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Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
Okay the funniest thing about this is that everyone’s saying I’m taking away his space by putting things in the window
He has this entire one right next to it with a blankie and he uses it exclusively for people watching. He really only goes to the other window when he decides to be A Menace
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it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.
so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.
this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.
And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:
“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”
I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.
And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!
they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.
obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.
the phone immediately began to ring.
“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”
“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.
I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.
@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.
My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:
me: hi there, you’ve got TST-
him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*
me: hey, is everything o-
him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!
me: sir i do not know you and i have never even seen you but i am in romantic love with you.
me: do I need to schedule around my CT scan next week? what if they have to sedate me and I can't drive afterward-
me: ...
me: I'm not a dog. I will probably be cooperative with the CT scan and not bite the tech.
A new global report released Monday by the U.S. Geological Survey revealed that every place on earth currently has the wrong amount of water. “New satellite data confirms that every corner of the earth has the incorrect quantity of water,” the report read in part, noting that even though the total amount of water on the planet seemed to be about right, give or take a few hundred milliliters, the distribution of that water across the globe was “way off.”
Somebody Tell the Forest Service the Wings Aren't Supposed to Come Off
...yes, I settled on that as my clickbait title.
Depending on where you live, aerial firefighting might not cross your mind very often. In the vast dry sections of the United States, however, air tankers that drop water or firefighting foam in the path of wildfires are vital to keeping certain communities safe. States like California are ravaged by wildfires each year. While it can be argued that fighting every wildfire is actually detrimental to the environment, when lives are at risk, air tanker pilots are often regarded as heroes- so it might surprise you that by 2002, on average, one large tanker crashed per year. This was normalization of deviance taken to its extreme, a frankly ridiculous number of accidents being treated as run-of-the-mill by the industry. So why, exactly, was being a tanker pilot so dangerous- and more important, what did we do about it?
(Warning: this post will include historical footage of a plane breaking up in flight that may be disturbing)
Something changed around the middle of the last century. We started to realize that these massive mechanical beasts we were creating were far more resilient than the wooden and fabric constructions of old. An aircraft of today could perhaps last ten, maybe twenty years... or even longer. Early aircraft had been designed with a "safe life" philosophy, essentially guaranteeing that all the parts on the aircraft would last X number of years, and after that, well... no more guarantees. In the second half of the century we began transitioning to the "failsafe" philosophy that aircraft (and indeed, most complex machines) use today. A plane could have a theoretically infinite service life, so long as parts could be maintained or replaced and no single failure would lead to total destruction. With doubler plates and spare parts, we could Ship of Theseus our way into an immortal aircraft!
Conveniently, a large number of military planes went to boneyards or were sold for cheap in the aftermath of World War II, many of which were snapped up and converted for other purposes- including aerial firefighting. These now highly specialized tankers became valuable assets, many staying in service for half a century longer than their original service lives.
So... how do we ensure that incredibly old planes are still safe? Metal wears down, parts need replacing, and issues will only compound over time. For this reason, airlines have continuing airworthiness programs that evaluate the ongoing needs of aging fleets and ensure inspections are being done accordingly.
A continuing airworthiness program is mandatory for aging aircraft under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration... but due to an interesting loophole, air tankers actually didn't fall under their jurisdiction at all. Aircraft that belong to the US government are considered to be the responsibility of the agency that owns them- in this case, the United States Forest Service. While these planes are operated by independent companies, they only operate under exclusive contracts with the Forest Service, making them exempt from FAA oversight. The only requirement, after they were initially signed off as airworthy, was that they continued to be maintained according to applicable military technical orders.
Now, the Forest Service, believe it or not, is not an aviation organization. They deal with trees. And being a US government organization, their priority was getting the cheapest possible services. Thus, these firefighting contracts worked in a way that one might describe as... flawed.
Each year, as the wildfire season approached, aerial firefighting companies would bid for a one year contract. All maintenance had to be done in the off season, as any lack of availability during the contract would be penalized. And given that the Forest Service could simply choose not to hire them next year, all maintenance decisions had to be made with that in mind. If we replace this part, conduct this inspection, or hire this contractor, will that be the straw that drives us to bankruptcy if our contract isn't renewed?
