i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”
it was in awe lmao
then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like
oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and
story time
okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.
to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.
i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.
i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.
all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.
so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?
however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”
LITERALLY the words that he said
which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.
my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.
so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”
This sounds like an X-files episode
Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.
I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.
Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.
So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.
………………..yeah, you guys caught me
i grew up in tracy
also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true
Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.
Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Not to be #thatperson but I feel like national news isn’t fully realizing how bad this is. Not to detract from the horror of Paradise and surrounding towns but this is really bad. And Sacramento is worse.
It is that bad, and you are not supposed to mind. You are supposed to accept the new normal. Sometimes American cities will be uninhabitable. Sometimes America will just burn. You will be encouraged to identify with this. It’ll probably be a whole thing, like how New Englanders take pride in driving in snowstorms.
The city of San Francisco currently has the worst air quality of anywhere in the world because of the wildfires. (This level of air quality, incidentally, is bad for people and kills them.) These once-in-a-lifetime wildfires will become more common in our lifetimes.
I think ! it’s okay! to say this isn’t fine!!
THIS IS NOT FINE
TEN YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN TOP OF NEWS CYCLE DISASTER COVERAGE
THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD AND WE SHOULD NOT LOOK AWAY
A few more things to think about:
a) This is happening in a region where the majority of the population does not have air conditioning in their homes, because the climate in the coastal parts of the Bay Area (including the East Bay, where we live) is typically very mild, and rarely gets warm enough to require cooling. Right now, it’s also not warm enough to require A/C for cooling, but A/C can also be used to filter indoor air. So most Bay Area residents do not have any technological means to filter the air inside their homes. When hbbo and I left earlier this week, the air inside was vastly better than the air outside, but the smoke was still so bad indoors that we were wearing N95 masks inside our apartment. Telling people to stay inside is a pretty inadequate way of protecting them when the air inside is so bad you taste ash every time you pull your mask down to take a sip of water.
c) N95 masks, the only protective mechanism most Bay Area residents have access to, frequently don’t fit children correctly, because their faces are too small to allow for a good seal, and a lot of public health outlets are just flat-out recommending against having children wear them. Just—think about that, for a second. The entire Bay Area and Central Valley are in the middle of a public health crisis that has, now, for large swathes of that area, lasted for over a week. There are very few places in that entire area, indoors or out, where you can go to get a full breath of clean air. So, throughout that area, most kids are just—breathing in smoke. All day. Every day. Indoors and out.
d) I grew up in Los Angeles and I’ve lived in California for most of my life (I’m 37), and yes, wildfires have always been a part of the California experience. But not in November. It used to be that California had a well-defined “fire season” that lasted from about May to about October, with the worst of the fire risk in the most heavily populated parts of the state coming between mid-August and mid-October, which is, for wide swathes of California, the hottest part of the year (I know this sounds bananas to non-Californians, but this is just what our climate’s like: our perceptual summer is dramatically late-shifted into the autumn, and our technical “summers” can actually be quite cool, especially if you’re near the coast, as is true in SF and LA).
e) You can use Breezometer to compare the air quality in the Bay Area to the air quality in your location. The air quality at our apartment is currently 18/100 on their scale (higher is better); it’s dipped as low as 12 at various points this week. As I’m writing this on Saturday morning, the air quality is noticeably improving for most of the state, but:
…last night, and for several days previous, that blob of red centered around Chico was contiguous all the way west to the coast, down the coast past Monterey, and all the way south (through that area that’s currently orange/yellow) down the middle of the state—the Central Valley—to Visalia, and orange down to Bakersfield. Because I think California scale is hard to grasp sometimes: it’s about a three hour drive in no traffic just from San Jose to the area that hbbo and I are staying, near San Luis Obispo (marked on the map as “San Luis” because the “Obispo” got cut off—green area on the western coast, near the bottom of this screencap). The actual fire, which is near Chico, is about 370 miles (595 km), or a five and a half hour drive, from the southern edge of its smoke cloud in Bakersfield.
I’m sorry if you guys are tired of me posting about this but it’s important so here’s some updated Camp Fire information:
– Camp Fire Public Information Line: (530) 538-7826
Updated Incident Report 11/10/18
1. The fire is now at 100,000 acres but is 20% contained
2. There are still 6,713 confirmed destroyed (6,453 houses, 260 commercial buildings)
3.Evacuation Orders & Warnings for Camp Fire
Current Evacuation Orders (per 11/10 7:00 a.m. incident update):
• Paradise, Magalia, Concow, Butte Creek Canyon, and Butte Valley
• Powellton zone
• Lovelock zone
• Humbug zone
• Stirling zone, Stirling City and Inskip
• North Coutelenc zone
• North Fir Haven zone
• Nimshew zone
• Carnegie/Colter zone
• South Firhaven zone
• South Coutelenc zone
• North Pines zone
• South Pines zone
• Old Magalia zone
• Lower Pentz zone
• Morgan Ridge zone
• Lower Clark zone
• Highway 32 at Nopel South all the way to Chico city limits
• Butte Creek Road
• Centerville Road
• Concow
• Pulga
• Yankee Hill
• Skyway from lower Paradise to the Chico city limits
• Morgan ridge
• Highway 70 from Pulga to West branch feather river bridge
• All of Clark Road and all of pentz road, south to highway 70, everything west to highway 99 and south to highway 149 including all of Butte Valley
• Shippee Road from Highway 149 to Highway 99
• Cherokee Road to Highway 70 to Lake Oroville south to Table Mountain Blvd.
