Category Archives: Weird
When Zombees Lurch through the Air
There was a cool little article from i09 that I posted on Twitter this last evening, on parasitic flies that convert honeybees into their mindless zombie slaves, then kill them…
Needless to say, this was quickly noted by my Twitter buddies @lukebunyip and @Greybeard3, and a hilarious discussion, with much brain-hemorrhaging punnistry involving zombie insects moaning (presumably by modulating the buzzing of their tiny decomposing wings) as they lurch in swarms through the air (making them scarier than simply shambling along the ground on their tiny legs) in a mindless search for… “honeyed brains…honeyed brains…”
Well, the subject came up about the fact that, despite the huge popularity of zombie flicks, why hasn’t anyone made a zombie insect movie? Think about it, like the giant ant movie “Them,” or even the a zombie version of the “Bugs” from Starship Troopers…
I think a really good movie, if done cleverly, could be made about giant zombie scarabs, and it’s too bad is hasn’t been done yet.
On the other hand, I can think of a few possible reasons, good or not so good, why it hasn’t been done:
The things that make zombies, at least of humans and other land vertebrates, like zombie dogs, so scary is their uncharacteristic (for otherwise sapient species) mindless behavior (like humans in modern consumer culture, which was the message of the first Night of the Living Dead…), shambling about, or worse, tirelessly running after their prey, and the horrific decay that easily shows on a mammalian body when it’s been dead for a while, making zombies gross to look at and smelly as well as an infectious menace.
This is not so easy to do with insects or other arthropods, since their chitinous carapaces, if rigid and relatively undamaged, can easily cover their inner remains for some time after death, visually hiding much of the decomposition which often would only show itself through it’s stench or upon closer examination by anyone inspecting it.
I think it would take more than an unpleasant smell to frighten me about bugs. Many species have a bad odor anyway, even when alive as a way of warding off predators.
Also, mindless behavior, in the sense of that relative to creatures with more complex brains, is typical of our joint-legged cousins on the tree of life, and so I suppose much of the horror of mindlessly shambling about would be vitiated by the fact that insects do it anyway, despite the otherwise very adaptive group behavior of social insects.
Insects that behave like automatons? Too normal. Not that scary…Sorry.
On the other hand, if normal-sized insects were zombified, and served as a devastating vector to transmit the condition to humans or other mammals in a movie, THAT would be cool, kind of like an undead version of the killer bees from The Swarm, and zombees (@Greybeard3 coined that, I think…) would be difficult to swat or keep out of places with small openings.
But I suspect, unless a clever enough writer comes up with a creative way to do it, possible I suppose, one will have to come up with a zombie flick starring undead insects that makes the bugs scary as monsters, despite acting and looking like they would anyway, even as giants.
WTF?? cows & cows & cows (surreal cow choreography)
Hat Tip to Twitterer @Pribbzilla for pointing me in the direction of this channel.
The Amazing Transparent Man (1960) – Full Movie
Courtesy of LuckyStrike502‘s YouTube Channel
The Amazing Transparent Man is a 1960 science fiction film starring Marguerite Chapman. Based on the 1956 novel The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson, it is an American B-movie which follows the story of an insane ex U. S. Army major who uses an escaped criminal to steal materials to improve the invisibility machine his scientist prisoner made.[1] It was one of two sci-fi films shot back to back by director Edgar G. Ulmer (the other being Beyond the Time Barrier).[2] The combined filming schedule for both films was only two weeks. The film was later featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The film has received very poor reviews and suffered in popularity as a result of its low budget. Leading science fiction author David Wingrove commented in his Science Fiction Source Book that “Its cheap-budget origins show throughout. Amazing claims too much for what is essentially a thriller involving an escaped criminal…”
The Amazing Transparent Man is in the public domain, and can be downloaded here for free: http://www.archive.org/details/The_Amazing_Transparent_Man.avi
Hypercubes? Yes, and they’re cool too!
Here is a couple of really eye-popping videos of those mathematical constructs that exist fully in more than just three space-time coordinates, the second video showing up to six, all displayed in a manner consistent with what our 3-D monkey brains can process! Just because we can’t literally visualize these higher space-time dimensions doesn’t mean we can’t think about them. These are what mathematicians and cosmologists mean when they say “dimension,” as opposed to the much less precise hijacking of the term by the New Age to refer to mystical otherworldly places. Awesomeness.
Sanity Roll… Unspeakable Horror…
I first saw this one on Wil Wheaton’s blog after a Twitter friend of mine pointed me at it (Thnx Kat!). Considering the Weird Tale approach of my online persona and some of the other material on this blog, an Old Spice commercial featuring the Dread Lord of Rlyeh himself, Great Cthulhu would be just perfect…and hilarious as the Outer Void, especially the references to the Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG. Try not to drink or eat anything while watching…
…I’d hate to have you spew onto your keyboard from laughing after failing your sanity check.
