So... Alright - Five Tabs

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Geoff invents a new game called "five tabs!" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga

chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga episode. It is being recorded ahead of time. I have a vacation coming up in the near future, so I need to bank a couple of episodes. Want to do an idea today that I, well, that I just had maybe 30 minutes ago, I was going through doing my research for the Woodsy owl episode, and I was closing all those tabs and I realized I had a bunch of old tabs that I'd left open, because they were subjects that I wanted to cover at some point and this often happens with me. I leave a tab open and I expect to get back to it at some point and there's like maybe a 30% chance I will which leaves 70% chance that I won't. If you're doing the math math of it that's how it

shakes out. So there's a you you know, a C chance that I, my grade in high school, my average grade in high school chance that I'm never gonna go back to those tabs, but I always leave them open. What ends up happening is they clog up my Safari and I get annoyed by how small all my other tabs are when I'm looking for something because I have so many tabs crammed in

and I can't allow myself to delete them because to delete them would be to throw away the thread of the inclination that I would turn that into an idea of or content in some way someday, right? So as I closed on my Woodsy Owl and Mark Trail tabs, I looked and I saw that I had five left that were clearly so all right related. And I didn't look at them past what the title of each tab was. I thought five tabs, which of those five tabs can I turn into content?

Why not all of them? Why don't I do an episode called five tabs? And instead of going through them and trying to reconnect with whatever that idea Why don't I do an episode called Five Tabs? And instead of going through them and trying to reconnect with whatever that idea was, because I do this from time to time and it never works, why don't I just use these five tabs and go through them in podcast with you and we'll discover what the fuck they are together.

So I present to you my latest idea, Five Tabs. Tab number one is the St. Louis Exposition. So is that the World's Fair? Is that what I was looking up? The St. Louis Exposition or St. Louis Expo was a series of, so not quite the World's Fair, okay, was a series of annual agricultural and technical fairs held in the St. Louis Fairgrounds Park from 1850 to 1902. Man, St. Louis, I want to know St.

Louis as a city better. Every time I've gone through it, I've found it to be quite charming and it seems to be laid out very well in terms of like, you know, how grids and neighborhoods are laid out. Interesting place that I really have barely cracked the surface on. It's where Jason Tatum's from, you know? It's where Nelly and the St. Lunatics are from. I feel like I participate in it adjacently through pop culture in those ways, but I don't really know anything about St. Louis itself. Huh.

In 1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a major World's Fair. Right. So the World's Fair of 1904 was held in St. Louis. It was called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The annual Agricultural and Technical Exposition was not held in that year. This would be the St. Louis Exposition. And then it ceased after the World's Fair. Okay, so they had a St. Louis Exposition

they would hold every year. Then the year that the World's Fair came in, they said, well, we better not hold it this year because it's gonna be all World's Fair. It's like all anybody talks about or cares about, right? And then after the World's Fair, maybe St. Louis was like, that's enough. That's a lot of fairs.

St. Louis, we're a big city and all, very cosmopolitan city, but that's a lot of fucking fairs for one city. Maybe we'll take a break, I guess. Huh, memorabilia from the annual St. Louis expositions are sometimes confused with the 1904 World's Fair memorabilia on auction websites. That doesn't surprise me at all because I'm confused by the idea that they're two different things.

This whole thing is fucking confusing. Let's see. In 1855, a group of St. Louisans, St. Louisans, is that real? Is that what you guys are called? Founded the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association, which held annual fairs starting in 1856. So that thing had been going for 50 years

when they shit canned it. Prominent citizens founded the association, which was not intended to pay dividends. All profits were to expand and beautify the fairgrounds. to pay dividends. All profits were to expand and beautify the fairgrounds. You read shit like that from 1855. You think like, how did we lose the idea of doing things for the greater good? How did we, on an individual level, get so selfish and Inwardly focused Be unable to see past our own

immediate wants needs and desires To recognize the need to do things for a greater good. We had that in the we had that in 1856 we don't have cars yet, but we understood the idea of the greater good. All right, off my soapbox. So it's a 50 acre site. This means nothing to me. It's at the corner of Grand Avenue and the Natural Bridge Plank Road. I assume if you live in St. Louis,

you're very familiar with Natural Bridge Plank Road. Well outside the city limits. It was an hour plus journey from the city by horse drawn carriage. I sped that up with the car thing I was talking about earlier probably. It was the largest amphitheater in America at the time seating 12,000 plus standing.

