4

Fine Restaurants Succeed Or Fail On The Word Of A Tire Company

For the past half century, restaurants all over the world have bowed to the power of one small, omnipresent cartel: Michelin. Yes, you've heard of them. You probably assumed the name was unrelated to the tire company, but if so, you were mistaken. For some reason, a tire company decides the fate of fine dining.

Michelin 
To be fair, their expert does look like he's had some experience with eating.

3

A Small Town In Macedonia Influences American Elections

We've all been in a panic lately about foreign powers maliciously influencing the American presidential election. And while most fingers are being pointed squarely at Russia, nobody seems to be looking at Macedonia, a tiny country in Eastern Europe that's influenced more elections than Putin could shake a stick at. And he's a stick-shaker, that guy.

The Kremlin
But calling him that breaks Russia's law against gay propaganda.

Though President Trump has made every effort to define "fake news" as anything he doesn't like, from The New York Times to a particularly difficult word jumble (some of the words go diagonally, Donny!), fake news is a real problem. In the run-up to the 2016 election, social media was swamped with false viral news stories, and when the real media tried to trace them to their sources, they discovered that most of them were, weirdly enough, coming from the small Macedonian town of Veles, which has a population of around 50,000.

The teenagers and young adults of Veles have become rich off an entire cottage industry of fake news, having set up around 100 websites dedicated to making up stories about American politicians and sharing them on Facebook for ad revenue. And when we say rich, we mean these kids are making upwards of $100,000 a year from Google Ads -- all in a town where the average annual wage is around $4,800.

via Wiki Commons
Its next-biggest industries are turnip farming and begging.

2

Half Of The World's Opioid Supply Comes From One Valley

The U.S. and Canada are currently dealing with one of the biggest drug crises of all time. Drug-related deaths are higher than ever before, particularly from opioids like heroin, opium, morphine, codeine, and OxyContin. These drugs all come from the seeds of one plant: the opium poppy. And by sheer volume, almost all of those plants come from one place: Afghanistan.

Spc. George Hunt/U.S. Army
Which is weird, because when has anything bad ever come out of Afghanistan?

Not only does Afghanistan produce almost 90 percent of the world's poppy extract -- both the good stuff that gets delivered by a doctor in a hospital and the bad stuff that gets delivered by a guy named "Docta" in the alleyway behind Arby's -- but fully half of that 90 percent comes from a single valley: Helmand Province.

Mark Ray/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Those fields aren't grass.

The poppy seed trade in Afghanistan is so massive that it accounts for around 15 percent of the country's GDP, and although poppy seeds are also a non-mind-altering culinary ingredient, the bulk of this annual harvest doesn't wind up sprinkled on a disappointing muffin. Afghanistan has the biggest drug economy in the world, leaving even South America's cocaine industry in the dust and making Pablo Escobar's empire look like a Kickstarter project.

KGM007/Wiki Commons
We hope this doesn't lead to Afghanistan becoming a dangerous place sometime in the future.

1

Every Beer Brand In The U.S. Is At The Whim Of One Obscure Bureaucrat

Each of the hundreds of American beer brands -- from Coors on down to the craft brew your hipster uncle whips up in his basement -- has its own unique name and label. And every single one of them has to be individually approved by one single bureaucrat. Also, he's a lunatic.

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau's Malt Beverage Labeling Specialist is the title given to the one person in charge of approving or denying the name and label design of every single beer that is sold in America -- an industry that grossed $252 billion in 2016. Until his retirement in 2015, that person was Kent Martin, who demanded that people refer to him simply as "Battle."

Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau
That's not the crazy part. That's the awesome part.

Battle was feared like a dictator for the decade that he worked as the TTB's chief beer dude. Since there are no clearly defined regulations on what can or cannot appear on a beer label, Battle was handed the power to approve or veto the designs of one of America's biggest industries based on little more than his intuition ... and how much he likes puns. Because beer brewers seem to love them.

Battle was renowned for being irritatingly pedantic. Among those beers he vetoed, one was called "Liquid Wisdom" (rejected because "the name contains a medical claim" -- a medical claim to ... wisdom?), one featured a King of Hearts playing card (any image of a heart apparently implies a health benefit), one had a picture of a hamburger (supposedly misled customers into "thinking the beer includes a meat product" -- how ripped off would you feel if you bought it and it wasn't Baconator-flavored?), and one had a picture of Santa Claus, but according to Battle, Santa looked drunk. And Santa doesn't get drunk. That's an official government opinion.

Scott Olson/Getty Images
Other labels should have been banned for implying the beverage contains alcohol.

Brewers knew that his word was law, and in all his time in office, there was only one known example of someone winning a battle against Battle. A California brewer wanted to market a beer called Weed Ale, which Battle vetoed because of the marijuana implication. But the beer was brewed in the town of Weed, CA, named after Civil War hero Abner Weed. It took an intervention from the ACLU, a senator, and goddamn Congress before Battle agreed to back down. Turns out his name wasn't just bravado -- the dude would fistfight God himself if the Almighty dared to put a Whopper on a Pilsner label.

Adam Koski took a big step toward secretly running the world when he wrote half of a fantasy book. Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs. Ryan is currently a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the host of the Penn Health-X Podcast, which focuses on healthcare management, entrepreneurship, and technology. Check out https://soundcloud.com/pennhealthxpodcast for more info!

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