As the Hollywood and occult hype machines spin into overdrive about the proposed end of the world on December 21st, 2012, at least one person who may or may not know something about it says it’s all bunk. According to an AP story, Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan Indian Elder had this to say:

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

Another person who should know points out:

“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”

He goes onto suggest this doomsday thing is a Western concept we’re projecting onto the Maya. So if the Maya say it’s bunk, who should we believe? Them or the folks who remade Godzilla?

link: Mayan Year 2012 Stirs Doomsday Theories – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News – FOXNews.com

Mark your calendars. August 31st, 2009 may have been the day the insects got the upper hand in their war against mankind.

Reportedly, a truck driver for the Minot Air Force Base 91st Missile Wing lost control of his vehicle when a “large insect” flew into the cab and (attacked) landed on his back.

When one solitary bug accomplishes what all of our enemies combined have been unable to do, it’s time to start buying Raid by the bulk.

‘Large insect’ sparked missile truck’s crash – Military- msnbc.com

Remember that time you went to take a photo and when you looked at it your iMac screen mysteriously shown through your body as if you were an ephemeral spirit because deep down your souls are intertwined? I do.

Got a weird photo? Send it to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail with “Weird photo” in the subject line or upload it to Flickr and tag it #weirdthingscom.

I took this photo outside Disneyland. It’s of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. No retouching took place. This is exactly how the photo appeared!

Want to see something spooky? Click on these slideshows and see some various ghost photos on Flickr.

The spirit photographs of William Hope

Vintage Spirit Photography

Seances

Got a spooky photo or video you want to share? Upload it to Flickr and tag it with #weirdthingscom

According to ScienceDaily it turns out those ugly yellow splotches of bug guts on your car can serve science. They use the bug guts to to do DNA sequencing to determine species distribution and other information.

To gather genetic material, they utilized a simple but effective collection method – the front bumper of a moving vehicle. Two samples of bug splatter were collected, the first after driving from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and the second after traveling from Maine to New Brunswick, Canada.

link: Bug Splatter On Your Car’s Windshield Is A Treasure Trove Of Genomic Biodiversity

Excitement over augmented reality applications for the iPhone and other devices is certainly justified to an extent. But let’s not forget the original augmented reality baring device as imagine by James Cameron, the Terminator T-800.

What we want is Terminator vision like Arnold had, to help us hot wire cars, find appropriate wardrobe and decide who lives and who dies. Hopefully we can use Terminator vision to fight off the inevitable machine apocalypse – instead of it being used to murder us all one-by-one.

In the meantime, maybe we should call a moratorium on any more augmented reality develop for platforms named “android”.

It took 2,500 years but investigators finally cracked the case of out what killed an Egyptian woman. What makes this particularly interesting is how recent DNA extraction techniques made it possible to extract fragments of tuberculosis bacteria DNA. She had been misdiagnosed just a decade earlier as having been killed by ovarian cancer.

After analyzing ancient DNA from tissue samples, Helen D. Donoghue of University College London and colleagues say that the mummified woman, who lived around 600 B.C. and was entombed in Thebes, died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer.

link: Observatory – Revising the Diagnosis Behind an Ancient Death – NYTimes.com

Researchers now speculate that an island chain once inhabited by the Minoan’s may have been a much larger island that was wiped out in a volcanic eruption that sent tidal waves as far as Israel.

Speculation has abounded as to whether the Santorini eruption inspired the legend of Atlantis, which Plato said drowned in the ocean. Although the isle is often regarded as just an invention, the explosion might have given rise to the story of a lost empire by helping to wipe out the real-life Minoan civilization that once dominated the Mediterranean, from which the myth of the bull-headed ‘minotaur’ comes.

link: Real Tsunami May Have Inspired Legend of Atlantis – Yahoo! News

link: Google Maps

Technically John P. Holdren wasn’t the science advisor when he made his dire predictions of an Ice Age and Ice Age powered super tidal waves bringing destruction upon us all in 1971. He was just trying to make sense of the data at hand back then (global cooling!) – and maybe give it a teensy tiny Roland Emmerich dramatic effect.

John Tierney over at TierneyLab at the NY Times points out some essays by Holdren and longtime doom and gloomer Paul Ehrlich that have been republished over at Zombietime.

Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age.

Holdren’s speculation and conclusion that forced abortion and mass sterilization would be viable and Constitutional avenues for population control to stave off environmental disaster are certainly out of box ideas. In his defense, the 1970’s was a scary time for Science Fiction. Logan’s Run, Silent Running and THX 1138 did not present an inspiring view of the future. Then again, outside Star Trek (which also prophesied a 21st Century collapse of civilization), what sci-fi films have a hopeful view of the future?

link: Holdren’s Ice Age Tidal Wave – TierneyLab Blog – NYTimes.com and zombietime

Wither the reputation of poor Catherine O’Leary. A muckraking hack thinks it’d make a great read to libel your name by insinuating a cow under your control kicked a lantern, which ignited the surrounding hay, which torched the barn which started the Great Chicago Fire.

These tall tales were eventually revealed to be what they were, fibs told by a fibbing fibber.

