We can FINALLY stop talking about the Mayan Apocalypse!

Although Michael Stipe made a killing off royalties.

I have been following this story of the Mayan Apocalypse for years. For so long, in fact, that I don't remember where I first heard about it or when. I know that I was well aware of it before the movie 2012 was released in 2009, so we're talking about at least four years of hearing people blather on about it. 

It seems like we have always been prepping for the fake Mayan Apocalypse, which was never even a thing to begin with. The modern Mayans didn't believe in it; heck, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the ancient Mayans didn't believe it, either.
 
Of course, that didn't stop every idiot with an agenda from claiming that it was "a real thing and you should buy these supplies from me in order to prepare for it." That's something I noticed in the last six months: you only ever heard people taking the 2012 apocalypse seriously when they were trying to sell you something. How very American.
 
Most people brushed off the 2012 prediction the way they have every other kooky end of the world prediction that ever comes up. But a lot of people believed in the 2012 apocalypse fervently. I wonder where they are right now as I type this, at 1:09 PM Pacific time on 12/21/12, with the world still spinning the way it always has. Of course, some will argue that the event will happen at midnight tonight (but which time zone?) or that the apocalypse has actually started but we just don't realize it yet.
 
Belief in an impeding Armageddon says more about the believer than the belief. It's a potent fantasy that has more in common with a superhero origin story than with reality. (Apocalypse Man was just an everyday schmoe until he became the last man standing! Protecting his family against invading hordes of scavengers! Surviving on his wits and his clever foresight!) It combines elements of self-sufficiency, "death to all the infidels and my stupid boss down at the plant," and an end to the never-ending soul-crushing mundanity of life, from paying bills to grocery shopping. I can totally understand the appeal, don't get me wrong.
 
At any rate, it's a huge relief that it's finally over and we can go back to bickering about the HAARP antenna array, and whether the Sandy Hook massacre was a "Mind-Control television event" or not.

Sandy Hook conspiracy theories

People don't want to believe one random kid could cause so much tragedy.

Every major event ends up trailing behind it a fog of conspiracy theories like the tail of comet, and the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre is no different. 

There are two main categories of conspiracy theory at work, and both of them have the same ending: Obama takes away all our rights.
 
According to the first category, the whole thing was a staged event. A false flag operation (conspiracy theorists love the phrase "false flag") designed to terrorize the populace into demanding succor from the government.
 
Unfortunately for those who preach this particular category, most of their facts are just plain wrong. For example, this particular image has been making the Twitter rounds like crazy. I count at least seven major factual errors, but that kind of thing doesn't stop people believing it.
 
The remainder of their facts are more easily explained by the commonplace phenomena whereby people who experience a tragic event prove to be terrible eyewitness reporters. In the chaotic hours which followed the shooting, there was a lot of confusion about who had done what and when and how and why and what the heck really happened. 
 
Personally, I feel that just because the facts got sorted out later by professional observers (i.e. police officers and other first responders) that doesn't necessarily imply a vast cover-up at work. 
 
You can never truly debunk this sort of conspiracy, because they will claim that either A) you have bought into the party line, or B) it's a huge cover-up, or C) you're a tool of the Illuminati trying to propagate confusion and disbelief among the true believers. (I get accused of being a tool of the Illuminati on a regular basis. Call it a job hazard.)
 
I guess it's easier to believe that the whole thing was faked, or that it was a deliberate military action, rather than believing the truth: that one crazy young man can destroy so many lives for no legitimate reason. 
 
In a sub-branch of this category, the Sandy Hook massacre happened because Obama's dark cabal used black magic to make it happen. This belief is being promoted by Alex Jones at InfoWars. He draws a crazy web of connections between the Aurora massacre, Sandy Hook, and the most recent Batman movie. 
 
In the second category, everything happened as per the conventional mainstream belief. However, Obama is leveraging this tragedy in order to take all our guns and institute martial law and basically kick off the apocalypse/civil war that the preppers have been waiting for. This one is impossible to debunk because it's pure theory. Until the jackbooted thugs institute door-to-door searches for all weaponry on the citizens, I guess we'll just have to put it in the "Pending" file.

