Today I learned +

[Thomas Shey]

I once had to shepherd a group of government representatives from Cuba. They wanted to have breakfast in Montreal and see Niagara Falls in the afternoon. No concept of the actual size of Canada.

They also wanted to go to a Harley Davidson dealership, but that's another story.

Far as I can tell, in this particular regard Canada is even somewhat more extreme than the U.S.

 

[MoonSong]

TIL something about a rear window Garfield craze in the late eighties. I had heard about it from the cartoon, but having been born after it, I thought it was made up as a commentary on consumerism. I learned of it because the other day I finally saw a window Garfield on a Taxi. I didn't even know these plushies were real.

Now I know these plushies were real. They were in vogue in the late eighties and came into being by accident. Jim Davies had ordered Garfield plushies with velcro on their hands but the factory fashioned them with suction cups instead. He then marketed them as window decoration. Then people started putting them in their cars. Then teen vandals started to window smash these cars for the plushies and gifted them to their girlfriends. Also that Paws would send a replacement to people mailing them a copy of the police report.

The Great Garfield Car Window Toy Craze

The lasagna-snorting cat's car plush led to a burglary spree and humane society protests.

www.mentalfloss.com

Far as I can tell, in this particular regard Canada is even somewhat more extreme than the U.S.

Some things here in our continent are very far from each other. Though I'm sure my perspective is skewed because I constantly move on a 40 mile radius across the city and back and fort between two states. Everything under a two-hour drive is registered to me as "extremely close".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Some things here in our continent are very far from each other. Though I'm sure my perspective is skewed because I constantly move on a 40 mile radius across the city and back and fort between two states. Everything under a two-hour drive is registered to me as "extremely close".

That (to various degrees) is probably a common gig in various North American areas; its certainly true with urban and urban adjacent areas all over the west half of the U.S. (I'm a lifetime Angelino so driving a while to get, well, anywhere is just a given).

 

[Ryujin]

TIL something about a rear window Garfield craze in the late eighties. I had heard about it from the cartoon, but having been born after it, I thought it was made up as a commentary on consumerism. I learned of it because the other day I finally saw a window Garfield on a Taxi. I didn't even know these plushies were real.

Now I know these plushies were real. They were in vogue in the late eighties and came into being by accident. Jim Davies had ordered Garfield plushies with velcro on their hands but the factory fashioned them with suction cups instead. He then marketed them as window decoration. Then people started putting them in their cars. Then teen vandals started to window smash these cars for the plushies and gifted them to their girlfriends. Also that Paws would send a replacement to people mailing them a copy of the police report.

The Great Garfield Car Window Toy Craze

The lasagna-snorting cat's car plush led to a burglary spree and humane society protests.

www.mentalfloss.com

Some things here in our continent are very far from each other. Though I'm sure my perspective is skewed because I constantly move on a 40 mile radius across the city and back and fort between two states. Everything under a two-hour drive is registered to me as "extremely close".

Doing cross-country flights from Toronto, to the west coast, there's an awful lot of nothing. During night flights it's quite common to see one or two lights, in a sea of dark.

 

[MoonSong]

Doing cross-country flights from Toronto, to the west coast, there's an awful lot of nothing. During night flights it's quite common to see one or two lights, in a sea of dark.

There's quite a lot of empty space and lots of concentrated lights.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Oh! Are we talking population density? <waves in Australian>

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh! Are we talking population density? <waves in Australian>

I think (note the emphasis) that you have a slightly different dynamic because your population really hugs the coasts as I understand it (there's certainly some of that in the U.S. but if my understanding of Australia is correct, not nearly to the same degree).

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Something like 90% of the Australian populaiton lives within an 100km of the coast. And most of that 90% live in 5 big cities.

Note, that we have a population of about 26 million. So that's a couple of million people spread out across an area approximately equal to 2/3rds that of the continental USA.

Big old empty middle.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I sometimes think people from more densely inhabited countries or even parts of the U.S. are really kind of unclear how relatively wild parts of the U.S. are and the impact that has on local lifestyles.

Have you ever seen the videos of certain CLEARLY naive city folk trying to pet “fluffy cows” or take a dip in the hot springs in Yellowstone, make friends with wild warthogs in Africa, feed wild bears in Russia, etc.?

Hell, when I was a kid, my own father was one of a bunch of people who fanned out across a roadside field, trying to get a photo of a MASSIVE elk. But he wised up when the elk alerted and started eyeballing the people closing in on him. He got his picture, returned to the car, and we drove off before anything else happened…

There’s definitely a too-large segment of city-dwellers (from all over the world) who are utterly clueless about how dangerous nature really is.

To be clear, I’m city folk. I understand a lot about animals, much less about dangerous plants. But I don’t know JACK about the dangers of terrain beyond the blatantly obvious.

 

[trappedslider]

Have you ever seen the videos of certain CLEARLY naive city folk trying to pet “fluffy cows” or take a dip in the hot springs in Yellowstone, make friends with wild warthogs in Africa, feed wild bears in Russia, etc.?

or steal a baby wombat