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(excerpt) The contaminated wasp nest was the result of “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” and “not related to a loss of contamination control”, the Department of Energy stated in the report. “The ground and surrounded area did not have any contamination,”
To me “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” sounds like lingering contamination that occurred during the storage process. But, if the “…ground and surrounded area did not have any contamination,…” then where is the “legacy” contamination located and how did wasps get exposed to it?
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It said the nest was sprayed and was disposed of as radiological waste, and that testing confirmed radiation levels “greater than 10 times the total contamination values” that federal regulations allow.
I wonder what the allowed radioactive contamination level of a wasp nest is? Interesting, but not surprising that we have a federal regulation for that.
the contaminated nest was discovered […] near tanks used to store liquid nuclear waste. […]The area where the nest was found – known as the “F-Area Tank Farm” – contains 22 underground carbon steel tanks
Ah, so they’re subterranean radioactive wasps! That makes it much better.
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F-Area, an underground radioactive waste dump filled with irradiated wasps? More like the F-That Area!
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The basic premise I knew, including the crime, but I didn’t realize how closely it lined up with GenX and with the ADHD, anxiety, and depression charts.
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LA’s secret celebrity tunnel was just a rumor. Until workers found it.
A long-rumored tunnel between Chateau Marmont and the old Players Club building wasn’t just a yarn
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/secret-tunnel-chateau-marmont-sunset-strip-20792350.php
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A couple of these things I could guess, a couple surprised me a little.
The dark undercurrent running through it though was really surprising. Be careful what you upvote and and add to your feeds, because some of it has a sinister undertone with subtle motives to what seems on the face to be happy nostalgia. And then you start getting less-subtle stuff related to that under-message.
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the world you grew up in no longer exists - it never did
My brain keeps jumping back to a conversation I had with my parents ca. 2003. The GWOT and Iraq were roaring full tilt, and my folks said how much scarier the world was now than when they were raising me. I was fully flabbergasted.
“We lived a very short drive from a radar base that was permanently staffed and operational, looking for Soviet missiles and bombers travelling in from over the North Pole. It was one of many. We found out later how very close the world came to nuclear war on more than one occasion. That era only feels safer because we know how that story ended, and lemme tell ya: for me, it was a plot twist. I did not see peace coming.”
The world feels safer when I know the story doesn’t end with the monsters destroying everything. But I only know that in retrospect.
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Exactly. Boomers were doing “Duck and Cover” drills in grade school….how is that not just as scary as anything nowadays? Answer: because we all lived through the time without getting bombed after all.
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Anticipation of Nostalgia. The Calculation of Transfiguration in Language, Literature and Fashion
I haven’t figured out how to access the full text yet, but the abstract reads very promising.
For starters I never knew that “nostalgia” began its life as a medical condition.
ETA:
The term was coined by one Johnnes Hofer in 1688, from nostos (home) and algos (pain) to describe an extreme, “sometimes fatal”, form of homesickness he had encountered in, amongst other people, Swiss mercenaries.
source, citation:
Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe, Basel 1688; on Hofer, see Klaus Brunnert, Nostalgie in der Geschichte der Medizin, Düsseldorf 1984; Simon Bunke, Heimweh. Studies on the Cultural and Literary History of a Deadly Disease, Freiburg 2009; Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was. War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion, Chicago 2018.
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I get the same feeling whenever anyone talks about how bad crime is these days.
I hit my teen years during peak crime. Five of the kids I went to high school with were arrested for murder before we graduated. I got shot at a few times (never hit, but a guy standing next to me got hit). I had stuff stolen. I got jumped once. I knew Crips and Bloods, and had some run-ins with them (resolved peacefully).
One time after work I called a cab because I was tired and didn’t feel like walking home and the cabbie freaked out when I told him where I was going, said he would never go to that neighborhood again because last time he got robbed. I said “cool, just drop me at the store outside the neighborhood and I’ll walk from there.” and gave him a really good tip. He looked nervous the whole time, but did it. As I was walking in, I had to walk around some people fighting in the apartment building’s parking lot.
And when people today talk about how bad crime is, when it’s at 50% the rate it was then, all I can think is “Where were you for like the past 50 years? Under a rock?”
Back in those days, you had to lock the door as you came in. Nowadays, it’s been 20+ years since I can even remember locking the door when anyone’s home and awake. Only if we’re all asleep or out.
But still, the '90s were some of my best memories. Good times. Crime was double what it is now back then, and more violent, but they were happy days. Tech was booming. The dot-com crash and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. It was rough daily but optimistic for the future.
And yeah, seeing all the kids posting “Are we going to have WWIII soon?” just makes me laugh as someone who was raised during the Cold War era. They have no idea what the tension was like back then.
Or how each of us had that discussion with our dad saying “Son, you’d best pick a branch and specialty now, and be prepared to volunteer for it. Because if you volunteer, you might get it, but if you get drafted, you’ll just be sent in as cannon fodder.” and having to think and choose something like “Nuclear attack submarine officer/crewman, so I’ll be somewhere in an unknown location safe under the ocean when the warheads drop, and won’t have to be the one firing them.” and then studying for that.
But yeah, the '80s were great too. Cold War was raging, economy was shit, but there was hope you could be a successful yuppie Wall Street raider, and you had a plan for WWIII.
These days are objectively better on most metrics, but people just latch onto all the fearbait headlines. And don’t really seem to be looking optimistically to the future.
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Presenter: … Doug was born in February 1929 and Dinsdale two weeks later; and again a week after that. Someone who remembers them well was their next door neighbor, Mrs. April Simmel.
Mrs. Simmel: Oh yes Kipling Road was a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other’s houses with each other’s property all day. They were a cheery lot.
Interviewer: Was it a terribly violent area?
Mrs. Simmel: Oh no…yes. Cheerful and violent. I remember Doug was keen on boxing, but when he learned to walk he took up putting the boot in the groin. He was very interested in that. His mother had a terrible job getting him to come in for tea. Putting his little boot in he’d be, bless him. All the kids were like that then, they didn’t have their heads stuffed with all this Cartesian dualism.
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Somewhat related, I recall visiting my parents during home leave in the mid 2000s. We were watching the news and there was a story about a murder in Kansas City, MO.
I was irritated by that, and said something to the effect: “why are they wasting time on this?”
My mom replied “it’s important we know this, there’s a killer on the loose.”
To which I replied “and you think he’s going to drive 8 hours to Minneapolis and continue his shooting spree here? No, there was no crime nearby to scare us with, they had to go all the way to Missouri for that.”
The news has an incentive to make the world seem ultra dangerous in order to get viewers to watch.
Don Henley was right.
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There’s always a killer on the loose. That’s just how we roll in the good ole USA.
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Beware all those with brains that squirm like toads!
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Please file under great headlines
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