5 Barbaric Practices That Are More Modern Than You Think

When it comes to history, it can be difficult to get a real sense of scale, like when you learn that the last surviving Civil War widow died in 2008. History is like that -- things we assume were left in the distant past have a way of lingering on, decades or centuries longer than you'd have thought. For example ...

#5. The Last American Execution by Firing Squad Was in 2010

Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images

If there is one thing humans have been especially good at throughout history, it's coming up with increasingly more efficient ways to execute people. As time progressed, crucifixion gave way to the guillotine, the guillotine gave way to hanging, hanging gave way to the firing squad, and the firing squad gave way to the electric chair. In recent decades, Old Sparky has lost out to chemical injection as the most popular method of removing the most unsociable of us from the mortal realm. It's just so much more civilized to treat it like a medical procedure, rather than, say, straight up shooting a dude.

Dennis Donohue/iStock/Getty Images
Though the idea of a win-and-you're-free deathmatch with a bear has been steadily gaining support.

But Actually ...

Despite the forward march of execution technology, it's only been about four years since the last firing squad execution was carried out in America.

In Utah, those sentenced to the death penalty had their choice of execution method from a list of options (you can't choose "be kicked into a jet engine by Steven Seagal"). This tradition technically ended in 2004, when the firing squad was officially outlawed in favor of lethal injection as the go-to technique for reducing the population of death row, but a caveat in the rule stated that anyone who received a death sentence before then was still permitted to choose to go out in a hail of gunfire.

Pasticcio/iStock/Getty Images
It just has a certain flair to it, on top of giving you a good setup for your last words.

Double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner, who was sentenced to death for murdering a lawyer while trying to escape trial for a previous murder, was the only guy since that ruling to decide that being shot to death was somehow better than dying peacefully in his sleep. And so, after sitting on death row for 25 years, Gardner was strapped to a chair and had a target painted over his heart, and five officers who volunteered to be a part of history were equipped with old school .30 caliber Winchesters. In line with tradition, one was loaded with blanks so that none of them could feel guilty (or on the other hand, brag) about being the one who fired the kill shot.

Although Gardner was one of only three people executed by firing squad since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, there's a chance it might soon make a comeback due to a recent shortage of drugs that is pushing states to find new ways of disposing of criminals. Of course, we could go back to the electric chair, but shit, prisons have to pay power bills, too, and besides that, they've probably been traumatized after watching The Green Mile.

tiripero/iStock/Getty Images
Leading to exploding mouse populations in prisons.

#4. Chernobyl Kept Running Until December 2000

Wyco/iStock/Getty Images

In 1986, the worst (accidental) nuclear incident in history at the time occurred when the Chernobyl nuclear plant decided to spit radiation over a good portion of the Ukrainian countryside and create an iconic Call of Duty level in the process. Since then, the region has been an abandoned, irradiated wasteland, overgrown with weeds and probably mutated rats or some shit. The plant itself is probably nothing more than a sprawling, silent complex with a big-ass crater in the center.

But Actually ...

Not only did the Chernobyl plant survive the meltdown, but it was business as usual for over a decade afterward. The world's most notoriously explosive power plant continued providing energyuntil December of 2000.

Dobresum/iStock/Getty Images
But unlike those Ruskie quitters, Three Mile Island is still going strong! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Though the popular impression is that the Chernobyl disaster was a Hiroshima-scale event, it was really just one reactor that was affected, and then it was less an atomic explosion than it was an atomic crop dusting. The other three reactors were just fine after the incident, and given that Eastern Europe still needed power to watch Wheel of Fortune and whatever crazy bear-wrestling game shows they have over there, the technicians continued to run the place for almost 14 more years. To keep the lethal radiation enclosed (and to ensure no one else gained mutant superpowers), a gigantic steel and concrete sarcophagus was placed around the ruined reactor, and from there it was just the same 9-to-5 as it had always been.

It was only after much international scrutiny spearheaded by Bill Clinton that the United States pledged $78 million to help Ukraine close down that nightmare factory and repair the structure that protects the rest of the world from its horrors. In December 2000, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma appeared on television and announced the closing of the plant, at which point chief Chernobyl technician and consonant hoarder Oleksandr Yelchishchev turned the switch that would see the permanent termination of the plant's unholy existence.

