Damnable things from the Cultleader

From the Lawrence (MA.) Eagle - Tribune (henceforth to be abbreviated as L.E-T, or "the Trib."), 4/25/1994:

DEEP IN THE OCEAN: Thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean and hundreds of miles offshore, there is an eerily calm world where the only light detectable to humans is bioluminescence, writes Usha McFarling of the Boston Globe. Each dive into a new location reveals species never before seen. For instance, a videotape made at 2900 feet by marine biologist Laurence Madin of Woods Hole, Mass., shows a volleyball-sized, bright yellow octopus that swims by using it's huge ears as oars. "It's all been there hundreds of millions of years," says Mr. Madin. "Everyone wonders what kind of aliens will be found in outer space. There's a lot of them in inner space."

Water Babies.

Squid Gods in spaceships, investigating their past? Laugh if you want - it's good for your stress levels, and wards off heart disease. Laugh deliberately, with a look of desperation in your eyes...

"Water Babies, haha! Hypersquid inside, hoho! Psychic time travelers, heehee...next he'll try to convince us that Boston has a coyote problem! Huh huh."

"WE'VE HAD PLENTY OF SIGHTINGS."

This from Bill Frenette, a Rhode Island animal warden, in reference to the inundation of New England by coyotes, as quoted from the L.E-T, 4/17/1994, by Linda Borg. Providence,RI; the Tobin Bridge in Boston; Newport, Swansea, Dighton, Somerset - coyotes all over the place.

Bigger than their western counterparts...average weight between 30 and 60 pounds. 125 reports a year in Mass. Seen in 80% of Rhode Island. Scores found dead, struck by cars. Said to be rapidly filling a vacant ecological niche in Suburbia, and even being so bold as to move into Urbia: surviving on Big Macs, birdseed, rodents, and house pets. Katherine Carey of Swansea, MA., let her five-pound hound (musta' been one of those funny looking little breeds of lap-yappers) out one morning, only to see the poor little thing get "scooped up" by a coyote.

"He was running away with my dog. I ran after him screaming and hollering. The coyote dropped my dog, and I grabbed the dog. It was very shaggy and gray. At first, I thought it was a wolf. No way it was a neighborhood dog. It looked too wild."

And that's a beautiful illustration of the main problem of dealing with transitory phenomena of ANY type. We're not talking about extraterrestrial invaders here - we're talking about coyotes! They are perfectly natural, and entirely possible. Still, people will laugh at a coyote sighting. Since they aren't accustomed to thinking of sharing their territory with coyotes, they'll say, "I won't believe it until I see one myself."

They're wrong, of course. All it takes is some uniformed lunkhead in a city pick-up saying, "Yeah, she saw a coyote, all right. There's a bunch of them around." THEN all the people quit laughing, and believe.

I think it's some sort of instinctive thing left over from when our simian ancestors bowed down to the alpha male in charge of the troop. Perhaps the uniform stands for the alpha male, symbolically. Just about any astronomer will say, positively, that there are no such things as UFOs. Let the President of America, along with the leaders from all the other nations on earth, make a proclamation to the contrary, and the astronomers would sing a different tune, saying that they suspected as much all along. Never mind that his word is no better (and frequently much worse) than anyone else's, or that the data is the same as it was before the announcement. Once the Chief babboon gives the grunt of assent, the others fall in line.

That's usually what the foolish monkeys mean by "Science," and the reason I don't worry about trying to convince scientists of anything. That's a politician's job.

I posted the following on Prodigy (may the Lord damn them) last year:

I found it! I found the bit about the werewolf! Believe it! Boston Globe, 9/4/93: Bear hunter hunting bear in Northern Maine, spots "large wolf-like beast", and kills it. Must have been a strange looking "large wolf-like beast," because our hunter carried it to the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department.

State biologists were stymied. The beast apparently was not a coyote, or a wolf, or anything else they'd come across. Species unknown, despite it's obvious wolfishness. They did what any biologist would do when given a werewolf - they cut it's head off. Maybe they were afraid that this cold, breathless, stiff animal would reanimate like Nancy Vitale, or maybe they behead every animal they seek to identify, but at any rate, off came it's head.The head in question was posted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon, where it will no doubt be hidden in the freezer I suspect the government hides all of the werewolf heads they probably have. Think of it for a moment. Rows and rows of werewolf heads, frozen. CIA cover-ups. FBI inquiries. President after president told, and all of them agreeing: "We have to keep this covered up. The people would riot."

Large wolf-like beasts roaming the countryside, using bear attacks as cover, safely assuming that nobody would ever figure out the Real Truth... But they didn't allow for me, or my files!

