I have mentioned this before: my new nightly ritual is to lull myself to sleep with a few episodes of this Fascinating Horror YouTube channel.
It's just so soothing. It's all these stories of disaster, incidents, crashes, and the like delivered in a very factual, pleasant English voice. No drama. Just a soothing gentleman stating things like, "There were no survivors" and "Soon the reactor core had melted."
Last weekend I was transfixed by the short documentary of the Glass Tower, which recounted a dreadful fire in high-rise glass skyscraper. It was the usual format: a) spooky music followed by b) synopsis of the event, then c) historical background, d) disaster, e) aftermath, and f) return of the spooky music.
I was deep into the disaster, and I had just gotten past the point in which the poor souls in the tower were down to just one means of escape (such as it always is) when intrepid firefighters set off explosions that broke the water towers on the roof and doused the flames.
"That is amazing!" I thought. "I bet that heroism probably helped inspire that movie in the seventies. What was it? 'The Towering Inferno.'" I paused YouTube and searched for more information about the infamous Glass Tower disaster.
Wikipedia routed me right to the plot synopsis of The Towering Inferno, of course, because that's exactly what he'd been recounting. Then I looked at the title of piece:
The Glass Tower: A Short "Documentary"
Yes. Quotation marks. All the other ones don't use quotes. They weren't on the title card, but they were there in the YouTube listing.
He even said celebrities like Paul Newman and Fred Astaire were in attendance at the event that started the fire. All done with a straight, matter-of-fact tone.
I'd been had. I loved it.
I'm back to the real disasters now. I'm in the middle of the Isla Nublar Incident, where a company builds an island resort and stocks it with cloned animals. It sounds like a bad idea to me, for some reason.
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