Lies agreed upon...

Old Testament Quote of the Day

2008-06-30T21:01:00.003-05:00

Abraham to Bbraham:"Can you pass the Zebra ham?"

The Whistle of Death

2008-06-30T20:44:00.004-05:00

Believed to be the last thing an individual "chosen" to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods heard in pre-columbian times, these reproductions of whistles found in the bony hands of the condemned sound appropriately haunting.

Click the link to hear some samples:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/06/30/pre-columbiansounds.ap/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Caspian Sea Monster

2008-06-22T22:40:00.004-05:00

Imagine a fleet of roaring jet-powered flying ships skimming undiscovered at speed towards the sandy beaches of the eastern US. Upon landing, each 500 ton leviathan spews up to a thousand soldiers and multiple tanks out of its belly which exceeds the length of a football field. Others patrol the coastline and fire barrages of cruise missiles onto the American mainland.

Although it sounds like a cheap plot of an 80s russiophobic movie, these awesome machines really existed.

In the 60s the USSR started to experiment with stubby winged airplane/boat hybrids which could utilize the ground effect generated by the compressed air between a flying object and the terrain it traverses in close proximity.

The design had three distinct advantages:

- since the flying ships lifted only a few feet out of the water they would evade enemy radar

- the ground effect allowed for payloads much greater than a conventional airplane

- they could travel at speeds up to 500mph

The Russians called these low flying contraptions Ekranoplans and they culminated in the above mentioned "Caspian Sea Monster". Today these awe-inspiring machines are rusting away in various dry-docks since their tactical relevancy has since diminished.

Still - I would love to see one of these obscure beasts roar past a flabbergasted audience during the Chicago air and water show...

Captain Future

2008-06-16T22:34:00.007-05:00

Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s in Germany, this adaptation of a Japanese anime show rocked my world. The Soundtrack still sends shivers up my spine and the captain's sideburns are priceless.

Captain Future, his metallic robot friend Grag, Otto - a gay looking and shape shifting android in a pink jumpsuit, as well as a professor's brain in a hovering, glass domed, contraption scoot about the galaxy and save all sorts of civilizations from impending doom. This show opened and twisted my mind and made me sit on the edge of my parents' appropriately brown sofa...

Creationist Stegosaur BBQ

2008-06-16T20:05:00.012-05:00

Here is a fun little mysterious tidbit from the jungles of Cambodia:

In the 12th century the Khmer, an advanced civilization, finished what must be considered one of the wonders of the world. A vast city of temples, oddly arranged like the constellation Draco (it's major temples representing a map of the constellation's stars). Giant, intricately carved spires jut above the canopy of the surrounding jungle and countless demonic faces adorn the surrounding buildings in all their Hindu glory.

I am talking about Angkor Wat of course. We don't know much about it's builders or why they vanished without much of a cultural record and what must once have been a meeting place for hundreds of thousands of people was reclaimed by the jungle for centuries.

Lately creationist evangelicals have adopted this unlikely place, so liberally adorned with Vishnu and cohorts, as an argument to propagate their beliefs.

Why? On one of the temples there is a small carving of what looks like a Stegosaurus. Odd? Certainly. Conclusive? By no means. Have a look at the pictures and make up your own mind. While the similarities are quite intriguing I still doubt that the Khmer enjoyed Stegosaur steaks a mere 800 years ago during a Sunday BBQ.

You gotta do better to prove the whole seven day thing guys...

The "Unluckification" of Friday the 13th

2008-06-13T21:21:00.009-05:00

Ever asked yourself why Friday the 13th is considered unlucky?

This superstition actually goes back about 700 years and involves the much written about and popularized Knights Templar.

The then reigning king of France, Philip the Fair, found himself in financial woes and happened to owe the Templar order a lot of money. In fact, the Templars can be considered the founders of our modern banking system of deposit and withdrawal from multiple locations.

After the heyday of the Crusades, the Templars happily tended their ever growing wealth and owned vast lands in France.

Back to the number 13: Philip suffered the above mentioned cash shortage and mounting debt and was generally jealous and suspicious of the order's considerable influence.

