We're no the likes o other men that work eight hours a day

[sovay]

I have spent nearly every waking moment of my day so far dealing with bureaucracy, but unlike the vast majority of my experiences dealing with bureaucracy, this one has been fast-moving and responsive and at one point a representative actually called me back concerned that I had not received an important piece of digital paperwork (which I had not, so she re-sent it and I filled it out and about two minutes later the original copy came through per rule of Roger Rabbit, only when it was funny). It may still come to nothing, but I can't say that they aren't taking us seriously. Have some links.

1. I had never heard of the 1971 Ibrox disaster before reading this account by a survivor. The idea that people could be funneled to their deaths like a fish-trap by nothing more than numbers and architecture and negligence—no stampede, no fire, no collapse—apparently disturbs me more than some other disasters.

2. Speaking of disasters, I had heard of Roopkund and its skeletons, but not of the more recent and even more mysterious remains sifted out from their pilgrim fellows by carbon dating and genetic analysis. The absence of any kind of local legend really makes me curious.

3. David Schraub on America as, actually, a center-left nation.

4. I took an internet quiz purporting to reveal how an audience would perceive me if I were a fictional character and spatch had to ask me if I was all right because of the noise I made when confronted with the image of red Converse sneakers kicking off a skateboard and the designation "edgy step on me":

it's You. you're the edgy character with combat boots that everyone wants to step on them ( depending on what your gender is. ) you probably have a very cool style, and you're also absolutely gorgeous in a way that average people just ... aren't. you might be a little bit of an asshole, but that's ok. you get a pass because you're extremely attractive. you radiate some sort of energy that i can't describe. i'm not sure you're a real person honestly.

5. Have some amazing photos of shipwrecks.

As a person who has never been interested in actors because I don't know them and does not crush on characters because they don't exist, I wish at the risk of TMI to register my absolute confusion at waking up from a piercingly sexual dream of Van Heflin in Act of Violence (1948). I adore that movie and his performance in it, but I wouldn't sleep with Frank Enley if, like Mary Astor's Pat, I got paid for it. I would almost hope it's a metaphor, except then I can't think for what. Dumpster fire doesn't even begin to cover that guy.

Comments

[starlady]

That journalist's story of being in a crush at the stadium twice reminds me of how my mom always used to say that if it's not your time, it's not your time. But I wound up reading the linked account of the Hillsborough disaster, in which the police were directly culpable for 96 deaths in similar circumstances and lied about it for decades, and found it even more chilling.

The Roopkund thing is fascinating. The hailstorm explanation for Roopkund A makes a lot of sense, but the Roopkund B deaths are wild. I incline to what the archaeologist quoted at the very end says, which is that an actual systematic dig in the area might yield enough context to illuminate the answers. That said--the lack of oral tradition doesn't seem definitive to me. The stuff about Nanda Devi gets remembered because it's about Nanda Devi. If these people didn't fit into that framework easily, they too would have been forgotten. And it's been long enough since the 18thC that it's not surprising that there aren't stories floating around about them outside that framework.

[sovay]

But I wound up reading the linked account of the Hillsborough disaster, in which the police were directly culpable for 96 deaths in similar circumstances and lied about it for decades, and found it even more chilling.

That was less horrifying to me because it was something that people drove to happen in the moment; the blaming of victims to the point of cover-up upsets me, but otherwise it was exactly the sort of lethally incompetent decision-making I was saying to spatch that the Ibrox disaster wasn't. I find it worse that Rangers F.C. set up a death trap and found out what it was and then just sort of left it until inevitably it killed so many people that it couldn't be ignored anymore, which did all those people so much good. There's an indifference in that that really bothers me.

The hailstorm explanation for Roopkund A makes a lot of sense, but the Roopkund B deaths are wild.

I'd read about the hailstorm explanation, but at a point when it was believed to explain all the skeletons. Finding out that there were multiple mass-death events at the lake was a serious what. I understand it makes sense in context of the local weather which trends favorably toward people whiting out in blizzards, but still.

I incline to what the archaeologist quoted at the very end says, which is that an actual systematic dig in the area might yield enough context to illuminate the answers.

Agreed. I hope it happens.

And it's been long enough since the 18thC that it's not surprising that there aren't stories floating around about them outside that framework.

I don't find the lack of oral tradition significant in the sense that I think it proves that the eighteenth-century Greek bones can't be what they appear; I was thinking of it more in line with Inuit stories about the Franklin expedition, where it was so weird to encounter a bunch of strung-out white men being lost and doing cannibalism that it went into the local legendry. If it's considered so unprecedented for a bunch of Mediterranean travelers to have been up by Roopkund in the first place, I feel like something about the incident should have stuck. (Because I like the way that history does not always look like the received version of itself, however, I would be delighted to discover it wasn't really unprecedented at all.)

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, I agree re Ibrox and Hillsborough. The Hillsborough disaster was the result of spectacularly bad decisions of the day, but you can sort of see how, even though the subsequent cover up was breathtakingly appalling. But the willingness of Rangers to just go "eh, who cares if it happens again?" is truly appalling.

(Mind you, Rangers are and were a fairly horrible club, so if any Scottish football team was going to have something like that happen, it's not a surprise that it was at their ground).

[sovay]

(Mind you, Rangers are and were a fairly horrible club, so if any Scottish football team was going to have something like that happen, it's not a surprise that it was at their ground).

(That's useful to know. I was not left with a positive impression, but I'd had no information on them at all before reading about the disaster.)

[rydra_wong]

But I wound up reading the linked account of the Hillsborough disaster, in which the police were directly culpable for 96 deaths in similar circumstances and lied about it for decades, and found it even more chilling.

Oh god -- it's one of the things that's so deeply burned into the national psyche over here (at least for people of my generation) that it's a jolt to realize that of course most people in other countries won't be familiar with it.

Awful, awful things happen when you funnel a sufficiently large number of people into a small space under pressure.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/03/hajj-crush-how-crowd-disasters-happen-and-how-they-can-be-avoided (content warning for the obvious -- if you are distressed by this sort of thing, this is very distressing)

[sovay]

Awful, awful things happen when you funnel a sufficiently large number of people into a small space under pressure.

I had just previously been familiar with the kind where it is for one reason or another deliberately done.

[rydra_wong]

Yup. But turns out, no panic or malice on the crowd's part is required; you just need people moving forwards at the "back" (e.g. trying to exit down stairs, or go into a stadium) and unable to tell what's happening at the "front".