A Disturbing Little Tour Of Rogue Taxidermy

Rogue Taxidermy is a folk-art form where you use dead animal parts to create some new, unique creature that never could have existed... but should have! So appropriate for Halloween.

The folk art form of rogue taxidermy seems to be rooted in the midwestern United States, and can be considered a hallmark of Midwest Gothic. The most famous group is the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. One typical truckstop chimera is the jackalope:

Rogue taxidermists got so carried away with the jackalope thing that they managed to infuse the critter into the North American culture at large, and now no roadside truckstop is complete without a mounted jackalope head on the wall. There's jackalope tattoos and faux nature documentaries and hundreds of photo manipulations. Jackalopes are world famous, a triumph of rogue taxidermy! Future popularity to a similar degree may be won for the hodag:

Or the fur-bearing trout:

As you can imagine, there's a huge crossover between the rogue taxidermy and cryptozoology worlds. Whether through intentional attempts to hoax the public, or tongue-in-cheek attempts to hoax the hoaxers by going "Look, I found one!"

Several resources about Quantum Entanglement

Since we now have our first experiment demonstrating that time is an emergent quantum phenomenon, it's about time we rounded up some info on this quantum entanglement idea and see if we can corner it.

The Wiki.

A friendly introduction to the fundamental problem we're trying to solve:

Here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining it some more:

So what's the big deal? Putting it into the most basic possible terms: We've observed small particles in the universe that act like they're "talking to each other" and determining how to be, even after they're separated and shouldn't be able to affect each other. It's like we can slice a red apple in half, put each half in a box and send the two boxes to opposite sides of the world, then have somebody open one box and paint their half of the apple green, and then when somebody on the other side of the world opens the box with their half-apple in it, it's turned green too.

And we don't know how this works. We've been trying to find out since the time of Einstein. Einstein himself called this "a spooky action at a distance."

Not only are we observing the effect that two particles can have on each other, and not only is it instantaneous (defying everything we know about the speed of information alone), but it appears to even be possible to have the same thing happen when the entangled elements are separated not only by space, but time as well. So Israeli scientists have made photons affect each other even when they didn't coexist at the same time.

So either we're dead wrong about this, or we have a way to both time travel and teleport either information or physical actions instantly. It could be a flaw in our reasoning based on some fundamental shortcoming of human perception and reasoning.

A LiveScience infographic:

And finally, quantum entanglement has been simulated within the world of, of all things, Minecraft.

Are we nuts? Maybe. Maybe the universe is nuts, too.

Paul the Psychic Octopus

From 2008 to 2010, a pet octopus named "Paul" was given the rather burdensome chore of predicting the outcome of World Cup soccer matches. His handlers would put food into two boxes at a time, each box decorated with the flag of their respective country's teams, then whichever one Paul decided to chow down on first would be the predicted winner. Over his two-year career, Paul got it right 11 out of 13 times.

Of course, nobody's really suggesting that Paul was following soccer games. Rather, plain old luck doesn't put the odds too far away - one might get the same sort of record flipping a coin. Some have speculated that Paul was attracted to flags with horizontal stripes, which just raises the question of why countries with horizontally-striped flags should win soccer matches more often.

Paul was the subject of international fame - for an octopus, anyway - and was widely missed after his passing at old age of octopus years. And just when this story couldn't get any sillier, there's conspiracy theories around his passing.

Here's Paul in action during one of his televised picks:

Paul and his handler also got death threats and recipe suggestions after Paul's predictions proved accurate:

OK, now that's silly enough!

The curious case of James R. Todino, the stranded time traveler

Time travel hoaxes are popular surreal pranks. I've mentioned John Titor before as being one of the greatest Internet pranksters of the time-traveller genre. But what can you do about a guy who's really convinced that he's a time traveller?

Such was the conundrum facing the maintainers over at the Museum of Hoaxes, who was one of many at the beginning of the century to receive spam emails asking for someone to sell the subject a "dimensional warp generator." The email went into great detail about specs for this device, which would include 512GB of RAM and a menu-driven GUI.

It turned out that the emails were being sent out by a known professional spammer who also happened to be delusionally insane. Wired breaks the straight story. Far from being a time traveller, Todino was a perfectly ordinary 22-year-old with a father in this present day who was worried about his son's mental illnesses being exploited by scammers online.

Make no mistake about it, this is actually a common problem with spammers. If you've ever received spam and wondered "who would ever fall for this?", the answer is, "nobody, actually, but authors of spam software and systems prey on gullible people who think they can make millions sending out spam. Big fleas got little fleas on their backs to bite 'em!