Cthulhu Ftaghn!
A Wee, or Maybe not so Wee, Bit of Wackjobbery
I find the title of this video series, “Labyrinth of Truth,” amusingly ironic, and an intellectual achievement worthy of the use of what is quickly becoming my favorite image…after all, the creator of the video couldn’t even correctly identify the game he thought he was talking about *giggle*
Like this:
Hordes of Man-Eating Killer Squids? I Doubt It.
Just recently, I had a bit of fun poking around online and sharpening my admittedly sparse google-chops on a bit of quick fact-checking that actually turned out to be rather fun.
I was clicking on links on one of my google alerts emails and one such link took me to an online news outlet called The Hindu.
The link took me directly to the “health” section of the paper, but just for giggles I clicked on the “science and technology” department to see what was there.
Mind you, this is the first time I’ve been on this site, and the headline that screamed out at me from one of the articles immediately raised my skeptical hackles:
Man eater squids devouring fish stock in Pacific
Go ahead…click on it…for much sensationalist hilarity.
I thought to myself “This could be fun…Now that my red flags have been raised, let’s see if this is just as bogus as I expect, or otherwise. Let’s find out if this is for real…or not.”
The first bit of text caught my attention:
Millions of giant squids have been devouring fish stock and attacking humans in the Pacific Ocean, causing potential threat to marine ecosystem.
This is, needless to say, a rather bold claim. Surely something like this would be on a more mainstream news outlet if there were anything to it, so why not on CNN or even Faux Nu’z? I also wondered about the confusion in the article of giant squids with Humboldt squids, since to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge of zoology, they are separate species.
This and the image-file included with the article being billed as that of a thawing Colossal squid, though obviously not being colossal even for a squid, raised still more red flags.
My figurative hackles where practically electrified.
But this minor technicality did not deter me from reading further. I also started looking for references I could check up on, you know, names and organizations, and low and behold, a fellow was mentioned, and allegedly quoted, by the name of Scott Cassell, who was reported as saying:
“Within five minutes my right shoulder had been pulled out of its socket. I had 30 big marks on my head and throat and one squid hit me so hard I saw stars. They then grabbed on to me and pulled me down so fast that I could not equalise and I ruptured my eardrum.”
“They are the most opportunistic predators on the planet. They eat everything in their path. One Humboldt squid in the course of two years can eat 27,000lb of fish. What is going to be the impact on the environment?”
Ummm… nothing?
I wondered if he knew of the quotations attributed to him by this highly reputable media outlet (*chortle*) provided he even existed at all and wasn’t simply the product of a double-fiction…
I googled his name, and found this link at the top of the search results, on a scuba-diving forum with an entry dated from November 20, 2007, which involved statements on an episode of Monster Quest also attributed to Cassell.
The statements posted weren’t smoking-gun evidence of a media hoax, but they didn’t sound at all like someone who just a mouse click away had been pronouncing raving dire warnings about the dangers of an infestation of evil squids (Hey! Creatures with tentacles are cool!).
I also noticed statements exactly like those quoted above on sites like the ForteanTimes and 2012 forums, further ramping up the suspicion factor. All examples I’ve found of the above quotes appear to originate from and cite the Daily Express article linked to below.
A bit of further looking indicated that the aforementioned quotes have probably been fabricated.
The pieces are falling into place…
The statement on the scuba forum, admittedly done via a proxy, sounded much more sober, more like the statements of a former military diver than a two-bit extra from the movie Tentacles.
But agreeing with my prejudices is not proof, so I decided to check up on the Wiki article on Humboldt squids, which lo and behold, do not appear to be the same species as Giant squid, much less Colossal squid.
Now, Wikipedia is far from the final word, but I was busy correcting a major error to a post from the previous day that one of my readers had caught on to and was kind enough to point out, so I looked about on other more reliable sources, which by and large supported the most of Wiki statements on these majestic creatures.
There’s this article on Scientific American about them, for example…
…and this post on Science20 with Humboldt Squid Hit The Tabloids pretty well appears to have nailed it.
But just so you can check out the text of the Daily Express article dated August 29, that appears to have been an almost verbatim cut and paste job onto The Hindu article dated afterward, Yep, it seems that though there is a population increase of these cool creatures in some parts of the oceans, we’re in no danger of being devoured by ravenous razor-tendriled Lovecraftian sushi any time soon.
I think I can safely write this off as spectacularly bad, but amusing, journalistic reporting, par for the course for tabloids.
Not exactly professional skeptic’s work, but nonetheless tons of fun!