So he decided to hatch a plan to arrest the entire Templar leadership simultaneously across the country and catch them by surprise. On Friday the 13th, 1307 Philip's troops entered all Templar monasteries, pulled everyone out of their beds and filled the royal dungeons with a bunch of bedraggled monks.

The entire theater was justified through colorful claims of idol worship, heresy and homosexual practices. Urinating on a cross and the adoration of a severed head were some of the specifics involved.

As was custom during the middle ages, confessions were obtained through the liberal application of torture and the order's Grandmaster Jacques de Molay was finally burned at the stake in 1314 after what must have been miserable years full of pain and humiliation.

These events left such an impression with the public at large that the date of the Templars' demise has been considered "unlucky" ever since...

Simple Beauty: Charley Harper

2008-06-02T20:04:00.008-05:00

Charley Harper (1922-2007) is one of my favorite illustrators. I find it fascinating how he uses deceptively simple two dimensional blocks of color to create a whole which entirely transcends the initial simplicity (if that makes any sense...).

In his long career Charley illustrated everything from biology books to the Ford Times or the occasional tourism poster. His modernist genius is timeless and he manages to capture nature in a geometric yet incredibly animated fashion. I have a wonderful book on order
(Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (Illustrated ed.), AMMO Books, ISBN 978-0978607654 $200) which depicts the highlights of his career in large scale and I can only recommend to anybody to have a look at it and get lost in what he calls minimal realism - capturing the essence of subjects with the fewest possible visual elements.

Going tribal

2008-05-31T12:39:00.007-05:00

After a long week and lots of travel combined with "blogger's block" this truly exciting story caught my attention.

I was first made aware of it by my office receptionist, an anthropologist by trade (another talent wasted - thankfully she's young and might go back to school).

Here is a synopsis of the story for anyone who did not yet hear about it:

A Brazilian protection agency published the pictures which were made during a fly-by to prove the fact that there are still tribes in the rain forest who have generally no contact to civilization and can be considered previously unknown. The amazing pictures show brightly painted people of which some take pot shots at the passing plane with their bows and arrows. The tribe appears to live in primitive long houses arranged in a straight line and surrounded by a narrow band of cultivated fields and plantations. Thankfully the Brazilian government did not disclose the exact location of the encounter and only indicated that it took place in proximity to the Peruvian border.

Unfortunately these last truly pristine people are in grave danger of encroaching logging and mining operations and any contact with the outside world would inevitably end in tragedy.

While they tend to be immune against many tropical diseases, a common western virus might easily wipe out an entire tribe. Their bodies are simply not adapted to non-indigenous pathogens.

At any rate, this story is a painful reminder to me of how our recent "progress" and ability to easily reach even the most remote places in the world has utterly destroyed bio and cultural diversity. A mere century ago explorers reported sightings of giant animals such as 40 foot anacondas in the Amazon or 30 foot crocodiles in Australia. Vanishing habitats have an adverse impact on the last of these, once dominant, predators and their offspring adapted by trading size for survivability. The same applies to our over-fished oceans.

In the end most cultures will be more and more homogenized and strive for the same material goals so successfully propagated by our global marketing machine. The beat of an excotic drum or moanful tune of a bone flute will inevitably be replaced by Jay-Z on a ghetto blaster. Bows and arrows give away to AK-47s. In another 100 years even these once proud and fiercely independent people will be "packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes" (to quote The Police - Synchronicity 2).

Sad.

Elvis re-enters the building

2008-05-20T20:14:00.012-05:00

It was all over the news today that a group of scientists succeeded in inserting genes from an extinct Tasmanian Tiger (a marsupial fox/wolf - like animal with a striped ass) into a mouse where the DNA continued to thrive and function.
I remember clearly when Jurassic Park was released, with its one minute of CG generated reptilian bliss, and renowned experts in the field dismissed any chance that we could really bring back T-Rex and company. We are admittedly quite a ways off from resurrecting prehistoric monsters and the Tasmanian Tiger's DNA was extracted from a specimen suspended in formaldehyde, which tends to be somewhat gentle on soft tissue material, yet if we project advancements in genetics another 15 years into the future the idea might not be so far fetched after all.
I can see the potential for rich megalomaniacs to go through some sort of re-birthing procedure or the zoos of this world competing for the most outrageous creature (Sea World - can you please take a stab at Liopleurodon and feed Shamu to it?)

