If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.
(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day – I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included – well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)
What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.
I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.
What I really want to know is how good the food was?
Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.
Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.
It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.
did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes
Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.
They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.
Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”
The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.
Like, 90% of infomercial style products were designed by/for disabled people, but you wouldn’t know that, because there is no viable market for them. THey have to be marketted and sold to abled people just so that any money can be made of off them and so the people who actually need them will have access.
I think snuggies are the one example almost everyone knows. They were invented for wheelchair users (Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a coat on and off of someone in a wheelchair? Cause it’s PRETTY FUCKIN HARD.) But now everyone just acts like they’re some ~quirky, white people thing~ and not A PRODUCT DESIGNED TO MAKE PEOPLES DAY TO DAY LIVES 10000X EASIER.
But if at any point you were to take your head out of your own ass and go “Hey, who would a product like this benefit,” that would be really cool.
This makes informational make so much sense now.
Like… of course there’s no reason for that guy to knock over that bowl of chips. However, the person it was actually designed for has constant hand tremors that would make this pretty rad, but since we don’t want to show that in a commercial, here’s an able bodied guy who can’t remember how gravity works.
Shit. Those commercials suddenly get a lot less funny when you realize it’s pretty much just people ineptly trying to mimic disability.
Or like the thing for the eggs? Like, oh, it cracks eggs perfectly, you only need one hand?
IT WAS DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE WHO ONLY HAVE THE USE OF ONE HAND.
Or the juice bottle pourer? For people who’re TOO LAZY TO POUR THEIR OWN JUICE? Or FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE DIFFICULTY BEARING WEIGHT IN THE HANDS.
It’s amazing how with just a few words by a few people, my whole perspective on something can shift entirely.
I feel so ignorant for never having realized this before.
Don’t feel bad. You’re not supposed to realize it, since the collective conscious isn’t supposed to realize disabled people are sentient and therefore can be advertised at.
This is why I hate those buzzfeed articles that have these products featured and the title is something like “for the laziest people ever” like For example, a device to pick up your sock and put it on your foot with minimal bending over ( http://youtu.be/9GFOqlAmJUc ) , it would take more effort than it’s worth for an able bodied person, but for someone who is disabled, it’s super helpful. These products are not even meant for able people to use, that’s why when they see them they think it’s ridiculous.
yeah it took me forever to realize this too. those buzzfeed articles feel especially weird now because i actually have some of those products – not because i’m lazy, but because it actually allowed me to do more within the constraints of my chronic illness
it isn’t that “disabled people aren’t enough of a market”
because if they were not enough of a market, then why would infomercial people design and sell a product for them?
as I understand it, FDA regulations say you are not allowed to advertise your product for disabled people without doing a bunch of ruinously expensive tests, tests that manufacturers of infomercial products can’t afford to do. because if you say your product is for disabled people, it’s a “medical device” and falls under their purview
so they have to pretend it has nothing to do with disability, because actually advertising it to the people it’s for would require them to spend insane amounts of money on useless tests
Yup. And then you get people who actually don’t know what they are talking about noticing that the actors in these infomercials are white and doing this “wypipo who sit at home be SO LAZY” thing
no.
wypipo who sit at home all day be on disability benefits, probably
Animal rights activist keep your colonial ethics off of our children. Look at yourself and your own complicit-ness in policies that are genocidal and problematic.
He literally fed his whole village. Alaska is known for having very high food prices and he provided for his village. I’m proud of him.
I’m proud of him too. Also bowheads aren’t endangered. At all. Welcome to ethical sources of food.
What he did was admirable. It is absolutely noble to make it so your village doesn’t starve to death during winter. These communities are too poor to move and relocate and food is so expensive they’re close to literally starving. He’s just taking care of his loved ones and neighbors and hunting whales is difficult and dangerous. Falling overboard can lead to drowning, hypothermia, and getting crushed by the ice floes they hunt in. People have died doing it. Undertaking risk to feed other people and keep them alive is absolutely noble.
