— Something is snatching up the wild leek crop that is a staple of the diet of the local Shor people of Kemero Region in Siberia!
The onion-loving creature leaves behind abundant large footprints with clearly-defined toes…
…well, even Bigfoot needs to take a leek now and then!
— It’s a little-known secret that I played a chicken (specifically, a rooster) in my second grade class play!
My elementary school had a tradition that once a year, each class would have to present a play to the rest of the school. During my second grade year, my class presented some kind of cutesy barnyard drama in which most of us played animals; this left me…strangely excited, possibly the earliest stirrings of the furry that I would someday become! Now I didn’t really want to play a chicken, and would have much preferred to play a horse or one of the cooler animals. This wasn’t even a mutant chicken or a Big Buckin’ Chicken like in the Burger King commercials a while back. I didn’t even get to wear a fursuit; the costume was largely comprised of a woman’s nylon over my head to which were attached construction paper eyes, a beak, and a chicken’s comb. Then as now elementary schools didn’t have big budgets…but hey, it was a gig, right?
…of course, years of therapy were required to deal with the issues raised by the nylon over my head, but at least I didn’t grow up to be a bank robber! And in sixth grade, I got to play a ghost, a role indicated by chains I had to wear around my neck that trailed down each shoulder, a la Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. This may have led to my long-time interest in the paranormal.
Today, of course, school plays don’t dare include ghostly characters as some in the community would interpret that as promoting occultism or who knows what else…but what did we know back then? <sighs>
– – You’re probably well aware that Bob Barker hosted The Price is Right game show for many years, and is a long time animal rights activist as well, having ended his shows with an admonition to “get your pets spayed or neutered.” The Robot Chicken show on Adult Swim did a cute bit with Barker going about following his retirement, and personally carrying out this mission, even using hedge clippers! <shudders>
But did you know that Barker was part Native American, and grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota? Well, Barker recently made a personal appeal to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina to stop exhibiting bears in pit-like enclosures at three local zoos. Barker called the bears’ conditions inhumane and asked that they be turned over to a sanctuary in California…
— Look!–Up in the sky!–Is it a bird?–Is it a plane?–Is Sarah Palin killing wolves from aircraft?–No, it’s an unidentified flying humanoid, and they’ve been reported since the days of the early indigenous people of Mexico thousands of years ago. Ancient petroglyphs from Mexico indicate having seen an aerial presence, although the stylized nature of the petroglyphs makes identification difficult. Today, witnesses in North America tell of human-like creatures that float or hover in the skies and at times descend to attack; one cop shared such an attack experience.
MonsterQuest examined a shaky, poor resolution video taken in June 2005 of something seen over Mexico City; a law enforcement video analyst found that the video hadn’t been faked, and couldn’t be explained. A 2004 video taken in Santa Monica, California suggested a flying humanoid about 7 feet in height and 3 to 4 feet wide. It was described as being bulky and slate gray in color. Speculations were that some sightings could be misidentified balloon clusters, although balloons tend to sway or bob. Eerily, witnesses described a feeling that the flying humanoids seemed aware of their presence! A justifiable criticism of the episode is that MonsterQuest completely ignored the most likely explanation for the “flying humanoids;” namely, that they were indeed humans wearing jet packs, an existing technology that has been around now for decades.–Remember the old black-and-white Rocketman serials?!
More intriguing was the corpse of a immature creature (left) captured in 2007 and now mummified, but reported to have been alive and aggressive when captured; the connection was that perhaps this was an infantile form of a flying humanoid, some kind of previously-unknown species. Described as appearing between a rat and a monkey, this small corpse was at first thought to have been that of a skinned monkey, although it was later found to have rudimentary skin, fangs, and semi-human features including a double arch which is thought to have given the creature the capacity to stand. Large eye orbits in the remains suggest that the beast had good vision. A piece of the creature’s tail was taken for DNA analysis, and it was found to contain no identifiable material! In other words, they’re not sure what it is! The creature appeared primate-like in appearance.
This Terror from the Sky episode was at least an improvement over the rather dreary and mundane wild dogs or rats episodes that MonsterQuest has aired in recent times…
— There is a matter of considerable importance of which you must be made aware: Michael Jackson’s nose is MISSING!!!
Or so reports The Rolling Stone. You’re probably aware that decades of plastic surgery had destroyed Michael Jackson’s nose; he had to wear a prosthesis instead, with claims of a false nose supported by a former housekeeper to Jackson. A witness who supposedly saw Michael’s body as it lay on the autopsy table in the morgue reportedly noted that said prosthetic nose was missing from the singer’s surgically mangled face, leaving behind a small, dark hole surrounded by bits of cartilage…Ewww!– As if removal of part of his brain hadn’t been enough…
The Michael Jackson saga keeps on getting more bizarre just as his doctor is the target of a manslaughter probe into the singer’s death. The question remains of the nose’s whereabouts. — Someone out there knows of the nose! I would suggest that we round up the usual suspects. — Let’s visit underworld bars and begin hurting people! One of them must know something…
If you like complex comic book heroes and dark story lines, you just might enjoy Watchmen, now available for purchase or rental. Set in an alternate reality circa 1985 that’s teetering on the brink of nuclear war, Watchmen covers the exploits of half a dozen flawed superheroes as they investigate the murder of one of their number and uncover a sinister plot threatening the world.
