We can now see how a galaxy will look 10,000 years in the future.

“It takes high-speed, sophisticated computer programs to measure the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur in only four years’ time,” said astronomer Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who conducted the study with fellow STScI astronomer Roeland van der Marel. “Ultimately, though, it is Hubble’s razor-sharp vision that is the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this cluster.”

That is awesome.

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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…
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It’s happening again… again. Give it up for Bloody Mary.

You have already been acquainted with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid/folktale (e.g., Bloody Mary) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets).

You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it have originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, creative problem solving techniques or subtle attempts at blackmail. And if there were, it would be something plagued by poorly welded corner seams and filled with molten lava, and nobody would want it.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the general ghost-in-the-mirror slumber party exploits of Bloody Mary, read this English-language Wikipedia article

As David Bowie once crooned, “Let’s dance!”:

Your Language Choices:
a.) Italian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Bloody Mary:

1. This language’s Bloody Mary entry is little more than a single-paragraph blurb that identifies the ritual as a courage test, mentions the optional use of candles and explains that the ghost is often summoned via the “rearview mirror of a car where there was associated in his lifetime, in which case at least one person has walked up it turned out to talk with her, but once.” The related links, however, guide readers to a page about a different legend – the legend of “Anne toilet.” According to the story, Anne was a young woman who was killed in the bathroom of her school and subsequently began haunting other school bathrooms. Supposedly, “in a certain school toilets should not everyone in a certain way and call Anne [ reply comes back from the shot. ‘ Wearing a red skirt , the most famous figure of the girl bobbed hair.”

2. On this language’s Wikipedia, the legend behind the familiar sleepover game goes thusly: there was a girl of 14 who died in an unspecified, but almost certainly tragic, accident. Her mother went so insane in the grief-coping center of her membrane that she “attacked on his arm a wire connected to a bell outside the coffin and the ground.” Mary’s mother swore she could hear the bell jingling, over and over again, resounding in her skull like some horrific parody of Christmas. Finally, she persuaded her already devestated husband to dig up their daughter’s coffin. “As soon as it was opened in horror as their parents saw that Mary had tried to open the coffin and had pulled all the nails against the wall to exit. But now Mary had died and the parents went mad with grief that he killed their daughter.” The page goes on to explain that in America, Bloody Mary is usually described as a girl killed in a car accident or “a girl buried alive by his own beliefs are so many parents.”

3. This language’s Wikipedia site doesn’t even have a page for Bloody Mary, but instead, after automatically sending users to a page about the cocktail, redirects folklore researchers to a catch-all page about Bogey figures throughout the world. Aside from an easily missed nod to Bloody M., the page features descriptions of Hakemann, “A hybrid of man and fish. Attracts swimmers children drown in water with a hook to it and be eaten by him,“ Schneider with the Shear, “which cuts the disobedient child,“ and Stranger, “a bright green pants and a black coat in appearance.“ (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

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I finally watched “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.” And I say Booo! I’m not gonna dress this post up in some florid over-long introduction and frilly poetical conclusion just so I can puke up all over it after the dance. The movie is no good.

For those of you who don’t obsessively track the misadventures of distributionless horror movies: “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is a 2007 serial killer flick, filmed documentary style, about a mass murderer in Poughkeepsie, New York, who videotaped his numerous hellacious homicides. Written, produced and directed by the Brothers Dowdle, the film kicked around the festival circuit, got bought by MGM, was scheduled for a tentative, ultimately cancelled, 2009 theatrical release, and then just sort of faded away. (You can dig it up online in all of the places you’re already thinking to check.)

Dance time.

AFTER THE JUMP…
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I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

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I’ve been reading the 1980 Arkham House anthology “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” in which 9 Lovecraft-lovin’ fiction authors were given the opportunity to trifle in the late horror master’s occult, cosmic sandbox, and it’s made me realize how easy it is to reduce Lovecraft’s time- and dimension-spanning vision to a stock set of props. That’s not a shot at the book, the contributors to which are, generally speaking, immensely imaginative in their takes on all things eldritch, stygian and squamish (if you can find it online, check out Basil Copper’s moody and frightening entry, “Shaft Number 247”).

Aside from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lovecraft is probably the inspiration behind the largest quantity of published fanfic. It just occurs to me that, given the current uptick in Lovecraft’s cultural stock value – Cthulhu plush dolls consorting among the superhero maquettes in so many comic stores, the continuous rumors surrounding Guillermo Del Toro’s never-gonna-happen “At The Mountains of Madness” adaptation, the recent DVD release of the documentary “Strange Tales – The Weird Life of H. P. Lovecraft” – it’s easy to get caught up in the physical landmarks of the author’s fiction while still ignoring their path, and that path’s downward trajectory into an insanity that transcends the clichéd jabbering symptoms of the stock lunatic, and defies the single crisp snap of the mind that is too often ascribed to the boundary between lucidity and madness.

