The social hierarchy of a wasp is pretty rigid. But what if a snide little parasite made you a deal. You could live the life of a queen, no foraging for anyone but yourself, living off the fat of the land. All you have to do is become subservient to a macabre march of death that enslaves your brethren and propagates the evil parasite.

For many paper wasps through Europe, the answer is “yes, please!”

The parasite X. vesparum infects the wasp which withdraw from their previous social pattern and instinctively fly away to a meeting point with other parasites. It’s there the parasites mate, with the male hosts disposing of their wasp coats, leaving them to die. But the females remain inside the wasps, turning them into zombie queens which find food for themselves and fatten up while infecting other nests and plants with the parasite larva.

“After that, they start wandering among the colonies,” spreading their deadly larval load, said Manfredini. “They don’t lay eggs. They don’t build colonies. They’re completely anarchic.”

Get your zombie queen paper wasp costume ready for Halloween!

[Wired]

Men are funnier than women, according to a new study out of UC San Diego.

But only barely, a scientist quickly added realizing he still has to go home to his wife.

And men mostly found other men funny which accounts for the slight advantage, added a young lab tech whose blind date arrived awkwardly while the announcement was made.

Although those qualifiers are not true (nor funny) the facts remain that men tested funnier on average than women, if just barely.

…the study’s first author Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology and a Ph.D. graduate of the same department, “The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype.”

Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier.

So how do a pack of intellectuals measure what is funny and what isn’t? Why a controlled version of a New Yorker cartoon caption contest, of course! (tea cups cling as pinkies arise) Each volunteer wrote captions for the legendarily erudite scribbles and then had they rated by other test takers. The study also tested to see if funny captions were more memorable.

[Science Daily]

Cyclops Shark! Sharks have moved into a new level of nightmare fuel!

Earlier this year fisher Enrique Lucero León legally caught a pregnant dusky shark near Cerralvo Island (see map) in the Gulf of California. When León cut open his catch, he found the odd-looking male embryo along with its nine normal siblings. “He said, That’s incredible—wow,” said biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña, of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico.

Sharks are being born with one eye and if it weren’t for this intrepid fisherman, he’d be creeping out the waters around California even as we type this sentence.

[Nat Geo]

There is a breath of fresh air, a unique buoyancy, to viewing a television series where you trust the storyteller. Gone is the nagging sense of second guessing or internal apologizing for obvious flaws because you so want to love the project as a whole.

It’s just you and the story, riding the rhythm of plot.

That is The Walking Dead.

Of course any informed fan of the series is living in fear, not unlike Andrea trembling behind the RV door with a curious walker sniffing inches away, as to when the current sense of rapture might abruptly end after AMC’s senseless in-production banishing of series mastermind Frank Darabont.

But enough of the dread, let’s focus on the now.

The zombie apocalypse survive-a-long returned to television Sunday after a nearly yearlong absence with nothing short of the best episode the series has delivered to date. Characters reset, season plots began to emerge and a few Lost tropes were dusted off for good measure.
The End is back, read on AFTER THE JUMP to get all the details on “What Lies Ahead” including the episodes best moments, ratings triumphs and a countdown as to when we can all start panicking about the quality of the series… (more…)

Andrew geeks out about the new Space X launches and proposes the first ever Weird Things meet-up. Brian descends into the jungle to find a furry, bipedal creature. Justin plays referee as the rest of the crew argue with each other on which side of the great Shark / Octopus War they are going to be on. Who will you choose?

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new book The Chronological Man: The Monster In The Mist for only 99¢ at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings101711.mp3

[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings101711.mp3[/podcast]

Sponsored by:

@snywalker

Jonathan Janzen

Diedre & Daniel

Picks:

Brian-

• Breaking Bad

Justin-

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Andrew-

• Real Steel

Simone Allyne is the Weird Things eBook reviewer focusing on readily available, affordable Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you have a book you’d like reviewed, please email WeirdThingsMail@Gmail

“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just eat people, like a normal vampire, but no, not only do I have a conscience, I have a roommate with a Kal-el complex and a priest for a best friend. “

I love vampires and I love detective stories, so imagine my excitement when I came across Hard Days Knight by John Hartness!  He’s taken two of my favorite genres and combined them into one heck of a story!

It’s the week before Halloween and all Hell is about to break loose, quite literally.

Vampire private detectives Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood have been hired by a young boy to keep him from being cursed for all eternity, but end up with a bigger problem than they could have ever imagined; a problem roughly the size of the 7^th circle of Hell.

Hartness writes a story that feels like a cross between Moonlight and Cara Lockwood’s Every Demon Has His Day.  His writing is witty, culturally relevant and has a good dose of pop culture references to keep you turning the pages to see just how bad it can get for these two self-professed nerdy, permanently college-aged vampires.