A possibility comes to mind: frozen Mammoth carcasses are found on the Siberian tundra with a certain regularity. It is quite possible that any recovered tissue might have usable genetic material which could then be inserted into an elephantine egg or embryo. Which raises another question. What happens if a hypothetical clone produces some sort of prehistoric pathogen which might prove fatal to our present fauna or flora or even ourselves?

Death by Dino fart...

In conclusion a few specimens who must remain dead or can never be cloned:

for intolerance reasons

for aesthetic reasons

no explanation necessary....

Last flight of the little prince

2008-05-13T21:22:00.006-05:00

Until the year 2004 the disappearance of the hailed french author Antoine de Saint Exupery, who blessed literature with "The little prince", was one of the many unsolved mysteries of World War 2.

On July 31st 1944 Saint Exupery set out on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in his twin engine P-38 Lightning, never to return. For years speculation about a possible suicide circulated among historians. There was no record of Axis activity in the near airspace and Antoine was an accomplished pilot who had set long distance records and used his passion of aviation as inspiration for his literary success.

Then in 1998 a French fisherman found his bracelet on a beach and finally in 2004 the wreckage of his plane was found not too far off the coast, roughly 90 yards below the sea. The mystery concerning the cause for the crash remained however.

Eventually a German aviation expert set out to interview surviving Luftwaffe pilots for possible clues regarding the incident. He did not have to search for long. The Messerschmidt 109 ace Horst Rippert came forward with a confession that he shot down Saint Exupery's Lightning while on a lone patrol along the southern French coast. His account of the engagement describes the author flying carelessly at 6,000 feet (a low and vulnerable altitude at the time) and apparently oblivious to the enemy in pursuit. Rippert made a dive on the Lightning and shot off a wing when, according to his account, Saint Exupery just spiraled down into the sea.

Later, when Rippert learned of the Allied effort to search for the author, he was mortified in a cruel twist of fate - "The little Prince" was the favorite book of his youth...

Separated at birth...

2008-05-13T19:18:00.005-05:00

The main difference: Dr. Bunsen accidentally blows stuff up...

Twisted Minds: Vlad Tepes (1431-1476)

2008-05-12T20:31:00.013-05:00

According to an account of German settlers the city of Brasov in Romania became one of the many victims of Vlad Dracul the Third, ruler of Transylvania. His favorite method of punishing unruly townsfolk happened to be death at the stake - thus his given surname: Tepes - The Impaler. It has been written that he enjoyed a good impaling so much so that he preferred to dine among the hundreds of writhing victims and bleeding corpses.

Given away to the Turks as a hostage by his father, he developed a fervent distaste for anything oriental (for more on the Ottomans read the earlier article about the siege of Vienna).

When the Turks besieged his castle his wife decided to throw herself from the highest tower, rather than to be captured, which understandably deepened Vlad's ongoing irritation...

In return he proceeded to fight back after several years of imprisonment and, to mix it up a bit, sent home sacks full of Turkish noses as proof of his exploits in combat.

All this unpleasantness afforded Vlad a good bit of respect. So much so that according to another anecdote he placed a golden cup in the middle of the town square of one of his villages overnight only to find it untouched in the morning. Nobody had dared to take it.

Many years later an author named Bram Stroker came upon a book about the Wallachian princes and must have been quite enarmored with our friend Vlad's antics since he decided to make him a quite prominent vampire protagonist of world literature: Dracula.

(Vlad's actual surname was Dracul - The Serpent/Dragon - a title inherited from his father who was a member of the "Order of the Dragon")

A retrospective on personality in sports

2008-05-08T21:28:00.015-05:00

At work today I was met with blank stares by the 20 somethings when mentioning the tennis greats of the 70s and 80s. I lamented about the demise of personality in sports, implying that watching the Tiger Woods' and Roger Federers of this world fills me with the comfortably numb embrace of disinterest.

