The University of Oxford’s Internet Institute has analyzed Google search patterns and discovered that there are places in the United States where there are more people searching for zombies and satan than for Santa Claus.

“a few pockets including just outside the San Francisco Bay and Seattle and the cities Houston, Dallas and Austin in Texas have a lot of zombie angst. Hmmm…it might be the only things these places are in agreement on. But one of the more interesting clusters runs from Tampa to Orlando Florida….home of Disney World. Sort of makes sense in a way. Also of interest is a thin band of zombies stretched out along the Eastern seaboard, west of most of the major metropolitan areas.”

Check out the Satan cluster around Tampa Bay; I am going to have to start watching my neighbors a little more closely. You can download the data here and find your own patterns.

[Floating Sheep via Gizmodo]

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Tirades ever thrown.

Today’s post actually revolves around a tiny blurb in a sixty year old magazine, so I’ll let you be the judge as to whether it is even close to on topic or not. But here’s the thing: I’m writing this post and your not and the bottom line is that the image said blurb conjured in my mind made me laugh. A lot.

Today we’re taking you back to a simpler time. A time when Santa Claus was just an amorphous figure. A character that was simply an amalgamation of religious stories and folklore, not some cheap marketing whore who’s willing to sell his bearded face to the highest bidder (which often seems to be your local mall…go figure).

But already, in 1951, there were hints that the times…oh, they were a changin’. Case in point, in December of that year LIFE magazine ran a story titled Santa Claus to Santa Stooge, all about the horrors of Santa shilling products and participating in promotional stunts. Apparently this was a new thing for the Greatest Generation to cope with, on account of one of the guys playing Santa in a parade in Ontario, after being mobbed by excited children (who had yet to be warned about unshaved strangers with candy), lost his temper and start kicking at all the greedy little grandparents to be.

Now you tell me, how can you not love the visual of some guy looking to cash in on his overweight gut and graying hair suddenly realizing he has bitten off more than he can chew and kicking wildly at any kid too excited by the idea of seeing the unseeable to stay out of leg’s length?!

Here’s the link to the LIFE article, but honestly, the entire magazine is filled with gold. Give it a look.

Anyone have any better crazy Santa stories?! Let me know!

Find the Fiend – Holiday Edition

Below are descriptions of three murderous Santas. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a homicidal costumed fat man who actually existed (and isn’t John Wayne Gacy). Can you Find the Fiend?

A) This troubled toy store employee made off with the company Santa Suit, which he then wore during an overnight killing spree.

B) This enraged rocket scientist decked himself out as jolly ol’ St. Nick before laying siege to his ex’s Christmas party with semi-automatics and Molotov cocktails.

C) This misguided bell-ringing charity Santa led a double life as a pickpocket and, upon being caught by a different charity Santa, promptly murdered and did away with the witness.

Answer after the cut.

The correct answer is b.

Tug at your collars and “too soon” me all you want – this 2008 story of Christmas carnage is too crazy not to reiterate. As a token of my respect for the victims and their families, I’ll forego any “Futurama” Santa references (but just the Santa ones. I can still say “Scruffy knows who killed them people.”) On December 18th of last year, Los Angeles natives Bruce Pardo and his ex-wife finalized their divorce and went their separate, acrimonious ways. The latter set about Christmas plans and, on Christmas Eve, attended a party at her parents’ house. The former, an unemployed NASA engineer, seethed home, rigged up a homemade flamethrower, loaded a couple handguns and slipped into a Santa suit. Despite his non-existent arrest record and violence-free past, Pardo storme

d his former in-laws’ party with guns blazing and Molotov cocktails spiraling fiery arcs through the air. Nine people were killed. LA County coroner official Ed Winter summed up the killing spree thusly: “the entire family was wiped out, and there’s basically like 16 orphans.” As luck would have it, Pardo’s Santa suit was cauterized to his skin, burning him so severely that he permanently postponed his intended escape to Canada in favor of a quick and dirty bullet to the head. In conclusion, I’m still not completely sure how many orphans there were.

