World News

Truely, we are living in the future.

In Europe we have a lot of old bombs laying around. We all know that when we dig up an old bomb we should get the hell away from it.

A few years ago, near where my family lived in New Jersey, there was a small newspaper article mentioning that construction on a set of mid-rise condominiums on the Delaware River was being notably delayed, with the vague implication that there was some trouble with financing or construction or something. [To be fair, both of these were true, but for very not-obvious reasons.] But then you start tracing back through the history of the site:

They had selected the site for the condos because it had been the site of a large flea market from the late 1970s to early 2000s, so all they'd have to do was dig up the parking lots, lay in utilities, and compact the soil to be ready to build. The flea market was there because it was the site of a massive drive-in movie theatre built in the early 1950s, so all they had had to do was put up some cheap buildings that were eventually condemned and torn down. The drive-in movie theatre was there because the land had already been cleared and flattened by the US government, so it was cheap to put in a parking lot and big screen.

Why had the government so kindly cleared and flattened the ground? Well, the site was right next to a small bridge across the Delaware; on the other side of the bridge was Frankford Arsenal, where they produced munitions during both World Wars. And they had to test the munitions, so they'd drive over the bridge and test them at this site in New Jersey. And it turns out that sometimes they were either high or lazy or careless or something, because sometimes they didn't bother driving across the bridge, they'd just shell New Jersey from across the river instead.

The shelling led to a bunch of unexploded ordinance being in extremely unexpected places, until it started showing up eighty years later, when the condo people actually started digging up the ground to lay in their utilities. Of course, the condo association was quietly and casually referencing vague construction delays, because if people knew it was a munitions testing site and they'd recently found a bunch of UXO, no one would buy the condos.

[Also, while trying to look up details for this comment, I discovered three other cases of UXO in New Jersey in the past couple years. This is all very weird to me.]

I used to live in an area that was one of the biggest targets for bombers in Germany during WW2. I remember every few months there was a bomb alarm. We had to leave the house for a few hours while it was being defused. No bomb ever blew up luckily and it just became routine.

And western Europe and the Middle East

Japanese cities were primarily built using wood as it was better suited for their climate and earthquakes. The fire bombing of Tokyo with a single deadliest attack on the Japanese mainland, killing even more than either atomic bomb drop.

The best history of this is “the bomber mafia” by Malcolm Gladwell.

He really tells the whole complex story.

The one thing that Commodore Perry didn't trade them was copies of The Three Little Pigs.

/s

Fiddy Men!

<Looks at the news the next day]

Dang it! They weren't Japanese! They're Laotian!