There are games that people play when they suffer from either psychosis or male insecurity.
The first is Russian Roulette, the game that killed Freddie Prinze, you know, Chico from Chico & the Man. You know, this guy:
It was officially ruled a accidental suicide because of his love for Russian Roulette, but let's be honest, you already have to have a bit of a death wish to willingly play it in the first place.
You put one round into a revolver & you spin it around so you don't know where the round is.
Once you do that, you simply hold it to the side of your head & pull the trigger. You know, like in the movie Deer Hunter, which everyone says is a great film & no one ever mentions how absolutely boring it is. I think it's one of those movies that people like because they are supposed to like it, not because it's entertaining.
Now keep in mind, I'm not advocating that you play Russian Roulette, but I'm sure it's a rush & if you are looking for a thrill, please be safe & use a revolver.
You know what, never mind. If you are dumb enough to play & you want to use your Glock 7 fucking go for it, have a blast, you're probably doing the world a favor. Your judgement is sound. Just make sure you go first.
The other really fun game you can play is chicken.
No, you know what I'm talking about.
There you go, you're getting closer.
Chicken is the ultimate male insecurity game. Two people get in their cars & drive as fast as humanely possible directly towards one another. The point of the game is to be the idiot willing to wreck his car & potentially kill himself. If you are that idiot, congratulations, you won.
If you are smart, & turn away, you lost.
If you are smart & don't play at all presumably you have the smaller penis.
And, if both of you plow into one another, congratulations, you are both so well hung that your cocks are clearly bigger than your brains. You should be proud. Now go play roulette with your Glock 7, you've earned it.
Now what could be more of a rush than playing chicken with cars?
What could be more of a rush than holding a revolver against your temple & pulling the trigger in the hopes that you are one of the five lucky clicks?
That's right, you guessed it. The only thing better is playing chicken with nuclear weapons.
A car is only going to give you so much of a rush. A .45 can only do so much damage but an ICBM can absolutely, positively kill every last mother-fucker on the planet.
You know what. I don't think I made my point clear. I'm a white dude with a lisp, I'm a fucking comic book nerd & I have a collection of books. There is no way in hell that I could possibly convey the right sentiment behind that last statement.
We need to go about this a little differently.
Pretend that I didn't say that. In fact, pretend that you're not reading this at all. Close your eyes...metaphorically, not literally, count to ten & conjure up the most positively entertaining actor that the world has ever seen.
There is a man out there & we have all sat through some horrible fucking movies just because he was in them...Juice, Deep Blue Sea, Changing Lanes.
You have him in your mind? Good. Now imagine that he is saying this, not me.
It's a hell of a lot more effective when you hear Sam Jackson say it isn't it? He's got this magical ability of making everything awesome...even Snakes on a Plane.
But the thing is, Samuel L. Jackson is a really smart man, smart enough to never, ever play chicken with nuclear weapons.
But this guy did:
This guy did too:
And so did this guy:
And so did this guy:
In fact, by the time the actor came into office, the game was played on almost a daily basis until the Soviet Union collapsed.
It was called "Brinksmanship" & the name of the game was to bring the world to the brink of WWIII in the hopes that the Soviets would chicken out & actually start the war.
You see there was nothing that many Americans wanted more than to clear the Soviet Union from the map. After all, propaganda only goes so far & annihilation would guarantee the desired outcome.
You see we had this image of the Soviet Union that we painted here in America. An image of starvation & breadlines & not enough of anything to go around. It was an image that we painted to turn our people away from, people like Bruce Springsteen, John Melloncamp, Sara Polly, & Martin Sheen. Dangerous Americans that wanted to protect the middle class...well I think Polly is a Canadian, but you get the point.
We didn't want Americans listening to Americans like him:
We wanted Americans listening to Canadians like him:
You know, so long as they ignored the rest of his liberal family:
And you can tell they are liberal because the father has a beard.
And the image that America crafted of the USSR was painstakingly inaccurate & really more of a reflection of the problems here at home & not so much the problems in the USSR.
For instance, we liked to say that in Soviet Russia there was a lot of this:
Sorry, that's a picture of America. I meant to say that there was a lot of this:
Shit, no, that's America again.
What we spent a LOT of time telling people here in America was that everyone in Russia was poor & had to wait all day in bread lines & there was nearly 100% unemployment & there was no competition & no one had any economic opportunities because communism doesn't work...
America was attacking their economic policy & not so much their system of government.
We are historically fine with brutal dictatorships like the Soviet Union had, I mean, we did sort of install & support this guy:
And this guy:
And we supported all of the horrible things that they did.
What we were most afraid of was the soviet economic policy. Free Healthcare, free college education, a guaranteed minimum income, job placement help, a poverty rate far lower than in America, a homeless rate far lower than in America, a higher life expectancy, a better education system & a more educated populace.
