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

One movie. Five people, living or dead, at the screening. Who and why?

Today’s screening: “eXistenZ”

An indispensible entry in the mid-‘90s oeuvre of sci-fi mind-ef cinema, David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ,” a pseudo update of his 1986 opus “Videodrome,” is the story of a state-of-the-art simulated reality game played on a bio-organic console that plugs into the user’s spine. But it goes wrong! Or is it just part of the game? Only some mutated lizards and Willem Defoe know the truth.

William Gibson (1948- ), Author

Gibson, whose 1984 novel “Neuromancer” kick-started the literary cyberpunk movement, was the first author to write in detail about an artificial reality accessed via surgically installed bio-ports. After the screening, he’ll want to personally thank Cronenberg for blatantly sexualizing his concept. Get in line, Will. You’re behind the inventor of the VCR and the first car crash victim.

Nick Bostrom (1973- ), Philosopher

Before the Wachowskis mated simulated reality with an S&M munitions factory, Bostrom posited the simulation hypothesis, which offers an empirically reasoned argument for reality as a technologically generated simulation. I have a lot of questions for Nick. “That door…is that a simulation? Okay, but what about the TV? Really? How about the ocean? Damn. But the moon is real, right?…”

James Woods (1947- ), Actor

Noted maniac and star of “Videodrome,” Woods can entertainingly contribute to the inevitable discussion comparing the two films – Which is cooler, “Videodrome”’s flesh gun that shoots cancer, or “eXistenZ”’s jawbone gun that shoots teeth? Would you rather have sex with Woods’ VCR tummy vagina or Jude Laws’ Konami spine anus? Woods responds, “yes to all.”

Carol Shaw, Video Game Designer

Best known for creating Activision’s “River Raid” in 1982, Shaw, now retired, was the first female game designer. Given that “eXistenZ” portrays a savvy female game designer (definitely not a Hollywood archetype), it would be fun to watch it with her. Plus, she’s something else I can point to and ask Nick if it’s simulated.

Jerry Holkins (1976- ), Writer

Writer of the hilarious gaming-centric webcomic “Penny Arcade,” Holkins is an outspoken gaming expert. He’s likely to offer a funny, intelligent critique of the movie’s portrayal of video game art and cultural. Also, I don’t know what his policy is on people rubbing his big, bald baby head, but I think Woods is gonna be all over it, regardless.

Ron Bailey at Reason.com attended the Singularity Summit on NYC and was presented with several scenarios of the future. Many of them were quite frightening.

As the Singularity Institute’s Anna Salamon explained in her opening presentation at the summit, smarter intelligences might choose to get rid of us because our matter is not optimally arranged to achieve their goals.

Fun stuff. Let’s hope our matter is as optimally arranged as possible.

Will Our Robot Overlords Be Friendly? – Reason Magazine

If you think the concept hurts your brain, wait until you try reading the article on Pravda.

We think it has something to do with human hybrids, but talks a lot about a dog giving birth to kittens…

Mankind Close to Creating ‘Mananimal’ – Pravda.Ru

Mr. Show had it first…

Real story.

UK’s own Diggerland won the prize this week in minimalist fashion. Watch the super-catchy commercial and theme song AFTER THE JUMP!

(more…)

Today’s Weird Things chat the trip you’ve been looking forward too all summer. Bug the hell out of your parents and fill up on cotten candy, we’re aiming to find the Weirdest Amusement Park in the World.

Here are the ground rules:

• Pictures, Pictures, Pictures

• Must be real. Not like that one book with the abandoned Civil War amusement park that was haunted.

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 Neatorama and is a veritable festering hive of blatant copyright infringement. Remember your friend in middle school who kept drawing Disney characters that looked slightly off? It’s like they let him design a theme park.

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

Few people on Earth have watched as many vampire films over the past few weeks as the hard-working staff of the 2009 Vampire Film Festival. While they prepare to descend onto New Orleans October 23rd for a four day celebration of vampire-centric film, music and celebration they were nice enough to send Weird Things their 10 biggest pet peeves with the vamp genre.

The search for a long-dead lover. It always ends in finding some poor girl who is the dead amours dead ringer, literally. That plot device had been overused to the point of being clichéd.

One bite transforms you into a vampire. Sorry, this would mean we’d be up to our eyebrows in the pesky things world-wide in about six months.

Vampires must kill regularly to feed. Anne Rice does this, but consider — three vampires in New Orleans killing at least once a night for sixty years. That is over sixty thousand corpses! In a city with a population of less than a quarter of a million! The Civil War was less devastating to the city!

Killer sun exposure. This device is not in vampire lore or Dracula but from the film Nosferatu. Vampires are depicted as an all-powerful, eternal beings but their Achilles’ heel is the sun. How can you be all-powerful if you can be bumped off by a suntan?

Sloppy eaters. I love cioppino, for example. Love it. But when I eat it, only a few drops might end up on my lips and shirt. Why would vampires be any different? Or if you use the analogy of addiction — do addicts spill cocaine? Not deliberately they don’t! In fact they’ll go to great lengths not to!

Flight. No offense but I’m a bit bored by vampires who can fly a la Superman. Or are associated with bats for some reason. Neither has any basis in folklore (well, some Asian vampires can fly…)

Secret vampire societies. Another overworked device that is a bit lame but takes care of one issue with vampires…how the hell do they make a living?

Vampire males who mope about being vampires. Okay we get it, you don’t like biting people for your next meal but please don’t push undead angst to the limit

Ancient juvenile delinquents. You have centuries to grow, to learn, to experience things. And in all that time all you end up becoming is a bully? Frankly, that is hard to believe. Some might atrophy, might go subtly mad as they coped less and less well with change, or become focused on individual obsessions, but wouldn’t others–given the time and the opportunities huge amounts of time provides–evolve into more interesting persons?

Bug-eating servants. Renfield was innovative in his day. Devouring live insects is no longer edgy, but cliche.

Other pet peeves include:

Weird Vampire Sounds. What’s Up with the hissing sounds the vampires make in films.

Letting it All Hang Out. The stupid face they make when they bare their fangs, is that really necessary?

Over stating the Myth. Garlic, stakes, crosses sunlight-one of these usually doesn’t work on vampires. Which ones varies. Usually it is accompanied by ” X doesn’t work!”

All Vampires Are Evil. How would that work, precisely? Even on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a person’s soul is replaced by a demon’s when turned undead, vampires ended up with a wide variety of behaviors, including Spike (starting before the chip) and Harmony. I’m less displeased if some kind of justification is given, but usually there isn’t even a hint.

Oversexed vampire tarts. They are always played by played by big-breasted, no-talented actresses and the whole thing is tired…at least to the women in the audience.

If you are in the New Orleans area or just really love the idea of those dapper undead scamps please take the time to check out the Vampire Film Festival website. The fest begins October 23rd and runs for four days. We thank them for helping us out and would like to editorially note that we are quite fond of the oversexed vampire tart concept.

If you’d like more information on the Cotesia Glomerata read this stuff. Wow.

Today’s Weird Things chat is going deep into the world of unwelcome guests. Ready the antidote, we’re going to find the Weirdest Parasites in the World.

Here are the ground rules:

• If possible PLEASE include a picture of either the parasite or the animal it infects.

• NO CRYPTIDS, all entries must be verified by mainstream science.

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 comes from National Geographic. They are grasshopper-infecting hairworms.

cientists say hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, pump the insects with a cocktail of chemicals that makes them commit suicide by leaping into water. The parasites then swim away from their drowning hosts to continue their life cycle.

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