The screech-in; a tradition that is perpetrated on the Atlantic coast of our very own country. The concept is simple, all you do is take a shot of screech, kiss a cod on the mouth, then say one line or another as designated by one of the locals. If you find yourself in this situation and you notice your thoughts are starting to stray into the “what the hell kind of person makes another person kiss a fish in order to fit in” area, I want you to take a deep breath and calm yourself down. Things could be worse. The maritimers could have had access to the sarcastic fringehead.

In the animal kingdom there are many non-lethal ways of fighting one of your own kind. You could rattle some horns, do some headbutting, a punch to the face, or even slapping necks (yeah, ok, giraffes are weird as hell too). But no. Somewhere along the line the fringehead genes decided its best plan for the future of the species involved expanding faces and pressing mouths. I can’t help but to imagine a scenario of our past where things were only slightly askew and us humans evolved this trait, and at the same time feel an overwhelming sensation of having dodged a bullet.

“I was about to drop a security deposit on that place on Georgia, but then another guy wanted in and he had more face than me so I had to give it up”

- Wolverox

P.S. – Don’t let your spirit get stuck in the sand.

Normally what I would do here is get some information on some sort of terrifying animal, then try to form it into some sort of coherent string of words to share with everybody. Today is different. Today I have almost no information or statistics on what I am saying.

Just a few moments ago, I was looking at a list of non-bird animals that are able to fly, glide, or otherwise become airborne for an extended period of time. Everything was looking in order: ants that could maneuver and glide when they fell off trees, spiders that use web as parachutes to float along in the wind. Then I got to the next header which read ‘Moluscs’. Seems like a strange group to have a flying member, butd hey, they are a pretty diverse group that has everything from limpets to the octopus, maybe there is some strange offshoot species that catches wind as it falls or some nonsense like that. Then I saw it – Flying squid.

Now squid were scary enough when it was just a fast moving cephalopod with grasping tentacles and a powerful parrot-like beak. But now they can use jet propulsion to launch themselves into the air and travel distances up to 50 meters? “Bullshit!” was my initial response (that I probably shouldn’t have yelled out loud, being at work at the time). So I hit some wikipedia pages for flying squid, and while they did mention briefly that a form of squid jet propulsion does exist it didn’t say anything about lifting said squid out of the ocean, not to mention 50m. So I went to youtube and google images to see some visuals of this thing. Nothing. Not one credible image or video. I offer a bounty of $20 + a hug for a video of a squid flying by it’s own power, and a warning to watch yourself when near the ocean (maybe)

-Wolverox

Once upon a time, the Ghostbusters were told that they could choose the form their destruction would take and, unable to keep his mind blank, Ray thought up what should have been the tool of their demise in the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Now it is our turn to decide. We all know that eventually we will create robots that will turn on us in a murderous fashion. We just get the chance to choose what we’ll be looking at when we’re on the short end of the genocide stick. While I would personally choose something along the lines of “target shaped” it seems the general consensus between the technology firms is bears. Robot bears. (more…)

The “hot” new video for Victoria’s hunky choklit bar, Blank! Jordan Minky! This song from an album that hopefully exists…coming soon….? While you’re at it you can check out the whole album Luminous Piles of Fir from Old Life Records at www.blankmusic.bandcamp.com…it’s absolutely the freshest…sizzling new live act to come as well…check it out! huge crash!

this makes me really happy

Today is the last day of November, and I think we all know what that means. That’s right! Only five more sleeps till December 5th, so go grab your sheepskins, masks, bells, and chains and put them somewhere easily accessible so you’ll be able to find them once you are all liquored up. Normally I’m the type of guy who sees Christmas decorations in the stores in November and get all grinch about it. But this year I’m feeling in the spirit and I can’t wait to get out on those streets, scare the children, hassle the pretty girls, and beat the not so pretty ones with a stick.

Wait, what? You mean you aren’t from a batshit crazy part of the world (I’m looking at you, Alps) and have no idea what I’m talking about? Id like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Meet the Krampus.

The story goes that Krampus travels around with old saint Nick doing things that range from mischievous to downright evil, but only to the kids on the naughty list. A couple examples include stealing all their presents, and putting them into a bag and kidnapping them(I wish I could tell you where he took them, but the Krampus is a slippery devil and who knows where he goes).

Of course, we as humans couldn’t let Krampus have all the fun. It has become a tradition in the Alpine towns for the young men to don the Krampus masks and furs and raid the town drunk while swinging chains, sticks, and bells. Technically this could happen at any point in December, however the 5th is when it is turned up to full steam and the young women are warned to stay indoors. But as backwards as it all seems, it holds a valuable message: if you don’t want to get messed up by a scary demon, just be nice.

