Long live the magic we made.

In 1989, President Bush sent troops to Panama to capture the dictator and drug lord, Manuel Noriega. But Noriega had fled to (I had to look up the full name) the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See. The troops couldn’t exactly get in, so they surrounded the place and has to wait him out, or somehow force him out. And it’s crazy how they did it. The literal United States Navy SEALs did this And it is real history

They blasted rock and roll music for days until he gave up

Apparently, Noriega only liked opera, so this annoyed him. But it gets better. The playlist was not only obnoxiously loud and obnoxiously American, it had a sense of irony. Here are some highlights:

Danger Zone Freedom Fighter Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down Give It Up I Fought the Law and the Law Won If I Had a Rocket Launcher Nowhere to Run Panama Paranoid Prisoner of Rock and Roll Rock and a Hard Place Stay Hungry They’re Coming to Take Me Away This Means War Wanted Dead or Alive

And my personal favorite, and a thing that actually happened: Never Gonna Give You Up

ajdlfhkajgf okay. so

in high school i was in the marching band and in my junior year i was co-section leader and i carried a metronome in my backpack to use in rehearsals after school

to preface this story, the day before The Event we had a lockdown because there was a “suspicious person” circling the building (it was a confused parent. i spent two hours in the percussion closet. can you fuckign image, with my level of anxiety. anyway) so everyone was kind of on edge

so in this particular year of high school i had math first thing in the morning, which was awful, so i liked to go visit my english teacher because she was my favourite and i liked hanging out with her in my free time. so i set my backpack down and i leave the room

it gets close to time for class to start and i start heading back to the classroom, and @starrymonk and another friend of ours come running up to me and they tell me that our math teacher thinks my backpack has a bomb in it

apparently, when i set down my backpack, the metronome was in the bottom and got turned on and started beeping

now bombs haven’t fucking beeped or ticked since the goddamn 1960s but fuck that logic, our math teacher was actually. fucking ild and had never heard of an electric metronome in her life and was shouting at students to evacuate the wing 

so im running up and trying to explain to this fucko that the beeping in ¾ time at 120bpm is not, in fact, a bomb, but a device for making sure my section is in time, but she’s fucking losing it and makes us evacuate to the cafeteria

the students in the cafeteria are losing their shit. yesterday they thought they were going to be the next victims of a school shooting and today they think they’re going to die via metronome bomb. im running around trying to find a fucking sane faculty member while simultaneously telling everyone i run into, “it’s not a bomb, it’s A FUCKING METRONOME”

i finally find the vice principal and tell him, “dude, it’s not a fucking bomb, it’s a metronome, you know me, i’m in the band, literally there are only like five hundred fucking students in this school you know exactly who i am”

so he grabs me and another staff member and we start heading back toward the wing with the fake bomb, and already the three officers that we have patrolling the school (because of the incident the previous day) and the principal are gathered near the classroom and they shout at us to stop at the end of the hall (which is no more than fifty feet from the classroom, if that, and yeah that’s totally far enough to save us in the event of a bomb going off, right)

so the vp shouts to them that i think it’s a metronome, and i’m like no, i know it’s a metronome it’s my backpack and im a band student for the love of god

so they’re like nah we’re gonna call bomb squad

so fucking, i’m sent back to the cafeteria and this is how things happen as my band director filled me in later that day

apparently, the principal calls my band director down at the opposite end of the school and he’s like “hey darren, could you identify the sound of a metronome over the phone???” and my band director has no clue what’s happening because he isn’t involved in this nonsense, he doesn’t have a class during first period and was probably napping in his office, but he’s like “yeah, probably??” and the principal holds the phone up to the noise and my band director says it sounds like a metronome

skipping about an hour of hysteria and me telling everyone repeatedly that they aren’t going to die, the intercom comes on and tells the student body to gather in the gym for an assembly, presumably so we can all die in one place when the metronome bomb goes off

i’m still telling everyone i can grab that the bomb isn’t real and we aren’t going to die, and then i sit in the bleachers, possibly the angriest i have ever been, while everyone gathers in the gym

the principal and other important faculty whoever the fuck come in and start talking about the previous day’s incident and how tensions are high, so someone may have been stressed and mistakenly thought a metronome (which he pronounced as “metrodome,” which i like to think of as a giant beeping sports stadium) was a live fucking bomb

meanwhile i see the doors to the gym open and my band director slides in. he looks around for a minute, then sees me, and fucking grins like the asshole he is and starts edging his way around the room to me

when he gets over to me, he turns to face the people talking about threats and mistakes and bullshit to cover the fact that they know nothing about music education

and then slowly and slyly he pulls my metronome out of his pocket and hands it over to me, and then separately hands me the two batteries to it and starts giggling