Forgive me if you'd read that before...I was going to move straight from the coyote sightings to some wolf sightings, but the article on wolves (L.E-T 3/27/94,AP) closed with a paragraph that referred back to the possible werewolf: Seven months later, Maine wildlife officials are still waiting for the results of genetic tests that would determine whether or not it was a wolf. If it was, then it would serve as the first real proof of recent wolves in the forests of Maine. If it was not, then the door to madness is ajar - and shapeshifters might roam while we sleep!

Whether or not it actually was a werewolf, there have been sightings of other "large, wolf-like beasts," and plenty of mountain lion reports, too - Vermont alone has been producing 20 to 30 big cat sightings per year.

They even found some tracks.

Many of the sightings of wolves and cougars have been coming from "credible" witnesses. Does that matter to scientific "experts?" Of course not. I quote:

"Wildlife biologists discount most of the reports as either the overactive imaginations of people unfamiliar with wildlife or say people are confusing smaller cats or coyotes for mountain lions or wolves."

"I guess I could compare it to people who are so anxious to find a Yeti or a bigfoot."

I'm left with the impression that were he to come across evidence of UFOs, werewolves, or necrotic arachnidism, he would misinterpret it to suit his pre-formed misconceptions.

I like the sound of "necrotic arachnidism."

That's when your flesh rots away from the bite of a poisonous spider...as has been happening in epidemic proportions in New York and Connecticut, despite the denials of "experts" quoted in the L.E-T, 5/1/1994.

I put it to you...

There is a poisonous species of spider, half an inch long, whose Latin name is Loxosceles Reclusa, and is more commonly known as the brown recluse (it hides during the day), or the fiddleback (it has a violin- shaped marking on it's back). It's said to live only in the Southern portion of the United States. Should it decide to teach you a lesson, it's highly toxic venom will gradually destroy all of the flesh around the bite. Your meat just sort of sloughs away like the nose of a leper, and what's left behind becomes gangrenous. The poison frequently makes you sick as a dog, and can even kill small children.

Peanuts compared to the black widow's neurotoxin, but still nothing to sneeze at.

Enter Curt Lindsay, of Saranac Lake, NY, who recieved a spider bite on his left shin. The flesh around the bite began to rot, so it was off to the doctor, who gave him some ineffective ointment. Nine days later he sees a smarter doctor, and learns that gangrene has set in to a depth of half an inch. Leg has yet to completely heal. Doctor's diagnosis: Bitten by brown recluse.

Six more cases of necrotic spider bites in New York State in the last year. Gangrene so severe they required hospitalization, surgery, and skin grafts.

Six to ten cases of necrotic arachnidism in Connecticut this year past, with two of the cases resulting in death.

One illustrative case - A quadriplegic woman was sitting outdoors when she saw a small brown spider crawl up her leg, and without provocation, bit her on the knee. Being paralyzed, she could not swat it or brush it away. Her doctor: "All the skin over the knee died."

In another case - this one with a witness - a girl saw a small brown spider bite the chin of her room-mate. She lost a spot of flesh on her face as large as a quarter. Needed a skin graft.

Connecticut's Department of Health put out an advisory on necrotic spider bites over the summer, creating a mild spider scare. Having been declared an "epidemic," such an advisory seems to be in order. Dr. Marc Bayer, Director of the Poison Control Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center:

"We are concerned because there is definite evi- dence of necrotic spider bites, whether it's caused by a brown recluse or similar-type spider."

But entomologists and conservation and health officials say they'll believe it when somebody brings them a bug. "You hear all these reports, but nobody's got an insect in hand," said Don Fasking, a specialist in forest insects and diseases for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

What boneheads.

Eight million dollar cancer research project called into question because of the falsification of data... see L.E-T, 3/30/1994.

New Hampshire Sunday News (Manchester), (AP), 11/14/1993: Misconduct in science is widespread, from over- looking sloppy data to outright falsification, according to a Maine group's survey of university faculty members and students.

The study, published Friday in American Scientist magazine, found that half of the faculty members and 43 percent of students at the country's largest universities said they had direct knowledge of misconduct in their labs.

And this is the crowd many among you would have take up the study of UFOs! A pack of liars so slick, with terminology so convoluted, and enjoying so much prestige that the average man is totally hornswaggled into thinking they have the last word on every subject! If only 7% of U.S. adults can be considered scientifically literate (L.E-T, 10/31/1993), why do people automatically bow and scrape to the merest mumblings of a scientist?

Faith.

Belief.

The same thing that keeps any voodoo priestess in control of her flock, or a politician in charge of his constituency. Let either tell a little fib - or, as is more frquently the case, a mighty whopper...

It's swallowed. Everyone is too busy, or too lazy, to bother trying to see if they're being lied to; so they are lied to, constantly.

