Back in 2014, you may recall, I told you of the dreadful Clown Epidemic that afflicted the world at that time. If that was an incredibly proactive advertising campaign for that freaky "It" movie that opened in September, it seems to have worked, since it's grossed $305 million at the box office. Of course, it's hard to balance that against the cost of three years worth of clowns but New Line Cinema probably at least broke even.
During the Great Clown Infestation of '14 very few clowns were
Clown
Image: Vermont State Police
caught and interrogated about their clownishness. Those that were generally turned out not to be ancient transdimensional creatures that eat children for breakfast. However, their motives were murky and they tended to disappear down storm drains before they could be questioned.
But now a clown has been caught and unmasked in Vermont. It turns out that creepy clowns are actually 43-year-old guys looking for a place to sleep off a bender. This particular clown was just too inebriated to find a storm drain.
Continuing on, however tenuously, with our "pork" theme from yesterday's church sign featuring the apparently quite delectable pastor Ressler of Saint Louis, I present you with "Sea Pork," the plague of South Carolina beaches. In fact, they invade beaches all up and down the eastern seaboard and into the Gulf, surprising hapless swimming children and wandering beachcombers by their self-defense technique of imitating a large pile of mucus or discarded squid intestines.
Tempting as that may sound, you probably should curb your desire to throw some fresh sea pork on the grill, although various fish, skates, and sharks favor them. Supposedly they got their name because people thought they looked like a piece of fatback, perhaps washed up from some sunken sea kitchen. I certainly never would have thought of that, but they say that the sea can play tricks on a man's mind...
Deliciously (?) enough, the little amorphous masses are also known as 'Sea Liver.'
In reality they aren't pig livers or hearty gobs of snot sneezed into the ocean by some salty sailor who's a bit under the weather. Instead they are members of the happy-go-lucky tunicate sub-phylum, which includes much prettier, but still not delicious, looking creatures, such as the Blue Sea Squirts. Many tunicates live together in colonies, and when sea pork floats onto your foot it's usually a dead colony that floated to the surface as corpses tend to do and was washed ashore by a storm.
Another reason not to toss it in your frying pan to have with your morning eggs that.
Have you ever noticed that when you're hiking through the Great American Northwest, you never run into Werewolves anymore? Nowadays, you run into Bigfoot instead. And that despite the fact that Werewolves used to be all the rage -- back in the middle ages, for instance. The only place you find them today is in those weird Twilight movies.
Contrary to widespread opinion, this is not the result of an epic, decades-long struggle for territory between the Bigfoots and the Werewolves during the late 1800's. No, according to Professor Brian Regal of Kean University, it was none other than Charles Darwin himself that shot a metaphorical silver bullet into the wayward Werewolf's heart.
Punk werewolves just hangin' out
Dr. Regal's research indicates that, when Darwin postulated his famous theory of a connection between man and ape in 1859, it sounded the deathknell for, among other things, a connection between man and wolf. From that point onwards, encounters in the dark woods with Werewolves petered out, to be replaced by confrontations with Sasquatch.
The Space World ice skating rink in Kitakyushu, Japan wanted to do something different. They wanted to give visitors the chance to "enjoy skating under unreal conditions at an attraction both unseen and unheard of." And one has to agree that they certainly succeeded in doing that. Their strategy? Freeze 5,000 fish into the ice and let patrons do donuts around their tiny, icy heads.
The Japanese public, while admitting this was an 'unreal condition,' was quite unenthusiastic about the idea. Taken aback, Space World was forced to close the exhibit prematurely and issue this apology:
"We have received a lot of opinions such as 'Using animals as entertainment and in events is bad' and 'Poor fish'. We sincerely apologise."
A horrendous atrocity has occurred in the state of Tennessee that strikes at the heart of everything we hold dear. Unfortunately, the deed cannot be undone at this late date, but we can still do what Americans have always done with perpetrators of crimes against humanity: hunt them down and make them pay!
Kellogg's Rice Krispie Treats, as we all know, are one of the most heavenly and delectable food items ever devised by the mind of man. Well, actually, more than likely, by the mind of woman. At any rate, Rice Krispie Treats have brought untold joy to millions and soothed many a wounded soul in their hour of need.
But now a story has emerged that's almost too hard to stomach. In 2014, at Kellogg's Memphis, Tennessee plant, a man (if he can even be called a 'man') unzipped his pants and peed -- yes, genuine urination my friends! -- peed all over the Rice Krispie Treat conveyor belt! As if that were not enough, he splashed some on the nearby Rice Krispie Treat Cereal belt too!
The goody-adulterating monster was so proud of his deed that he taped it all on his smartphone and put it on the Internet (although he waited 2 years to do it, the fiend!).
But don't fret that you might accidentally eat some of the defiled bars, because you probably already did. Those boxes have long since passed their expiration dates, and been gobbled down by unknowing consumers. The same goes for your kid's breakfast cereal as well.
Criminal psychologists tell us that men who relieve themselves in cereal factories seldom do it just once. This villain is most likely a serial cereal urinator, and has undoubtedly urinated elsewhere. We must track him down and put him somewhere far from all crunchy treats. Stop him before he pees again!
Today's Google doodle salutes Clara Rockmore, a virtuoso at playing the Theremin which evidently inspired the Rolling Stones and led on to the once-popular Moog Synthesizer, for which I used to own a copy of Bach's greatest electronic hits. It was interesting one time, just annoying after that.