Todino (like the mythical John Titor, whom, remember, has never been positively identified) gained widespread Internet fame and cultural tribute, making this list of time travel claims, and being famous enough that there's dozens of accounts claiming to be him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth.

Sadly, no verifiable interviews with Todino exist on YouTube. So for second prize, here's a different kook who raves about time travel conspiracy theories:

Get hit by lightning seven times; kill yourself at age 71 by gunshot

Roy Sullivan got into the Guinness Book of World Records as having been struck by lightning seven times - and survived them all! This was seven separate incidents, mind you, over a period of years from 1942 to 1977. He also claimed an eighth strike which happened to him as a child, but never bothered to record it.

Perhaps bothered too much by the way God seemed to have it in for him, he committed suicide by gunshot at age 71. His experience, however, form an important contribution to the specialized medical field of Keraunopathy - the study of the effects of lightning strikes on the human body.

Horned-head

Just found it startling, that's all. Wikimedia commons images can surprise you sometimes.

What was up with the green children of Woolpit?

Of all the feral children stories, the green children of Woolpit seem the most curious. They were two Flemish children who walked up to farmers in Suffolk, England, in the 12th century. The children, a boy and a girl, both had green skin. After dumping a fanciful story of a distant twilight land called "Saint Martin", which may or may not have been true, the children were adopted into the community and eventually went on to live normal lives and regain normal skin color.

It turns out that the skin pigment could have been a symptom of a nutritional deficiency, called 'hypochromic anemia.' Similar to how leaves turn color in the fall, the lack of red blood cell pigmentation simply leaves other elements of the body to lend a skin color instead.

Whatever you do, do not search Google images for 'hypochromic anemia'. They're not nearly as pretty as you're picturing it.

But perhaps encounters with people afflicted with this condition accounts for widespread folklore tales of little green elves, gnomes, leprechauns, and other mythical humanoids - maybe they were just malnourished, and so short, and anemic.

Edmund Trebus, notorious hoarder

In Crouch End, North London, Trebus was constantly at odds with police over his hoarding behavior. He would come home with wheelbarrows of trash and lovingly sort it into piles in his home and yard. Amongst his many acquisitions were almost every record recorded by Elvis Presley.

Despite these problems, he lived to the age of 83.

Today he stands as one of history's most famous hoarders.

One wonders why more researchers don't tie hoarding disease to rampant capitalism. When you build an entire society based on owning more and more crap, what can you expect but that some people take it to an extreme?

Now go clean your house.

Wacky medieval laws

During the height of witch-hunting in the 15th century, there was a book published in Germany that was a sort of "Witch-Hunting for Dummies" guide, name of Malleus Maleficarum.

Full page scans available at Cornell's online repository, and while you're there, they have a few other witch-related tomes to check out for all your witchery needs. There's also a full site devoted to this and other witch-related beliefs, even into the present day.

But even practices for catching plain old criminals wasn't much better. For instance, there was the process of cruentation, in which an accused murderer was brought together with the corpse of the presumed victim and ordered to lay their hands upon the carcass. If the dead body should then spontaneously begin bleeding from its wounds, that would be a sign from on high that the defendant was guilty. One can only imagine how many murderers got off scott-free.

Many such practices are covered in the blanket category of "Trial by Ordeal," where you get all the variations on tying you up and throwing you into the river to see if you sink or swim, or plunging your hand into boiling water to see if God healed you, or simply swallowing poison, or other such life-jeopardizing trials. In some cases, surviving the ordeal unscathed meant that God had declared you innocent, while in other areas it was considered just the opposite proof, that you had escaped by the Devil's aide.

Then there was the practice of compurgation, a law which meant that you could be found innocent if you could find twelve people who said they believed your side of the story. Well, who couldn't scare up twelve friends?

One more curiosity is the German principle of "stadtluft macht frei," a kind of statue-of-limitations where if a serf had managed to escape capture for a year-and-a-day, they was no longer open to being re-chained.

And for a final medieval law oddity, animals could be tried in a court of law exactly as if they were human.

It's come to this: Happiness is now a disease

A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder:

"It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant."

Okaaaay... Pretty sure this is a parody, but you never can be quite sure.

On a related note, there's also discussion about whether to classify unipolar mania. See, unipolar mania is like bipolar disorder in a higher key; instead of cycling between extremes of depression and mania, you just have the manic phases. So most of the time you're normal, except sometimes you're extremely hyper and happy.

Doesn't that sound nice?

Sleeping Mother Earth

From the tourist info:

"The Madre Tierra Eco-Resort is located a mile from the center of Vilcabamba, the Andean village made famous for the longevity of its citizens. Visitors come from all over the world for the relaxed atmosphere, the deliciously healthy food from our gardens, the mineralized pure water, the fresh, clean air and to spend time among Ecuador's very gentle people."