It really gets my goat. I could go about my research in a "scientific" fashion, and make up accounts as I go; but instead I choose to limit myself to the truth, and am written off as a "pseudo-scientist," or worse. The result is that they sit around plush faculty dining halls chewing pate and caviar with their mouths open, thinking up funding scams during lulls in their vapid conversations, which means that they have to rush around at the last minute, frenziedly falsifying data to make it look as if they have been doing their jobs. On the other hand, you have the likes of me; when I tell you of something I found, and where I found it, you can go back to my original source and see that I tell the truth.

A voodoo priestess and her zombies. A scientist and his caviar suppliers.

Let's have a look at the subject of zombies, and save the munchers of fish roe for later derisions.

Here is another thing I posted in Prodigy. It's the story of Nancy Vitale, which I earlier mentioned in connection with the beheaded werewolf. I bring it up again because I've found a few more articles in this vein:

A nosy landlord discovers a corpse, and quickly phones for an ambulance. An emergency medical service team arrives, inspects the cadaver, and declares it dead. A medical examiner was leisurely dispatched to the scene, and upon inspection of the lifeless shell, and having followed all "EMS guidelines and New York State procedures involved in giving a presumptive diagnosis of death," announced that the body of the ex-Nancy Vitale was thoroughly deceased. Croaked. Kaput. Flat-lined. Bought the farm. Family members were summoned, lengthy interviews performed, and paperwork filled out - all in the presence of the body, which everybody agreed was dead.

Dead, dead, dead!

Then the corpse, dead for nearly three hours, reanimated.

I swear I'm not making this up - it's right there in the Lawrence (MA) Eagle -Tribune of 6/17/93, as reported by Tom Hays of Associated Press. The formerly deceased Ms. Vitale was said to be improving in a New York hospital.

"Her body was cold and stiff. No pulse. No respiration," stressed Mr. Hays. "Indeed," he continued, "the cloak of death covered Nancy Vitale so completely, everyone thought she was dead."

And maybe, just maybe...they were right. She can thank her lucky stars it happened in Brooklyn, because in many parts of the world the standard treatment for reanimated corpses includes a stake through the heart and burial at a crossroads.

Of note, when I checked the encyclopedia for "death", I learned that 'algor mortis' was the term for the drop in body temperature (frequently used to establish time of death), but 'rigor mortis' (stiffness) takes five or six hours to kick in. She was discovered 'dead', and was stiff ...implying that the time spent in such a state was probably closer to 6-9 hours.

A couple of hours to get cold, and five to get stiff.

I found another cold, stiff one in the L.E-T 1/29/1994, (AP): "Camera's flash revives man believed dead."

According to this article, on 1/26/1994 the San Leandro CA. police broke into the house of Mr. Frederic Green. They found the 82 year old man on his bedroom floor, and determined that he was dead. They said he was "stiff and cold," and was definitely not breathing, or exhibiting any other signs that he might still be among the quick.

Dead. Finis. Gonzo.

You know how these things work - a coroner is sent for. Depending on thoroughness more than speed, they assemble what they think they might need, and then proceed to the scene at a reasonable pace.

Once there, he photographed the cadaver, which, like Nancy Vitale, reanimated. Just started to gasp, apparently unaware that "his flesh felt hard and stiff."

The zombie was last reported to be in the care of the San Leandro Hospital, and was recovering nicely.

When I am found dead, I want you to comfortably prop me up in an easy chair, and leave me there until the my neighbors complain of the stink. Under no circumstances are either coroners or morticians allowed to touch me, though they may take as many photos as they like.

From the L.E-T (4/26/1994): "Macabre 18th-century tales about exhumed corpses found to have clawed the interior of their caskets were not entirely fanciful, writes Jim Holt in The Republic. "Graveyard excavations reveal that nearly two percent of those interred before the advent of embalming in the 20th century were buried alive."

So, either 2% of the population joins the ranks of the walking dead, or morticians kill one client in fifty!

I suppose death by embalming beats being buried alive...

Killer bees in Arizona (_USA Today_, 3/11/1994), sixty colonies had been detected statewide. The little buzzers swarmed Peoria, and were said to have been "collected." People in Northern zones still snicker about killer bees. I predict they'll continue to make light of it for about fifteen years, and then there will be congressional hearings over why more was not done to halt the migration.

In the L.E-T, 5/4/1994, The multinational toy company, Mattel, is said to be suing a California psychic accused of receiving channeled messages from the spirit of Barbie (the doll), and publishing them in a popular newsletter.

No more ridiculous than little elves whispering good advice to famous astronomers, right?

Elvis sightings reported in Florida Today, 1/12/1994. The King stopped off to look at some cars displayed by a local dealer, and even test drove a new Eldorado; through Cocoa Beach, I presume. He was later seen X-ing it up at Marz, a "rave" joint specializing in house and techno music.

I was invited to that club by a Cocoa Beach stripper, but got caught up with a different stripper, and couldn't make it. I regret missing the chance to actually shake the King's hand, but I have more sightings to console me.