What happened?

When did the world turn into a robotic factory of parentally driven poster boys and girls? When did wearing a Nike branded baseball cap backwards become the ultimate expression of rebellion?

Children - meet the boys:

John McEnroe: When was the last time that any person with a rudimentary interest in medicine could take an exact blood pressure reading just by looking at a guy's face? Who still dares to make any referee their bitch?

Ivan Lendl: A magician who inexplicably made not having a personality his personality. One could suspend this guy's balls half an inch above the spinning blade of a lawnmower and his facial expression would remain suitably relaxed.

Jimmy Connors: Choleric should be renamed to connorleric.

Carl Lewis: If the Olympic committee allowed feather boas, his would have been 20 feet long and pink.

Bjorn Borg; Sweat bands, training suits two sizes too small and all that hair - timeless

Jackie Stewart: Plaid golf hat and matching pants while dominating Formula 1 - enough said.

Nikki Lauda: What purpose do ears serve anyways?

Muhammad Ali: Would handily defeat any opponent through a tidal wave of smack talking alone.

Now that i have gotten that off my chest I will skip ESPN with a content sigh and go back to watching reality TV.

The land that should not be there...

2008-05-07T19:42:00.008-05:00

In 1513 the Turkish admiral Piri Reis compiled from hitherto unknown sources a map that singlehandedly upends several established "facts" concerning world exploration. This visually pleasing piece of cartography was drawn on the skin of a gazelle and has been authenticated by many renowned scientific institutes.

So what is the big deal?

1. The map shows detailed depictions of the coastlines of western Africa and Eastern South America. Both were officially not known at the time.
Gavin Menzies, a retired commander of a submarine in the Royal Navy, offers an intriguing theory in his book 1421 - The Year China Discovered the World.
The author builds a convincing case out of circumstantial evidence (such as Chinese way markers in Africa, the rudder of a giant junk in the Sacramento river and genetically Chinese poultry in South America, etc.), that a Chinese armada of giant ships as much as 130 yards long set out in 1421 to circumnavigate the earth. Gavin speculates that a small number of ships actually succeeded and on the way discovered every continent, including Antarctica.
He even presents evidence that the Chinese established settlements which can be traced back through, once more, the use of modern genetics.

2. The map contains an even bigger enigma. Piri Reis presents a very detailed depiction of the coastline of Antarctica - the actual landmass under the polar icecap...
According to science the last time the coastline of Antarctica was exposed lies 6000 years in the past. Who would have had the means to travel to and accurately measure the end of the world in the late stone age?

Some of these questions might never be solved and it is probably good that way. What would the world be without one or the other great mystery?

Flying Giraffe

2008-05-06T19:26:00.003-05:00

I stumbled upon this pic a while ago. Quetzalcoatlus, a giant Pterosaur, was as big as a giraffe with a wingspan of 13-15 yards.

Twisted Minds: Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516)

2008-05-04T17:29:00.003-05:00

Hieronymus Bosch produced some of the most twisted images ever put on canvas at a time when contemporary artists struggled to overcome the two (and a half) dimensional limitations of Gothic depiction while tiptoeing into the neo-classicism that was to become the Renaissance.

As such he can be labeled as the inventor of surrealism much in the fold of later representatives of the genre such as Salvador Dali.

Bosch's character has long been an enigma to art historians since very little is known about his motivation and his core beliefs. On one hand he belonged to an ultra-conservative catholic society and some say his depictions of demons, monsters and charlatans are merely a means to illustrate the perils of not adhering to church doctrine but I find that quite difficult to believe. If you have a good look at his most famous work: The Garden of Earthly Delights (click to enlarge), you will find such sweet little details as a man looking out of a glass bubble connected to a frog's ass or a guy kissing a pig wearing a nun's headdress while a little birdman ice skates through hell (indicating that it has frozen over?).

At any rate - one will be hard pressed to find anything weirder or farther ahead of its time. Rock on Hieronymus!

Dr. Evil's Envy

2008-05-02T20:16:00.008-05:00

So, it turns out the Chinese have been building a giant underground lair for their nuclear submarine fleet with all the trimmings. Above ground there is a harbor for aircraft carriers and other toys.

