Tag: 50th anniversary (Page 1 of 3)

You haven’t thought about weaponized stampedes, have you? You’ve probably barely given a second thought to stampedes in general, let alone ones pointed at specific targets for military/political reasons. How would one even weaponize a stampede, anyway? Sharp shoes?

What about artificially generated weaponized stampedes? How much prepping have you done when Obama begins Operation: Mob Rule and artificially generated weaponized stampedes start popping up left and right? Just want some Sbarro’s? Sorry, you’re getting trampled by an AGWS.

Well, Enthusiasts, your inattention–criminal though it may be–can continue unabated because someone has done your thinking for you. A gentleman somewhere outside of Wheeling has come up with a plan.

OBJECTIVE:  Try to convince one of the band members to explicitly inform fans that… legitimate emergency stadium evacuation orders would NEVER be delivered via their personal phones.

Yes, fellow Enthusiasts: this summer’s Chicago shows are under serious threat of AGWS attack. Terrorists (one would assume) are planning (or PREPARING) to call or text a significant percentage of the crowd (during the show, when phone conversations will be easy) and tell them about an emergency, thereby inducing panic and generating (artificially) a weaponized stampede.

This plan has flaws.

Even our assumptions must be questioned: can a stampede be weaponized in the first place, and, digging to a more primal place, can humans stampede in a deadly enough manner to even be used as a weapon?

People are good at smushing each other against fences or trampling one another at concerts or retail superstores, but these are more rightly called crushes, rather than stampedes. (This New Yorker article by John Seabrook from 2011 is a great primer.)

Bison stampede, and they’re good at it. Besides ruminating and being on nickels, stampeding is the thing bison are best at. Anything in the way of the stampede will be obliterated, because bison weigh a million pounds and run a million miles an hour for a million hours straight. They also travel in very large packs, but I don’t want to guess the exact size.

If a person is in the way of a bison stampede, that person is getting fucked up by bison: first off, the size and speed and number thing. Second: bison have feet the size of dinner plates, and they will step on you. Third: as the bison are stepping on you, their lumpy buffalo genitalia will smack you in your face, and American bison have dicks made of razors, and balls made of lemons with their peels removed, and pubes made from salt. You will be hurt very badly.

People stampeding, though, is a pass. It’s just not workable from a physiology and physics standpoint: for a stampede to develop any force, it needs a certain density/weight and speed. F=MA, y’dig? Picture the bison – a solid line hundreds of yards deep with two-ton beasts running at 35 mph. That’s power.

People just aren’t heavy enough and fast enough to do any real damage, especially in a stampede when around half the participants will have tripped over one another ten feet into the chaos.

(A stampede is a mobile riot; a riot is a stationary stampede. Discuss.)

And that human stampede I just thought-experimented at you was (I’m declaring after the fact) made up of athletes and the fit and the young. The stampede (weaponized) at the Dead show is going to be made up of, you know: old fuckers, mostly. Most people will have kept themselves in shape, but time marches on, and this stampede (weaponized) will be hampered by the pace, which may be described alternately as an “amble,” a mosey,” or “just settin’ one foot front o’ the other, brother.”

A bunch of bearded dudes in carefully-chosen vintage t-shirts bumping into things does not a stampede make.

So, I don’t think we have to worry about the effect, but what about the cause. We are warned that the stampede will be started via smart phones. The terrorists (one would assume) would hack into the mainframe and call a large number of people in the stadium during the show. The terrorists (one would assume) would then communicate scary messages to the recipients, causing them to freak out. Soon, a critical mass of people will have freaked out, and boom: your weaponized stampede has been artificially generated.

Leaving aside the sad, weird silliness of this whole thing – what if? To make the calls, you’d need live people because you can always tell a recording over the phone. So, you’d need a whole call center of people doing this and they would have a script, right? “Help me,” or “You need to leave the stadium,” or whatever and the day comes and all of the callers have their script memorized, except for Jenkins.

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Yeah, hi? You at the Dead show?”

“Uh, yes. Who is this, please?”

“You should get out of there. Bad shit, man. Gonna get all freaky up in there.”

“Who is this? What?”

“Never mind who this is: an authority figure. Or something. RUN. YOU GOTTA LEAVE THE STADIUM. YAAARRGH!”

…

“You panicking?”

“No. Who is this?”

“Dude, I’m the guy out in the parking lot keying your car and fucking your wife.”