Rachel Gardner/iStock/Getty Images
The switch itself was rather anticlimactic.

Kuchma's address appeared to lament the premature closure of the plant, which seems odd, because it did run for over a decade after, y'know, killing all those people and irradiating over 1,000 square miles of land for the foreseeable future.

#3. The Last Battle Between Sailing Vessels Was in World War II

Josh Doughty/iStock/Getty Images

Before people discovered how to build ships that ran under their own power, naval battles from the dawn of civilization had always been decided on the whim of whichever direction God decided to blow wind on their sails. Considering that we've had boats powered by actual engines since the Industrial Revolution, you'd assume that by the time World War II rolled around that nobody was out there fighting Master and Commander style. This was, after all, a conflict featuring tanks, stealth bombers, and goddamn nuclear weapons.

Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
And missiles from outer space.

But Actually ...

Not only did history's last battle between sailing vessels happen in World War II, but it was actually the final naval battle of the war, occurring shortly after the Japanese had surrendered but before all of the Japanese had received the memo. It was late in August 1945, and having been given notice that the war had ended, U.S. Navy Lieutenants Livingston Swentzel and Stuart Pittman were on their way home via China. They weren't making the journey by battleship, but instead commanded two Chinese junks.

If you haven't seen Pirates of the Caribbean, a junk looks like this:

Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
"Junk" is being kind.

On August 20, the two were probably wondering what they did to get stuck with this shitty assignment on their measly sailing ships when suddenly they came across yet another sailing ship that was acting suspiciously. It turned out to be a Japanese vessel, and when it saw the Americans very slowly approaching, they gradually turned around and, after several minutes of slow motion suspense, opened fire, kicking off the last sailing battle the world will probably ever see until Kevin Costner's Waterworld becomes real.

Pittman, realizing that his day just got much more exciting than expected, responded by opening fire with all weapons he had on board, to which the Japanese responded in kind. Discovering he had a bazooka, Pittman ordered his ship within 100 meters to fire it onto the enemy ship. Three bazooka hits later, the Japanese still continued to fight on, and Pittman ended the battle as any movie-quality sailing battle should end: with a hostile boarding. He maneuvered his ship next to the Japanese one and gave the one order all Navy officers secretly hope to yell: "Prepare to board!"

Gary Blakeley/iStock/Getty Images
A controversy later arose as to whether the lack of rope swinging constituted a proper boarding.

Pittman personally led the charge onto the enemy ship for vicious hand-to-hand combat with guns, bayonets, and a freaking meat cleaver. The battle continued until the Japanese surrendered, with 43 dead and 39 captured. And as of yet, Hollywood has somehow still neglected to make a movie out of this whole thing.

#2. Negro Leagues Baseball Was Played Until the 1980s

Wiki Commons

Baseball's Negro Leagues are an artifact from that awkward period in America after white people decided that African-Americans were allowed to participate in society but before they were comfortable being near them. The segregated leagues lasted from the late 1800s until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier right after World War II, at which point white America graciously decided to allow some of the greatest baseball players on the planet to join them on the field.

But Actually ...

Dark-skinned Americans stopped being forced to play in the Negro Leagues after 1947, but that didn't mean the Negro Leagues teams packed up their bats and stopped playing. In fact, they continued playing ball right past the Civil Rights Act, up until the 1960s. It was something of a sore topic among Negro Leagues managers that the Major Leagues were suddenly stealing all of their best athletes, and they actually campaigned to stop the white folk from taking away their best players.

Bowman Gum
"Sorry, but the chance to make racists rage-shit their pants is too good to pass up."

Even after the 1970s ended, a team known as the Indianapolis Clowns refused to buckle to the pressures of integration and continued to play under the Negro Leagues banner. They became the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, but instead of always winning rigged matches, they almost always lost to junior college teams practicing for the upcoming season. It wasn't until 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, and the B-52s' "Love Shack" release, that they finally ran out of backing. Still, a league started by segregation lived on right until the Seinfeld premiere episode.