Reportedly Dr. Evil visited the facility and was suitably impressed. It is rather easy to imagine thousands of people in orange jumpsuits scurrying about while smallish electric vehicles zoom around noiselessly in an aimless ballet of evil business. Upon opening a broom closet one might find Mr. and Mrs. Incredible engaged in kinky endeavors and Sean Connery looking on with expert appreciation while non-chalantly shooting 4 guards wearing funny hats with one bullet over his right shoulder...

Bathtubcreaturefeature

2008-04-29T20:42:00.011-05:00

Unfortunately a lot of really cool animals happen to be extinct. What would I give to see one of these beasts alive...

Liopleurodon:

What is believed to be the biggest carnivorous animal that ever lived. 50 to 75 feet and maybe as much as 100 tons of badassness. 150 million years ago this little lizard could feast on whatever it wanted whenever it wanted.

Dunkleosteus:

A Devonian superfish with giant horn shears instead of teeth. This beauty grew to about 30 feet and you can see a nice specimen of it's armor plated head in the Field Museum in Chicago. Boy wouldn't it be nice if they replaced the sickeningly cute dolphins with a couple of these in the Shedd...

Megalodon:

A 50 foot version of today's Great White Shark which might have gone extinct as recently as a few thousand years ago. Take that Spielberg.

Global Warming

2008-04-28T22:11:00.003-05:00

...is happening elsewhere. Almost May in Chicago and snow - wtf? Need to move to Southern France...

Ottomans - Not just furniture

2008-04-26T20:14:00.005-05:00

A couple of weeks ago the great Ayatollah visited Washington DC. Joyous calls to prayer echoed from minarets all over the country...

You say I'm nuts? Yes, I know, it was the Pope but it might as well have been his Islamic counterpart. A mere 480 years ago our western civilization came within an inch of Ottoman rule.

In the fall of 1529 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (he stole that title from me) showed up at the gates of Vienna with 80,000 men after handily conquering Hungary (then quite formidable).

The great Austrian capital was the last bastion in his way on the road to overrunning the rest of Europe and establishing a vast empire. Ottoman rule was quite benevolent as long as the subjugated enemy agreed to become vassals of the Sultan. If they decided not to do so they met rather creative ends on stakes or were fried to a crisp. Alas Vienna decided to hold out and was reinforced by a smallish band of Landsknecht mercenaries.

An epic battle ensued fought in mines under the city walls and vicious hand to hand battles above ground. Only one factor kept the Ottomans outside the city: The fall of 1529 happened to be incredibly wet and turned what were then unpaved roads into veritable swamps. The Ottomans posessed formidable siege cannons which they had to leave behind due to the fact that their incredible weight caused them to bog down in the mud. The relentless rain also took its toll on the many camels which were used as pack animals.

In the end weather and the stoic inhabitants of Vienna wore on Suleiman's Jannissary crack troops and he decided to retreat back to Constantinople (which fell to the Ottomans in 1453). He never returned.

At the time the Near East was technologically (and in many ways culturally) superior to the West and an Ottoman state could well have lasted a long time and the Mayflower would probably have been a felucca flying the banner of the sickle moon...

Ode to Drivers in Chicago

2008-04-22T22:23:00.002-05:00

1. If you are female, blond, wear a baseball cap with rhinestones on it and drive a Land Rover or Lexus SUV (or anything equivalent) - please restrict your driving to the hours between 11 pm and 4 am. You have no idea where your vehicle starts, ends or how it functions.

2. If you double park and block traffic: You deserve to be hit by a snow plow

3. If you race people at a four way stop or take their right of way: how does it feel to be located between the cheeks?

4. If you sit on people's tail in your BMW M3: try growing a penis...

5. If you go 35 mph on Lakeshore Drive: walk

Moviemagic

2008-04-21T20:57:00.004-05:00

I am giddy as can be. Hellboy: The Golden Army is about to hit theaters on July 11th.

If you haven't seen the first movie directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and starring Ron Perlman, I urge you to check it out.

