A Rare Update

Oh you Poor Unfortunate Souls
Okay, seriously, I'm sorry to those of you who check this page that I don't update it more frequently. "Stop apologizing," you say, "and just write less but more frequently!" Fair enough, I say. You are a fair crowd. I reckon it'll be easier for me to update more frequently if I don't try to write as much. Also, I reckon I want to use the work "reckon" more. It really makes me feel in touch with my roots. Like a real American.

Wilhelm Scream
I recently saw a youtube video that featured a compilation of movies that all contained the same scream. It was a scream that you would undoubtedly recognize; the exact same sound has been featured in literally hundreds of pieces of popular entertainment. It was first featured in a 1951 movie called Drums of Death, where a heroic Army captain flees from the vicious Seminole into the Everglades where one of his comrades is eaten by an alligator. Decades later, Star Wars sound architect Ben Burtt found the clip and used it multiple times in the Original Trilogy. Since that first Star Wars movie, it's been an inside joke in Hollywood to use that scream in as many places as possible. Just watch that youtube video I linked and you'll see what I mean. It's even been used in video games. What I find particularly funny about it is that it sounds nothing like what I imagine a man being eaten by an alligator would sound like. In my mind, being eaten alive would involve curse words.

Tuskegee Experiment
On a completely different note, have you ever seen the movie "Half Baked"? There's a part where Dave Chappelle's character, in order to get medical grade marijuana from a scientist, claims that his grandfather was part of the "Tuskegee Experiments". I didn't get the joke when I saw it last, so I decided to look it up...whoa. In a nutshell, uneducated black men in the south were denied access to treatment for syphilis so that the progression of the disease, which generally leads to dementia and death, could be observed. Horrible, huh? Guess how long this "study" went on. Take a guess. From 1932 until 1972. FORTY YEARS! About 600 men were involved in the study, with 200 as control subjects. In 1972 information about the study was leaked to the press, causing an uproar, and the study was terminated.

By the end of the study, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Twenty-eight of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

It's hard for me to believe that this was going on that recently. Almost in my lifetime! I wonder what other unbelievably horrible things are happening under our very noses.

Explosive Decompression
There was an article on the internets about different types of death, and one of them was rapid depressurization. In movies, people who are ejected out an airlock into space blow up and pop like a balloon, due to the lack of air pressure keeping their insides from rupturing their skin. Apparently this is just a fun fiction; in order to pop, you must have gone from much more than 1 atmosphere of pressure to a vacuum. If you were to be ejected into the vacuum of space, you're not going to pop, but asphyxiate. The effects of explosive decompression (charmingly acronym-ized "ED" on wikipedia...isn't that used as an acronym for something else these days?) are much more entertaining. In a diving bell accident on the Byford deep sea rig in 1983, 4 divers were in a depressurization chamber at 9 atmosphere when the safety hatch was suddenly opened; one of the divers was essentially sprayed through the hatch, while the other 3 essentially just had the components of their blood instantaneously boil apart. For all of them, death was thought to be instantaneous, but I'll bet the clean up still sucked.

North Pacific Gyre
Did you know that there's a giant continent sized island of human trash floating in the north Pacific? Yup. There's a spot called the North Pacific Gyre where ocean currents cause trash to accumulate and only rarely escape. Up until the advent of plastic, most flotsom and jetsom in the ocean was organic, and therefore would biodegrade, but now there's a large area where plastic particles outnumber the predominant plankton of the area 7 to 1. Next time the lady at Whole Foods suggests that plastic bags are better for the environment I'm going to sneer at her like I'M the haughty organic grocery store clerk.