#1. Part of the Roman Empire Still Exists Today

BargotiPhotography/iStock/Getty Images

Since we humans have such relatively short lifespans, it's difficult to come to terms with the fact that nation-states have been a pretty recent fad of history. It's only a few short generations ago that the world was made up of gigantic empires that spanned continents. In fact, by the time America achieved independence at the turn of the 18th century, it was still a mishmash of English, French, and Spanish colonies battling in a worldwide Thunderdome to collect the most land. Even still, you imagine that the era of globe-spanning empires only exists today as your most accomplished Sid Meier game.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
You know Julius Caesar would never settle for a pansy-ass space-race victory.

But Actually ...

Pretty much the first group of people to look at a map of the entire Earth and say "I'll take one of those, please" was the Roman Empire, except they didn't really say "please." Over the course of a significant chunk of human history, the Romans went forth and conquered most of the known world until eventually it became so huge and unwieldy that it broke apart into smaller and smaller pieces.

You probably learned that the fall of the Roman Empire is the milestone that separates the ancient from the medieval world, but what you might not know is that it never entirely fell. It just got smaller, its constituent parts being divvied up among rival empires until there was nothing left ... except Liechtenstein, an incredibly tiny nation near modern-day Italy.

Wikipedia
It was briefly overthrown when a drunken tourist accidentally wandered into parliament and sat in the prime minister's chair.

After literally millennia, tiny Liechtenstein, just a dot on the world map, is the last remaining outpost of the Roman Empire that has never been conquered. To this day, even its royal family is descended from their no-doubt inbred Roman ancestors.

As for the rest of the Roman Empire, it is officially recorded in history as having fallen in the 1400s, when it was finally conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1452, just in time to be reported by the printing press. So how long did the Ottomans stick around? They existed until 1922, until they were defeated in goddamned World War I, meaning a country that fought the Roman Empire was competing in the modern Olympics and being talked about by Warren G. Harding. This basically means that, if you play the Kevin Bacon game with world leaders, the 29th president is surprisingly damned close to Julius Caesar.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Who has a salad, that was eaten by ... Kevin Bacon.

5 Soldiers Who Were More Badass Than Rambo (Without Guns)

We've told a lot of stories about badass soldiers on modern battlefields. It's inherently cool to be someone who has survived whizzing bullets and bursting artillery, and it's inherently cooler to be someone who looked out at all that modern murder technology and said, "Fuck it, too easy."

Collected below are men who didn't need guns to make a difference on battlefields full of modern weaponry. They brought knives, fists, and freaking shovels to fights someone else started via earth-pounding cannons and automatic weapons. These are men who know that wars aren't won by the side with the best gear and the coolest-looking toys. Wars are won by the side with the soldiers who want it hardest.

#5. Corporal Toloza Takes on AK-47s With a Pocket Knife

S-e-v-e-r-e/iStock/Getty Images

Once upon a time, there was an El Salvadoran corporal named Samuel Toloza. There probably stillis a guy named Toloza in El Salvador, but we've got to assume he either quit the army or moved past corporal a while back.

NA/AbleStock.com/Getty Images
At this point, he's probably evolved into a being of pure energy.

Anyway, Toloza owned a pocket knife. He brought it with him to Iraq, probably in anticipation of the myriad knife-related tasks you run into when your life is basically one long armed campout. He used it to slice open MREs, maybe pry open the odd can of chili, and all in all the knife had a pretty placid life until the day Iraqi gunmen surrounded Toloza and his buddies.

The soldiers quickly ran out of ammunition. They were wounded, outnumbered, and functionally unarmed. It's not the sort of situation most soldiers thrive in. It's also not the sort of situation small pocket knives thrive in, especially considering small pocket knives only really thrive when you're whittlin' or cutting up lines of coke. But Corporal Toloza had gone to all the trouble of bringing that knife to Iraq. So he figured "fuck it" and charged a bunch of dudes with automatic rifles wielding a blade almost small enough to legally carry on a plane.

AP Photo/Saurabh Das via Joint Force Quarterly
"Does the crusted blood count against my 3 ounces of liquid?"

Toloza stabbed several of the attackers, who, we've got to stress this, had freaking guns. This whole "crazy knife-wielding man" thing was enough to knock the Iraqis off their game until a counterattack could rescue Toloza and his men. Although if they hadn't, he was probably only one X-ACTO away from being able to finish the job.

#4. Gurkha Beats Taliban Insurgents Down With a Tripod

goodze/iStock/Getty Images

Actual weapons are all well and good, but you don't always have the luxury of something designed to hurt people, or even something designed to cut open small packages and lengths of rope. Sometimes all you have is a tripod. A Nepalese Gurkha named Dipprasad Pun found himself inexactly this situation one gunfire-y night in Afghanistan.