Our protagonists find themselves trapped in the middle of a multiple kidnapping case, during which Jimmy and Greg uncover a plan to bring forth an archduke of Hell.  In their attempt to thwart a literal Hell on earth situation they enlist the help of a police detective, a priest, a witch, and a fallen angel (who also happens to own strip club) to save the world. This unusual group of human and non-human band together to stop zombies, witches, neuroses and potentially the worst sunburn of their lives while cracking jokes and searching for the perfect midnight snack.

Hard Day’s Knight is a perfect fall read, just in time for Halloween!

[Amazon]

Walking Dead mastermind Robert Kirkman has famously said his most popular franchise was borne from wondering what happens after a zombie movie. Typically, a zombie outbreak story begins with a relatable reality, add zombies, initial crisis ensues, survivors band together and after a few casualties the initial crisis is solved. But when the credits roll, our main characters are left in a world changed forever.

What happens to them? How do they cope? How do they eat? Do they forget the past? Do they make a future?

The Walking Dead is that story and Kirkman is telling it twice. Once in the original comic incarnation and simultaneously on AMC as a surprisingly popular hour-long drama (returning with a second season this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on AMC) of which he is a writer and executive producer. There is a reason his second draft, initially reshaped by mastermind Frank Darabont, is more popular.

Thanks to more consistent relatable characters, key revisions in the canon story and new wrinkles added exclusively in the AMC series it’s way, way better than the source material. Some might disagree but we survive by pulling together and not apart, with a warning of heavy spoilers through the first season of the AMC show and the first 25 issues of the comic, I’ll explain my position. (more…)

While filming the fifth installment of the Resident Evil franchise 16 zombie extras fell from a platform. Emergency responders, who were unaware of the costumes, were taken aback when brought to the pile of mangled faces, discolored skin and peeling flesh.

Paramedics responded to the call from Cinespace Film Studios around 8 a.m. to find what appeared — thanks to Hollywood special effects makeup — to be people who had suffered some untold catastrophe.

“I could see the look on the first paramedic, saying ‘Oh my God,'” Toronto emergency medical services Commander David Ralph said with a laugh.

Toronto Police Sgt. Andrew Gibson said responders quickly figured out which zombies were injured and which were just in character. “It did kind of catch us off guard when we walked in,” he said.

Thankfully, none of the injuries were life threatening and all of the zombies will live on to stagger another day.

[Fox News]

Interesting find on Deadline today suggesting that Box Office success can be directly predicted by your impatience while watching a DVR’d episode of Fringe.

More specifically, commercials for movies that are fast forwarded more often tend to do worse when released in theaters than those that get viewed. One might think this would reward high spectacle films that would showcase an eye-popping visual to stop a FF in it’s tracks but it isn’t that simple. According to TiVo the most skipped movie ad is The Three Musketeers which features all manner of zeppelins, swordplay, muskets, jumping, bodices and swordplay.

The least skipped? Shrek spin-off Puss In Boots.

What still needs to be adjusted for, in our opinion, is repetition of ads. We might suspect that a film with an ad in heavy rotation for two weeks would get a higher skip rating in the second week than the first because people have seen the clip already.

So the next time you want to predict Box Office success, look no further than your own thumb for the answers.

[Deadline]

Red Hartebeest: 1 – Biker: 0.

That looked pretty deliberate on the Hartebeest’s part. Also looks very painful.

[Deadspin]

Phoenix Jones prowls the streets at night, keeping things safe for the citizens of Seattle. But today he finds himself on the other end of the law, accused of needlessly pepper spraying a pack of late-night revelers who may press charges against the body-armor clad super hero.

A video of the incident, seen above, shows Jones rushing into what looks like a violent scrum before breaking it up. To pacify the crowd he pulls the trigger on a black bottle of pepper spray and shoots into the scrum. This does not please some of the women of the group who begin to beat Phoenix with handbags and shoes.

While waiting for the cops to arrive, two of the men from the group attempt to gain retribution by charging Phoenix, only to end up with an eye full of pepper-y tears for their troubles.

The pedestrians, described as “drunken” in the video of the incident, claim they were singing peacefully before Jones charged toward them.

Police eventually arrived and arrested Phoenix who spent the night in jail.

[Fox News]

In the comments on our post yesterday about the Creston Flats Bigfoot footage, and the resulting controversy over it’s legitimacy, we got a very interesting comment. A person claiming to be Troy Hunter, the creator of the video, gives us a full explanation on the video including how old it is (three years), if he believes it’s Bigfoot (he doesn’t) and if he used any kind of digital editing to create the clip (he didn’t).

The email used to create the comment is associated elsewhere on the net with Troy and the IP address used is from the appropriate Western Canadian region. So, we’re taking this one as legit but feel free to apply all due skepticism.