All of those really horrible policies we wanted to keep from the public because we looked at things like poverty & homelessness as good for business. It meant lower wages which means greater profit for the upper class:
And besides we already knew that Americans would reject a government that did the shit that the Soviet Union was doing to its people. You know, shit like banning books & throwing political prisoners into detention centers without a trial & spying on absolutely everyone.
You know, they knew that we wouldn't stand for shit like this.
That was made possible in Soviet Russia by laws like this:
But we might actually support things like free healthcare & education & a GMI & all the things that we are still told to hate because it will raise a standard of living & gives people greater opportunities.
So, we wanted to start a nuclear war, but we didn't want to get the blame for starting a nuclear war. So we started playing Chicken with the USSR to get them to launch their nuclear weapons at the USA first, destroy a city or two, & give us the excuse to launch on them & protect capitalism.
So we would routinely load up a nuclear bomber & fly it towards Russia on a path to Moscow, & then call off the bombing mission right before it entered Soviet Airspace in the hopes that they would launch their nuclear weapons at us.
That one is Russian.
Anyway, thankfully, cooler heads prevailed but this was a game invented by two people.
Dean Acheson:
Who framed a lot of US Foreign Policy during the Cold War & had pushed to drop a bomb on Russia since the days of Harry Truman. His principle belief is the only conversation worth having with a communist is one that came out of the barrel of a gun.
He also wrote this, which is sort of required reading if you are really interested in the Cold War & want a better understanding about how we faced that problem.
And the other guy was a man named Henry Kissinger.
Who must not be confused with Ben Stein.
Because even though they worked together, Ben is a comedian & Henry is a monster. Now imagine how horrible it must be for Ben Stein to live his life with the knowledge that he looks like Henry Kissinger.
Anyway, Henry is wanted for war crimes outside of the United States, for a number of reasons, one involving a soccer stadium in Chile.
The story of why Henry is wanted for war crimes was later turned into a great movie staring Sissy Spacek
And an absolutely horrible movie staring Jennifer Connelly
Moving on....
Henry & Dean got together & came to the conclusion that the only way to save the world is to completely destroy it.
You know, like toddlers .
And like Kennedy said, the plan is great because, if they get their way, there will be no one left to tell them exactly how stupid it was.
But, thankfully, in Soviet Russia, cooler heads prevailed. Russia didn't blink & all they ended up shooting down was a spy plane & not a bomber carrying a nuclear payload.
Which is where a formerly great band got it's name.
So I guess we have the two of them to thank for some pretty faboo music.
And that's great & all, but U2 is not the appropriate music for this post.
That's better.
Moving on....
When you play with toys, even expensive Nuclear toys that could destroy the entire planet, sometimes they get lost & sometimes they get broken.
BUT...before you get pissed at America, all through the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, the newly unemployed military brass were selling their nuclear weapons for the price of a Mercedes Benz.
Now, which is better, selling your nuclear weapons to the highest bidder or just losing them.
When America loses a nuclear device it is called a Pinnacle Broken Arrow. Pinnacle as in, it is a situation of interest. Broken Arrow is the code for the actual missing nuclear weapon.
They made a really bad movie about that too.
Of course the movie is pure fiction. Things like that don't happen in real life, I mean, we make a really good point about clearing the pilots for our stealth bombers.
We have never, ever had a B-2 Spirit pilot pilfer either the bomber or the payload & really, we weren't using the Stealth Bombers to play chicken with the Russians.
We weren't even using the SR-71.
We were using the B-50s, anyone know why?
That's right, we were using them because they were easier to see. It's sort of pointless to use a stealth bomber when you are trying to goat the Russians into starting a war.
The point was to make sure that the Soviets saw the bomber coming that way they would launch first.
This presents a problem for a fair few people.
This problem is especially touchy if you live in the most beautiful city in the world.
That's right, there is no place on earth more beautiful than Savannah Georgia. Yeah, I've been to Paris, it doesn't hold a candle to Savannah. Sorry. Neither does New York, LA is ugly, & it's even more beautiful than my sweet home Chicago.
The reason is because it's more of an enormous park full of flowers, Spanish moss, & live oaks than it is an actual city. One pretty little garden square a block. Nothing can beat it.
And that absolute beauty is the reason why we dropped a nuclear bomb on it.
Tybee Island is a short drive from Savannah, & kind of part of the city.
The second bomb fell into the mud & lodged itself pretty deep. They had to go digging for bomb number 2.
It logged itself 180 feet into the mud, which prevented the uranium from leaking despite the flood that followed.
In 1965, again while preparing to play chicken with the USSR, we misplaced a B-43 Nuclear bomb off the coast of Japan.