By 2002, this system had killed many, many pilots already. But this time it would be caught on film.
Before the eyes of horrified onlookers, the wings of a C-130 Hercules aerial tanker bent upwards, tore off, and left the fuselage to plummet into the forest below. Only a month later, it happened again.
Two tankers, different aircraft, both owned by the same company. Both were determined to have the same cause- metal fatigue at the base of the wing. Wing failures in tankers are a well known phenomenon (one happened during a gender reveal a couple years back). Tankers need to fly in low to drop their cargo and then pull up in quick succession. The combination of dropping so much weight and the intense maneuver can lead to incredibly high G-forces afting on the wings, and if it's done too quickly or the pilot pulls up too much, the wings will fail at the base. In this case, the pilots didn't do either, but the metal fatigue on the wings reduced the G-forces necessary to lead to failure.
As it turns out, this metal fatigue was hidden under modifications made to the aircraft structure when it was converted. This area was only being inspected every 48 months, in accordance with the original military guidelines (which, again, were from half a century ago). However, because the G-forces involved in these retardant drops were so high, Lockheed later determined that the areas should have been inspected every 4 months.
To be clear: the fact that planes were being treated this way, and the fact that nobody seemed to care for decades how dangerous aerial firefighting was, is normalization of deviance to the highest extent. Can we coin a new term, normalization of negligence?
In the aftermath of the investigation into these accidents, the Forest Service turned over a new leaf (heh). In a rare move for a governmental organization, they realized that they needed to shell out a little more cash. They would now hire companies for longer contracts of 3 to 5 years, meaning maintenance stopped being an economic stressor. Continuing airworthiness programs were built into their contracts, as well as other aviation safety requirements, and companies that couldn't match up quickly went out of business. While this transition was a hard one, it was also necessary. Since the reforms, very few air tankers have been lost in the United States.
Nowadays, those early air tankers have mostly been retired. Most surviving warbirds are thankfully confined to museums and specialized organizations where they are much less likely to have their wings fall off (although that wouldn't save them from a poorly run airshow, but that's a story for another day). Modern air tankers are still not purpose built but are far more reliable, often being converted civillian planes rather than military surplus. I'll leave you with one of those to hopefully put you in a better mood- here, the largest firefighting plane in history, the 747 Global Supertanker, which can carry up to 74,000L of fire retardant. Sick as fuck.
My source for much of this post is this article by Admiral Cloudberg, which goes into a lot more detail. Go check it out.
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We had heavy rain last night-- the kind that usually means worms coming up--so I fully expected Vice to have brought me one. Here is this morning's gift:
Two wool dryer balls! Stolen fron the laundry downstairs. Good job Vice!
Also please know that sometimes my phone tries to do portrait mode and gets it really wrong and instead gives me these cat cutouts on solid color backgrounds.
For a start, you can only buy these as a three-flavor set on the Bush's Baked Beans website, but to be fair to them it was pretty reasonably priced even for three normal-sized baked bean cans, which is what I thought I was getting. Then they showed up in like, a goddamn GIFT BOX and they're MASSIVE.
They also come with a baked bean can koozie (pictured left) and a branded can opener (pictured right).
So far I've only sampled the Apple Pie flavor.
I had thought -- well, hoped -- that it would be primarily cinnamon flavor, which doesn't actually go badly with the tomato-molasses sauce that canned baked beans normally have. This hope was a mistake.
Eating these beans is like mainlining some kind of legume-based distilled concept of Christmas. My face filled with a powerful dose of cinnamon, as though my sinuses were suddenly potpourri bowls. For a few minutes, as I chewed and swallowed, I lived in a world suffused by pure artificial cinnamon.
Normally when I make baked beans from a can (which is not often anymore, since I have a pressure cooker and like five pounds of dry pinto beans) I drain off some of the sauce and add mustard and barbecue sauce to remix it a little.
After sampling some of the Pure Christmas Bean (tm) I took the second half of the tin I'd reserved, drained it, and added plain yellow mustard; that did actually take the edge off and make them slightly more edible. And it's not that they even tasted bad -- they just tasted overwhelming.
Stay tuned for Dill Pickle. I'm saving Rocket Pop for last.
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1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago
2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.
vaporwave
gummygunk
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
