Sole Video Footage of Anne Frank Posted Online

I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a freshman in high school and was deeply moved by it. I've never heard of anyone who read it and was not similarly moved. The teenager's two-year account of hiding from the Nazis with her parents and other family members and friends in a secret apartment in Holland for over two years was cut short on August 4, 1944, when she and the other Jews who were in hiding were betrayed, arrested, and deported to Auschwitz. Anne perished soon afterward in the death camp.

Until now, I only knew Anne through the pages of her Diary and in the few pictures of her that I've seen. But today, I ran across a newly released, brief video clip of her which news sources say is "the only footage of Anne Frank ever recorded . . ."

The video, uploaded by the Anne Frank House of Amsterdam on Wednesday, depicts the front of an apartment building where Frank's family lived on July 22, 1941, roughly a year before her family went into hiding in a secret apartment.

Frank is seen on video leaning out of the second-floor window of her Amsterdam home to get a glimpse of her neighbor, who is getting married. . . . (continue)

You Can Run But You Can't Hide From McDonalds

Question: What's the farthest distance you can go in the U.S. to get away from a McDonalds?

Answer: "Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car."

As this map shows, if you happen to be somewhere else like, say, California or anywhere east of the Mississippi, you can run (though not very far) but you can't hide from them Golden Arches.

I spotted this bit of fascinating, if useless, knowledge on the First Things blog. They linked to this post by Stephen Von Worley, who said:

This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall. First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a cubic yard of kitty litter, a carafe of pre-Columbian frappasmoochino, or fifty gross of pink highlighter pens, I’m there in a jiffy!

But, Mr. Real Estate Tycoon, did you have to plop your shopping center smack dab in the middle of what was previously nowhere? Okay, the land was cheap. And yes, you did traffic studies and proved that the interstate and distant suburbs would drench whatever you built in a raging torrent of eager consumerism. But your retail monstrosity drains the wildness from the countryside for twenty miles in every direction! Sure, you can’t see it from everywhere - but once you know it’s there, you feel it. In the rural drawl of a neighboring rancher, that flat-out sucks!

Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.

So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…

Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s! . . . (continue reading)