So what was the real reason Chi Town burnt down? Meteor showers! At least according to a 2004 report from engineer and physicist Robert R. Wood.

On October 8, 1871, a fire started that burned much of Chicago, killing 300, and destroying $200,000,000 worth of property. Most people are unaware that within a few minutes, major fires started in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, killing more than 2000 people in the farming country. Because of the poor communications with the upstate areas, the magnitude of the upstate horror was not known for weeks.

Biela’s Comet, with a solar orbital period of 6 years 9 months, had been disturbed by Jupiter on a previous passage and broke into two large comets. It has been hypothesized that one of them struck Earth and broke into several smaller pieces. These pieces, consisting of frozen comet gases would have likely included combustibles like methane CH4 and acetylene C2H2 that melted, vaporized and explosively ignited, causing impressive incendiary results upstate, consistent with surviving witness reports.

Blame that on a cow!

Bloody Mary is the Monster of the Week! Matt Finley explained some of the ghastly woman’s other talents on Monday. Wednesday he explained exactly why you’ve been hoodwinked into calling her out all these years..

With all the varying verbal harpoons fired out into the ether to drag Bloody Mary back into the living world, it’s easy to forget that, though the current urban legend has been disassembled and reconfigured, often to the point of unrecognizability, the first fearful, double-dog-dared invocations of Bloody Mary were spoken with Mary I of England in mind.

Mary I (not to be confused with Queen Mary of the Scots, who is often wrongly identified as the crotchety mirror-dwelling apparition) was the only child of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catharine of Aragorn, to survive into adulthood. Despite being unfavored and disregarded by her family, she received the crown in 1553 after her half-brother Edward died of tuberculosis. Bloody Mary went on to earn her macabre epithet when, after officially restoring Roman Catholicism to Great Britain, she began rounding up Protestant leaders and burning them at the stake, igniting a flurry of religious riots and violence. The most enduring modern connection to the story is any variant of the game in which summoners must speak the words, “Bloody Mary, I killed your child”- Mary I became so obsessed with producing a male heir that she endured two phantom pregnancies, during which she firmly believed she was carrying a child that was then somehow miscarried or aborted.

Generalizing for purposes of brevity, the origins of Bloody Mary as a Protestant horror story belie the deeper history of both a uniquely Protestant fascination with the occult and a trend of propagandized anti-Catholic gothic literature. Unlike most 16th century Catholics, whose faith was entrenched in dogma, hierarchy, tradition and ritual, many Protestants, especially in Ireland, believed in ghosts and superstitiously permitted the occult to fill in certain gaps that existed in the post-enlightenment thought that Protestantism so thoroughly embraced. Beyond assigning Mary I her now-infamous soubriquet (despite the fact that, in reality, the queen didn’t execute any more people than her Protestant father), the Protestants were later known for distributing pulp novellas that portrayed convents as dark caverns of orgiastic chaos with priests travelling through underground tunnels to engage in violent fornication with nuns, yielding innumerable illegitimate children that were then disposed of by horrific means. Given these factors, it’s easy to understand how a violent, Catholic threat to the Protestant faith was transformed into a vengeful specter – a zombified appendage of history reaching out at the giggling great grandchildren of unjustly murdered Anglicans.

Today’s Weird Things chat will one day be discovered by a team of overexcited, yet likely emotionally repressed, academics wearing khaki shorts. Hold on to your butts, we’re looking for the Weirdest Dinosaur in the World.

Here are the ground rules:

• Pictures, Pictures, Pictures

• Must be real.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids right here at the front page at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Our baseline was found on About.com and is the Suchomimus. Take it away blockquote…

Evolutionarily speaking, dinosaurs and crocodiles both branched off from archosaurs at the end of the Triassic period, and thereafter maintained fairly distinct lifestyles. Suchomimus looked like a bizarre hybrid of these two families: this theropod had the body of a carnivorous dinosaur, but the long, narrow, toothy snout of a crocodile (which it presumably used to snatch fish and small lizards out of lakes and rivers).

The truth is out there, we find it today at 5:30 p.m. EST.

The recent discovery of another megalithic site near Stonehenge has added yet another layer to the mystery.

The presence of “Blue Stonehenge” approximately a mile away suggests that it was part of a larger scheme. What these stone age land developers had in mind is still a matter of debate.

Sheffield University’s Professor Mike Parker Pearson, Director of the project, said: “It could be that Blue Stonehenge was where the dead began their final journey to Stonehenge. “Not many people know that Stonehenge was Britain’s largest burial ground at that time. Maybe the bluestone circle is where people were cremated before their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself.”

link: ‘Blue Stonehenge’ Discovered By UK Archaeologists

The Russian space research institute IKI has announced ambitious plans to explore the planet Venus. Is this a sign that they’ve forgone Mars because the “Red Planet” is just so cliche now? Or do they know something we don’t?

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Russia plots return to Venus

From New Scientist comes research that sleep is even weirder than we thought. Microsleep, hallucinations and sleepwalking murder are just some of the symptoms…

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

link: Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone – life – 07 October 2009 – New Scientist via KurzweilAI