Location Reviews
Location Reviews
[Inside the main panel there is a frame with a Google location map with the typical red pin stuck in the center of the map inside a large gray region of the map. A river goes from the north through the gray region and out to the west. East and south of the river some roads and other items are shown, several of them also outside the gray region. The red pin is stuck next to a corner in one of the roads.]
[Below the map is the name of the location at the red pin, and below that there are three lines of unreadable text:] Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility
[Below that there is broken line with text in the break, and below that follows 11 reviews with yellow stars to the left. The stars are either just outlines or colored completely, with the left one always being filled:] Reviews (22) [5 of 5 stars filled] Greatest country on earth [2 of 5 stars filled] Looks cool but you can't get in [1 of 5 stars filled] What is this store [4 of 5 stars filled] My cousin worked here [2 of 5 stars filled] Waitstaff heavily armed and very rude [1 of 5 stars filled] Stop doing chemtrails [1 of 5 stars filled] This place is a symptom of the military-industrial complex strangling our democracy and... (read full review-1184 words) [4 of 5 stars filled] Anyone else notice the hole in the west fence? [5 of 5 stars filled] Whoa, missiles! [3 of 5 stars filled] Good idea but confusing web site. How do I preorder? [1 of 5 stars filled] Please don't launch these
[Caption below the panel:] I love finding reviews of places that really don't need to have reviews.

Many online advertising services and social media networks (like Google and Yelp , both mentioned in the title text, and for instance Facebook ) allow users to leave reviews of stores, businesses and locations. For various reasons these sites often find themselves with pages dedicated to, as Randall puts it, "places that really don't need reviews" such as municipal works installations, government property, and natural landmarks. This naturally attracts both clueless people and lots of self-styled comedians leaving less-than-helpful comments on such review pages.
Randall is just poking fun at this phenomenon by inventing possible reviews for the (fictional) location Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility , depicted with a Google Maps -styled map page along with a series of so-called reviews. (There does exist a Canyon River located in Ontario / Canada and one in Washington /USA (the latter is a significant tributary to the Satsop River ). Canada does not maintain nuclear weapons since 1984, so the launch site should be located in Washington).
See explanations for the 11 visible (out of 22) reviews in the table below . Of course those responsible for such a facility with nuclear missiles would not like the attention they would be getting in this way, especially not when one of the comments mentions a hole in the fence... Although this comic makes a joke about reviews it has chosen a very dangerous facility to joke about. See more about this under Politics below
In the title text Randall mentions that both Google and Yelp keep deleting his scathing reviews of several locations like the above. The questions is if they would have done it if they had not been so harsh... While Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility appears not to exist, the places/phenomena he lists in the title text certainly do, and are places that you either cannot or would not normally visit as destinations. Here below each "location" is explained. That the deletion of such reviews is real has been proven by this comic, as it also happened for those that (of course) posted these reviews on Google maps as a response to this comic.
Mariana Trench is the deepest area of the world's oceans, about 10,994 meters (36,070 ft) deep, located between Japan and Australia. The pressure in the Mariana Trench is about 1,086 bars, more than 1,000 times the standard atmospheric pressure of about 1 bar at sea level. Despite this enormous pressure some organisms live in the Mariana Trench . Humans can reach the ground only by special deep-sea submarines, like Jacques Piccard did in 1960 with the Bathyscaphe Trieste . See reviews for the Mariana Trench at Google Maps and Facebook .
The Chernobyl reactor core is the most dangerous part of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant . It is located in the North of Ukraine. In the reactor No. 4 there was a nuclear disaster that happened on 26 April 1986. It caused devastating damage and massive radioactive contamination. There is still a Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 30 kilometers around the power plant. See reviews for the Chernobyl power plant at Google Maps and Facebook .
Jet streams are a meteorologic phenomenon about 9 to 16 kilometers above the ground. A stream consists of air currents with speeds from 92 km/h (50 kn; 57 mph) to over 398 km/h (215 kn; 247 mph). Such jet streams are routinely used for reducing fuel usage for long distance plane travels. As it is a ribbon rather than a point, it could not have a single point on the map. Also, the jet stream fluctuates north and south; so even if it could be pinpointed, the location would be constantly changing.
The equator is, as with the jet streams, not a singular place but a circumference around the Earth. Reviewing the equator as a singular location is rather pointless, though there is a whole range of specific (and interesting) locations around the equator, with countries with tropical rainforest climate , which many people from European and North American countries struggle with. That said, most of the equator goes over water.
In the table the rating is given with the review. After that an explanation both of the rating and of the review is given. Notice that any or all of the reviews could be sarcastic or "trolling", as is fairly typical on the internet, especially for reviews given for such a location as this one. This table assumes all the reviews are played straight.
The decision to make a comic depicting a nuclear missile launch facility may not be entirely random, given Randall's mildly political mood lately. In particular, it could be due to the cold relationship between Russia and the United States at the time of this comics release. Two weeks prior to this comics release Russia Deploys Missile, Violating Treaty and Challenging Trump . This was less than a month after Donald Trump became president. Trump has been positive towards Vladimir Putin earlier, but after the violation USA condemned the new missile. That Randall was not in favor of Trump becoming president was made clear in 1756: I'm With Her . His predecessor Barack Obama even stated, before Trump was elected, that If Trump can't handle Twitter, then he can't handle nuclear codes . Randall has earlier mentioned the codes indirectly in 1242: Scary Names , where he mentions the Nuclear football , which is much more scary than the name... It is a year ago he finished a "series" of four comics in a short period about nuclear weapons with 1655: Doomsday Clock (see about the other comics at the bottom of that explanation). But it seems that recent events have made him think about it again, although he tries no to as made evident in 1796: Focus Knob .
[Inside the main panel there is a frame with a Google location map with the typical red pin stuck in the center of the map inside a large gray region of the map. A river goes from the north through the gray region and out to the west. East and south of the river some roads and other items are shown, several of them also outside the gray region. The red pin is stuck next to a corner in one of the roads.]
[Below the map is the name of the location at the red pin, and below that there are three lines of unreadable text:] Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility
[Below that there is broken line with text in the break, and below that follows 11 reviews with yellow stars to the left. The stars are either just outlines or colored completely, with the left one always being filled:] Reviews (22) [5 of 5 stars filled] Greatest country on earth [2 of 5 stars filled] Looks cool but you can't get in [1 of 5 stars filled] What is this store [4 of 5 stars filled] My cousin worked here [2 of 5 stars filled] Waitstaff heavily armed and very rude [1 of 5 stars filled] Stop doing chemtrails [1 of 5 stars filled] This place is a symptom of the military-industrial complex strangling our democracy and... (read full review-1184 words) [4 of 5 stars filled] Anyone else notice the hole in the west fence? [5 of 5 stars filled] Whoa, missiles! [3 of 5 stars filled] Good idea but confusing web site. How do I preorder? [1 of 5 stars filled] Please don't launch these
[Caption below the panel:] I love finding reviews of places that really don't need to have reviews.
