Look at the Little Flashy Thing

So basically what you're saying is, this was the reflection of Mercury shining through swamp gas rising off Venus. And it happens all the time.

Which is why no one ever noticed it before.

Bring Up the Twelve Pounders!

Good thing nobody had a horse shot out from beneath him.

When's the air date?

The Battery That Wouldn't Die

According to this story, this battery has been producing electricity since 1950. I have a story that is slightly different. This is the story of the zombie battery that came back from the dead.

My grandmother had a simple, battery-operated wall clock in her house. When she died in the late 70s, my mom took it to our house and hung it on the wall. Not long after, it's pair of Eveready D batteries died and the clock stopped. She never replaced the batteries, nor got rid of the clock. It just hung on the wall, I suppose as a reminder of her deceased mother.

I'm guessing around 1990 or 91, one night mom called me, breathless and a little scared. She said, do you remember Mamaw's old clock?

Yes, I said.

It's running, she said.

She just happened to notice that the time had changed, and upon closer examination saw that the second hand was moving. No telling how long it had been running, but the old clock continued running for several more hours on 15 year old dead D batteries, before stopping again. It's still on her wall, but it has never run since.

Common sense says that batteries that have been dead for 15 or so years don't just suddenly recharge themselves. Yet that's what they did. There's no rational scientific explanation for it. E pur si muove.

Baby Snakes

Last night's weird dream - my spayed cat had two kittens. Then our roomer (we don't have a roomer) got mad at us and moved out, but not before dumping his collection of baby snakes (cue Frank Zappa) in his bedroom.

Now the house is crawling with small poisonous snakes, and four cats chasing them, and me trying to catch the snakes before one of them bites a cat. And all the while I'm getting bitten on the thumbs and trying to suck out the poison while trying to rip the heads off the snakes and throw them out in the rain. My hands were getting numb from the venom.

More of a nightmare of frustration than a nightmare of horror. Anyone care to interpret?

I Hear Dead People

According to a new study, nearly 1-in-10 children, ages 7-8, hears disembodied voices on a regular basis, but there is no evidence that this is a signal of impending schizophrenia, according to the scientists.

Uh. That's good to know. However, it does leave unanswered the question, why are they hearing voices?

It is proven that, like dogs, children can hear sounds that adults can't hear. If it's perfectly reasonable that kids can hear a ring tone that adults can't hear, why is it suggestive of possible mental illness that they hear voices that other people can't?

Maybe they really are hearing voices. Did anyone ever consider that possibility? 

I suggest an experiment. Give these kids electronic audio recording devices, disguised as event counters, and tell them to press the counter button any time they hear voices. When the button is pressed, the recorder turns on for 60 seconds. After a month, collect the recorders, play back the devices and see if they picked up anything.

Seems a worthwhile experiment if you aren't in the least interested in the future of your scientific career.

Wooooooooooo! Wooooooooooo!

Earthquake Clouds Over Haiti

I was scrolling through a slideshow of the earthquake in Haiti, when I noticed this photo.

Earthquake clouds are said to be linear cloud formations that appear before an earthquake. They look something like the photo above. I'm not sure when this photo was taken, so I can't say whether or not they are genuine earthquake clouds (if there is even such a thing as genuine earthquake clouds).

But that's what they look like to me.

BTW, notice any similarities between the grid pattern of the clouds and the grid pattern of the haarp?

I didn't go there. But former Secretary of Defense Cohen did.

Angels Playing HAARPs

Last week's bitter cold winter weather curiously enough circled the entire northern hemisphere - from right here in Memphis to North Dakota, Great Britain, Russia, and China. I speculated in my previous post that perhaps the Gulf Stream was weakening.

This piece suggests that it was The Norway Spiral.

Far out, man.

El Nino, or El Gulfo?

UK freezes in South Pole weather


(UKPA) – 1 hour ago

Temperatures in big-freeze Britain are on a par with the South Pole after the country suffered its coldest night of the winter so far.

The mercury sank to minus 21.6C in the Scottish Highlands early on Friday - close to the minus 22.9C currently at the southernmost part of the globe.

I wonder, is this El Nino? Or is the flow of the Gulf Stream failing?

It's currently 12° F (-11°C) in Memphis.

Meet the Stupids

This is what watching too much Disney will do to you.

Note the expressions of delight on the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Stupid in the front seat. But won't they be surprised, and won't there be many questions asked, when somebody gets his happy smiling face bitten off?

The woman in the back seat has enough sense to be alarmed.