Devil’s advocate, though – if you’re intent on adding to the bevy of lazy Lovecraft-inspired tales that, together, read like the Taco Bell menu, with each uniquely named product comprising the same dependable set of tired ingredients, here’s what you might want to include:

Giant, Really, Really Old Books of the Occult

The tomes are always heavy and dusty, with brittle, yellowed pages and a voluminous quantity of forbidden information regarding alchemy and the summoning of ancient powers. Sometimes they are written in archaic, forgotten languages, but, for the multilingual late bloomer, the library at Miskatonic University usually has the last existing translation. Someone’s always searching for these volumes so they can discover wild, pseudo-scientific secrets, but then they just end up summoning Nyarlathotep or a bunch of Shoggoths. Note to Hollywood: Please make a “NeverEnding Story” remake in which the kindly book dealer gives Bastian the Necronomicon. Lots of times, these books are owned by…

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

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I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

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Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Fever

Zeus’ Toolbox

You will need: 1 THUNDER AXE (Symmetrical Double-Headed Axe)
Instructions: Use THUNDER AXE
Note: Use caution when operating THUNDER AXE

From The Country That Gave You The Blood Of Kali…

You will need: Water; Dirt Collected From Tomb Of St. Thomas In Chennai, India
Instructions: Mix water and holy grave dirt; Drink

Neptune’s Formalwear Accessory

You will need: 1 Seahorse (fresh or dried)
Instructions: Fasten seahorse to left arm
Note: If you think it looks weird having a seahorse attached to only one of you arms, use THUNDER AXE to remove other arm

Sweet, Merciful Oats

You will need: 1 Pious Neighbor; 1 Dish; Grain
Instructions: Place grain in dish; Instruct pious neighbor to pray over grain
Note: Works best for fevers caused by “ill wishers”

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease (9 End Pieces Worse)

You will need: 9 Loaves of Bread
Instructions: Eat first slice from each loaf

Repentance Of The Drunken Steel (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Wine-Soaked Sword Formerly Used To Decapitate A Man
Instructions: Touch sword
Note: If you don’t have such a sword, make one! All you need is a regular sword, a man, a steady arm and wine

Audubon’s Last Resort

You will need: 1 Bag; 1 String; 1 Tub of Cold Water; 1 Live Eagle
Instructions: Clip nails; Place clippings in bag; Tie bag around eagle’s neck; Hold eagle in tub of water; When eagle becomes sick, fever will dissipate

3k Exorcism Dash

You will need: 1 Garter; 1 Koorsboom Tree
Instructions: Compel fever spirits to leave body and enter garter;
Tie garter around Koorsboom tree; run from Koorsboom tree without once looking back
Note: fever can also be driven into a Fedora, which should then be placed on a baby bear

Woah! Shell Shock!

You will need: 1 Live Turtle; Pepper; Incense
Instructions: Cut open live turtle; Rub insides with pepper and incense; Apply to feet
Note: Cure is most likely to work if selected turtle’s demeanor is cool, but also rude

Larva THIS, Buttface! (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Righteous Loogie; 1 Hairy Caterpillar
Instructions: Spit on caterpillar; Say, “Take that!” (optional)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

Find the Fiend

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This gray gelatinous creature, which, like a slug, is rumored to favor warm beer, is sometimes blamed for abducting both pets and people from neighborhoods in Eastern Maine.

b.) Similar to genies, these small monsters supposedly possess the ability to realize the fantasies of their victims, though, once realized, the dreams are said to turn deadly.

c.) These winged monsters allegedly kidnap children, fly the children to the peak of a dormant volcano and then devour the children.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…

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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

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Sure, the monsters that stalk through horror films aren’t great guys but they aren’t all bad. Matt Finley investigates the Upside Of Evil…

I didn’t write a tribute to the late Dennis Hopper. I wanted to. But what I could add to the conversation? Yeah, I saw “Speed” in the theatre, but I didn’t feel as though that qualified me to pen an adoring elegy to Easy Rider himself. The director of “Colors.” King of the Koopas.

Then, last night, I watched “Blue Velvet.” I gotta say, the movie gets more rewarding with every consecutive viewing, and it’s largely due to Hopper’s unfailingly disturbing portrayal of Frank Booth, a monster twice as grotesque as the latex-bound, corn syrup-smeared atrocities I usually address in these posts. Just like how every rose has its thorn, every thorn has its dreams (Or, you know, its overly cautious bee that has a crush on it but doesn’t want to get stabbed, or to jump-start the rumor mill). It would be arrogant to assume that, just because Frank Booth is a psychotic, gas-huffing, misogynistic sadist with a longshoreman’s tongue and a wolverine’s temper, we can’t learn something from him.

So, Mr. Hopper – Here’s to your f*ck:

The lessons begin AFTER THE JUMP. Also, if you haven’t seen Blue Velvet, consider yourself spoiler warned. (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

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