-Wolverox

Does anyone else ever have those moments when you find out a particular piece of information and can’t believe that you weren’t aware of it already? Not because it is something you would have liked to have known, but because it falls within a subject that you hear or read a lot about and you really should have come across it earlier. Well, I had one of those moments today, and I’d like to introduce you to the bird so scary it doesn’t need to fly, the ninja of New Guinea, the third largest bird in the world, heir to the throne of Gondor, the Cassowary.

If you were to walk through the rainforests of New Guinea or northwestern Australia you’d probably never lay eyes on one of these cockatrice-like monsters, since they prefer to work incognito and will stealthily split when they hear a human coming. Well, most of the time they will split. If one chooses to stick around you can consider yourself unlucky enough to see firsthand why the Cassowary is notorious amongst the locals for having a very short fuse. In fact, they hold the world record for being the most dangerous bird alive today (by today I mean 2007). One little tidbit I got from the wikipedia page, where I admittedly got most my information on this bird, says that during WWII, troops stationed in New Guinea were told to stay away from the Cassowaries because of how aggressive they can be. These are fully grown men with guns that are trained to kill other fully grown men with guns, but they better stay away from old crazy eyes over there or shit is going to get real ugly real fast.

The cassowary isn’t just dangerous because it is mean. It is less akin to a schoolyard bully than it is to a highly trained martial artist. You know that crazy master in Kill Bill who had that technique where he would hit someone a couple times and then their heart would explode after they took a few steps? Well the cassowary has a similar technique. What it does is kick you in the stomach, then a little bit later you die of an intestinal rupture.

I would like to drop some more scientific facts, maybe do some comparisons to the other flightless birds of today or gastornis, phorusrhacos, and the terror birds of ancient South America. However, most of the spare minutes I had to research and write this I spent watching this video over and over.

-Wolverox

We’ve all heard the old adage that the only thing that will survive a nuclear war is the cockroach. Spawned from the fact that cockroaches are notoriously hard to kill with most other methods, it does seem like a plausible scenario. It turns out however, that they are actually pretty bad at not dying to gamma radiation. It takes roughly 600-1000 rads to kill a human and, while it takes much more to actually kill it, a roach becomes sterile after ~1000 rads itself. So as the last human inhales his last breath before being irradiated to death he can comfort himself in knowing that the infamous pests are soon to follow.

Then he could exhale in a scream knowing that the true inheritors of Earth are freaking parasite wasps. Habrobracon, a member of the Braconidae family is our current having-your-atoms-ionized-without-experiencing-a-horrible-death champion ringing in at 180,000 rads before dieing. “But wait” you say, “if this wasp is a parasite wouldn’t it’s hosts just die and by proxy the wasp would perish as well?”. Unfortunately, we aren’t off the hook that easily. One of the other insects I’ve been able to find radiation stats on is the fruit fly which can stand up to a respectable 64,000 rads. If you take a look at the favoured hosts of the Braconidae, you’ll notice fly larvae in there amongst many other insects (all of which are reasonable at surviving radiation on account of their cells not dividing constantly like vertebrates).

How do we know that these wasps take this ridiculously high amount of radiation to kill? 180,000 rads is a lot to be throwing around the lab unprotected and making a big lead shield is way too obvious. Pay attention, because this is why I love the human race. What we did was put them inside a screen, put the screen inside a rocket, blasted it into orbit, then bombarded them with gamma radiation, just to see what happened.

Speaking of seeing what happened, imagine being up on the international space station when the nukes start flying and everything on earth is hit almost uniformly with ~170,000 rads. You jump (float) into your space shuttle and head back to earth  to survey the damage. As you step out onto the brown and barren Earth, you can hear nothing aside from the whistling of the wind and the buzzing of the wasps.

-Wolverox

The year was 1998, and I was but a mere 10 year old lad playing cards with my brother in the cabin of our boat. We were tied to the Newcastle Island docks just off the coast of Nanaimo and it was a standard west coast night – kind of wet, a little windy, and sort of cold. Any warmth that the small electric heater had generated was instantly dissipated as my father and his friend entered the cabin.

