debauchery @elitesquid - Tumblr Blog

Friend: “Hey, I haven’t seen you in forever! how are you?”

me: “Fine, thanks.”

Lemony Snicket from outta nowhere: “Of course, in this case, ‘fine’ is only meant to reassure. She has never been less fine, nor was she ever fine in the first place. Here, the word ‘fine’ could be defined as ‘I am actually slowly dying on the inside, but don’t wish for anyone to worry’.

nandamai

The Attorney General of Massachusetts, everybody.

ohheyjorge

Yes Maura!!!! I love her so much

midwesthotmess-deactivated20180

LIVE: Anti-Trump Protests Outside JFK Airport After Refugees Detained At JFK Airport

ruinedchildhood

alwaysbewoke

Always reblog

pinataparty23-deactivated201404

what if there were professional text post critics

meistens

Rating: ★★★★☆

Witty and insightful. A must-reblog post. Suspense from lack of punctuation and resolution leaves the reader pondering possibilities late into the night.

cassiebones

Anna Kendrick is very important.

wednesdays-in-paris-at-cafes

God bless this woman.

profmeowmers

high key can u give me a rundown of ur fav wacky wwii shenanigans

Okay friends today we are gonna learnabout the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually anarmy made of ghosts

pictured: the unit patch for theGhost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK

see one of the things that made WWII sofucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow weinvented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted tosee how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dudeto fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room forshenanigans

so the normal method of dealing withaerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Sayyou’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombsdropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount ofnetting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an emptyfield from the air

there’s a building under that weirdlump

that’s cool! That’sreally cool! But not cool enough

At some pointsomebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead ofdisguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields asunits”

holy fuckingshit!!!

the British hadused a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked upin tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during OperationBertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a specialunit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.

so the US militarydecides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out andrecruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makesthem into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THEGHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY

the ghost army’sjob was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and thenbasically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unitsneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expectingthem

okay time to getinto the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost armyfaked being a real unit:

step 1: INFLATABLETANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD

that’s a big ol balloon!!!

the ghost army hada stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflagenetting so from the air it looked like someone had just done areal shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiersthat they would set up to make the scene look populated, since theghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of30,000 men

what’s really coolis that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuffitself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then alsohad to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake trackthat a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks arereally hard on your landscaping

step 2: “spoofradio”

the last couple ofdays before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghostarmy would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- somepeople would take longer to type out certain letters or would havepauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to theradio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radiooperators apart from just their fist

anyway the ghostarmy operators would move in and basically listen to all the realunit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fistso it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to makethis section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY

step 3: making alot of noise

the ghost army hadspecial trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole libraryof stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unitinflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination ofsound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and thenplayed everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mixtape

step 4: fuckinpartying!!!

see the thing aboutimpersonating your own units is that other allied units would knowabout it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators couldhear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had tofool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fakemateriel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sewthe unit’s patches on their own uniforms

once they weredressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost armydudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actualfighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying thingslike “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVERDIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”

so anyway thisbunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptionsbetween 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germansso successfully that they actually got shelled

I'mma leave youwith this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” byRick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actualmember of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier thananything I could ever write:

On anotheroccasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the securityperimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they hadseen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was fourGIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. Theylooked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said‘The Americans are very strong.‘”

haunted-hideaway

The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.

weloveshortvideos

classy-viking

love everything about this. the girls making fun of the boys, the endless dumb fun the boys are having, its pure

thebigbiwolf

current aesthetic: cute english teacher who’s high key banging the history professor

satanstrousers

current aesthetic: the history professor

velvetjailofcrimes-deactivated2

current aesthetic: the history professor’s substitute who joins in on the action.

datvikingtho

current aesthetic: the principal who really wants to get in on this sexyfest, but also doesn’t want this whole thing to blow up in his face.

professor-remus-deactivated2018

aesthetic: the librarian who nearly exposes the whole affair before joining in.

welpwomp

aesthetic: The bookish guidance counselor who thinks you all need Jesus.

gandalfthegreywarden-deactivate

Aesthetic: the law student in his dorm across campus who can hear everything.

ghost-roads

Every time I see this it has different characters I love this post

srsfunny

Mr. Martin the Chillest Teacher of all Time

its-tuesday-again

keterkid

People who are younger than you but taller

gondor-calls-for-aid

People who are younger than you but better than you at something

emeraldembers

People who are younger than you

discipleofpuck

People

gentlepanpirate

Being turned into a llama

stabilizedinsanity

A LLAMA?! HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD!!!

nemusou-blog

yeah… weird

newts-in-hats

So if you guys don’t know about Epaulette Sharks, you better watch this now! This juvenile is the cutest little sea puppy and he’s always happy to greet us when we come up to the glass.

Also, they walk along the sand using their fins which is amazing to watch.

justnoodlefishthings

A nice wet puppy

sawkinator

@discovery this is the kind of stuff I would like to see on Shark Week thanks

funnystories

funny story

i was really awkward when i was little, so i got picked on a lot. by my older brothers, by bullies at school, by the kids next door. i didn’t mind too much, cause i was little, but after a while my parents got tired of it, so they put me in martial arts classes so i could start leaning self defense. after I was in there for a year or so, i started to get some confidence, and start sticking up for myself, and it worked. everyone stopped picking on me (except my brothers, but you can’t win ‘em all), anyway, i loved it. i kept taking different self defense classes all the way through middle school and high school and honestly, I was getting pretty good.

then, my freshmen year of college i started dating this guy who was twice my size (i’m pretty small though) and when i told him i had taken those classes, he started pressuring me to show him what I knew. i refused, and he let it go pretty easily. but about a week later, he rushed at me out of nowhere, and in a moment of sheer panic i did a kind of leg sweep thingy, and slammed his face into my knee. he fell on the floor, gushing blood, and laughing like crazy. once the shock of what had happened wore off, i started laughing too. had I really just broken my boyfriends face?!? i helped him off the floor, and helped him clean up, as he explained what i already knew, he hadn’t believed me, but i changed that. we’re married now, and he likes to tell the story of how he fell in love when I gave his first broken nose