Are you ready for the apocalypse?

Only one week left! Until forever.

No one believes the Mayan apocalypse. Well, almost no one. Your crazy uncle on Facebook probably does. Maybe that coworker who still can't stop talking about The Da Vinci Code. But no one credible has any stock in the magic date of 12/21/12. 

And yet, tensions seem to be running unusually high as we head toward the end of the year. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like traffic is more ornery, people are crabbier in general, and of course there is this incredibly distressing rash of mass public shootings.
 
You know that old saw, "Live like there's no tomorrow"? Well, that's supposed to be an inspirational saying, but the truth is that if they really knew there was no tomorrow, a lot of people would do really bad things. They might commit murder/suicide, run through a crowded shopping mall firing an assault rifle, or take a dump on their boss's desk. 
 
I worry that the next week is going to be rough. Because the truth is that a lot of people think the world is going to end next Friday. And who can say what stupid, reckless acts they will commit between now and then?
 
A lot more people only kinda half believe the "prophecy." These people are going to be particularly stressed out. You dump a semi-belief in the end of the world on top of a very real set of annual holiday stressors (Shopping! Family! Money!) and you have a recipe for disaster.
 
People seemed to get spooked by the 12/12/12 date. I suspect it's partly because it so closely echoes the 12/21/12 date. A precursor, a sense of dramatic foreshadowing. 
 
None of the believers knows what form the apocalypse will take, of course. That makes it worse, adding to the anxiety. How can you prepare for something you know nothing about? Some people believe the Earth will be pelted with asteroids. Others, that a massive solar storm (another Carrington Event) will knock out all electronics. And many religious people believe that it will be the Second Coming, with the lava and the pitchforks and the unbelievers Left Behind.
 
In the meantime, people are coping with their anxiety by buying things. It is the most American of coping strategies. Purchases of bulk survival food, guns, and gold are all up. (Never mind that in a real emergency, no one gives a rip about gold. People want water, food, and gas - in that order.)
 
My personal prediction? I predict a lot of sheepish people on Saturday the 22nd. And over the month that follows, I predict that gold prices will fall dramatically, as the hoarders come to their senses and start selling off some of their assets to try and make January's rent.

Verizon files patent for creepiest invention ever

This TV will scrutinize your appearance, tone of voice, home decor and your every move.

A lot of people are turned off by the way that Gmail harvests words from your e-mail messages and uses them to decide which ads to show you. Others find it unsettling the way the Kinect for XBOX 360 can detect your movements and translate them into video game form. 

Those people have no idea what's coming next.
 
Verizon has filed a patent for a device that will watch you watching television, and fine-tune the ads accordingly. Let's say that you and your partner start squabbling while watching television: the device might show you ads for marriage counseling. Or if you start cuddling, it might show ads for contraceptives or flowers.
 
The device will also assess the "physical attributes" of the people watching television. Got long hair? You'll see commercials for conditioner. Overweight? You'll see weight loss ads, and probably fast food ads too. The device will register the tone of your voice, and act accordingly. If you sound stressed, it might show ads for aromatherapy candles or vacation destinations.
 
It will also be able to scan the room within its field of vision and harvest that data. Got a beer can collection? You'll see ads for beer. Is there a cat present? Cat food ads.
 
Those aren't hypotheticals: those are all actual examples which Verizon cites in its patent application.
 
The amazing thing isn't that this patent has been filed. Similar patents have been filed before. Just because you file a patent, it doesn't mean you plan to follow through with it. But this situation is a little different because it's being filed by the country's largest television provider (Verizon), and because we already have all the technology to actually do this. It's just a matter of getting all the pieces to talk to each other, from the facial recognition software to the ad device tailor. This is not a trivial issue, technologically speaking, but it is certainly feasible given today's tech.
 
Verizon already has the ability to "spy" on people's usage patterns through statistics sent back by DVRs and digital cable receivers. If you record every Downton Abbey episode but never watch it, Verizon knows this. Most people are willing to take the trade-off: their privacy in exchange for digital cable.
 