While the avian-themed Nite Owl appears to be the only quasi-furry character in the movie, for me the heart and soul of the flick is Rorschach. Looking like some 1940’s gumshoe detective in a trench coat and a fedora, Rorschach also sports an enigmatic mask on which play constantly-changing inkblot images that give the character his name. Rorschach also has the best dialogue in the flick, lines like:
“Felt dark planet turn under my feet and know what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.”
(…from the journal of Rorschach as seen in the movie, Watchmen…)
While a sociopath as “crazy as a snake’s armpit,” Rorschach makes disturbing sense at times, has a kind of tragic nobility to him, and is exceedingly tough and cool. When locked up in a prison with fifty or so criminals he placed there, Rorschach re-frames the situation to consider the cons as locked up with him, not he with them…he is the alpha predator there, and he proves it!
Watchmen also features Ozymandias, the world’s smartest human, with his intriguing animal companion, lynx. There is also the blue-skinned Dr. Manhattan, yet another physicist given awesome powers to manipulate matter as a result of a terrible accident. Nearly-omnipotent, Dr. Manhattan spends much of the movie fully-exposed in the nude…(when you’re omnipotent, you can dress pretty much any darn way you want!)
The movie also has a wonderful historical perspective, going back to 1940 or so to chronicle the early history of these superheroes and their parents; you’ll even catch glimpses of President Kennedy and the legendary second gunman who assassinated him, and view Watchmen fighting on the American side in Vietnam. There’s a Mothman in this group as well, but he’s not the cryptid and winds up in an asylum, possibly due to a cheesy costume.
You’ll probably either love or hate Watchmen, but I fell into the former group…guess I’m learning what cats know…
—I appreciate you, my loyal, intelligent, and off-beat readers!–As of July 27th, we’ve had over 40,000 hits on this blog, reaching up to 769 hits on a single day!—Foxsylvania has been listed as a growing blog and on lists of “better blogs” (whatever they are), and it’s all because of you!
When I started Foxsylvania and was getting three to seven hits a day, I almost packed it in…sure am glad now that I didn’t! Hope you’ll forgive me now if I indulge in something that we furry types do in moments of extremity every now and then…<GROUP HUG!!!–AARGH!!!>
‘Scuse me, I lost my mind for a minute…I’m sure I’m gonna be sore after that one, but it’s a good hurt, right?– All I wanted to say is, thank y’all for reading…and I’ll keep doing whatever it is I’m doing here if you keep on reading…Why be normal?!
…alrighty then, carry on, and try to look busy!
— In an incident reported July 17th, a Colorado man used an 18″ chainsaw to successfully fight off a mountain lion that attacked him during a camping trip with his wife and two toddlers in northwest Wyoming! The adult male lion was described as being emaciated and showing other signs of starvation when he pounced on the man, an ex-Marine…Semper Fi, Dude!
The camper met the lion head-on with his chainsaw running, inflicting a six- to eight-inch gash on the lion’s shoulder and suffering only a small puncture wound on his forearm. Knowing when it was outmatched, the lion ceased the attack.
The mountain lion was later killed by wildlife officials after it attacked a dog brought in to track it. Rabies tests were negative on the mountain lion, although other diseases have not been ruled out and starvation seems likely to have contributed to his unusual behavior…
(…chainsaws: good for cutting wood and predators down to size! And remember…when chainsaws are outlawed, only outlaws will have chainsaws! <fires up a big Stihl chainsaw…BRAPPP!> Bring it on, baby, yeah!)
— Believe it or not, there appears to be a live-action Aquaman movie in the works, with the star yet undecided! Aquaman has come a long way since his rather insipid portrayal as a whale-summoner in old ‘toon shows like SuperFriends; more recent incarnations have portrayed a superhero with an edge; buff, wounded, and with some anger issues. The poor guy was one of the few without a secret identity; he was always Aquaman, 24/7!
Movies are also being planned for The Green Arrow, and even a Bizarro (Superman) flick! –And get this: they’re trying to convince Cher to play Catwoman! She always did strike me as having feline qualities…
…it’s a great time to be alive, right? 😉
— MonsterQuest seems to be straining a bit to come up with new material, and the new season opener was not a strong muchless a dazzling entry; we all know that there are feral dogs out there, some abandoned pets, others wild for generations.
The problem is a real and serious one, however, with significant wild dog populations reported in Detroit, Toledo, East St. Louis, and other cities in the midwest. Large packs of territorial predators prowl the streets, often disease-ridden and aggressive. This is not a breed-specific issue but rather one of human mismanagement; yep, ole homo sap botches things again!
In 2005, a map of canine DNA was established. MonsterQuest drew blood from some feral dogs that they succeeded in caging, and found genetic traces of Pit Bull, German Shepherd, and Rotweiler lineage, as well as more remote traces of other breeds; mixing the genes of more aggressive breeds with feral dogs yields potentially undesirable behavioral traits. MonsterQuest also used a camera on a collar or “collar-cam” to monitor the daily location and activities of wild dogs, finding that the packs tend to hang in wooded areas as well as abandoned homes; again, no great surprises.
As urban decay accelerates in the troubled economy and people flee the cities, the problems posed by feral dog packs are increasing. An attack by a wild dog occurs nationally once every 40 seconds, some resulting in deaths…
FOXSYLVANIA 
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