Over the Bridge and Down the Rabbit Hole

There are a few problems with the internet that I would like fixed post haste, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. The first is the pervasive unreliability. Once you’ve stepped outside the realm of traditional journalistic and research-based sites, you enter a world devoid of context, documentation, integrity, and any reliable basis in fact. E-mail forwards, link dumps, photo postings, (gasp) blogs, and a surprising number of apparently legitimate sites exist in a total accountability vacuum. This means that when you are wandering around the internet and stumble upon an unattributed but fascinating photograph such as this (click on photo for larger version),

you have to stop for a minute. Not only do you have no idea where this amazing bridge is located, what it’s called, how tall it is, what it’s crossing, or when it was built, you don’t even know if it actually exists. Adobe Photoshop being the evil, hallucinogenic tool of visual deception that it is, this could pretty easily be a carefully altered picture of a model built in somebody’s backyard with forks and kite string. Yes, it is not Photoshop’s fault that it becomes harder every year to trust photographic evidence of anything, but it is one hell of an enabler.

So we have this pretty amazing but possibly nonexistent Wonder Bridge. This brings me to my second problem with the internet, which is that if you are curious enough about anything, you will be able to find scads of information on it, and some of this information (roughly 63%) will come from the legitimate, sources-cited, clad-in-the-sharp-wool-suit-of-respectability side of the internet. Well, actually, that’s not the problem. That is good. What is not good is that those of us who are relentlessly curious about the trivial and the semi-trivial (see: career in theatre history) might choose to spend an amount of time tracking down reliable, documented information about this cool but unsubstantiated bridge. This amount of time is a very flexible quantity, ranging from “too much” to “way, way, way too much.” Fortunately for me, a portion of my current employment involves an operating system upgrade on about one hundred computers, and there is an awfully lot of file copying that has to take place while I sit and watch it take place. The result: just the right amount of too much time at my disposal.

“Say,” you’re wondering, “wouldn’t that be a great time to work on that dissertation you’ve been not writing for ninety-four years now?” Well, yes, shut up, it would, in theory, but in practice you can’t write a dissertation while waiting for software to upgrade. I’ve tried. The mental processes required are as contrary as Australian Rules Football and transcendental meditation. You simply can’t go from one to the other. You can, however, grade quizzes, play chess badly, read up on the NFL, or dive down the rabbit hole of elusive and dubious information that is the internet, searching half-blindly for a gigantic quasi-existent bridge.

Down the rabbit hole is, of course, a fantastic double-edged sword for the curious and attention-phobic mind. On one hand, you can, with the right search string and a few lucky hits on Google, find what you’re looking for, thus satisfying the need for cited sources and confirmed reality. In this case, I found it at Snopes.com, a very handy site with substantial research dedicated to proving or disproving a wide range of urban legends, e-mail forwards, historical myths, and widely circulated photographs, among other things. I don’t consider them a definitive source for knowledge, but they do cite their sources, which is good.. The friendly people at Snopes were able to confirm that happily, yes this is a real bridge. It is called the Millau Bridge, was completed in December 2004, and is, of course, in France. This makes complete sense given that it seems to raise a massively beautiful fuss about crossing gracefully over a valley that German or American engineers would have just paved their way down into or filled in with gravel. Instead, the French have made the world’s tallest auto bridge, and a thing of beauty it is. Here are three other excellent photos from different angles which demonstrate that the above photo was taken before all seven suspension towers were completed(again, click on the photos for larger versions):



This beast is 1.6 miles long and the roadway soars a ridiculous and record setting 885 feet above the floor of the Tarn valley. The highest support pillar is 1,122 feet high, which is about 300 feet shorter than the top of the Empire State Building’s lightning rod.

I shall cite my sources, although I don’t think that the MLA folks recognize hyperlinks as appropriate citation format. For a Guardian newspaper article and several small photos, go here. For the Snopes article on the bridge, go here. Si vous parlez français, cliquez ici pour le site officiel.

So on that hand (this would still be the one hand that we’re talking about), you have the following: Internet = Good. Fantastic photo of bridge stumbled across. Bridge’s existence confirmed with minimal effort. Facts and additional photos acquired. Ridiculously graceful French architectural feat shared with readers. Very nice.

But then there’s that other hand, the one that can’t leave well enough alone. The one that whispers, “Hey, while we’re here, let’s see what else Snopes has about bridges.” So, you perform a quick search, and lo and behold, you have fifteen other interesting bridge photos/urban legends/movie legends. For instance, did you know that the Germans built this, Europe’s largest water bridge?

Or did you know that, in a completely-bridge-unrelated matter, a storm-chaser named Mike Hollingshead took some absolutely jaw-dropping photos (assuming, ha ha, that they haven’t been digitally altered) of various storm cells over the Iowa and Kansas that are frequently misattributed as being photos of the leading elements of Hurricane Katrina?



Good lord, who dug this rabbit hole so deep? And how did I get so turned around in it that I can’t remember which way I came in? The birds ate the bread crumbs, the string broke, and I’m lost. This started off as one of my “Hey, look at this interesting photo I found” posts and then curiosity and Adult ADD kicked in, and here we are. To recap:

1. The internet is interesting and unreliable.
2. The French built one hell of a bridge.
3. The Germans too, but for boats.
4. Storm clouds are high art when well photographed.

And there we have a list that points out the primary drawback – or, depending on how you see it, the primary benefit – of the internet: it is a venue in which old fogeys Theme, Context, and Authority are getting their toes mashed pretty well by those upstart postmodern bastards Random Association, Community Perception, and Variable Information. I think that the point here (there is one, I swear I’m getting to it) is that there is one hell of a lot of information at your fingertips, but it refuses to be contained in any kind of logical form such as, say, a book. The result is a perfectly contradictory universe, at once informative and untrustworthy, fascinating and pointless, interconnected and unrelated. It’s a brave new world. Let’s be careful out there.