However, I suspect that if Verizon tries to market a device like this, they may find more people fleeing the land of television than ever before. Honestly, between Netflix Streaming and Hulu, there's practically no reason to watch television right now anyway. Something like this could really spell the death of broadcast television altogether. (And would that be such a bad thing?)

Seattle's time-traveling attorney

Andrew Basiago and Project Pegasus

 

I had heard about Andrew Basiago before, but I had forgotten about him until watching a recent episode of Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory. Basiago claims that between the ages of 7 and 12, he participated in an ultra-top-secret military program called "Project Pegasus." This was (according to Basiago) a DARPA project involving time travel.
 
Basiago says that DARPA used Tesla technology to create a portal which - in his explanation - sounds quite a lot like the prop from the Stargate movies and television show. The subjects of the experiment, all children, leaped through the vortex and were sent back in time. 
 
According to Basiago's accounts, he was sent back primarily to the earliest years of United States history. He appeared once in George Washington's camp, and made several jumps related to Abraham Lincoln. In one of these, he claims to have been recorded in a famous photograph that Josephine Cogg took of president Lincoln. And indeed, the boy in the photograph does look somewhat like Basiago as a child. (But then again, so would a lot of kids.)
 
Perhaps the greatest refutation of Basiago's claims is the plain fact of the world as it is today. If the United States military truly had the ability to send people to different locations and eras in the past, surely they would have put it to better use by now. Why would the military take what is literally the most powerful weapon on the planet, and put it in mothballs? 
 
And then there is the question of why DARPA would use children in these experiments. The idea of the military performing experiments on American children sounds preposterous in any context, particularly one as dangerous and complicated as sending them back in time. And why would the kids' parents sign off on it? The concept of "informed consent" was first introduced in the late 1950s, and was well in place by the early 1970s, when Basiago claims to have been involved in these experiments.
 
Even if we take the extremely cynical view that the US military does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, why would DARPA use kids in the first place? Basiago's explanation is that children would be less alarming to the locals than the sight of a full-grown modern military recruit. But children are simply not as capable as adults, in any capacity. In fact, an unattended eight year old wandering around Gettysburg would probably attract more attention than a trained and appropriately-attired adult.
 
Jesse Ventura came to the conclusion that Project Pegasus may have been an experiment in hypnotic suggestion, a.k.a. mind control. That Basiago may be experiencing false, planted memories. That's still a stretch, but it's still more plausible than time travel.
 

The Mystery Spot

The Upper Peninsula's wonder - real or not?

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is home to some strange things. Spending my summers there as a child, I marveled at the billboards that seemed to be especially designed for children – “Mom, Dad, can we stop?”

It seems to be a law of of tourism that whenever there is a beautiful natural area, like Yellowstone National Park, The Smoky Mountains or Niagara Falls, tacky tourist trap nonsense springs up all around it. This is the same for the whole of the Upper Peninsula, or, as it is more commonly known, the U.P. Signs for water parks, mini-golf and specialty museums line the highway, giving every child passing in a station wagon reason to pester their parents.

The most intriguing of these signs was (is?) The Mystery Spot. What could it be? A place where the laws of gravity don’t apply? Prepare to have your mind blown.

I finally got my parents to stop one summer. Forgive my murky memory. This was a long time ago. If you have ever made or will make the trip, please let me know. But I remember that even as a child it seemed fishy. Sure, the ball seemed to roll uphill, but then everything was at an angle – the floor, the walls, and the table upon which the ball rolled.

Was this a scam? Sure seemed like it. But then, like I said, there is no shortage of strange phenomena in the U.P. There are even glowing lights that float in the sky somewhere out in the woods – another legend, perhaps, but worth a future investigation.

Although I wasn’t convinced at the time, I’ve met many, many people since that claim the Mystery Spot is real. They say it is over a special underground geological formation that causes gravity to go sideways.

I hope there is someone out there who can clear this up for me.

Serbian authorities warn vampire may be on the loose

Villagers stock up on garlic.

The rural village of Zarozje in Serbia also happens to be the home town of Sava Savanovic, one of the most famous vampires in Serbian history. And according to a recent warning from the town council, Savanovic may be wandering the streets after the recent collapse of his former home.