As I get older (and older and older) I find myself quite hard to please when it comes to movies. Rarely do I find a film engaging enough to keep me from falling asleep...

Well, this little morsel has it all: funny lines, evil Nazis, monsters, a good dose of mysticism and brilliant visuals. My all time favorite character in the Hellboy story has to be Abe Sapien, a hyper intelligent aquatic man (in fashionable shades of aqua blue).

Hellboy is the brainchild of Mike Mignola, a brilliant comic artist whose illustrations are truly special. The protagonist is the result of an experiment to harness the powers of hell and he turns out to be a "good" demon who likes kitties and ends up working for the "Bureau of Paranormal Research" with a band of misfits (like Abe) - the fun starts here...

A thousand suns

2008-04-19T11:53:00.009-05:00

Over the last few years I developed an interest in one of the darkest and most enigmatic periods of modern history - the last days of World War 2. This period is presumably well documented and immortalized in countless movies where rakish young GIs triumph over goose stepping semi-robotic Nazis in feats of unimaginable heroism.

So why would I consider those months enigmatic? Because history is nothing but "lies agreed upon".

Aside from the well documented atrocities and insane personality cult propagated by the Third Reich there was a world of cutting edge research, fueled and accelerated by the fires of desperation. The Allies were well aware of the development of alleged wonder weapons and scoured the German countryside with special forces units (under the code name "Operation Paperclip"). Shiploads of advanced jet fighters, guided rockets, submarines and other equipment were brought to the US (and Russia for that matter) and examined carefully. Curiously in the years immediately after the war the victors of WW2 and newly minted enemies of the cold war engaged in a race of technological achievements which were in many cases nothing but reverse engineered war loot.

This article explores the possibility of a German nuclear bomb. Immediately after the conclusion of the war the Americans showcased a primitive pseudo nuclear reactor in a Bavarian cave which was to be the laughable extent of the German nuclear program. Case closed.

Only recently have historians begun to uncover evidence that in fact the German nuclear effort was much farther advanced than the Allies would admit. Below are a few interesting tidbits:

- Numerous eyewitnesses described a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" off the island of Ruegen in northern Germany. At the same time an Italian reporter was supposedly present when the Germans conducted a test of what they described as a disintegration bomb. His descriptions of the resulting devastation and characteristic mushroom cloud raised a few eyebrows.

- A similar event supposedly happened in Orhdruf, Thuringia which was at the center of intense interest for the US Army when Germany was overrun.

- The US bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a Uranium based weapon, whereas the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was Plutonium based. The US never tested a uranium based device and there is evidence that just weeks before the attack on Hiroshima there was nowhere near enough weapons grade uranium available in the US to build a bomb. Where did it come from?

I am just scratching the surface here. This does by no means prove that there really was an atomic bomb in Nazi Germany but it raises a plethora of questions. While the US and Russia officially strived to serve justice on the Nazi war criminals, they were much more lenient with party members sporting scientific backgrounds and quickly made "bona fide Americans' out of them. (The same holds true for the Russians) After all, the predominant language during cigarette breaks of the Apollo program, this most American of achievements, was German. It's leader and spiritual father was Wernher von Braun - a prominent rocket scientist and folk hero in Nazi Germany (read Johnny Yen's blog for a related article).

In the end American and Russian propaganda has obscured a brief but fascinating and frightening episode of German scientific history. A lot remains to be uncovered and many files concerning this subject in the US archives remain highly classified to this day...

Would you like a black hole with that?

2008-04-12T15:36:00.003-05:00

CERN, Switzerland - Imagine a 16 mile long, circular tunnel deep underground. Within this tunnel lie two circuits and every 100 feet or so a giant supercooled magnet so strong that it would pull your belt buckle right through your body if you would turn your back to it (not recommended).

The magnets power two counter rotating currents of protons and anti-protons at almost the speed of light (99.9999999%). In a giant magnetically stabilized chamber the two beams can be made to meet which causes the particles to smash into one another with unfathomable violence, releasing brutal heat (the surface of the sun would seem like a chilly place afterwards and you would grab a jacket). All that fun has a price tag of billions of dollars. So why would anybody but Dr. Evil build such a thing?