Speaking as someone who lives in Alaska after moving up from NJ, people from the lower 48 just have no idea how easy they have it in being able to just get food off of a grocery shelf. Grocery store food is expensive as fuck here. In some places in Alaska, it’s even worse than in many of the food deserts in the US, and climate conditions (a short growing season) and soil quality make growing extra food for your home (like in a garden) very difficult. I’m lucky in that I can afford the supermarket stuff because my roommate is in law enforcement and I’m a skilled worker in healthcare (which there are shortages of up here) and that pays well.
But just for example, it costs our house of 3 about $400-$500 a month on groceries, and that’s with buying really cheap staples, like dried beans, rice, cheap as fuck ramen, and all generic instead of name brand. We rarely eat any fresh fruit or vegetables, because it all has to be dried, frozen, or canned to be affordable. And we’re in one of the least remote areas, not far from Anchorage (where things are the cheapest in the state). We can at least make the 300 mile trip sometimes to Anchorage to buy things in bulk from Costco. In some remote places in Alaska, groceries are $500 to $700 or even $1000 a month.
But many rural Alaskans aren’t as lucky as us. They’re born into poverty (esp. indigenous Alaskans), and have trouble getting out of poverty due to the remoteness of the area making job opportunities harder to come by than many areas in the lower 48. And often their only way of eating enough is subsistence hunting. Even non-indigenous rural Alaskans and people living in the bush sometimes only have a choice between hunting things like elk (also NOT endangered) and starving to death, and moving down to the Lower 48 takes thousands of dollars they just are too poor to put together.
This is just bullying by a bunch of privileged idiots that have no idea how easy they have it, plain and simple. There’s a reason Alaskans have been supportive of this kid and it’s that it’s just a lot harder surviving up here.
yo mad props to this kid. alaska is freakin mental they gots moose in they parkin lots. (i went to alaska on a cruise this year)
one of the bus drivers i had said that most of them hunt and trade any meat theyve hunted (so they can have a variety of meats to choose from so they dont get bored w one type) including reindeer n moose and other things (bear? i forgot what she said) ((she also said u cant trade meat for a truck, like thats a law lmao))
but most of alaskans live off the land. even though alaska is part of the US, p much nothing is the same as the lower 48. its p crazy.
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Yeah, even where I’m at, which is less remote than other places, most people do a little hunting and fishing on the side because food is so expensive. Like our freezer right now is stuffed with a whole trash bag of frozen fish that my roommate caught. Since meat is one of the most expensive things, it definitely helps save money to catch or hunt at least some of your own.
I always knew arctic regions had problems getting food but it didn’t sink in properly until I moved to iceland. I’m in a more metropolitan area now (read: a town of 2000 people), but in the village where I used to live, it was a 45 minute drive over two mountains to get groceries, and about half of the year, those mountain roads are at risk of completely snowing over. When that happens, visibility drops to zero and going up there in anything less than a search and rescue tricked out monster truck thing is dangerous. The doctor was also over those mountains, as was the post office, the mechanic, the pharmacy, and anything else you needed. And even in good weather, food was hard. It’s expensive being that isolated, and it’s not like you can shop around for the cheapest option.
And living that far north has an effect on your dietary requirements too. You need meat and dairy to survive winter. We got about 6 hours of daylight in winter, less if the weather was particularly bad. I was working in a factory without windows between 6am and 3pm so I was only really getting about 3 hours of sun. You need a shitton of protein and vitamin D to get through the day when it’s dark all the time, especially considering most of the jobs up there are labor intensive like farming, fishing, or factory work. Sure you can add supplements, but a jar of 30 pills will cost you at least £15 and if you can’t get to the pharmacy because the mountain is snowed over, you’re fucked.