4. Evacuation Shelter Information:
OPEN: Yuba-Sutter Fairground (442 Franklin Ave, Yuba City, CA 95991)
OPEN: Chester Memorial Hall (22 Gay Street, Chester)
THIS SHELTER IS FULL: Butte County Fairgrounds (199 E Hazel St, Gridley, CA 95948)
THIS SHELTER IS FULL: Glenn County Fairgrounds (221 E Yolo St, Orland, CA 95963)
THIS SHELTER IS FULL: Chico Elks Club (1705 Manzanita, Chico)
THIS SHELTER IS FULL: Oroville Nazarene Church (2238 Monte Vista Ave, Oroville, CA 95966)
THIS SHELTER IS FULL: Neighborhood Church (2801 Notre Dame Blvd, Chico, CA 95928)
If assistance is needed in evacuating, call 9-1-1.
5. Animal Shelter Information:
Small Animal: Small animals evacuated due to the Camp Fire can be taken to:
The Old County Hospital at 2279 Del Oro and Mono, Suite E
The Chico Municipal Airport (150 Airpark Blvd, Chico, CA 95973)
Large Animal: Large animals evacuated due to the Camp Fire can be taken to the Butte County Fairgrounds, 199 E Hazel St, Gridley, CA 95948
6. The fire could potentially reach Oroville, CA because of wind movements. This isn’t a fact it’s just a possibility, I heard them discussing it on Action News Now
7. If you live in Chico, Butte County, or the surrounding area, the evacuation shelters and evacuation animal shelters are in need of volunteers and supplies
8. The air quality is still super bad so wear a mask if going outside, don’t overexhert yourself, and keep animals inside as much as possible. If you’re having trouble breathing, they probably are too especially smaller animals like dogs and cats
9. This is Paradise, CA in relation to the fire if anyone was wondering. Basically right in the middle of everything.
10. The town of Paradise has been destroyed that much I can say, and it’s devastating. PLEASE SHARE THIS BECAUSE AN ENTIRE TOWN WAS JUST WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE MAP AND NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT
Here’s some of my own pictures that I took the other day of the sky. It was Day 2 of the fire and it looked like the apocalypse if I’m being honest. The first two pictures were taken at 11:17 AM but it looks like it could be anywhere from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM (also that’s nothing in the sky on picture 2 I think it’s just a reflection on my camera lens). The last picture was taken around 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM and I know the picture itself isn’t that good but you can clearly see all of the thick smoke in the air.
California is one of the hot-zones
in the world’s urban housing crisis, driven by a combination of
opposition to highrise/high-density living and the mass purchase of
foreclosed properties following the 2008 crisis by giant Wall Street
landlords who have steadily ratcheted up rents
and evictions in a big to safeguard the flow of payments to bondholders
who get a share of the rents extracted from struggling tenants living
in dangerous, substanding housing.
California’s cities have different policy levers they can yank on to
address this: zoning changes, commuter rail, school spending. But one
lever that cities have relied upon since the beginning of modern urban
government is missing: rent control. California state law forbids rent
control on single-family homes; and apartments build after 1995.
A ballot measure, Prop 10, will allow cities to impose rent controls on
all rental stock, allowing voters a say in the way that their cities are
developed. But the giant hedge funds that own hundreds of thousands of
California rental properties are pumping millions more into
scare-campaigns intended to convince voters to oppose Prop 10.
Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world, is
California’s biggest corporate landlord, with 127,000 single-family
homes in its “portfolio.” They’re responsible for $6,859,747 in
anti-Prop-10 spending, part of the $45m attack on the proposition.
Landlords across California have sent eviction notices to their tenants
giving them 60 days to leave; other have announced massive rent
increases – and tenants have been notified that these will be cancelled
only if Prop 10 fails.
We all know quails as those dough bodied little birds with a single dongle growing out of their heads. But did you know that the California quail [Callipepla californica] also likes to roll in the dirt? The act of dust bathing is a communal activity that helps the quails keep their feathers clean from parasites, and is so enjoyed by them that some ornithologists can tell when a quail has been nearby just by looking for the craters left behind after a quail has finished its “bath”. Images by