“We didn’t drive and my wife is right here next to me.”

“Dammit. Listen, man: you don’t know me, and you don’t owe me anything, but it would really help me out if you could lose your shit and, like, run people over.”

…

“Lose my shit?”

“Yeah, you know: panic.”

“Full-on, hands-waving, frothing at the mouth and pushing old ladies out of the way panic? That’s what you want?”

“Could you? It would be huge for me.”

“The thing is: I don’t think anyone would notice. Most of the people at this show are higher than they’ve been in decades.”

“Sure.”

“Literally decades. Lord Ganesh could waltz in here and make love to a terrordactyl and half the crowd would be ‘Oh, shit, man,’ and that’s about it.”

“Still.”

“Y’don’t know ’til ya try, huh? Kid, I like this attitude of yours. Hold on.

…

“No go.”

“No? You did the arms?”

“Yeah. People thought it was a cool variation on the noodle dance and now the whole section’s doing it.”

“What about the running around and screaming and pushing people out of your way? That didn’t work.”

“Oh, I didn’t actually do that: it’s rude.”

“Oh.”

“Now, son: stop working for nefarious call centers catering to shady organizations  run by evil terrorists (one would assume) and fomenting lunacy and maelstroms of whatnot when people are trying to get their boogies on. Go back to school, learn a trade, and find Jesus. I saw him in Calgary, but it was an acoustic tour. Good day to you, sir!”

So, you know: no real danger. It might rain, or be real hot. It’s gonna be real hot.

• Haunted house.
• On a JetBlue flight to Vancouver to pick up my estranged brother’s remains. Middle seat.
• Waffle House at 3 a.m.
• A sad zoo with sad animals in sad cages and sad children watching them stand there sadly.
• A weird zoo made up of only wallabies and a dead camel named Albert.
• An exciting zoo that employed as keepers anarchists, animal-rights activists, and the forgetful.
• Any zoo, really. Zoos should be outlawed.
• On a Duck Boat tour of Boston. Quack quack.
• On a Fuck Boat tour of Bangkok. Cock cock.
• In Marriott Hotel convention room B with a bunch of cosplayers.
• Maricopa County jail.
• Rura Penthe.
• Azkaban.
• Bedlam.
• Arkham.
• At a Discount Shoe Warehouse the week before school starts.
• A Generation Ship bound for the outskirts of the Felis system that got intercepted by the Death Poets of Knar’r and ritually destroyed for the glory of the Holy Limerick.
• A basement in Saigon with Christopher Walken and a revolver.
• An abattoir.
• An oubliette.
• Bricked up in the walls of a church like a Medieval nun the Mother Superior caught humping the gardener.
• Tokyo (during Godzilla attack.)
• Eritrea (anytime.) (Sorry, Eritrea: your shit’s fucked up.)
• One of those cruise-ships full of diarrhea.
• FOB 211, Afghanistan.
• The locker room of the team the Harlem Globetrotters always beats, the Washington Generals. It has to smell like bad choices and balls in there.
• A CVS in the middle of the night with tweakers wandering up and down the aisles for hours.
• An old-time movie theater. Not a romantic, grand motion picture house: just a rundown Loews in the exurbs that hadn’t been redone since it was built and the sound’s shitty and the hot dogs are old and there are two or three drifters having sex in the men’s room.
• While accompanying Ray Lewis on his errands, which take three to four hours because of all the times Ray Lewis stops to yell about Jesus–and commitment and teamwork and other things but mostly Jesus–to fellow shoppers.
• A failing Unitarian church in Newark, Delaware.

TotD has tried to teach. On the subject of drugs, I have always maintained that by avoiding powders and pills, and not doing all your drugs at once, harm might be reduced. We know that life is short, and that we must therefore listen to ’73.  If you’re going to take your dick out at the mall, then it should be at a Foot Locker.

But there’s one overriding theme to all of this silliness and slapdash sentimentality, and it is this: Time is a cunt.

Time doesn’t pass because it has to: it wants to. There is a glee time takes in every minute ripped from us while we sleep or when we weren’t paying attention. Time was paying attention. And counting. Always counting.

Time pisses on all of our fires.

Time turns acid tests into the Acid Tests into The Acid Test into the line outside Winterland into the lot outside the Greek into Shakedown Street into an All-Access Luxury VIP Shakedown Experience and Barbecue©.

This is not my beautiful house.