Wow, we really improved upon the 12,000 person amphitheater over the last 100, 200 years or so, huh? We already got I was about to look it up and see what the largest amphitheater in the world is But we did that in a previous episode I'm not gonna I'm not gonna retread the annual fair was an immediate success and became noted all over the country It was in reality a gigantic county fair. Well, that's what it sounds like There were booths for vending wine beer and other deluxe. Yeah, it's like a food and wine festival, right? You just go and get fucking hammered

and then look at other people's folk art. There were livestock, poultry, vegetables. Yeah, this is it. There was a three-story chicken palace for displaying poultry, as well as a floral hall and a Gothic fine arts hall. They made it available to the public to have picnics for a nominal fee in 1860. Oh, right. Then the civil war happened. That put things on

hold for a while. They use the fairgrounds for military and training purposes. Yeah, that makes sense. They converted it into one of the amphitheater into the largest, most thoroughly ventilated hospitals in the United States, accommodating 2,500 patients. So you can accommodate 10,000 music fans or 2,500 hospital patients in the same space. That's how that breaks down. Huh.

Anyway, the last official fair was held in 1902 because preparations were underway for the World's Fair. And then another blow to the fair's arrival after 1904 was the abolition of horse racing in Missouri in 1905. I guess horse racing was a big part of it, even though that wasn't covered at any point in the history that I was reading. I guess it was a big enough component of it

to stop it from coming back though, or at least to contribute to it not coming back. Huh. Well, there you go. I guess there's no, when was the last one 1902 How old is the oldest? American today as Of November 2024. Well, that's not very today. This fucking AI thing sucks. Who is the oldest American currently?

Naomi Whitehead who's's 114 years old. She was born in 1910. Yeah, so how about that to blow your mind a little bit? There is not currently a human being alive in the United States that was alive during the final 1902 St. Louis Exposition. 1902 does feel like an impossibly far time away, but it also doesn't because I was born in 1975.

So, you know, in my childhood and even early adulthood, 1904 was, I can still touch it. I knew people who were alive in 1904, you know? Maybe not personally, but they were around, they were on television. Every day Willard Scott was introducing them to me. Man, that's crazy. So when I was born in 1975,

for someone to have attended, or at least to have been alive during the 1902 exposition, they would have to be 73. So there were everybody in America who was 73 years or older, the day I was born, lived in a St. Louis exposition world. How about a second tab? City Beautiful Movement. The City Beautiful Movement, this has got to be related to the St. Louis Exposition in some way.

The City Beautiful Movement was a reform philosophy of North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and the 1900s with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. It was a part of the progressive social reform movement in North America under the leadership of the upper middle class, which was concerned with poor living conditions in all major cities.

Wow. Once again, even snooty rich upper middle class know-it-alls were concerned with the living conditions in all major US cities in the 1890s and the early 1900s and did something about it. I guess by making pretty architecture, the people that were under a poor living conditions were probably like, wow, that's a beautiful arch, but I'm still very hungry, you know, but I'm also 130 years removed from that event. So how the fuck do I know one way or the other? I do think it's fucking amazing that enough people got together to create a progressive social reform movement to beautify and add

monumental grandeur to our cities That those ideas seem so far in the past In the reality of 2025 that it breaks my fucking heart You know what I mean? I'm not trying to get off on a rant or anything. Certainly not what I'm going for, but to read about how in 1890 we got it. We got the idea that we needed to improve our spaces for all to elevate all.

It just seems like the polar opposite of the world I'm living in, but maybe I'm crazy. What do I know? Let's learn more about this. It began in the United States in response to a crowding in tenement districts, a consequence of high birth rates. Well, we definitely don't have high birth rates anymore.

Increased immigration and internal migration of rural populations into cities. Okay, so our solution for immigration in the 1890s and the 1900s was to create more and beautiful spaces for people. Our solution for immigration in 2025 is not that. God damn. Sorry, this is not intent to turn political,

but everything I'm fucking reading reminds me of the polar opposite of something I'm experiencing in 2025 and it's fucking obnoxious. Architectural idioms, the particular architectural style of the movement borrowed mainly from the contemporary Beaux Arts and neoclassical architectures, which emphasized the necessity of order, dignity, and harmony.

I understand neoclassical, but I've never heard of Beaux Arts. Beaux Arts was the academic architectural style taught in the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, particularly from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. It drew upon the principles of French neoclassicism, but also incorporated Renaissance and Baroque elements. Huh. I've seen some of those buildings when I was in Paris. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's beautiful.

Oh! So the image I'm looking at is the entrance to the Grand Pal was in Paris, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, that's beautiful. Oh, so the image I'm looking at is the entrance to the Grand Palais in Paris. Wow, that's instantly recognizable. And Grand Central Terminal in New York City as well. Wow, that's cool. Anyway, uh, Bo Arts feels like that's something I probably should have known about.