They were speaking about a man named Bob (I use the name as a generic placeholder, having forgotten the original, although I think it might have actually been Bob). Neither of them had really known the man, just heard his name mentioned and occasionally saw him around the docks, as he used the same marina as us. From the little information I have been able to gather about him, I can say that he was pretty much your average middle aged man, and you know what is common for middle aged men? Heart attacks. Just a couple days prior, Bob had been working on his boat alone in the evening when he was struck down by a heart attack. Now, heart attacks aren’t usually instantly fatal, however if you are like poor Bob and you fall into the ocean while having a heart attack you are completely ruined. If the story of Bob ended there it would be kind of sad and unremarkable to the point of not worth sharing. It doesn’t end there however, in fact it only serves to set up the real story.

The next morning the body was found washed upon the shore of Newcastle Island, the very same island that we were now docked at. Even though the remains of Bob were quickly retrieved before the crack of dawn, they were too late to get him before the wildlife could give him a hard time. As the coastguard zodiac pulled into Midden Bay they found the corpse near the shore surrounded by albino raccoons. In the glare of the spotlight the raccoons eye’s flashed red before they ran off into the woods. As Bob was placed into the boat to be brought back into the city, they noticed that a lot of him was missing. The albino raccoons of Newcastle Island had eaten much of the man, and even scarier, had gotten themselves a taste for human.

-Wolverox

In today’s adventure we are traveling to the Mediterranean, a land with some of the oldest tales of terrifying sea monsters on the planet. Now we are told a new menace has arisen and warned in dire tones that it will soon be gunning for us. Join me as I take a look at ‘Marine Mucilage’ and explain why I don’t care.

So what happens in the warm still waters of the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas is organic matter (both living and not) falls from the surface and congregates near the floor. While this is happening, bacteria are doing their own thing and spitting out exopolymers (basically glue) to whatever piece of sea garbage they are attached to. Eventually, large chains are formed. Large chains that just happen to make a good spot for others critters to come hide out or look for food. Of course that just makes it a better place to hide or eat and we have ourselves a chain reaction.

Now that we have our blob of sea-garbage we can start looking at why people are flipping their lids. I have to admit after you have to start describing the length in miles of one of these things with 4 digits you begin to take notice. This thick mucus structure can also trap fish and cover their gills  until they suffocate and eventually dissolve into part of the blob themselves. What has scientists and the guys at national geographic up in arms though, is the ability for the mucilage to carry bacteria and viruses, the most notable of which being E(scherichia) Coli.

Which brings me to why I don’t care, or more specifically, why this thing fails at being a human killing terror machine. The first is that these things have been reported since the 1700′s and if there was a high rate of infection someone would have noticed earlier that hey, all these guys that have e coli went to the beach and swam in bio-garbage yesterday. Secondly, when will this conversation ever be necessary? “I know the beach is covered with this weird sick mucus, but I am going to swim anyway”    “Don’t do that, there is incredible microbial biodiversity in those, maybe even E Coli”    “oh, well I better not then”.

a link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html

-Wolverox

If someone asks you to name a place on earth that you would consider safe, I would be willing to bet that Columbia isn’t the first name that jumps into your mind. It isn’t strange that a place filled to the brim with piranhas, jaguars, and drug lords sounds forbidding. Now, what if I were to tell you that Columbia is a veritable playground when compared to 59 million years ago? (This being after the dinosaurs went extinct; Dinosaurs being scary is a given.)

Recently, in a coal mine in Columbia the miners found themselves digging up something other than coal: snake skeletons. Specifically the fossilized skeletons of what has been named Titanoboa.

The vertebrae on the left is a modern anaconda, the one on the right is titanoboa. Now some stats courtesy of Wikipedia: length 12-15 meters, weight 2,500lbs, diameter 1 meter. If this snake was lying next to you, you could literally touch it with your hand without having to bend down. The cool thing I learned when reading about this monster is that on account of there being a direct correlation between temperature and the maximum size a snake can obtain, scientists are able to determine the average temperature of the era. Until now I couldn’t have cared less about global warming (sorry, ‘climate change’). Fewer polar bears and slightly higher sea levels don’t phase me, but add giant freaking snakes to the table and you’ve got my attention.

I’m going to do a quick round of mathematics here before I sign off. If you look on the internet you can find images/videos of anacondas eating various animals. Going off the one where it eats an alligator I come up with the following:

Largish anaconda: 300lbs.

Large male alligator: 800lbs. Probable alligator: 400lbs

Titanoboa: 2,500lbs

Average male giraffe: 2,630lbs

Alligator to anaconda weight ratio: 1.25

Giraffe to titanoboa weight ratio: 1.052

Verdict: Scary ass snake could eat a giraffe whole.*

-Wolverox

* may or may not be bullshit