs. That's largely thanks to the exact conspiracy that drives the plot of 1980s children's movie.

Holy shit.