Cate Gillon / Getty
Pictured: a Gurkha. Not pictured: fucks.

Pun was on guard duty, alone, when dozens of attackers swarmed out of the mountains with murder on their minds. He emptied every weapon in his arsenal: a machine gun, 17 grenades, and a land mine, somehow. But eventually that all ran dry, and there were still Taliban guys he hadn't killed.

A normal man might have given up. Pun grabbed a nearby gun tripod and proceeded to wail on multiple armed men until help finally arrived. It's hard to imagine he needed them. Give a dude like this an empty iPhone case and he could probably fight his way out of a convention for drunken UFC fighters with impulse control problems.

WPA Pool/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Shit, he could probably hobble Seal Team Six with the case for that medal.

#3. Grabbing a Bomb Maker Off a Motorcycle

Zeffss1/iStock/Getty Images

Movies have the benefit of trained stuntmen and women, people who dedicate their entire professional lives to figuring out how to jump from moving vehicle to moving vehicle without crippling themselves. War sometimes calls for the same abilities, but provides no opportunity for preparation. It's also got notoriously lax rules about cushioned landing pads. This probably leads a lot of young men to die horribly trying to do awesome-looking stunts.

But every now and then, it works out gloriously.

PA via The Mirror
Almost as glorious as his matted locks of power.

Private Lee Stephens, one of the crewmen on a British Warrior armored vehicle, was minding his own business, chasing down a motorcycle-bound terrorist. The bad guy's comrades were providing covering fire, and Stephens had no weapon in hand to take the shot. So, he used his body as a weapon and leaped off the goddamn truck to tackle that terrorist off his motorcycle. Said terrorist turned out to be a high-level bomb maker, and this whole story pretty much fulfills our need for a new Lethal Weapon movie.

Unlike a movie, Lee didn't have a screenwriter to help him script his explanation to the press:

"My muckers were getting shot at and I was hopefully doing what they would do for me in the same situation."

Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty Images
This is the only picture we could find that's nearly as British as the sentence you just read.

No one knows what the word "muckers" means, but based on the context, we have to assume he was talking about his testicles.

#2. Two Men Fistfight on an Active Battlefield

Comstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images

OK, so the Civil War isn't super modern as conflicts go, but it was a war where gunfire dominated the battlefield, and old standbys like the sword really started to look like outdated relics of a more elegant, less survivable age. But at least the sword has a few thousand years of advancement onfreaking fists, mankind's first and fleshiest of weapons.

Siri Stafford/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Hello, old friend.

So you wouldn't expect one of the first mechanized wars in history to have had any fistfights of consequence. It's just a stupid idea in an era of Gatling guns. And yet two bold soldiers weren't willing to leave man's oldest way of messing up his fellow man behind. During the Battle of the Wilderness, a Yankee and a Confederate warrior each sheltered in the same gully for cover from the murder whizzing about in the air above them.

They decided immediately that this whole "dual occupancy" trench thing wasn't going to fly. Both men agreed that one of them needed to take the other prisoner. A straight-up fistfight was the only sane way to decide which man would capture the other. So they started punching each other, and gradually both sides around them stopped firing to gawk at the spectacle of two young men fisting each other's meaty frames in a brutal ballet much less sexy than this sentence has made it sound so far.

Panorios / Vetta / Getty
Like this, but before showering existed.

Eventually the Yankee surrendered, and the two presumably staggered off arm-in-arm to have a beer.

#1. One Man Makes War the Shovel Way

Dorling Kindersly / Getty

Every now and then we come across a story so insane, so unbelievably impressive, that we can't believe. We're convinced the only reason you haven't already heard of Anthony Kaho'ohanohano is because his name ought to be freaking impossiblebased on everything we know about letters.

But he was a real man. And he could do more with a folding shovel than the average SWAT team can do with ... uh, itself.

U.S. Army
Hell, this guy ate SWAT teams and pooped out Delta Force.