The first large. OK, yeah, this is how I came to it, probably, looking back on it. The first large-scale elaboration of the City Beautiful Movement occurred in Chicago at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, which is something that I was very interested in. I think everybody who read Devil in the White City got very interested in the World's Columbian Exposition

in the mid-2000s, around the time that book came out, because it was a fascinating book, and it was so was so well written and it was such an interesting point in time and there was so much going on in that book and so many wild stories around the just the Herculean efforts that went into building and pulling that thing off while also dealing with a serial killer and H.H. Holmes and man, if you've never read that book by the way, you should it's really fucking good. The planning of the expedition was directed by Daniel Burnham of Burnham and Root.

Burnham and Root got the gig to do the exposition and then Root died almost immediately, which was hard on Burnham because Root was considered to be like the talent, like the main guy. Burnham was kind of like his sidekick, also incredibly talented, but I think saw Root as the real talent.

And when Root died, he then had to elevate himself and clearly was able to. But that's also going off what I remember from a book I read 20 years ago. So take all of that with a grain of salt. Nope, I think this is where I came to it from. The popularization begun by the World Columbian Exposition was increased by the Louisiana Purchase Expedition of 1904 held in St. Louis. Its commissioner of architects selected Franco-American architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray to be chief of design and within three years he designed the following fair buildings in the prevailing Beaux Arts, the Palace of Agriculture, the Cascades and the Colonnades, the Palace of Forestry, Fish

and Game and the Palace of Horticulture. Oh, and also the Palace of Transportation. So I guess the Louisiana Purchase Expedition was all decked out in the city beautiful style of bow arts and neoclassicism. Interesting. When you let arrow truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow. Like that pile of laundry.

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All right. Third tab, All right, third tab, Majingo Island or Magingo Island. I don't immediately remember. Oh, yeah, no, here we go. Magingo Island is a 2000 square meter. You know what? I'm going to learn how to pronounce it so I'm not an asshole. How to pronounce Magingo. Okay, now I know how to pronounce it.

Majingo Island is a 2000,000 square meter island in Kenya on Lake Victoria. So it's an island in a lake. The island was the center of a low level territorial dispute between Kenya and Uganda and is extremely densely populated. I think this is why I was reading about this place. I think it's one of the most densely populated places on earth. this place. I think it's one of the most densely populated places on earth. The island has a population of about 131, mostly fishermen and fish traders who are served by four pubs, a number of brothels and a pharmacy on the island. It has a density of more than 65,000 people per square kilometer, which makes it one of the most densely populated islands in Africa and the world I wonder what it's like to visit that place. It's so small. It's not displayed on some maps

Huh? I think I came to it from because I saw a picture of it on reddit or something, but that's interesting I really don't know. I wonder if you can is there Majingo Island tourism Not saying I want to go there, but I just wonder if it if it exists Majingo Island Safari visiting Majingo Island tourism? Not saying I want to go there, but I just wonder if it if it exists. Majingo Island Safari, visiting Majingo Island, safari, vacations and travel. Jingo Island, point four, nine acres. So that place is smaller than a half an acre. And according to this, says it's home to more than 500 residents. Wow. It's the most crowded island in the world.

Reaching Majingo Island is an adventure that begins long before you set foot on the island itself. Okay, they will arrange your transportation ensuring a seamless journey via scenic boat ride from the mainland as you depart Lake Victoria, it unfolds breathtaking views. Okay it's all pretty. Upon arrival at Majingo Island, you'll be greeted by a lively atmosphere filled with the sounds of fishermen hauling in their catches

and locals engaging in daily activities. The island's compact size means that everything is within proximity. And those, and everything would be, hold on. Where was it? Four pubs, a number of brothels, and a pharmacy. Those are probably, those are gotta be the big tourist hotspots on Majingo Island.

The richness of the local culture more than compensates for the scarcity of amenities. Activities you can enjoy, there are cultural tours, relaxation and scenic views, and fishing expeditions. Oh, there you go. If you've ever been to Majingo Island, would you let me know and tell me what it was like and if it was cool and if you have photos?

My email address is eric at jeffsboss.com and I would love to hear from you sincerely. Let's look at our fourth tab. List of cities by population density. This must have been in relation to Majingo Island. Okay. The most popular, let's see just the top 10. And by the way, Majingo, I'm looking for it here on this list. It may not show up because it's not like a major city. It might not be large enough. Yeah. It's got to be the case because these places don't seem as densely populated.