Cards Against Humanity is a game whose own creators describe it as, “a party game for horrible people.” The game has been extremely popular, with several official and unofficial expansion packs available. Recently, a group of behavior analysts decided to get in on the fun by making their own expansion pack. Unfortunately, the result is anything but fun. In fact, it makes light of several abusive…
Another weird and frustrating phenomenon when you get sucked into an argument with conservative types (something I usually try to avoid bothering with anymore) is that there’s this very narrow set of people they’re convinced are key figures, even “leaders” on any given topic. Talk about climate change and they bring up Al Gore. Talk about women’s rights and they bring up Anita Sarkeesian.
To this day I have NO IDEA what any of those people have ever said on those topics, and in most cases, I never even heard of them outside of conservative complaints and memes. I would never know the name Anita Sarkeesian if she wasn’t one random blogger out of thousands that an obscure niche of people went positively ballistic over. I’ve never heard of anyone accepting the existence of global warming just because non-scientist Al Gore said to.
If I tell them this they never believe it. They’re completely convinced that the beliefs they hate actually revolve around some random youtubers or B-list politicians they randomly elevated into their own bugbears and the idea that the people they fight hardest against actually have barely any influence or fame outside their own subculture seems almost impossible for them to accept.
George Soros.
I always see people saying George Soros pays people like me to protest (I wish), or buses people to vote on battleground states, some way or another he has us under our thrall.
I don’t even know who the fuck George Soros IS
I don’t even feel bothered to Google him and find out- he’s utterly irrelevant to my life. But apparently all liberals are on his payroll somehow.
I, too, never heard of George Soros before just recently.
They could make up absolutely any name in these arguments and it would have just as much meaning to me. “You’re only pro-vaccine because you’re shilling for Jiminy Ferpendoodle!!!”
I’ve heard this referred to as the central fallacy of the authoritarian mindset: It’s not that authoritarians don’t care about facts, it’s that facts aren’t real until they are confirmed by an Authority. Of course no liberal believed in Global Warming until Al Gore said so! Why would they believe it, until Someone In Charge said it? And moreover, if you can prove That Person Isn’t Really An Authority, the facts will change! See also:
Why Creationists are obsessed with disproving Darwin – not his theory, but the man himself. As if casting doubt on Darwin-a-dude-born-in-eighteen-fucking-oh-nine-for-chrissake-’s personal beliefs will somehow completely disprove the ensuing two centuries of scientific research.
Why various idiot politicians try to legislate away Global Climate Change, as if making laws against the ocean will stop it from rising.
I’m sure you could add on ten thousand bullet points but it’s Saturday and I don’t wanna do the research when I could be cleaning my kitchen and playing Minecraft.
I was at work today for Labour Day and on TV was Good Morning America. The theme was celebrating the American worker and their accomplishments. I’ll tell you how it went down.
Kelly put on her glasses, smile wide, and pulled out a piece of paper which she read from. The paper was from an article
(which I have issues with, but I will leave alone for now) by ABC news. Kelly proceeded only to read the opening of it, which reads: ‘Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world. More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese. And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.’
And everyone cheered.
And they kept cheering when Kelly put her paper down and smiled at everyone. (not continuing with the rest of the article which suggests that this may in fact be a problem).
And I just couldn’t BELIEVE that anyone was cheering. America. AMERICA you work more than the French, who are entitled by law to have 5 weeks off a year for vacation and can not work more than 35 hours per week. You work more than Norway, who average 33 hours per week and 44,000 dollars a year. Germany, where AGAIN, we see a shorter work week and better pay! And all of these countries have health care and better pay and free/affordable education!
WHY ARE YOU CHEERING?
I have a different interpretation of this information: the American worker is the most taken advantage of worker in the industrialized world. It’s plain and simple. You work long hours and get horrible pay. You take multiple jobs and work and work and work just to get by. Unions are disappearing, jobs are always looking for part timers and all you are doing is giving up your time for less money, less vacation, less safety and stability and less education than anyone else on the list.
Celebrate Labour day. Celebrate the accomplishments of the common worker, but don’t let these people trick you into thinking you should celebrate the theft of your time and energy, or the fruits of your labour.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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