And this creation, sleeping mother earth personified.

A gallery of mathematical cranks, wanks, and wonks

You wouldn't think that mathematics, as a field, would attract that many fringe-living crackpots - at least not as much as, say, medicine or space physics. In math, after all, either 2 plus 2 adds up to 4 or else it doesn't, and there's not much room for argument after that. But, oh, how wrong you'd be! Join me on this intellectual Tilt-A-Whirl as we explore the home pages of some extremely unhinged amateur mathematicians:

Zim Mathematics

The startling page layout is just the appetizer to Zim Olsen's theories. However, Zim doesn't really seem as out there as some, merely extremely eccentric. On the crank side, there's the ranting philosophy of how we should think of mathematics, which reads like a better-educated Time Cube manifesto. On the other hand, we have the following masterpiece:

The Lord’s Prayer in System(s) Mathematics

Our Father who art in heaven
hallowed be thy name;
(1) + - × ÷ = (0) + - × ÷ = (1+0) + - × ÷ = (1,0) + - × ÷

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
(1) +, -, ×, ÷ = (0) +, -,×, ÷ = (1+0) +, -, ×, ÷ = (1,0) +, -, ×, ÷

Give us this day our daily Bread.
Y(A,B) + - × ÷ => X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷)

Forgive us for our sins,
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

As we forgive those who sin against us.
W(A,B,Y(1,0) + - × ÷) => W(1,0)

Lead us not into temptation
X(1,0,Y(A,B)) + - × ÷

But deliver us from evil.
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

For thine is the Kingdom, the Power,
and the Glory, forever and ever.
F(1,0) = ___, ___, …___

OK, anybody who can engage in such whimsy has my benefit of the doubt.

Diamond Theory

Here again, I don't think Steven Cullinane is really unhinged per se. At the very least, his geometric study is fun to play with, particularly when you find this toy. And I'm not really sure that anything he says is wrong per se. But you might find yourself asking "So what?" or more to the point, "Why is this supposed to be the central theory to explaining life, the universe, and everything?"

The Correct Value for Pi

OK, here at last is somebody I can pin to the board. This Iranian scholar can't stand it that Pi is infinite, and insists that its true value is actually 3.125, so there! Wrong sir! Thank you for being up front and not burying it under 100 pages of dense "proof."

Impossible Correspondence

Ah, we love the argumentative ones! This colorful Mad Hatter uses amusing George-Clinton-type coinages like "supraconsciousness" to insist that everybody else is wrong, dammit, especially that Albert Einstein. Go on, pick a page, any page - the "Analysis of Maths by Theosophical Reduction" argues that we only need nine digits to define the universe and then wades into the I-Ching and something called the Mayan "Tzolk'in"... uh, this:

...guaranteeing that this refugee from Klingon astrology will lose the hell out of you before you can even suss out what he's rambling about. Oh, and there's a great bit of numerology about the Quran, and a piece on market cycles and Fibonacci done with no sense of irony for Darren Arinovsky's film. And hey, there's this:

"In his stand against the ether, Einstein had argued, "we should not speak of things that can't be measured." Probably the number one reason for saying that was to insure the job of measurements. Today, the Aether not only has been experimentally shown to "exist", but the reversed, subluminal group wave Aether and the superluminal phase wave Aether could also be measured once it was defined as the existent medium."

Treasures, treasures I tell you!

C.F. Russel - Cubed

This is impossible. I take back everything I ever said about the Time Cube guy; THIS is the craziest web person with a cube-centric theory! Oh, the pages start out tame enough,

but it gets crazier...

and crazier...

and CRAZIER!!!

God, thank you, man! I made it up to page 16 before I couldn't hang on any more and blew my load! And THEN I found this dingus. Take me! Take me away to your crazy, right-angled world forever.

8 Things you never knew were in the King James Bible

Jesus gets thrown out of town:

Matthew 8:34 "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts."

You should turn your rebellious son over to the town to be murdered:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

God commanded Saul to slaughter a whole town, including the women, babies, and animals:

1 Samuel 15:1-3 "Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

If you rape an unmarried woman, your only penalty is paying her father 50 silver coins and marrying her:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."

If two men are fighting and the wife of one gets in the way to try to break it up, she can get her hand chopped off:

Deuteronomy 25:11-12 " When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

Moses made a brass snake charm to cure snakebite:

Numbers 21:8-9 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."

God will smear crap on you:

Malachi 2:2-3 "If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.  Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."