Kaho'ohanohano was fighting in the Korean War, trying to stop North Korea from becoming All Korea, when he ran into a minor problem: All his friends were retreating, and he had to stop an entire army from chasing them down. He did this via the traditional methods, aka "every gun at hand." But eventually those ran out, and he was also shot repeatedly. When the North Koreans massed for their final charge, Kaho'ohanohano had only one weapon left: his entrenching shovel.

The world will never know exactly what happened that fateful day, but when American forces recovered the position, they found Tony's body, shovel in hand, surrounded by 13 men he'd beaten to death before deciding to take the counsel of his many bullet wounds and die.

4 Hilarious Attempts to Fix Things That Weren't Broken

The world is bullshit. Our government doesn't work. There are rocks everywhere. Almost nothing hovers.

Issaurinko/Robert Churchill/GlobalP/indigolotos/iStock/Getty Images
All of these were supposed to be hovering by now, dammit.

People have been noticing the bullshittedness of the world for a long time now, and history is littered with examples of people who have tried to do something about it. And failed miserably, because, as previously discussed, the world is bullshit. Here are the stories of their failure.

#4. The 13-Month Calendar

The calendar we use is kind of nuts. August has 31 days. September has 30. February has 28, except when it doesn't, except when it does. Our weeks are seven days long, which isn't divisible by anything, nor does it go evenly into any of the months, except when it does, except when it doesn't. Basically nothing about our calendar makes sense, and indeed, the only reason we use it is because one of the popes made us.

Wikimedia Commons
"Also, God said to name it after me."

OK, strictly speaking, the problem has more to do with the Earth and the sun not being able to get their shit together and create a year that's composed of a nice round number of days: 365.25 doesn't divide evenly by anything, no matter what the pope says.

Wikimedia Commons
"God's working on changing what integers are, right now."

Still, that hasn't stopped people from trying. And 365.25 is kind of close to 364, which is 28 times 13. That means we could have nice, even 28-day months, except we'll have 13 of them, which is basically the unevenest number there is. And we'd still have a spare day each year, which we'd have to do something with. It probably couldn't be a regular day. These guys who invented a 13-month calendar want to call it the "day out of time." The guys who invented this 13-month calendarcall the spare day "Year Day," which sounds less dumb until you think about it, at which point it sounds much, much dumber. And it wasn't even just kooks promoting these alternative calendars. After World War II, the United Nations was seriously considering a "World Calendar" that featured 12 months (phew) but still had those insane "blank days," which are so confusing.

None of these proposals have gone anywhere, although unlike some of the other items on this list, it's not just because people were lazy. No, it turns out that the idea of a blank day is really hard for most religions to wrap their heads around. If you're supposed to dedicate every Sunday to worshiping God and you spend the day after Saturday drinking beer in a park because that's the blank day for the year, is God going to be cool with your accounting?

Wikimedia Commons
"HINT: NO."

#3. Map Reform

The Earth is spherical because of ... uh... I think seasons? And its ballingness makes it very difficult to depict a map of its surface on something flat. There are ways to do this, of course, called projections, but no matter what projection you use, you will always distort the shape, size, or proportions of the surface you're depicting. For example, the familiar Mercator projection ...

Strebe via Wikimedia Commons

... shows things in the Northern Hemisphere as being much larger than things around the equator. Notably, Greenland looks like a massive continent, larger than Africa, when in reality it's quite a bit smaller than India.

Visage/Stockbyte/Getty Images
And just a smidge less populated.

OK, so what? It's not like we ever need to roughly estimate how large continents are, like when we're sizing tarps or something. But some people argue that by making countries in the Northern Hemisphere appear larger, it makes them seem more important than they are, and it makes it easier for us wealthy Northern Hemispherites to ignore the concerns of people around the equator.

Visage/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Thanks for the spicy food, though, guys.

To counteract this subtle psychological effect, different projections have been proposed that more accurately portray the relative sizes of the continents. Like this Gall-Peters projection ...

Strebe via Wikimedia Commons

... which makes the Northern Hemisphere look like it got stepped on.

In the 1970s, the (re-)inventor of the Gall-Peters projection, Arno Peters, began lobbying the map users of the world to use his projection instead of the Mercator for the above reasons. This slightly noble pursuit wasn't helped by the fact that, by most accounts, Peters was a colossal ass about the whole thing. Notably, the argument he was making wasn't new; cartographers had long known and pointed out the problems with the Mercator and advocated the use of more reasonable projections, like the Robinson. Also, the Gall-Peters map isn't "less" distorting than the Mercator; it's just differently distorting. And finally, the reason we call it the Gall-Peters projection is because it was first invented by some dude called Gall a hundred-odd years earlier, which Peters never really acknowledged.

