Holy Hell You Guys

For 37 years it’s been up there on the flat roof of Mark Gubin’s building in the flight path of Mitchell International Airport. A sign painted in letters 6 feet tall tells people arriving here by air: “WELCOME TO CLEVELAND.”

“There’s not a real purpose for having this here except madness, which I tend to be pretty good at,” Gubin said

Above that the roof, he was having lunch one day in 1978 with a woman who worked as his assistant. Taking note of all the low-flying planes, she said it would be nice to make a sign welcoming everyone to Milwaukee. “You know what would even be better?” Gubin said.

The next thing you know, he’s out there on the black roof with a roller and white paint creating the sign that would bring more notoriety than anything else in his long career. A story about his confusing message ran in thousands of newspapers and magazines, on national TV news, “The Tonight Show,” Paul Harvey, all over.

(Fact Source)

[the man has a heavy russian accent]

This

over this

I searched that up, it was an old (deleted) tweet from when he was a minor and he’s obviously grown out of that

What I think is that obviously there’s a long history of bi women being told they’re “just straight.”

So, around 2015, mostly on tumblr, there was a really big push to highlight bi women’s attraction to other women.

What I think inadvertently happened from this is a downplaying of bi women’s attraction to men, so jokes like “I’m bi, which means I’m attracted to all women and one man” became very popular.

And that kind of joke got SO big, that on the internet the understanding of a bi woman became “attracted to most women, not that many men, and is ASHAMED of that attraction to men.”

And I think that for bi women who are very online… some of them actually internalised that shame, because it feels like there’s this need to prove that you actually are bi through attraction to women.

So even when acting on attraction to men, they will still try to downplay that and highlight attraction to women, which is where jokes like “I have a boyfriend but I wish I had a girlfriend” come from, which are fuckin’ weird!

I did not have to travel, it was in my hometown!

And I do regret it a little bit. When I rolled up at like, 11:20, there were maybe 30 people there. It was a MASSIVE open, grassy area, and I thought, “oh cool, plenty of room for social distancing." Hell, we could’ve had a hundred joshes and spectators there and socially distanced just fine. Unfortunately, WAYYYY more people showed up than I think any of us bargained for. By the time I realized the crowd was closing in behind me, there were probably a solid 1k+ people there. So there I found myself on the front lines of The Joshening, and I figured. Well, it’s too damn late now, might as well record for posterity.

 And OG Josh, bless the guy, was doing his damnedest to keep the thing as covid-safe as possible. He literally had a pocket full of masks that he was offering to anybody he saw without one, and he really did pick the biggest open area he possibly could. He even picked pool noodles and rock-paper-scissors as “combat” methods that you could remain socially distant for! 

Dude knew the original post (which btw is literally from last year when I don’t think ANYBODY thought covid would last until April 2021,) had spiraled WAY beyond his ability to reel it back in, so he showed up, took responsibility, and tried to make the best of an absolutely fucking ABSURD situation. 

Had I known how many people would come out to a random-ass field in the middle of my fucking NOWHERE little city, I absolutely would have stayed home. As things stand, I don’t feel particularly at risk of spreading anything, I’m vaccinated and was masked up the whole time. But literally as soon as I realized how many people were around I got real fucking nervous. 

Did y’all know the vast majority of the people there were from OUT OF STATE? Like not even just out-of-town, but like, Not Even Within The State Of Nebraska. There was a guy there from Denver. There was a guy there from fucking WASHINGTON DC. All for the fucking Josh Battle. Literally if just people from Lincoln showed up, it probably WOULD have been like, maybe 30 people? And that would’ve been perfectly safe assuming everybody masked up and spread out.

It’s this wild combo of like “oh god unintentional superspreader event” but also.... Just a lot of people doing some real wholesome and silly shit?? Like... I’ll be real it was the most fun I’ve had since quarantine started. The vibes were wonderful. It just snowballed in a way I don’t think anybody could have foreseen or prevented once it started going?