Savanovic lived in a tiny cabin on the riverfront property where he once ran an old wooden mill. According to local legend, Savanovic used to kill and drink the blood of farmers who came to his mill to grind their grain. 
 
Savanovic's watermill was functional until the 1950s, and his cabin stood for hundreds of years before finally collapsing this week. The family which purchased the property several decades ago had done a brisk business with the tourist trade, giving tours of Savanovic's home and mill. However, they limited their tours to the daytime, believing that Savanovic still lingered on the property. 
 
For the same reason, they avoided making repairs to Savanovic's home, for fear of risking his wrath. Unfortunately, this decision is what ultimately led to the collapse of his cabin from lack of maintenance.
 
The local city council has issued a public health warning to residents, urging them to smear their doors and windows with garlic to repel Savanovic. With the collapse of the "vampire mill," many believe that Savanovic will be looking for a new home and new victims - and that he may be in particularly ill temper with the townspeople for the destruction of his home.
 
Although most people probably think of Romania (specifically Transylvania) as vampire territory, the belief in vampires is rife throughout eastern Europe. Serbia itself has a long folklore tradition of vampires. People who are suspected of possibly becoming vampires after their death (like suicides, or people who died at a crossroads) are often buried with precautions already in place. The head may be cut off and turned around backwards in the casket, a brick or rock may be shoved into the mouth (to prevent it from chewing its way out of the coffin after death), and the heart may be removed before burial and burned separately.
 
Zarozje is a small, remote, hardscrabble village with approximately 1,000 residents. Many of the residents have guest worker visas, and travel to Switzerland for work. Those who remain scrape out a living cultivating raspberries or cutting and selling firewood. Although the village's population is slowly dwindling as the younger residents move away to find work and new families, the village itself is still hanging on. Here's hoping Savanovic spares these hard-working Serbs, and that they find a way to placate his spirit (and put their own nightmares to rest).
 

Building around elves in Iceland

Mess with an elf stone at your peril!

In Iceland, there is a strong - if somewhat sheepish and not-exactly-talked-about - national belief in elves. Elves are linked to Iceland's Celtic heritage, and in the Celtic tradition, elves are creatures which are not to be trifled with. 

Elves live in stones, and prefer some stones to others. Large, craggy, "interesting" stones are much more likely to appeal to an elf. But any stone may become an elf's home. Because elves are able to control their size, even a small stone can harbor an elf.
 
Elves are a force of nature in Iceland, connected to the powers of wind and sun and storms. Mess with an elf and you can find yourself being perpetually dogged by a string of bad luck, or worse. Elves are particularly protective of their homes. Any disturbance to an elf rock will be, in local lore, met with disaster. 
 
Elf stones are often identified when they refuse to be budged. If a stone cannot be moved by a bulldozer, if jackhammers break when trying to crack it, then most likely that stone is protected by an elf. In these cases it is almost always simply left in place, with the rest of the construction amended to accommodate it.
 
A wise construction company will frequently bring on a folklorist early in the process, to ensure that no local elves or fairies will be disrupted by the project. Even if the company doesn't (officially) believe in elves, it is always wise to work with local custom rather than against it. In the Iceland town of Kopavogur, one particular elf stone had so much local legend behind it that a new road construction project had to be routed around the stone. 
 
This may all sound silly to some readers. But consider that many Western buildings lack a 13th floor. Or that in America, real estate agents are required by law to disclose whether a house is haunted, or if a death has occurred in the house. And even if a Western construction company doesn't believe in feng shui, you learn to take it into consideration when working on projects for China-based businesses.
 
In this interesting New York Times article, one bit in particular caught my eye. A woman explained that "some elves borrowed her kitchen scissors, only to return them a week later to a place she had repeatedly searched." If that happened elsewhere in the world, she probably would have blamed poltergeists, or the ghost of her dead grandmother, or feng shui, or aliens.
 
Perhaps, by talking about fairies or elves or ghosts or aliens, we are all simply attempting to construct a framework to explain the same strange phenomena that happens everywhere. (And if so, what is it, really?)

