NJ Transit Is The Absolute Worst Transit System, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: NJ Transit truly sucks, Santa Claus is dead and buried, and farmers markets are full of frauds.
Your Local Farmers Market Might Be Full Of Frauds
There's nothing like waking up early on a crisp fall morning, brewing a hot cup of coffee, pulling on a warm sweater, heading to your local farmers market and… buying some apples grown by a huge commercial agriculture operation?
The CBC's Charlsie Agro went on the hunt at a number of Ontario-area farmers markets and discovered that many of the "local farmer" stalls were stocking produce that definitely did not come from a small local farm — some of it still sporting grocery stickers.
NJ Transit Is The Worst Of The Worst
If you ride regularly on a mass transit system, you likely complain regularly about said mass transit system. Especially in the US, there aren't really any "good" transit systems. There are "good enough" ones. There are "bad" ones. And then there's "New Jersey Transit."
Through a public records request, Bloomberg Businessweek obtained 666 pages of complaints filed by NJ Transit riders during a four-week period last spring. It's worth reading through the worst of the worst complaints Bloomberg found, but this complaint from one rider really sums things up for us: "Please stop treating us like idiots and give us the information we need so we can get home rather than spending hours in the world's worst train station."
Santa Claus Is Dead
I know what you're thinking: Christmas is canceled and 2017 can't get any worse. Fear not, Christmas will proceed as it has for the last 1600 years, because Santa Claus (that is, St. Nicholas, the 4th century saint from Turkey) has been dead since 343 AD and that hasn't changed.
One thing that has changed: Archaeologists in the province of Antalya in southern Turkey think they've found old St. Nick's final resting place. While they're pretty confident they've got the right tomb, they're still digging to figure out if Santa's skeletal remains are still intact. Happy holidays!
'American Girl' Almost Wasn't A Hit
When you think of Tom Petty (RIP), "American Girl" is probably one of the songs that first comes to mind. But that wasn't always the case. Released as a single in 1977, "American Girl" flopped in America, as Katherine Brooks details over at the Huffington Post.
Ironically, it hit the charts in the UK in '77, but didn't catch on in the US until nearly 2 decades later thanks to rounds on the karaoke circuit and movie soundtracks.
Screenwriters Think George Lucas Is One Of The Best Screenwriters Of All Time
Nobody would ever accuse George Lucas of being good at writing dialogue. Exhibit #1 (through infinity):
Conversational difficulties aside, Lucas still rates pretty high (16) on Vulture's list of the top 100 screenwriters ever, thanks the fact that he created perhaps the most popular and enduring sci fi universe out there. Check out the full list over at Vulture, which unfortunately doesn't answer our one pressing screenwriter question — which Coen brother is better (they share the #2 spot)?