Uh... this:

2 Kings 18:27 "But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?"

I can't pass up this opportunity to tie in one of my favorite works from one of my favorite web humorists, so here's the Professor Brothers (aka SuperDeluxe aka Brad Neely) with a lesson on Sodom & Gamorrah:

Heaven's Gate cult initiation tape

Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult famous for their 1997 mass suicide, in which 39 members quietly laid down in bunk beds with plastic bags taped over their heads and died. They believed that they would launch themselves onto a flying saucer trailing the then-visible Hale-Bopp comet. At the time, I was working at the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada, on the night shift. We had an excellent view of the comet from the top floor of the plant, where we'd pause on break and stare at the blurry speck in the sky, wondering what madness possessed these people.

Well, I've recently discovered the entire tape series of cult leader Marshall Applewhite's video speeches to the sect members on YouTube. So spend some time listening to this guy ramble and see if maybe he couldn't hypnotise you into cutting your junk off and killing yourself (with $5.75 in your pocket, gotta remember the fare!):

That's just part one. There's the whole series here.

Oh, and let us not forget that the original website, maintained by the cult members who financed themselves through web development, is still up for anyone to view. The creepiest touch is the expanding 'red alert' GIF at the top. Did the cult members check the page every day for this signal? And when it appeared, that was their "boarding call"?

How did hippos get to Columbia?

Well, as the video explains, the hippos - the original pair, anyway - were part of the menagerie of Pablo Escobar, famous Columbian drug lord. They adapted to the environment and roam free today, starting from a breeding pair.

The life and times of Pablo Escobar read like something straight out of Scarface. Legends of his tremendous cocaine-fueled wealth even include an anecdote of how they had to store cash in a warehouse for so long that rats broke in and gnawed 10% of the stored $100-bills, destroying them. Escobar's henchmen just shrugged and wrote it off as a loss.

Anyway, when you're so goddamned rich that you have a problem with rats eating your money because you can't spend it fast enough, you tend to splurge on a few indulgences. So Escobar built himself a wonderland, complete with his own zoo. What a show-off!

And that's why today, hippos are now a native species in Columbia.

Stumbled on Star Wars in animated GIF form. The entire movie.

It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.

How long can life forms stay active in a sealed glass sphere?

The answer turns out to not only be fascinating, but a nice little cottage industry. Ecosphere is a company that sells just such an item: a glass globe with simple plant and animal life forms, which you just set in the window and let sunlight do the rest. It's basically a sealed, maintenance-free aquarium.

Here's a video of one in action:

From the site:

"Because the living organisms within the EcoSphere utilize their resources without overpopulating or contaminating their environment, the EcoSphere requires virtually no maintenance.
EcoSpheres have an average life expectancy of two years. However, it is not uncommon for shrimp populations to be thriving in systems as old as 7 years."

One wonders what the long-term implications of this would be. What if generations reproduced within the ecosphere - would they mutate? Could they evolve? Certainly, sealed systems in nature do tend to produce life forms with exaggerated characteristics. Could the system survive a global apocalypse? It needs sunlight energy, so we know it couldn't survive in space, but what if we included an artificial life source and launched it at habitable planets? Would the seed be planted for Earth-like, but adapted, life forms when we eventually go there?

Your Whacko Conspiracy Video of the Week

Meet Macon Carrington, who has his own YouTube channel and would like to have a word with you about the secret, horrific rituals that Scientologists and Freemasons inflict on hapless kids. With demonstrations on dolls and better special effects than most History Channel shows.

Oh, he's also nuttier than squirrel scat and hair-raisingly creepy besides.

DISCLAIMER: Which is not to say that Scientologists or Freemasons are exactly nice people, and in fact there is evidence that Scientologists have done mean stuff to people before.

The Iowa lapdance scholarship

You've probably heard more than one stripper, poledancer, or other adult entertainer claim that she's doing this to work her way through college. But how about, when you're done, you keep working to put somebody else through college, too? And that was the inspiration for the idea of the lapdance scholarship...

"The LapDance Scholarship was founded in December 2010 by Hailey Jude Minder, a self-proclaimed vaginally-funded experience artist.  As an artist, Hailey has always been interested in, and often troubled by, the sources of fine arts funding. Having become somewhat disenchanted with the whole search for funding and the sources of such funds, Hailey set out to make her own.  Moonlighting as a stripper twice a week, Hailey is bringing funding for the arts into the trenches.  She has funded her own art in this manner and now wishes to help her fellow artists achieve their goals."

Courtesy of The Great God Pan Is Dead, where the complete story also involves the amazing story of the project to turn copies of dildos into art.

One of which I'll post here, because to hell with being squeamish about it...

Unbelievable hand-drawn sketchs animated as gifs

Haunting and whimsical artwork gallery by Dain Fagerholm. Save for your trippiest viewing experiences.