We still don't know where it is.
It was armed at the time & because of that we opted not to tell the Japanese government until well into the 1980s.
In 1966 we lost an mk-28 hydrogen bomb, well, we lost several off the coast of Palomare, Italy in another attempt to goat the Soviets into launching nuclear weapons on us.
Thankfully, this time the bombs were recovered by a couple of poor Italian fisherman.
And thanks to international sea laws, we had to pay them an undisclosed sum of millions & millions of dollars to buy back our hydrogen bombs.
We never actually detonated a bomb in the Soviet Union. We didn't blow up Italy & thankfully, we didn't blow up Goldsboro North Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Yuba City California, Morocco, Japan (well, we did blow it up twice, but not the third time), Mars Bluff, South Carolina, or Savage Mountain Maryland.
We did, however, blow up Alaska on our way back from trying to start a nuclear war with the Russians.
We lost a bomber & scattered nuclear material across the middle of nowhere Alaska, somewhere between Fairbanks & Canada.
Now to be fair this time we did find the wreckage.
And then somehow lost it.
But a Canadian hunting party found it about a decade later.
And we did blow the ever-loving shit out of Greenland.
Boom!
We were trying to start a nuclear war with Russia & destroy the entire world in the process, but we ended up bombing Thule airport in Greenland instead.
Greenland forgave us, but it turned out to be the only successful nuclear bombing of an NATO country in a time of peace during the Cold War & the US government is still paying the workers compensation claims & paying for the radioactive clean up in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.
And in 1980 we did successfully blow up Damascus Arkansas.
The bomb went off, but the safety features operated successfully & prevented the spread of nuclear material. So we did technically, successfully bomb a US city but this time it was a transport accident & not a chicken accident & the nuclear material remained intact.
I guess the point of this post is simple.
"Don't play with nuclear weapons, you might lose an eye, or you might just blow up Greenland."
I'll leave you with this:
The first is Russian Roulette, the game that killed Freddie Prinze, you know, Chico from Chico & the Man. You know, this guy:
You put one round into a revolver & you spin it around so you don't know where the round is.
The other really fun game you can play is chicken.
Chicken is the ultimate male insecurity game. Two people get in their cars & drive as fast as humanely possible directly towards one another. The point of the game is to be the idiot willing to wreck his car & potentially kill himself. If you are that idiot, congratulations, you won.
If you are smart, & turn away, you lost.
If you are smart & don't play at all presumably you have the smaller penis.
And, if both of you plow into one another, congratulations, you are both so well hung that your cocks are clearly bigger than your brains. You should be proud. Now go play roulette with your Glock 7, you've earned it.
What could be more of a rush than holding a revolver against your temple & pulling the trigger in the hopes that you are one of the five lucky clicks?
That's right, you guessed it. The only thing better is playing chicken with nuclear weapons.
We need to go about this a little differently.
Pretend that I didn't say that. In fact, pretend that you're not reading this at all. Close your eyes...metaphorically, not literally, count to ten & conjure up the most positively entertaining actor that the world has ever seen.
There is a man out there & we have all sat through some horrible fucking movies just because he was in them...Juice, Deep Blue Sea, Changing Lanes.
You have him in your mind? Good. Now imagine that he is saying this, not me.
"ICBM for when you absolutely, positively, need to kill every last mother-fucker on the planet!"
It's a hell of a lot more effective when you hear Sam Jackson say it isn't it? He's got this magical ability of making everything awesome...even Snakes on a Plane.
But the thing is, Samuel L. Jackson is a really smart man, smart enough to never, ever play chicken with nuclear weapons.
But this guy did:
It was called "Brinksmanship" & the name of the game was to bring the world to the brink of WWIII in the hopes that the Soviets would chicken out & actually start the war.
You see there was nothing that many Americans wanted more than to clear the Soviet Union from the map. After all, propaganda only goes so far & annihilation would guarantee the desired outcome.
You see we had this image of the Soviet Union that we painted here in America. An image of starvation & breadlines & not enough of anything to go around. It was an image that we painted to turn our people away from, people like Bruce Springsteen, John Melloncamp, Sara Polly, & Martin Sheen. Dangerous Americans that wanted to protect the middle class...well I think Polly is a Canadian, but you get the point.
We didn't want Americans listening to Americans like him:
For instance, we liked to say that in Soviet Russia there was a lot of this:
What we spent a LOT of time telling people here in America was that everyone in Russia was poor & had to wait all day in bread lines & there was nearly 100% unemployment & there was no competition & no one had any economic opportunities because communism doesn't work...
America was attacking their economic policy & not so much their system of government.