Statement a. described Billy Chapman, the axe-wielding, Santa-impersonating antagonist of the 1984 holiday-themed slasher flick “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” See, as a child, Billy watched a man in a Santa costume murder his parents, so… I don’t think I have to explain the science of this – when something kills someone you love, you become that thing and kill other people. It’s like how Lisa Niemi recently turned into pancreatic cancer and tried to mail herself to Val Kilmer.

Statement c. described the murderous rapscallion from the 2007 Christmas episode of Fox’s procedural soap, “Bones.” Fans surely felt that the best gift they received that year was an episode of the show in which the murderer wasn’t the first suspect introduced, who is generally immediately dismissed in favor of myriad motive-drenched red herrings, and then suddenly re-introduced in the final heart-stopping minutes as some puzzled-over mystery clue is suddenly linked to their innocuous, off-handedly remarked-upon hobby.

Hodgins: “I analyzed that regular baking flour we found in the wound… it’s actually Chinese baking flour.”

Dr. Bennan: “Oh my God… the victim’s cousin – he mentioned that he collects Asian bread-making supplies!”

Booth: “C’mon, Bones – ‘supplies’? Just call it ‘stuff,’ like everyone else.”

Angela: “I have the modern equivalent of Penny’s magic computer book from Inspector Gadget AND I’m sexual.”

Okay. I’m done.

Christmas episode.

This week, you will be visited by three holiday-themed urban legends. Unless you don’t have an RSS feed set up. In that case, you’ll have to come to them. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – a Very Weird Things Xmas.

Today: Daddy’s Christmas Oops

One over-excited father, one rented Santa suit and one deceptively narrow chimney. We all know where this one’s going. The story is so classic and simple, it’s practically the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of Christmas urban legends. Maybe the family gathers around a burning Yule log and suddenly notices an odd, but deliciously meaty, burning smell. Or maybe the odor only arrives after the New Year, and isn’t meaty or burny, but just sort of pervasively rank. However you want to play it, the coup de grâce is, of course, the discovery of the father’s body – burnt or rotted out, asphyxiated or broken-necked – lodged firmly in the ash-dark guts of the flue. “But he was supposed to be on a business trip!” shrieks the wailing widow. A nosy on-looker turns to her overweight friend and whispers, “it’s just like in ‘Gremlins.’” (The good news is, unlike the haunted house hangings, there’s no truth to this one. Yes, over the years, some unlucky revelers in St. Nick garb have managed to Winnie the Pooh themselves into narrow fireplace vents, but those folks were ult

imately rescued by bemused Emergency officials.)

Still, there’s a strange cultural impulse to exploit whatever darkness can be forcibly wrung from the well-intentioned. I mean, really – it’s Christmas. But when folks aren’t bitching about all the different ways it was raped by capitalism, or pointing out its indirectly involvement in “Jingle All the Way, “ they’re dreaming up seasonal horror stories that hinge on the joyful heart of the holiday coming back around to bite someone in the ass. This story’s particularly unforgiving in that it not only subverts yuletide intangibles, like generosity and togetherness, into the unraveling threads of a family’s undoing, but also incorporates Santa – a physical representation of holiday cheer – as the linchpin of tragedy.

Is it meant as a subtle jab at the head-scratching physics of the bizarre holiday mascot’s yearly spree? Is it trying to deliver another tired true-meaning-of-Christmas polemic – if the chimney-lodged father focused on the spirit of the day rather than its garish trappings his children would still have a dad? Or is it a viral PSA sent directly from the man himself – a finger-wagging “HO HO HO! Leave it the professionals! (no, seriously, I’m a magic elf. If you try this at home, you WILL die.)” As urban legends go, the story is refreshingly non-didactic. At the very least, it’s a beautifully simple foil to America’s smile-straining attempts at confabulating Norman Rockwell reality out of regurgitated carols and ingenuous, brandy-spiked Dickensian rejoinders.