Also note - the engine and headlamps of this vehicle are valuable enought to install a screen to protect them from the wildlife. But not the passengers!

uhhhhhhh

Your Modern GOOP

Palin'nglui deth'panl! Cthulhu R'lymbaugh wgah'nobama fhascist!

All hail the Great Old Ones Party.

Please note that the three stars at the top of the logo have not been altered. In the actual GOP logo, they really are point-down. What can that possibly symbolize?

I'm not sayin'.

I'm just sayin'. That's a bit weird, don't you think?

I'm No Astrologer, But...

... doesn't a planet in a highly elliptical retrograde orbit seem more likely to be a captured planet than one whose orbit has been reversed by a close call with another planet?

Party Time

Today is the 101st anniversary of the Tunguska Event. Scientists would have us believe a small comet or meteor detonated over the Siberian forest on this day in 1908, when the truth is a UFO exploded when its warp core went critical and generated a microscopic black hole. The resulting explosion created a rift in the space-time continuum, which allowed malignant entities from another dimension access into our world, and that's why everything has gone to hell in a handbasket ever since.

I'm No Meteorologist

... but I wonder, how do they know this?

"Meteorologists said the Air France jet entered an unusual storm with 100 mph (160 kph) updrafts that acted as a vacuum, sucking water up from the ocean."

If they have radar data about the storm, why don't they have radar data about the airplane? But if they don't have radar data about the storm, how do they know it was unusual with 100 mph updrafts? If they can make a reasonable assumption about the storm and the speed of its updrafts, then it couldn't have been that ususual, therefore the pilots should have been able to handle it.

Also, I have read there were two planes in the immediate area of where they believe the plane went down. One article, which I can't find now, quoted a pilot as saying they saw a white flash of light descending toward the ocean. The light lasted about six seconds. Well, if they were close enough to see it, they were certainly close enough to see it on their own plane's radar. Can't they review the radar record from nearby airplanes and discover what happened, or at least get an idea of where it happened?

Oh, and one other thing. That American Airlines plane that crashed November 12, 2001 was an Airbus 300. It's tail and both engines broke off in midflight, due to "turbulence."

As of today, still no wreckage recovered, and France says they're not even confident any wreckage has been spotted.

I'm No Scientist

But I do wonder...

How do you unearth a 1 million year old mammoth skeleton in a 286 million year old coal deposit?

Call me crazy, but these numbers just don't add up. Isn't this rather like finding an Egyptian mummy buried in a Cadillac El Dorado?

Either the mammoth is a lot older than the dinosaurs, or coal is a lot younger than is currently believed. But both dates can't be true.

They just can't.

That Settles It

What do Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, General Douglas McArthur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, The Vatican, various rocket scientists, a former astronaut, a British Air Marshal, and the director of Project Blue Book all have in common?

The last one should give it away - belief in flying saucers piloted by beings from another world.

Why would the government cover this up? Because of the Book of Revelations.

Happy ETA Day

No, not Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Basque nationalist organization famous for carrying out terrorist attacks in Spain. I'm talking about Extraterrestrial Abduction Day, of course!

In celebration of this future religious holiday, I have posted a story originally published in Nature in 2006. It was later republished in the Futures from Nature anthology, alongside stories by such giants as Arthur C. Clarke, Frederck Pohl, Michael Moorcock, and many more.

I give you: Adam's Hot Dogs at the End of the World.

Go Back to Bed

If you haven't checked out The Paranormal Pastor blog, you ought to, because the man knows how to tell a good ghost story.

What I'm offering today isn't really a ghost story. But let me preface this by saying that I grew up in a haunted house. Ask anybody who ever visited, much less spent the night there, and they will tell you hell yes that was one spooky-ass place.

When I was about 22, I was living at home and working nights, so I would sleep through the day. One afternoon I woke up to the sound of voices. Nothing particularly unusual about that, as we heard voices there quite often. But these were the voices of two men having a conversation. I got out of bed and walked to the den, where I found two men standing by the door to the sunroom talking about something. I don't know what they were saying.

One of them saw me and said, "He's awake."

The other man turned to me and said, "Go back to bed."

So I did. I went back to bed and fell asleep without a second thought. Only when I woke up a couple of hours later did it occur to me how strange this was.

This isn't a ghost story. I'm not sure what kind of story it is. I may have been dreaming, but it doesn't feel like a dream. The memory is vivid because of its high strangeness.

They're Special

Tennessee special education teacher charged with giving head to her daugher's 14-year-old boyfriend. I'm sure 35-year-old Dawn and the unnamed youth were soul mates.

"Mama, you stoled my boyfriend! How cud u?"

I just love living in the south.

A Dream Within a Dream

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

The universe may be a giant hologram.