101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [55]
Don’t worry—no one’s actually been hurt. Disaster City is a fifty-two-acre urban search-and-rescue training ground at Texas A&M. Want to practice responding to an earthquake? Worried about a terrorist attack? Need practice searching for victims in an eleven-thousand-square-foot pile of concrete rubble? It’s all here. A one-stop shop for simulated disaster, it comes complete with collapsed homes, a passenger train derailment, and a government complex inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing and built to replicate what might happen if a large explosion destroyed a three-story office building and parking garage.
As the largest and most comprehensive facility of its kind in the world, Disaster City is an invaluable training ground for rescue workers. Teams travel from around the globe to get a chance to practice here. But if you end up strolling through the city on a simulation weekend, watch out. That’s when the victims arrive—a never-ending stream of volunteers whose definition of weekend fun involves having makeup artists burn their arms, cut their faces, give them compound fractures, or impale them with rebar. Once wounded, the volunteers are sent out into the field to scream in pain and beg for help, thus adding the critical element of reality that makes Disaster City one of the world’s best places to train—and one of the most unpleasant places to come across unawares.
Chapter 89
The Inside of a Spotted Hyena’s Birth Canal
While most mammals maintain separate orifices for urination and giving birth, the spotted hyena makes no such accommodation. One of the most dominant predators on the African savanna, it does both through something called a pseudo-penis, a seven-inch fleshy protrusion that also happens to be its clitoris.
Wikipedia Commons
Considering that females also have fake scrotums and pseudo-testes, early researchers can be forgiven for being repeatedly confused when their “male” hyenas gave birth. But the title of this entry refers to what the inside of a hyena’s birth canal would be like from the perspective of a cub. Imagine, if you will, trying to give birth to a two-pound hyena through your penis. Now imagine that you are the baby trying to get out.
Chapter 90
Gropers’ Night on the Tokyo Subway
For a nonconfrontational person, I have some pretty aggressive daydreams. An example: when I’m standing on a crowded bus or subway, I like to imagine what I would do if a man tried to grab my butt. In my fantasy, I take hold of his hand and pull it into the air. “Whose hand is this?” I’d shout. “Was it yours? Because it was just on my ass.” The offender would slink away in shame as my fellow passengers commended me for my wit and courage.
Suffice it to say, that has never happened.
But my chances might improve if I were to ride a crowded late-night train in Tokyo during bˉ onenkai season. Bˉ onenkai means “forget the year party” and is a December tradition similar to American office holiday parties: a professionally condoned excuse to get roaringly drunk. Unfortunately for female commuters, it also results in crowds of boozy men riding late-night commuter trains. Inhibitions unleashed, many of these gentlemen decide that there is no better way to ring in the new year than to grab a fellow commuter’s bottom.
It’s not just around the holidays, though. A survey conducted by the Tokyo metropolitan government and the country’s largest railway operator found that 64 percent of women in their twenties and thirties reported being groped on public transportation. This became so much of a problem that in 2000, Tokyo’s Keio Electric Railway Co. introduced female-only train cars.
Ladies-only cars make it easier to avoid having a stranger touch your boob, but they occasionally lead to a different problem: the assumption that any woman not traveling in the female carriage wants to be touched. Some critics say that instead of sequestering women, there should instead be groper cars, where like-minded men can congregate.
This would never really happen