imagining like a frat bro with the hat on sideways and like the sleeves cut off his shirt getting drunk as fuck and crying to his boys like spilling jungle juice on himself getting the couch all sticky and shit and then he takes his phone out of his pocket and all his bros are like bro do not text her right now but he opens a sudoku app and chooses “master” difficulty and starts filling in the board at blinding speed. he wakes up in the morning and every cell is wrong
“you’re american (derogatory)” doesn’t phase me as an argument anymore, especially when it comes from europeans. yeah, sure, you’re absolutely right. now cry.
when you say “great lakes” and “cursed” in the same sentence, we usually think you’re just talking about Lake Superior.
the great lakes are huge, sure! combined, they’re roughly the size of fucking France.
but Superior is the granddaddy of them all.
the largest of the great lakes in terms of surface area, depth, and overall volume, Lake Superior contains 2,903 cubic miles of water, or 10% of the world’s entire surface freshwater supply.
that’s enough to cover the entire surface area of North AND South America in a solid foot of ice-cold murkish water, and probably also a bunch of confused sturgeons. yow!
but sturgeons aren’t all this lake contains, by any means!
it’s also full of corpses.
see, Lake Superior is just SO fucking hugebig and deep (about 1000 feet at its deepest point) that it doesn’t warm up very quickly, even in the depths of summer! its northerly location and the amount of time it spends frozen over each year means that this lake reaches an average surface temperature of 46-56 degrees fahrenheit, even in the hottest months.
don’t even think about the coldest months.
that’s cold enough to kill you dead as a Sim with a deleted pool ladder if you fall in and can’t get out! and it’s ALSO cold enough that if you do die, your body will just sink into the icy depths, and stay there. you won’t rot, and there isn’t even anything alive down there that might consider your corpsicle a worthy feast because there’s so little oxygen; you’re basically just stuck down there in the world’s largest meat freezer for the rest of eternity.
but you’re in good company! since everyone who dies on the lake and sinks to the bottom is still there, there are an estimated 10,000 corpses lying around on the lakebed right now!
(there are a number of explorable shipwrecks in Superior that are known to still, uh, have crew on board, so to speak. divers are expected to leave them alone and treat their death sites respectfully.)
and that’s not even counting the literal thousands of years humans were paddling around on the lakes in pre-colonial times either, so in all honesty that’s probably lowballing it.
and that doesn’t seem likely to change, anytime soon- as long as the lake exists, those corpses are just going to be stuck down there, waiting around for whatever comes next.
so uh anyway, if the concept of the eternal preservation of your mortal form bothers you, stay AWAY from that lake! and maybe just become a volcano researcher instead, I dunno.
sheesh.
You know, Superior has a very deserved reputation as the winter-blooded reaper of the Great Lakes (and we love that for her) but Lake Michigan is actually the statistically more deadly lake. More swimmers and the shape of the lake, with its riptides and longshore tides, means that more people drown there than in Superior.
Fun related fact from your unfriendly neighborhood criminal lawyer! Michigan has this law:
At first glance, it sounds like it criminalizes this behavior:
But actually it exists specifically because of the unrotting dead in Lake Superior. See, the wreck of the Eddie Fitz was located, and dive teams took video of it in 1994. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975, with all hands, and some of them were visibly still at their posts in the documentary film made about the discovery of the site. If you do the math, that’s not actually a super long time between the sinking and the discovery of it, and so there were still quite a few surviving relatives of the crew who were, understandably, upset about the airing of the footage. They also largely did not want their loved ones to be retrieved from the wreck, and so they remain. And to protect them, MCL 750.160a was passed, as well as some similar legislation in other regions that border Superior.
And so Superior keeps her dead for all the endless years to come, and when we send the living down to visit, they do so without cameras rolling.
Eddie Fitz day is the 10th, so I hope you’re ready for lakeposting
told my coworker “they’re accusing the chivelord of chive fraud” and it turns out she doesn’t know what any of that means and i look crazy
HE CONFESSED TO THE CHIVE FRAUD
context for the people not following along with chivegate: chopping a cup of chives is a pretty standard test of a chef’s knife skills, so about a month ago a redditor on r/KitchenConfidential started cutting a cup of chives every day until reddit says they’re perfect. he quickly became a wildly popular character, his chives posts regularly hit the front page of reddit. ah what happy larks we’ve had. chive montage break.
but earlier today someone posted that for the past two days he had posted the same cup of chives, just a different photo and flipped. investigation, accusation, excuses, and despair followed in the comments. a few hours later the chivelord himself posted an apology, stating that he had been having car trouble and was unable to get and chop chives and had been too embarrassed skip a day. he offered to submit to the most-upvoted reasonable punishment, which as of right now is, in second place, buying a tripod and posting videos of him chopping his chives, and in first place, simply sitting with the weight of his betrayal
When I am in the courts I frequently find myself regretting Marcus Regulus, though I hardly mean to say that I want him back again. Why then, you may ask, do I regret him? For these reasons. He used to hold the profession in great respect; he used to be nervous and anxious to succeed and write out his speeches beforehand, though he could never thoroughly commit them to memory. Even his practice of smearing ointment over either his right or left eye - the former if he were appearing for the plaintiff, and the latter when he was pleading for a defendant - and his habit of changing the white patch from one eyebrow to the other, and consulting the soothsayers as to how his cases would go, though due to gross superstition on his part, were also to be partly explained by the great regard in which he held our profession. Again, his other practice of always demanding that we should be allowed to speak as long as we desired, and the way in which he succeeded in getting an audience together, were very gratifying to those who were engaged in the same cases as he was.
Pliny the Younger Letters 6.2
Everyone’s reblogging my addition and I didn’t even put in the best part of the letter!
However, be that as it may, Regulus did well to die, and he would have done better still if he had died earlier.