Phone calls from the dead

A common - if unnerving - phenomena.

A recent plot twist in a certain popular television show got me wondering whether people have actually reported receiving calls from the dead. And it turns out that indeed, this is one of the most common forms of accidental communication with ghosts. Hundreds of cases have been reported over the years since the telephone was invented, and no doubt hundreds more went unreported for various reasons.

 
1. The witness gets a phone call from someone. The call is usually brief and succinct. The caller may ask "Are you okay?" or say "I love you." Later, the victim learns that the caller had been dead at the time of the call. (In a rare sub-set of this form, the witness receives a call from someone that they already know to be dead, like a parent who died many years ago. By far, most calls from the deceased happen within 24 hours of the death.)
 
2. The witness gets an urgent phone call from someone living. The caller later swears that they meant to call the witness, but never got around to it. (Perhaps they placed the call in a fugue state, or perhaps some aspect of their intention caused the phone call to happen.)
 
3. The witness places a call to someone. Later they learn that the person they called had been dead at the time.
 
This phenomena is not limited to land lines, but it does seem to happen on land lines a preponderance of the time. Perhaps because land lines, being physical media, have a whole host of interference noises that can be manipulated, wires that can be loosened, and sensitive equipment at every stage of the line.
 
Edison himself believed that the telephone could be used to contact the dead. Edison had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal, and even attempted to build a telephone specifically for contacting the dead.
 
A slightly different form of phone call from the dead occurs with cell phones, where the deceased's cell phone places calls to people whose numbers are stored in the phone's memory. Invariably in these cases, no sounds are heard from the other end. In fact, one famous case of this sort has been rated "True" by the esteemed Snopes.com. 
 
In these cases, it may be that the calls are placed by a slight bit of physical manipulation, pressing a few key buttons to cause the call to go through to a stored number.  

Bloop mystery solved!

The culprit: iceberg sounds

The "bloop" was one of the world's greatest mysteries… until now. This loud deep ocean noise was recorded from several different locations. It followed no known sound forms, and its location could not be pinpointed beyond the general area of the south Pacific ocean off the coast of South America. This ultra-low-frequency sound was extremely loud, carrying for hundreds of miles underwater. 

The bloop has long held cult status. Animal Planet famously used the "bloop" as a plot point in their mockumentary "Mermaids: The Body Found." It was used in the initial viral marketing for the movie "Cloverfield." And many people speculated tongue-in-cheek that the bloop was the sound of Cthulhu awakening from his watery slumber.
 
The sound was heard several times in 1997, and never again… until now.
 
The U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as part of its acoustics monitoring program has analyzed the bloop in comparison with recent recordings, and determined that it is the sound of an icequake. 
 
An icequake is just like an earthquake, but in an iceberg instead of the planet's crust. Technically called a "non-tectonic seismic event," icequakes usually occur when a glacier or iceberg shifts suddenly. Icebergs and glaciers are colossally heavy, and when the ice shifts off a patch of land, the earth's crust rebounds upwards. 
 
NOAA has hydrophones scattered throughout the world's oceans. In early 2008 their hydrophones in Scotia Sea recorded the sounds as an iceberg dubbed A53a disintegrated. This iceberg experienced multiple icequakes as the gargantuan object fractured, crumbled, split, and eventually shuddered to pieces. And NOAA has determined that the sounds recorded during that iceberg's death are a match on the spectrogram for the bloop.
 
NOAA is even able to speculate on which iceberg actually generated the bloop. When the bloop was recorded, icebergs between Bransfield Straits and the Ross Sea were in the process of disintegrating. (It might also have been a large iceberg at Cape Adare.)
 
Not to sound fatalistic, but in hindsight it was only a matter of time before the sound was re-recorded and analyzed. The world's icebergs are disintegrating at an increasingly rapid rate. And it's lucky that we were able to identify the bloop before all of the icebergs were gone. If NOAA scientists had not done the analysis work to cross-reference the bloop with current icequake recordings, it's possible that it would have remained a mystery forever. (Spoilsports!) (I kid.)

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