101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [49]
If you go, keep in mind that you’ll be visiting as Jack Cayman, a character with a retractable chainsaw built into one arm. It’s a lucky accessory, given the context, but be sure to use it wisely—players are awarded points not just for kills, but for style. “The amount of points for killing foes increases by increasing the foe’s pain or using more unusual methods of killing,” explains one description of the game. “For example, while the player could impale an enemy on a wall of spikes, the player will earn significantly more points if they had previously forced a tire around the enemy or stuffed the enemy in a garbage can before impaling him.”
I know what you’re thinking: how should I pack? In addition to a tourniquet and a machete, make sure you bring aspirin—the roughly sketched characters and streetscapes in Varrigan City are rendered in a headache-inducing palette of black and white that’s only broken by the red of human blood.
Chapter 78
The Inner Workings of a Rendering Plant
As a kid, I used to eat dog treats. I didn’t like the taste—I ate them because as an only child, gnawing on a Beggin’ Strip gave me a sense of solidarity with the closest thing I had to a sibling: our family dog. But that was before I learned about rendering plants.
At its most basic, rendering is just a form of recycling. From slaughterhouse waste and expired meat to euthanized pets and deadstock, rendering plants take every type of nonhuman body part you can imagine and recycle it into protein, fat, and bone meal. Once isolated, these materials are used in everything from livestock feed to paints, lubricants, jet fuel, cosmetics, tires, and, yes, dog treats.
Gross though they may be, it’s a good thing rendering plants exist: according to the National Renderers Association, America’s rendering plants process about fifty-nine billion pounds of inedible animal by-products every year. If we didn’t render, we’d be left with some pretty unsavory options: burying the carcasses (where they can leach into groundwater), incinerating them, or composting them (i.e., letting them rot).
None is as efficient as rendering, but that doesn’t mean you want to visit a plant. Let’s take the example of what happens to a dead cow. After being dragged into a truck and hauled to the rendering plant, it’s put in a pile of other dead, bloated creatures, all covered in swarming maggots. A plant worker makes a small incision in its hide and inserts a tube that blows air between its skin and flesh, making it easier to remove the hide, which an employee then does by hand with a knife, being careful not to puncture the bloated gut. Once separated, the hide is preserved for leather, and the skinned carcass is ground into bits. This might very well be the most memorable sight from your visit: a dead, skinned beast, chain around its ankles, being jerkily lowered into a giant grinder like the dead body in Fargo’s infamous wood chipper scene. Brains, bones, organs, everything gets ground up in a roar, coming out the other end in a pulverized goo that’s then boiled down to separate its ingredients.
Intrigued? You’ll have to sign up for a tour. As for me, I’ll never eat a Milk-Bone again.
Chapter 79
An Airplane After It Has Been Stranded on the Runway for Eight Hours
People’s willingness to sit within inches of one another in a giant cigar tube with uncomfortable seats and stale air depends on a simple, but unbreakable, agreement: if you stay put and shut up, the plane will take you where you want to go.
So if something goes wrong and the plane can’t take off—as was the case on December 29, 2006, with American Airlines Flight 1348 from San Francisco to Dallas/Fort Worth—airlines should take aggressive steps to avoid mutiny. In this particular case, strong storms in Dallas forced the plane to be rerouted