Rarely do people cheat the system in fun or interesting ways, as usually it doesn't amount to more than "I used an expired coupon at Denny's, AND THEY TOOK IT." But every once in a while, somebody will bend the rules in a way that is so creative and astounding that you almost wish they'd dedicate their powers to something useful. Like how ...
Imagine you want to open a swinger's club with a dungeon and a playroom and, we're presuming, an extremely dedicated janitorial staff. Well, first you need real estate, and that's what the group Freedom for All thought they had when they purchased the building next to a Christian school in Nashville.
In a stunning twist, the community at large did not enjoy the idea of a fuck enthusiast club next to a Jesus-y school, and the city changed the zoning laws to deny the business the right to be there. So Freedom For All said they were going to open a church instead, and bafflingly, they were approved this time. Most people might be suspicious of someone who says they want to open a sex club, only to immediately make a 180 and decide they want a church, but Nashville citizens are apparently a trusting lot.
To qualify as a church, you have to demonstrate that people go there to worship, so when code inspectors showed up and saw that the choir room featured restraint chairs, and other rooms had holes in walls so people could spy on the sexy (yet pious) goings-on, it raised some questions. The inspectors did apparently snap a number of pictures of people having sex, and even some video, but that's not very impressive evidence. If you go to Pornhub right now and search for "ass worshiping," you're going to find a lot of videos. I think it's one of the world's fastest-growing faiths.
It looks like numerous attempts were made to shut the club down, but the government is a little reluctant to tell people what qualifies as a church, so the Temple of Holy Doin' It went strong for a couple of years before the owners packed up shop and sold the place. Probably too many building inspectors filming free porn inside to make it worthwhile.
Peter Frohlich teaches programming at Johns Hopkins University, and he grades on a curve. In his class, the top mark always equals 100 percent. Even if there are 100 questions and the best student gets 70 right, that becomes 100 percent, and every other student is graded in relation to that. He says it's a good way to judge everyone relative to their peers -- and really, if everyone screws up a question, you have to admit maybe it wasn't taught correctly. The students, however, noted a flaw in the plan: Everyone could get an A by simply agreeing to do nothing.
For the final exam in 2015, every student in the classes Frohlich taught boycotted the exam. They all showed up and waited outside to make sure no little sneak-thief would ruin it for everyone, and no one did. Everyone got 0. After all, why would anyone defect when the only thing taking the exam could do is ensure a worse grade for everyone else? As long as all were united, it was better to take the 0 that would become a perfect score when curved.
Realizing he'd be screwed over by his own rules, Frohlich had the good grace to at least praise the students for coming together as a group to work for their mutual benefit, and honored his own cockamamie policy by giving everyone an A. But he did change his standards after that to allow himself the right to stick it to anyone he felt was trying to game the system.
I can count the number of flights I've taken on one hand, if that hand is holding six things in it. And I've never flown first class, with the most luxurious thing I've ever experienced on a flight being a flight attendant giving me a whole can of Pepsi instead of that shot glass full of ice I've had on every other flight. But I'd like to know what it's like to fly as a rich person, and so did travel blogger Sam Huang. The problem is that the specific Emirates flight he wanted to take is so fancy that it costs $60,000. That's more than most bloggers make in, well, an eternity.
If that price sounds insane for a flight that doesn't land on Mars, keep in mind that we're talking about a luxury experience intended to convince billionaires to do this instead of taking the teleportation devices we all know they secretly have -- and he wanted to take a trip around the world. So in order to experience it without breaking the bank, Huang managed to plot out the most baffling string of loopholes and workarounds to get the flight for only $300.
The entire process is detailed at length on Huang's website, but it involved using a hell of a lot of frequent flyer miles and transferring bonus miles from one source to another to another, maximizing as much as he possibly could. He had to book it as one flight with a hell of a lot of layovers -- he stopped in 11 cities across seven countries. And to get a lot of those miles, he signed up for credit cards. Lots and lots of credit cards which offered miles as bonuses. Once he had 100,000 miles racked up after several months of balancing up to 15 credit cards, he was good to go.
If it seems like a lot of work, we can't emphasize enough that this Emirates flight is opulent to the point of stupidity. Hate cramped seats on normal planes? You get your own golden room on this flight. You can have a shower on this flight. There's unlimited champagne and caviar and, what the hell, have some Hennessy while you're at it.
The only thing this flight is missing is a solid gold handjob, and that's only because I don't really know what that means.
Elizabeth Swaney competed in the Winter Olympics on Team Hungary after 110 percent gaming the shit out of Olympic regulations. If Olympic tomfuckery were an event, she'd rightly win the gold. But it's not.
Instead, Swaney managed to compete in the numerous worldwide freestyle skiing competitions necessary to qualify for the Olympics, and even ranked top 30, which is the cutoff for qualifying. This kind of makes it sound like she was still pretty good, but she actually did this by avoiding the big qualifiers that most athletes went to, instead heading to ones that were so unpopular that there literally weren't even 30 competitors.
Swaney, who can ski in the sense that she doesn't fall down on skis, then proceeded to not fall down on her skis. This strategy was somewhat brilliant, because if she did no tricks and literally just skied downhill during a freestyle, she at least got points for finishing. Other competitors who tried to actually do tricks, as is the nature of the sport, suffered the fate of messing up sometimes. A failed trick can cost you more than a successful trickless run. So she qualified -- not for Team America, but Team Hungary, which had a lack of qualified skiers. Swaney, whose grandparents were Hungarian, used that to sneak right in like a weasel that can barely ski into a hen house.
You may have seen the highlights of Swaney's Olympic run, in which she partnered with gravity to get from the top of a hill to the bottom. It was literally less exciting than watching me try to get out of a really low sofa. At least that involves a lot of flips and leg movement.
Here's a problem too many of us can relate to: We want to get shitfaced in public, but the man is all like, "Unshit that face, or else!" So now you're drinking a goddamn Pomme Baya La Croix on the boardwalk like a fancy vagabond. Well, a group of intrepid kiwis (the people, not the fruits or the birds) were not about to let their New Year's celebration be unshitted by anyone, the laws be damned.
The police in the Coromandel area of New Zealand had issued a ban on public boozing for the holiday. But why even celebrate a new year if you're sober enough to remember the old one? So the desperate-to-be-drunk New Zealanders headed into international waters, which in this case were literally several yards offshore, and constructed an island out of sand during low tide. They built it up enough so that when the tide rolled in that night, they had an island big enough for a picnic table and a half dozen people or so.
As you know, anything that happens in international waters is fully legal. It's like Bloodsport meets the Wild West, only with sharks. You want to stage a no-holds-barred genetically enhanced emu fight? You do it in international waters. Or, you know, you just get wasted at an island picnic table. It's a rich tapestry of possibilities. As goofy-ass as this plan sounds, it worked like a charm. Local cops saw the island and the maritime drunks and thought it was as amusing as everyone else did. And no one remembered 2017. Happy New Year, indeed.
Even if you'll never fly first-class on one, you can still get yourself a model of the Emirates A380 and dream about it.
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Ian Fortey
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