Posts Tagged ‘fiasco’
“Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.”*…
When things go wrong– very, very wrong: an example from your correspondent’s childhood…
When Beach Park’s Howard Hilton was planning the Great Tampa Snow Show, he envisioned smiling kids, Santa Claus spreading good cheer, frolicking reindeer and lots of snow. A giant Christmas tree would hulk over the festivities, and there would be a massive, five-story ski slope.
Instead, Hilton’s eight-day event turned into the most flawed spectacle in Tampa history.
The event… was designed to promote downtown businesses during the Christmas season. Even though hundreds of thousands came to the show, it resulted in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer and several sunburned seals…
It was supposed to be a winter wonderland: “Tampa’s 1958 Snow Show was an epic fiasco” from @TB_Times.
(TotH to Rusty Foster and his glorious newsletter, Today in Tabs, which reminded me of a singular event in my first Christmas season in Central Florida… one that I had, I guess, repressed…)
For more (laugh out loud) stories of snafu: “Fiasco,” from This American Life (especially “Act One,” which is possibly the funniest true story I’ve ever heard.)
* Orlando Bloom
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As we celebrate shambles, we might note that today is Twilight Zone Day, a celebration of Rod Serling’s masterful series, The Twilight Zone (See also here and here)– in which, of course, unintended consequences feature centrally.
“One ingredient of many fiascos is that great, massive, heart-wrenching chaos and failure are more likely to occur when great ambitions come into play”*…
There’s a term for when a single hiccup triggers a chain reaction that makes everything go absolutely, altogether, totally, and undeniably wrong, causing a large and intricate system to collapse on itself. On the street you might call it a fiasco—but in more formal parlance it’s called “cascading failure.”
Sound familiar? If you’ve been through an electrical grid outage, there’s a good chance you’ve heard it in that context. It’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s a relatively recent term, and the complexity of modern life has multiplied the real-life scenarios for its use in the fields of technology, biology, and finance. The easiest way to think about cascading failure is as a line of tumbling dominoes—or the plot of Jurassic Park, a blockbuster about how the smallest of errors can lead to total catastrophe…
Epic power blackouts, the “flash crash,” coronavirus response, and so much more: “Cascading Failure.”
* Ira Glass, in his introduction to “Opening Night,” Act One of the This American Life episode “Fiasco“… and the funniest 21 minutes of radio your correspondent has ever heard.
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As we consider causation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986, at 11:10p, that operators at the the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine received the go-ahead to commence a safety test that was scheduled to coincide with a routine shutdown for maintenance. Just over two hours later, an unexpected power surge triggered what we now know as “The Chernobyl disaster”– considered, even after Fukushima, the worst nuclear catastrophe in history. It killed 31 people directly, including 28 workers and firefighters who died of acute radiation poisoning during the cleanup. Experts believe it likewise caused thousands of premature cancer deaths, though the exact number is disputed. To this day, the area around the plant remains so contaminated that it’s officially closed to human habitation.
A view of the facility three days after the incident
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