Okay, we'll do the top five. The Malay and the Maldives with a population of 211,000 is the fifth most densely populated place in the world with a density of 36,536 people per kilometer. Number four is Mandaluang in the Philippines. Mandaluang, wow, that's a pretty looking city. Huge. Good Lord.

It's a highly urbanized city in the national capital region of the Philippines. It has a population of 425,758 people, so about twice the size of Mali, and density of about 38,000 per kilometer. Number three is Manila, also in the Philippines, of course, with a much larger 1.8 million people and a density of about 43,000 per kilometer. Manila is the capital and second most populous city of the Philippines. I did not know it was second most populous It is behind Quazon City that I don't think I've ever heard of Quazon City before but it's more populated than Manila Man, I'm an idiot. Okay Number two is Giza Talk about another impressive skyline. Good Lord third largest city in Egypt by area

First by population density, obviously four point four million people crammed in to about 45,000 per kilometer. That's dense. And then the number one most densely populated city in the world, Croix de Bouquet, I hope I said that right, is a commune in Haiti. The commune, is that what it's called? Okay, it's a commune in the O.S. Department of Haiti. It's eight miles to the northeast

of Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince, has a population of about 250,000 people, and is also about 45,700 people per kilometer. It is, however, only five kilometers. So the area is five kilometer, 250,000 people crammed into five kilometers. Good Lord. It was originally located on the shore,

but after the 1770 Port-au-Prince earthquake, they were moved inland. Interesting. Wow. So none of those are technically as populated as Majingo Island but you know obviously they're infinitely larger than Majingo Island. Let's see what our fifth and final tab is. Okay ah the Lancia Stratos Zero. It's a car. It is a very very cool futuristic car that was produced in

1970. It was a concept car. Five-speed manual trans, I don't know why I'm telling you what the transmission is. It is a Grand Tourer concept sports car from the Italian automobile manufacturers, Bertone and Lancia. I don't know that I've heard of Bertone, but I have heard of Lancia.

It was presented at the 1970 Tour and Auto Show, predating the production of Lancia Stratos by three years, which is like the I guess the production version of it. And also I'm looking at a picture of it. The Lancia Stratos HF is a pretty cool looking car. It looks kind of like a speed racer's car a little bit. But the Lancia Stratos Zero is infinitely cooler. I encourage you to look this thing up.

It is an angular, trapezoidal, ultra futuristic science fiction, design styled aerodynamically shaped car with a height of only 84 centimeters. It is really cool. It is very science fiction-y. It looks, it's that kind of science fiction that looked cool when it hit and then became kind of lame

and outdated for a very long time and is now cool again. Like it now looks almost modern. Like I could, they changed the rims, but outside of that you could see this car on the street. You know, this could be like the, like if Polestar decided to create a race car, I could see it looking like this Anyway, that's our fifth tab. I guess it was just a really cool This is probably why I never made an episode out of it. Oh, hold on. There's something interesting The Lancia Stratos zero appears in the 1988 Michael Jackson musical film moonwalker in the smooth criminal section

The character of Michael Jackson is cornered by gangsters He turns into a bulletproof Lancia Stratos Zero and gets away. So the car that Michael Jackson turns into is this car. There you go. You can go watch Moonwalker right now and see for yourself. All right. That was five tabs. That was fun. That was, uh, I don't know. I'm only 28 minutes in, but that feels like it was a lot of talking for some reason. I thought today for a song of the day, I'd do something a little different. Instead of picking a song of the day, I'm just going to look at the last five songs

that were on my playlist. I listened to my playlist on random, so I never know what's coming up. So the first song was Braid, Killing a Camera. I could definitely have made that a song of the episode. I've been listening to a lot of Braid lately and man, I know it's like their most popular, well-known song and all. So it's kind of an obvious choice, but it's such a fun song. The next song was White Man and Hammersmith Play by The Clash, which I've almost done an episode of this show on. I don't know if I ever have.

Listening to the song in the British Airways lounge at Heathrow Airport in whatever year I was doing it was I think the moment I had the idea for this podcast. And I'm just remembering that now I was going to do a whole episode on this song at some point and I never did. It's interesting that it came up in the playlist. That's number two. Number three was Forever My Queen by Pentagram. That's a fun song. Number four was Never Bought It by Dinosaur Jr. One of their best, most obvious songs. And number five was Barely Holdin' On by Polo G. Those are the last five songs I listened to.

And those will be your five songs of the episode. I think that'll do it for today. Tune in next week where I will talk about some other bullshit and hopefully you'll go, ah, that was worth a listen. Alright.