You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [75]
What went wrong? Well, as they say, never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup. Smedley was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently, none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none were brought up on criminal charges, presumably because the defendants were each independently wealthy enough to hire the Supreme Court as their legal representation. Still, the House’s McCormack-Dickstein Committee deemed the general’s testimony credible, before it was promptly swept under the rug of history (a gorgeous oriental number the people involved in the conspiracy paid for).
The lesson here? No matter how wealthy you are, you don’t do business with guys named Smedley and you never piss off a man named Dickstein.
FOUR TICKING TIME BOMBS IN NATURE MORE TERRIFYING (AND LIKELY) THAN THE ONES IN DISASTER MOVIES
THE good news is that most of the spectacular natural disasters Hollywood and the mainstream media worry over are either exaggerated or totally made up. The bad news: nature is chock-full of ticking time bombs quietly waiting to turn the world into one of the scary books in the Bible, and you’ve probably never heard of any of them.
4. DISASTER BY LAND!
What they said to worry about: the San Andreas Fault
You may remember when Lex Luthor tried to set the San Andreas to “coast disintegrating earthquake” mode in 1977’s Superman , or when it shook LA right off the continental shelf in the NBC miniseries 10.5. There’s even a geophysics professor who believes it will destroy LA sometime in the next decade with an earthquake he’s creatively nicknamed “the Big One.” While we’re in no place to argue with a geophysics professor, or even know if that’s a real profession, we can tell you Saint Andrew’s not the guy you should be worried about.
What you should worry about: the New Madrid Fault Line
The New Madrid Seismic Zone stretches from Illinois to Alabama and doesn’t care how unimpressive its IMDb page is. See, it’s not in the business of destroying recognizable landmarks. It drinks terror piss and eats nightmares, and it wants to make sure America’s always stocked with both.
And it can do it too.
Being underneath fly-over country makes its job easier, and not just because Alabama’s sewage system was built with balsa wood and slave labor. Its landlocked location means the New Madrid can wreck your shit from five states away. Coastal towns like Los Angeles are actually better off in an earthquake, since a good portion of the fury gets dissipated out to sea. No such luck for anyone living in the New Madrid’s million-square-mile seismic zone.
In 1968, it wrecked the civic building in Henderson, Kentucky, and made buildings sway in Boston and twenty-three other freaking states. That’s pretty terrifying when you realize that the quake’s epicenter was in Illinois. And that was just a blip compared to the New Madrid sequence, a series of 1811- 12 quakes that registered over an 8.0 on the Richter scale (multiple times), cracked sidewalks from Missouri to Baltimore, and permanently altered the course of the Mississippi River. The few unlucky bastards already living in the Midwest at the time saw waves rushing up rivers and something called “sand volcanoes.” Not content with claiming mere human casualties, the New Madrid took down the entire town of Little Prairie, Missouri, when it liquidated the ground it was built on. We’re not exaggerating. The entire town was just swallowed by the ground. It no longer exists. Try to imagine the ground you’re standing on suddenly going from solid to liquid, as though the earth, like you,