It is the one and only contraption allowing us to simulate conditions as they were found immediately after the big bang (get your mind out of the gutter). It is called a Large Hadron Collider.

Scientists hope to find new particles during these forced collisions such as the Higgs particle (a particle which could explain the existence of mass in our universe) and dark matter.

There is even a small possibility that the impact would create a miniature black hole which would most likely be unstable and evaporate shortly after it's inception. If for some reason however the black hole stabilizes and acquires enough mass, it would eat the Large Hadron Collider with its entire staff and then slowly sink to the middle of the earth where it would devour our lovely planet from the inside out.

What a f...ing brilliant way to go.

LHC - 8 billion dollars

Electricity used - 100 million dollars

Being devoured by a black hole - priceless

Harden the f... up!

2008-04-12T15:13:00.003-05:00

Click Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmXri8ZCKjc

This is a hilarious parody of Chopper Reed (can't make that name up). An Australian career criminal who's antics have made him a celebrity down under.

Funny as can be. MATURE content...

Monkeybusiness

2008-04-06T10:47:00.006-05:00

You might have noticed that giant ape dude in the background of my header. Since he is a permanent part of this blog we might as well talk about him for a bit. He represents my interest in unknown, rare or otherwise strange creatures. They are what makes this planet a mysterious place and I refuse to give in to the notion that everything that might lurk in the shadows and crevices of some remote, misty forest or deep and forbidding ocean trench has already been discovered.

Back to our hairy friend. Many cultures across the globe have some sort of folklore about big bi-pedal and ape-like creatures deeply ingrained in their cultural fabric. The Tibetans have their Yeti, the North American Native people are the origin of many lores about the Sasquatch (now better known as Bigfoot). Even some Eastern European legends of similar creatures exist.

This apparent continuity affords the question if it is truly possible that so many cultures dream up the same bogeyman. And there is evidence that he existed!

Paleontologists (scientists devoted to the study of extinct species) unearthed some uncommonly large teeth in a series of ancient Chinese caves which were attributed to a type of giant ape. Fittingly they decided to call him/her Gigantopithicus.

And here is the kicker: This 10 foot and god knows how many hundreds of pounds monster walked among humans. There are varying opinions of exactly how long ago this branch of the evolutionary tree bit the dust but some theories exist that this might not have occurred until a relatively recent 10,000 years ago.

Ok -we might have the Yeti covered since he is after all an Asian "invention". But why would the native Americans tell the same story on a different continent? Surely Gigantopithicus did not evolve on different continents at roughly the same time?

He did not have to.

As you are probably aware, the Native Americans are not so "native" after all. It is widely believed that the first immigrants into North America arrived between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago.

From where?

Asia!

How?

During the most recent ice ages the oceans of the world were significantly lower due to the fact that large quantities of the earth's water turned to ice. The Bering Strait, a relatively narrow ocean channel separating modern day Alaska and Russia, would have been an icy bridge linking the two continents.

It only makes sense that these Proto - Americans would have brought their folklore along as they slowly spread across the continent. Some say that a few adventurous apes might also have lumbered across this land bridge and established a breeding population here. I have my doubts due to the complete absence of a fossil record.

Anyways - all of a sudden the story of Bigfoot makes a lot more sense - doesn't it?

Why am I doing this?

2008-04-05T23:58:00.003-05:00

That's what I am asking myself... I am new to blogging and will not bore anyone who might stumble upon this page with my moods, ailments or reviews of strawberry lip gloss.
It so happened that in real life I ended up with a job which subjects me to the constant thumbscrews of revenue, Ebitda and a myriad of rules and regulations. On the other hand the curious kid in me is very much alive and in my scarce spare time I tend to immerse myself in the obscure and fascinating tidbits of history, science and culture. As such I will use this blog as a recreational vehicle to record these musings and share them with anybody who has nothing better to do than to browse this little piece of virtual real estate.

You wonder why I named this blog "Lies agreed upon"? Napoleon Bonaparte once crafted my favorite quote: "History is nothing but lies commonly agreed upon". How true!

Stay tuned...