WARNING: The following post contains SPOILERS about the new film The Box. If you do not wish to read SPOILERS, do not read this post. For it does indeed contain SPOILERS. SPOILERS.

Everyone knows the scenario: a well-dressed stranger arrives at your door and presents you with a wood-paneled box, atop which is a glass dome containing a shiny, red button. He says something to the effect of, “if you press the button, someone that you don’t know will totally die and you’ll receive x amount of cash money. Aw yeahz.” What do you do?

This past weekend, Richard Kelly’s adaptation of the classic Richard Matheson story “Button, Button” arrived in theaters and answered the question in true Darko style, with a resounding “I’d… um… well… deformed mind control guy and water teleportation and some NSA experiments funded by lightning aliens and… what was the question?” More than anything, though, Kelly’s film turns the mind back to Matheson’s original philosophical conundrum and the true issues at hand.

What Does it Mean to “Know” Someone?

Matheson’s ending, which is wholly disregarded in the Twilight Zone’s adaptation, and only summarily addressed in Kelly’s film, turns the wording of the enigmatic button contract into its own philosophical dilemma – after the button is activated, the presser’s husband dies and the confused, despondent presser is told, in smirking, ironic-twist fashion, that she never really knew him. Yeah, it’s sort of annoying in that Philosophy 101 “do I really even know myself?!” BUH BUH BUM! kinda way, but it does add a new dimension to the initial problem. You know who I don’t know? RICHARD MATHESON! OHHHH! INSANITY! Statistically speaking, though, it would most likely kill a random Asian person.

What’s a Human Life Worth?

Obviously, the woman in Matheson’s story, who presses the button for a payout of $50,000, values a single human life to be worth, at most, $50,000. The question becomes, of the theoretical individuals who don’t press the button, how many are actually morally incorruptible and how many are merely waiting for a better offer. The button test, as designed, doesn’t assess whether people will compromise their morals and indirectly kill a stranger for money; it tests whether certain individuals will compromise their morals for a specific sum. On one hand, this reveals a major flaw in the well-dressed stranger’s test. On the other hand, it does make you pause to think how much money you’d have to receive to press the button. On a third hand, it makes you think that you’d probably be willing to go as low as $10,000.

Pressing a Button is Fun

Think about how much more money you’d want if you only got to flip a switch or pull on a rope.

Travelet.com has this fun tourist destination known as Rookund in the Himalayas. It’s a lake filled with skeletons:

Roopkund is better off known as “The skeleton lake” due to the presence of an enormous grave that holds about 300 to 600 skeletons. This discovery has revolutionized the world of ancient history ever since 1942, when a park ranger came across this mass deposition of bones. It probably is an in-accessible frozen lake that requires about four day travel to reach from the nearest locality. Recently, it has become an important spot for the visitors as they learn and conjecture this advent of science.

link: Roopkund – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
link: Roopkund The Mysterious Skeleton Lake | Travelet

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

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!

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

Aboriginal mythology tells of an aquatic demon called a “bunyip” that haunts Australia’s riverbeds and marshes, lurking silently beneath the water’s shimmering surface, waiting to devour or drown any careless passersby. At night, the bunyip’s fierce roaring call sounds out across the black, hollow veil of darkness, rousing children from slumber and echoing through the dreams of adults.

According to the traditional folklore of various tribes, the bunyip has a dog-like head, walrus tusks, seal flippers, a furred torso and a horse tail. Sometimes also feathers. Or scales. It has also been described as a giant snake with a wild, tattered mane and as a half-human monster with a long neck and the head of a bird. There isn’t much consensus.

The creature’s tribe-to-tribe physiological variants underscore an interesting aspect of mythology – the biological attributes of legendary monsters are far less important to their existence than the socio-cultural service the beasties offer. The bunyip, for example, boasts as many physical variations as it does alleged sightings, but one detail remains consistent – its predilection toward dragging hapless Aborigines into streams, swamps and billabongs. The tale of the bunyip, then, has less to do with compiling a thorough dossier of Australia’s supernatural threats than with creatively imparting children with cautionary advice and containing the chaotic, imposing enigmas of the natural world within a comfortable, familiar narrative. Whether a bird-headed humanoid or a tusked snake, by keeping kids away from the crocodile-laden waters of Australia’s rivers, the bunyip helped prevent drownings and other gruesome deaths. It also, as evidenced by the many terrified descriptions of the animal’s nighttime vocalizations, offered tribes an explanation for the many unexplained sounds that issued out, distant and haunting, from wild dark glens and black lakes.

In the 1800s, the bunyip took on an entirely new cultural significance – as an example of the way Britain co-opted and Westernized the folklore and traditions of its colonies. In typical European fashion (as evidenced in America by the transmogrification of Native American mythology from symbolic representations of the aspects of nature to horror stories about colossal birds and sea serpents), the bunyip was immediately removed from its cultural context and literalized. The story promised more than ethnographic insight into an unfamiliar indigenous civilization – it promised a marvelous new animal.