Strebe via Wikimedia Commons
"I didn't think anyone but me could create something so ugly."

Although a few users switched to the Gall-Peters projection, a lot didn't, and the argument kind of faded away. The only lasting impact the whole debate made was that most people realized that guys who talk about maps are really boring.

#2. Metrication

The metric system is the system of measures that most of the world uses for measuring things. All of its fundamental units can be increased or decreased by powers of 10 to arrive at different units, making calculations and conversions straightforward, with minimal need for memorization. Really, the whole thing works swimmingly well. So long as you use it.

Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com/Getty Images
You see where I'm going with this.

The United States does not use the metric system, and instead still uses a system of measures based on the size of various parts of their anatomy. Although most of the world switched to the metric system in the 19th century, the English-speaking world managed to hold off until the 1970s, when they eventually acknowledged the benefits of the metric system and caved in. Only the United States refused.

Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com/Getty Images
All 11 trillion hogshead/feet of it.

Obviously, there are some serious complications in switching your country's system of measurement. All your old signs are now useless. Any data you gathered in the old units have to be converted before they can be reused, which is a big problem for things like engineering or surveying. And all of your old recipes and calculations and empirical formulas have to be redone. Converting to a new system of measurement basically consigns your country to a muddled few years where everyone has to scratch their heads and be capable of converting between the two.

Tony_Kwan/iStock/Getty Images
"I'll have a six-pack, please."
"Sir?"
*sigh* "I'll have 0.6 decabeers, please."

Consequently, when the United States sort of tried to implement the metric system, it did so only on a voluntary basis, with no mandate to force the private sector to use it, which the private sector, taking one look at all the hassle, promptly didn't do. The metric system was adopted in weird sorts of half measures. It's essentially universal in the sciences, but much less so in engineering, and almost nonexistent in construction. In consumer goods, there's an odd mishmash of units, where most items are sold in ounces or hogs or whatever, with a few odd exceptions, like 2-liter bottles of Coke, or 2 grams of coke, or 9 mm ammunition.

saritwuttisan/iStock/Getty Images
Which could come in handy for either your Coke or your coke-dealing business, I'm not sure which.

It's really the worst of all possible worlds, the metric system having penetrated enough that if you're in any field where you have to measure things, you have to be capable of working with both systems, and if you make any mistakes, oh whoops, you've lost a $125 million spaceship. Instead of a few years of confused conversions, the United States has backed itself into a few decades of confused conversions instead.

#1. Spelling Reform

I've talked a bit about how messed up English spelling is before, but in summary, the English language was assembled without any thought, planning, or shred of common sense whatsoever, mainly by mashing different languages into a blender. The spelling, needless to say, suffers for it. There are essentially no useful rules to learn English spelling other than practice and rote memorization. The alphabetic principle (words should be spelled the way they sound) only occasionally works, and every shorthand "I before E" rule we learn has so many exceptions that by the time we learn all those exceptions, we've just done rote memorization again. If you need a specific example, consider how the sequence of letters "ough" has between six and 10 pronunciations, depending on where you live in the English-speaking world.

"Coughing is rough, though," I thought, ploughing through a contrived example.

A number of different people have proposed spelling reform over the years, with varying degrees of success. Noah Webster, for example, managed to turn "publick" into "public," but couldn't quite pull off some of his other proposals, like turning "soup" into "soop" or "women" into "wimmen."

Wikimedia Commons
"I ran my tung over the wimmen in turn, looking for the one that tasted most like soop."

The main problem with spelling reform is that there's no one in charge of the English language. The guys who write our dictionaries are the closest, and even then you can see the limits of Webster's power. Even if you run the dictionary factory, to truly make a spelling change take hold, you first must convince basically every English speaker to listen to you, and who the fuck do you think you are? Countries with officials in charge of their language (most of them, actually) are capable of pulling this off; in the 1990s, Germany did something with all those extra F's and S's in their words. Added more of them, I think. But for us unregulated English speakers? We'll just have to laugh and stomach the fact that we'll never be able to "laff" and "stumuk" it.