We are historically fine with brutal dictatorships like the Soviet Union had, I mean, we did sort of install & support this guy:
What we were most afraid of was the soviet economic policy. Free Healthcare, free college education, a guaranteed minimum income, job placement help, a poverty rate far lower than in America, a homeless rate far lower than in America, a higher life expectancy, a better education system & a more educated populace.
All of those really horrible policies we wanted to keep from the public because we looked at things like poverty & homelessness as good for business. It meant lower wages which means greater profit for the upper class:
You know, they knew that we wouldn't stand for shit like this.
So, we wanted to start a nuclear war, but we didn't want to get the blame for starting a nuclear war. So we started playing Chicken with the USSR to get them to launch their nuclear weapons at the USA first, destroy a city or two, & give us the excuse to launch on them & protect capitalism.
Anyway, thankfully, cooler heads prevailed but this was a game invented by two people.
Dean Acheson:
He also wrote this, which is sort of required reading if you are really interested in the Cold War & want a better understanding about how we faced that problem.
The story of why Henry is wanted for war crimes was later turned into a great movie staring Sissy Spacek
Henry & Dean got together & came to the conclusion that the only way to save the world is to completely destroy it.
You know, like toddlers .
But, thankfully, in Soviet Russia, cooler heads prevailed. Russia didn't blink & all they ended up shooting down was a spy plane & not a bomber carrying a nuclear payload.
Moving on....
When you play with toys, even expensive Nuclear toys that could destroy the entire planet, sometimes they get lost & sometimes they get broken.
BUT...before you get pissed at America, all through the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, the newly unemployed military brass were selling their nuclear weapons for the price of a Mercedes Benz.
When America loses a nuclear device it is called a Pinnacle Broken Arrow. Pinnacle as in, it is a situation of interest. Broken Arrow is the code for the actual missing nuclear weapon.
They made a really bad movie about that too.
We weren't even using the SR-71.
The point was to make sure that the Soviets saw the bomber coming that way they would launch first.
This presents a problem for a fair few people.
This problem is especially touchy if you live in the most beautiful city in the world.
The reason is because it's more of an enormous park full of flowers, Spanish moss, & live oaks than it is an actual city. One pretty little garden square a block. Nothing can beat it.
And that absolute beauty is the reason why we dropped a nuclear bomb on it.
What?
Tybee Island is a short drive from Savannah, & kind of part of the city.
It's on the Atlantic & was a din for pirates, as was Savannah. So in 1958 we were playing with our nuclear bombs & our bombers & one ran into another & droped a nuclear payload on Tybee Island.
Fortunately the pilots didn't have time to arm the bomb before they dropped it in Georgia & it sank harmlessly into the mud & sand off Tybee Island & was sort of lost to time.
Officials believe that had we dropped it on Savannah itself & not into the mud than it would have certainly detonated & we wouldn't have Savannah any longer.
They also believe that even thought they can't find the nuclear bomb, the mud it sank into would probably keep it relatively safe & prevent it from leaking harmful radiation.
They think.
And then in 1961, while playing chicken with the Russians we accidentally dropped a Mark 39 Nuclear bomb on Goldsboro North Carolina.
Thankfully the bomb descended by parachute & did not explode.
They actually found it intact & upright.
Yay!
It turns out that the Soviets maybe didn't need to launch first, we were doing a pretty damn good job of dropping nuclear bombs on our own cities.
It was armed at the time & because of that we opted not to tell the Japanese government until well into the 1980s.
In 1966 we lost an mk-28 hydrogen bomb, well, we lost several off the coast of Palomare, Italy in another attempt to goat the Soviets into launching nuclear weapons on us.
We never actually detonated a bomb in the Soviet Union. We didn't blow up Italy & thankfully, we didn't blow up Goldsboro North Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Yuba City California, Morocco, Japan (well, we did blow it up twice, but not the third time), Mars Bluff, South Carolina, or Savage Mountain Maryland.
We did, however, blow up Alaska on our way back from trying to start a nuclear war with the Russians.
Now to be fair this time we did find the wreckage.
And then somehow lost it.
But a Canadian hunting party found it about a decade later.
And we did blow the ever-loving shit out of Greenland.
Boom!
Greenland forgave us, but it turned out to be the only successful nuclear bombing of an NATO country in a time of peace during the Cold War & the US government is still paying the workers compensation claims & paying for the radioactive clean up in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.
And in 1980 we did successfully blow up Damascus Arkansas.
The bomb went off, but the safety features operated successfully & prevented the spread of nuclear material. So we did technically, successfully bomb a US city but this time it was a transport accident & not a chicken accident & the nuclear material remained intact.
I guess the point of this post is simple.
"Don't play with nuclear weapons, you might lose an eye, or you might just blow up Greenland."
I'll leave you with this:
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