Chart of the day

As someone who had to sit in traffic recently I was incensed. How could God do this to me! As it turns out, God doesn't hate me as much as he hates other parts of the country. So, apparently there wasn't some universal force conspiring to screw me over worse than everyone else in the entirety of recorded history. Who knew?

But because they are good citizens and decent Americans, the people at Good magazine decided to graph out this information of how long certain American cities spend sitting in traffic and do it in comparison to how long it would take someone to read War and Peace, listen to Wagner's Ring cycle, or watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know no one has ever read War and Peace or listened to Der Ring des Nibelungen, but just use them as stand ins for the concept of "unimaginably long shit."

It turns out that if you lived in LA, the traffic would have given you a chance to be incredibly literarily and operatically cultured... if you didn't live in LA and weren't an American. But you would have gotten to see Frodo a hell of a lot of times. Yeaaaah!

As always, click to embiggen.