I believe this is not a Bigfoot but the footage is in fact real. There has been controversy about whether or not I created this scene using cuts from another scene; it certainly is not a cut, its all real.

What happened after I shot the video, I immediately drove my
car to where the thing would emerge; I cut it off at the pass. First off, there was an empty car sitting beside the track. When it came out, at the very moment it came out, another vehicle pulled out of the parking lot at the Creston Valley Wildlife Centre, which was just behind me and that third vehicle drove past the empty car, my car and the thing that emerged. I believe that the other person driving the vehicle also saw the thing that emerged, it would have been very difficult not to.

What was actually wading through those bushes? Find out AFTER THE JUMP where the rest of the story continues!

What I saw that day was a human being wearing some sort of
bug screen on his head and what looked like a complete bug suit of some
sort. He was walking with two dogs. I believe I had my 35mm camera ready to capture the best photos of a real sasquatch but man was I disappointed to see a man and a car. The look on the guys’ face was almost pure fright and I was so embarrassed for him, I couldn’t even take a picture of him.

I left to continue my journey to drive to Cranbrook thinking
that I was a victim of a hoaxer. All I could think about was that the beer brewery company in Creston was using the image of the sasquatch in their marketing efforts and that somehow this guy might have had something to do with it. What I didn’t think so much about was the other vehicle that sped off, maybe somebody was in the process of creating a video and I just happened to come along at the exact time and then I shot my own video.

When I shot that video, I imagined I was really shooting a
video of a sasquatch. I was as disappointed as many of you who read this will be as well and to you I apologize. Maybe that guy was just out for a walk with his dogs and he liked to go where the mosquitoes roam; I don’t know the full story only he does. Maybe the
footage I shot was really a Bigfoot and this guy in a bugsuit just came out of nowhere out for an early stroll but based on a balance of probabilities, that guy was the same in the footage I shot.

The weekend before I posted my video clip, I went to Cranbrook and retrieved all my videotapes. On Thursday night I found the three-year-old footage of what really, really does look like Bigfoot and without giving it much thought, I shared it to YouTube under Creative Commons – Attribution. If I recall, I didn’t do anything with this footage because I believed it was not Bigfoot and that it would only serve
to help sell more beer for a beer brewing company, “It’s the beer out here”.

The day after I posted the video, there were people who said
I made this footage by mixing the Patterson-Gimley footage into a different scene; it is all real, 100%. It is exactly as I saw it that day as I was passing by. Now that I have been asked about why I waited three years to reveal this footage, you have the answer. I am not a hoaxer, I just posted what I saw and then I defended the fact it is an intact footage.

Before this gets carried away, I felt it was important to share the rest of the story with you and I thank all the skeptics who were very
skeptical, you know who you are and I thank you and please accept my apology for not explaining everything I knew about this footage right from the start.

As a result of posting, I had the opportunity this past weekend to do some research. As for Bigfoot, yes, I am a believer and yes, we have stories, and I may have seen one in 1985 as well as evidence in the 1970s in the Creston Flats. I was able to do some learning through
various online blogs and videos, etc. I have a very strong theory about a particular Bigfoot story and I wish to shed light on in the future. Just remember that all I did was present original footage and respond to questions and comments that came out, since you have asked; now you have the full story.

Need light? Can’t afford electricity? Here is a novel solution being implemented in the slums of the Philippines. WARNING: it does involve cutting a hole in a roof.

Crypto folks were abuzz this weekend with a new video entitled Creston Flats Bigfoot. Without further comment, here is that video:

More details on the area where it was shot including local pictures and Google Maps can be found here at Bigfoot Evidence.

Meanwhile, The Crypto Hunters have called shenanigans on the clip and explain their grievance in a short video clip of their own, as found on their Facebook page.

So what say you weirdlings and weirdos? Real deal or digital trickery?

Two counties in Southern England have kept a disturbing secret since 2000. Big cats. Huge, killer beasts have prowled their streets. According to a Freedom of Information Act request, over 205 sightings in a ten year time.

Details of the phone calls range from straightforward details of times, locations and descriptions, to the somewhat strange.

One call recorded in February 2000, from the Roche area of Mid Cornwall, states: “Sighting of large cat-type creature. Caller stated that her son saw a large cat in fields behind their farm in the last five minutes or so.

“Caller stated that it has disappeared again but she wanted to know if they could shoot it, if seen again, or is it protected?” Seven months later, a member of the public from Axminster said: “The beast of Bodmin Moor is in the top of my garden lying down digesting his dinner. I called you 30 minutes ago re. this.”

Although reports have tapered off in recent years, there still remains the mystery of where these cats came from and if they are still lurking in the darkness. Waiting to strike.

[This Is Cornwall]

This is a water hazard I can get behind.

[io9 via Sky News and YouTube]