Wednesday: The Great Victorian Bunyip Hunt

Special thanks to Sky News’ Viewers’ Editor Paul Bromley. We writes, what looks to be a pretty awesome blog.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how That ‘70s Show’s Donna and CSI: Miami’s Horatio Crane were both created by their respective networks in order to fulfill SAG-regulated ginger nut quotas. But with monsters. Enjoy.

Reaper, Episode 1×03, “All Mine”
AND
X-Files, Episode 9×05, “Lord of the Flies”

Fleas provide a wily vector for the bubonic plague and wipe out a third of the world’s population.

Killer bees buzz up against America’s borders, causing a prolonged nationwide freakout.

All kinds of weird bugs terrify Willie Scott and Indiana Jones almost dies.

Spread out across every continent and driven by a simplistic nervous system that puppeteers their segmented bodies towards only the most primal satisfactions, insects have alternately fascinated and terrified humans since the first time some blundering caveman saw a beehive and went all My Girl on it. Their ubiquity and instinctual persistence postures them as an ever-moving imagined boundary between nature and civilization that, for every two steps it’s forced back by poisons and zappers, advances one step forward into kitchens and bedrooms. Insects have proved such an enduring fixture of human experience that they’ve infested language itself, swarming the vernacular with a bevy of bug-related clichés, euphemisms and metaphors, ranging from “the birds and the bees” to “mad as a hornet” to “patience, young grasshopper.” It’s no surprise, then, that these perceived pests, and the swarm of associations they evoke, occupy their own cavernous burrow in the pantheon of pop culture, eating their way into the very foundation of American narrative.

Even beyond their aforementioned presence in spoken rhetoric, insects’ universality and relative biological simplicity allow them to play the cipher for a variety of basic human circumstances, relationships and emotions. For instance, both the episodes examined in today’s column employ bugs in exploring different dimensions of love, from the ardor and stewardship that shape and fortify it, to the gnawing jealousy and guilt that can hollow it out from the inside. One episode uses the fundamental disgust that bugs can instill to channel the gross desperation and jealousy that the jilting wake of lust- gone-awry can inflict, while the other, in a failed attempt to portray a good kid gone bad in the name of both love and a genetic disease, ends up utilizing the simple, beautiful biology of insects as a microscope through which to examine the exact point of impact in a collision between feelings and actions.

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After much speculation the bio blob spotting floating off the coast of Alaska has been identified as common marine algae.

Here’s the official wording:

“We got the results back from the lab today,” said Ed Meggert of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks on Thursday. “It was marine algae.”

Miles of the thick, dark gunk had been spotted floating between Barrow and Wainwright, prompting North Slope Borough officials and the Coast Guard to investigate last week. A sample was sent to a DEC lab in Anchorage, where workers looked at it under a microscope and declared it some kind of simple plant — an algae, Meggert said.

Everyone consult your office pool and notify the winners to collect from the treasurer.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

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Please follow the cues for this YouTube playlist throughout the post.

In the sewers of North Carolina lies a strange creature. Pulsating and wiggling in the first video on this playlist. Could it be of alien origin? CHUD? A metaphor of a chemical society gone too far?

Apparently none of the above. According to the How Stuff Works blog this thing is called Bryozoa. It’s a 350-million year old primitive animal life form comprised of smaller, ickier life forms. Which brings us to video number two, as it happens, down on the Bayou they don’t take to kindly to 350-million year old primitive animal life forms. Watch as a pair of Bryozoa are blown to bits by way of a M1 Springfield 30.06 rifle. And Rage Against The Machine.

But just when things have come to a shocking conclusion, we get the cliff hanger. Those gun nuts got the wrong guy/thing. The inquisitive minds at Deep Sea News consulted an expert on Bryozoa and he claims the sewer video features a pulsating look at Tubifex (video number three, please) a collection of worms that normally are found at the edge of polutted streams. In the NC sewer video, he claims that they’ve gathered around each other and the movements are caused by one worm contracting, which stimulated all the others to move.

Credit to Brian Brushwood and Dodd Vickers for digging through this mess on Twitter last night.

Elmo doesn’t really love you, in fact, he wants to kill you. Or so found out a Florida two-year old named James when his talking Elmo doll started making death threats. Elmo was behaving well enough, until one day the adorable toddler’s mother changed the batteries and the doll’s language took a Chuckiesque turn. It stated saying “Kill James”. How creeped out would you be, if the doll you had bought for your toddler started ordering his demise?

After the family made a media stink about the incident last year, Fisher-Price, makers of the foul mouthed doll, promised to launch an investigation and replaced the offending, lovable, red mop-head.

-To hear an audio recording of the doll saying “Kill James” click here.