Same source, next day:

Charles Wentworth said to have seen him in the bathroom of the Merritt Square Mall. The witness claimed:

"He was wearing a white suit with some shiny sequins on it."

Lois Sharpe, of Merritt Island, claimed he put in an appearence at a Golden Life senior citizen's meeting on the previous Thursday.

A diner at Herbie K's insisted that on 1/8/1994 she established physical contact with The King, in the form of a handshake. She was quoted:

"I know it was him because he had on one of those white, tight suits with red rhinestones."

Whether he is really alive, has been cloned, is a ghost, or is one of the 2% that wind up zombiefied is up to posterity to determine. I merely point out that he has been seen.

I have heard that one gram of plutonium - a piece about the size of a dime - if spread equally over the entire earth, would result in the planet-wide extinction of every living thing within twenty years. I've also heard that it is the most toxic substance known to man.

According to the L.E-T, 2/28/1994, more than 500 pounds of this vile stuff has gone missing from the Savannah River nuclear power plant. Officials blame everything but themselves, claiming that paperwork, waste, and discrepancies in measurement are to blame, but qualify these excuses by saying that if these aren't the reasons, then the poisonous stuff is probably stuck away somewhere in the plant. They're not really sure, though.

All they're sure of is that one quarter of a ton is missing, and that there's no cause for alarm.

And the modern-day John Henry, fighting his war with technology, proving that the human spirit can triumph over machines...that soulless metal cannot prevail over drunken flesh; that PEOPLE, not GADGETS, are the top of this food chain! Computers be damned! Down with the automobile! A million righteous voices shouting in unison, "DEATH TO THE CAN OPENERS!"

Shades of The Terminator, but it's what Our Crazy Leaders have plans for, anyway.

An historic battle of Man vs. Robot was written up in the Boston Globe, 11/26/1993, (AP). Robert Conner, a 38 year-old resident of Islip Terrace, New York, was practicing his constitutional right to get drunk and bear arms. His wife was practicing hers when she called the police and asked them to come and take the shotgun away from her soused husband.

There is nothing illegal about being drunk in your own house, and nothing illegal about having a shotgun in your house, and nothing illegal about combining the two. Still, the police had to come and mess with the guy.

Under the circumstances, I might have refused to come out and talk to them. That's the path our hero chose, and it was within his legal rights, if the police had no warrants or probable cause.

The cops must have been nervous about several things: The man wasn't really breaking any laws; he was an armed drunkard; and many of the police at the scene planned to become, at the end of their shifts, armed drunkards.

Something of a police tradition, I understand. It wasn't a hostage situation, and the poor guy was innocent of any criminal wrongdoing, but by now the neighbors were out watching the show, and the cops had to do something.

They sent in the Robot.

The article doesn't offer a description of the monster, so I'll have to depend on my imagination to supply one. My vision:

A twelve foot, six ton, semi-human looking thing; it's arms ending in viscious pincers capable of shredding a perpetrator in one squeeze; chest-mounted, forward-facing 9mm machine guns; two surface to surface rockets on swiveling shoulder mounts; aluminum/kevlar composite armor plate, blued. Powered by two Chrysler 440's w/4- barrel carbs, max speed 33 mph, capable of operating for six hours before refueling, submersible, stereo and airbags optional.

Think of poor Bob, drunk, wondering why everybody was making such a big deal out of everything, when suddenly a roaring, clanking, blued steel nightmare stomps up the street, it's single lens focussed on Bob's front door.

Bob must have been worried, facing such an invention. Christ knows I'd have been. Such a sight would have sent me packing...I'd have been running or hiding from this metallic killer! Show me a fight I am destined to lose, and I will be outta' there.

Not Bob Connor.

Bob bravely stood his ground. I think he sensed, through his alcoholic stupor, that this was the Big Showdown. The future of our species hung in the balance, and Bob was not going to be pushed around by a machine, no matter how many guns were mounted on it. Tipsily, he must have seen that this motored Goliath had weak spot, and with only a shotgun to defend himself, Bob must have known he would only get in a shot or two. He had to make them count. Too much was at stake. The Thing approached - Bob held his fire.

Halfway there - Bob waited.

It reached the front door -

Bob must have known that it was now or never. He smashed his gun through the window, pointed it directly at the robot's cluster of video lenses, microphones, and speakers...and fired point-blank into the Thing's face!

It must have still been twitching, because he let fly with another round.

The monster fell... He'd killed it, God bless him. Score one for the humans!

Having nothing in his heart but love for fellow humans, Bob then surrendered to the police, and was charged with "reckless endangerment," and "criminal mischief." Not much of a reward for saving the world from the domination of evil robots, but heroes like Bob rarely get the praise they deserve.

Return to FortSpace