This all begs the question, "What the heck is a Theremin??"
Well, it's a large, dark piece of furniture that would look quite at home in your den next to the cabinet with your good china in it, except for 2 or more metal antennae sticking out of it. As it turns out, instead of china, your lovely Theremin is packed with electronics that are designed to do one irritating thing: emit loud feedback when you cause interference by waving your hands around between those antenna.
Mr. Theremin, who invented the Theremin, discovered in his russian lab that by gracefully moving your hands within the electric field between the 2 antenna you could control the noise created by the interference and actually make spooky musical notes. For Theremin players like Ms. Rockmore it provided the added performance value of hypnotic hand-dancing for the audience during the concert.
And on the inside...
Theremins hit the big time right after WW II so you hear them in creepy science fiction movies of the 1950s like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing (From Another World). The Beach Boys play a quasi-Theremin (controlled by a knob and a slider) in Good Vibrations. Someone once described Theremin music as, "a cello lost in a dense fog, crying because it does not know how to get home."
Soon enough though Theremin fever cooled when the public got sick of it and musicians moved on to newer, better instruments -- like the Moog Synthesizer. But a nostalgic 1993 movie called Theremin: An Electronic Odysseyreignited interest in the old thing. Less awkward miniaturized Theremins are now available. Composers are writing Theremin concerts and Sheldon is playing one on Big Bang Theory.
Where I live, in the not-takin'-nuthin'-offa'-nobody (that's our official motto, I think) state of Texas, we think we're pretty tough. It's not just the people, either; the whole place is hostile to its inhabitants. The wildlife is plain angry, bugs are huge, especially the stinging ones, and the weather tries to kill us all the time.
To stand a chance the citizens have developed a larger-than-life hostility of their own. Nobody but nobody transgresses on a Texan's property, and if they do they're quite likely to meet a herd of huge of dogs who are as angry as the rest of the animals.
But as it turns out, we're small potatoes compared to Florida. They guard their homes with alligators. Hungry ones.
The trees of Ireland are evidently quite hungry. One was recently found to have eaten a corpse from the Middle Ages. As if it wasn't enough to be beaten to death somehow, the poor fellow had to endure several hundred years of slowly passing through the alimentary canal (or whatever they have) of a beech tree.
Deep in the fog-shroudded Ypsilanti night a dark figure slithered through the quiet neighborhood. Spying an open window he or she slid inside, ready to silently relieve the inhabitants of their most valuable possessions...
Never captured nor even sighted, the dreaded "Frozen Meat & Chain Saw Monster" still stalks the nights of eastern central Michigan -- and the nightmares of her people. Who knows what frozen meats he will desire next? What brand chain saw will he purloin?
It is conjectured that the fiend may have watched this very video before embarking on his crime wave:
More evidence of Mars' highly advanced magic powers!
Thanks to Curiosity the Martian Rover we are learning more about the red planet than we did in all the centuries of scientific endeavour before it got there. As you know if you faithfully read these pages, we've discovered the first evidence of petrified lizards in space. In addition, Sleestaks from Land of the Lost have also been found next to the last of their bowling balls.
But now, in possibly the most mind-boggling revelation yet, NASA has uncovered (and simultaneously denied, as they always do) great feats of magic performed millennia ago by the now-fossilized lizards. Apparently, the mighty power of their levitation tricks still floats spoons in the reddish wilderness to this very day!
Out here on the sea, a man sees many a strange sight and hears tales in the dead of night that makes his blood run cold. But most fearful of all are the tales of a creature so terrifying that the mighty Kraken cowers before it, aircraft carriers change course to avoid it, and Great White Whales skitter swiftly away. Some say it's a demon, some that it's a refugee from the Jurassic age, and others don't dare guess -- just sit in despair in the darkened corners of their sailing ship's hold and weep like a grizzled baby.
Aye, thar be a name for this nameless horror, a name even the boldest sea captains can barely whisper. Oceanographers quail in fear as they slowly write it on their white boards, the hair of rugged Maine lobstermen turns instantly white when it's spoken, and the crews of nuclear submarines simultaneously lose their lunches when they hear that dreaded name: THE BIO-DUCK!!!
The Bio-Duck's angry and unpredictable undersea quacking has bedeviled mariners for 50 years and more. But now, heedless of the danger, devil-may-care scientists have gathered their courage and invaded the Bio-Duck's dark lair. The tables have been turned on this foul beast at last, finally unmasking the ferocious Bio-Duck as...
Harvard is an elite school boasting many claims to fame -- their Nobel laureate professors, their sterling worldwide reputation, and perhaps most impressive of all the 3 books in their libraries bound in human flesh. One of them (the ever-popular Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae) even has an inscription telling us whose flesh it is: "King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace."
So you can imagine their chagrin and horror when it was discovered the other day that that's not real people skin at all! Instead it's just plain, ordinary, blotchy sheep skin. Harvard alumni are today are slinking dejectedly through the halls of power and wealth, doing their best to avoid eye contact with the other plutocrats -- especially the ones from Yale.
But worry not anthropodermic bibliopegy fans! Binding your favorite reading material in the flesh of your neighbor had a bit of a vogue at one time, so there are still plenty of places to go other than Harvard. Click here to see a list of the Top 10 books Harvard yearns to possess.
