Across Difficult Country

You’ve seen him - that hobo pushing an overloaded cart full of stuff around town. Today as he passed me some items fell off, but he didn’t notice and continued down the block. “Sir“, I said, “I believe you dropped your miniature globe, and your phone, and your dolls head stuck on the end of a stick .” He came back and retrieved the orb and scepter.                                                     

Researchers at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki discovered a new benefit to smoking  that may prevent the sort of insufferable, overwrought rhapsodizing about food amateur gluttons and professional restaurant critics indulge in. Researchers not at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki found a “ space giraffe ” frolicking on the lunar surface. Does this mean NASA’s plan to bomb the moon violates the Endangered Species Act? Lawyers for the space agency refuse to comment.

High atop a lonely mountain, deep within the Philippines jungle, a carnivorous plant that eats rats has been discovered, by a crack team of British carnivorous plant experts who just happened to be in the area. Giant carnivorous plant Nepenthes Attenboroughii Remember the cow eating tree in India known as the pili mara ? Hopefully this amazing find will force establishment botanists to reconsider the evidence for its existence.

The summer of the present is not the summer of the future we daydreamed of in summers of the past.

XII. What is the Forest of the King, and what the reason of this name. M. The forest of the king is the safe dwelling-place of wild beasts; not of every kind, but of the kinds that live in woods; not in all places, but in fixed ones, and ones suitable for the purpose; whence it is called "forests," the "e" being changed into "o," as if it were "feresta" . i.e., an abiding place for wild beasts. D. Is there a forest of the king in each county? M. No; but only in the wooded ones, where the wild beasts can have their lairs and ripe nourishment: nor does it matter to whom the woods belong, whether to the king, or to the nobles of the kingdom, the wild beasts can none the less run around everywhere free and unharmed. - from The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer (c. 1180).

On July 2 the bodies of popular masked midget wrestlers La Parkita and El Espectrito Jr. were found in a Mexico City hotel room . Authorities believe the tiny grapplers were drugged and murdered by thieving whores. Author, investigator, and Fortean theorist John Keel died of cancer on July 3. Keel coined the highly useful terms “ultraterrestrials” and “MIB (Men in Black)”. His most famous book was The Mothman Prophecies . Keel was 79. Walter Cronkite died on July 17, at the age of 92. Beginning in 1962 “Uncle Walter”, as pudding heads called him, read the news on television for the CBS network. Eventually Cronkite became “ the most trusted man in America ”, demonstrating the hypnotic power of the idiot box, and the ease with which Americans are gulled. Cronkite left CBS in 1981 amid allegations he had drunkenly raped CBS colleague Bob “ The Captain Kangaroo ” Keeshan during an out of control office party. Late in life Cronkite dated the older sister of singer Carly Simon.

Do sunspots affect human creativity? The brain is, after all, a finely tuned, highly complex electro-chemical meatball, and sunspots are able to disrupt electrical systems of far simpler, less finely tuned nature. It turns out I’m not the first person to ponder such a connection (which is a good thing, because I'm also too lazy to try and verify it). A professor named Suitbert Ertel exhaustively examined the historical record, and concluded bursts of cultural creativity, across the globe and throughout history, occurred 10 to 15 years after periods of low solar activity. Ertel has a lot of unusual ideas , but Hans Eysenck, for one, was impressed by Ertel‘s theory and evidence , concluding, "However difficult to explain, the facts do not admit of any doubt; there is a close coincidence in solar activity and human behaviour." Presently sunspot activity is extremely low . If Ertel is correct, contrary to what we see all around us, our culture isn’t dead; in reality we a...