Thursday, September 27, 2007

Bigfoot in Suburbia



This report hits close to home. I have a near and dear friend (let's call him Jason) that has been attacked by the same vindictive Bigfoot, three separate times. The first time Jason considered it common place. Who hasn't had at least one encounter with a Bigfoot, or as I prefer to call them North American Yeti or NAY. It wasn't until the second incident that Jason got worried and began to take action. He started compiling a file and kept detailed records of each incident.

1. The first happened over night and Jason wasn't even aware that there was a problem until he went out to go to work in the morning, and noticed his back windshield was shattered and ripped open. In the glass and on the back seat he discovered samplings of long brown-red hairs. That had a distinct smell. Jason described the smell as, "my dog Burma after treein' a skunk and then walking home in the rain". This is similar to other eye-witness accounts of the unique smell of a NAY.

Speculators might say that it could have been a dog, but the anchor to the story is the fact that Jason's box of Slim Jims that he kept under his driver seat for the long hauls was gone. "No durn dog is goin take my Slim Jims and not leave a mess of paper and wrappers behind".




2. The second encounter was weird and proves the vindictive nature of this particular NAY. While driving home from work one night about four months after the first event. Jason was enjoying a car heated McMuffin he had forgotten about on his drive to work in the morning. When, "Shaish! The glass shatters again in the back seat winder." A fellow co-worker (we'll call her) Julie saw the whole thing and reported that she thought "a depressed bird had flown into and then shattered the window". The truth was far far darker. Julie and Jason pulled over to inspect his window and discovered a crude mud pie that had been baked by the sun as the cause of the window shattering. Before any of you might say "damn kids" the finger prints found on the mud pie were three times the size of Jason and twice the size of Julie's. After inspecting the damage and using Julie's emergency car phone to call AAA Jason went back to his car to wait and discovered the mud pie and his McMuffin were gone. "It was at that moment that I knew that damn Yeti knew where I worked and lived, and by Gilligan he was after my food."



NAY are not that far off the evolutionary ladder from say the bear or racoon, and we have all seen Grizzly Man and know what happens when someone feeds a wild animal.

I'm not saying that Jason was the cause but he has become the undeserved victim in this deadly ballet.


3. The final incident that brings us to the current time was a month ago. Jason was watching his nightly Perry Mason when he heard a loud, "CraYptch!" and without thinking of his own safety Jason grabbed his 1942 Packard Clipper hubcap that he always has on hand for protection and headed for his car. He saw it for the first time walking down the charming street with overhanging tree branches sucking on one of his pickled pig's feet. Without thinking Jason threw his hubcap frisbee style at the NAY hitting it in the flabby left love handle causing it to drop the jar of pig’s feet and run.



Jason took a photo of the last break in for proof and naysayer’s. It is clear to anyone that the hole in the back of his windshield looks just like a giant foot has crushed the window. and the scale of the picture shows the foot to be almost half the size of the whole window. Truly amazing proof.



Now as a librarian, I know this all sounds hard to believe even from our 47 loyal reader's but I swear on my degree Jason, has had and might continue to have encounters with a NAY that appears to steal the food from his car. After hearing the story, I had to ask Jason, what he's learned from the series of events. He had this to say, "Well I have to say I knew something was goin on be it heat expansion, warped glass, but I never thought I would be the target of on going Yeti attacks. I must say after I caught him red handed with my pig's feet I don't leave no more food in my car I either eat it or take it with me when I get out".

I hope you've all been educated about this serious problem we face as a society. As we continue to encroach on our few remaining wild places we will be the ones who will suffer for it. Be it a mountain lion that attacks and kills a morning runner or yeti that break into your car for random scraps of food. You can't feed wild animals without eventually getting bitten.

You've been warned...

Monday, September 17, 2007

Suspiciously Addictive Nacho Cheese Chips Have a Secret Ingredient . . . Heroin!

Frank and Ada Gross never believed that their angelic 8 year old son, Eric would ever fall prey to the dark grasp of addiction. However 576 family sized packages of Nacho Cheese Boritos later, it had became evident that their son had developed a nacho cheese dependency for the popular chips.

"It seemed like we never saw him without one of those giant red bags." Ada explains, "He ate them morning, noon, and night. My walls were constantly covered in orange fingerprints and he ruined three couches by wiping his hands on the cushions."

Frank and Ada first became suspicious of the tasty chips when they found large, hidden stockpiles of Nacho Cheese Boritos throughout their home. Eric had begun covertly hoarding the chips to ensure he always had an available "stash."

As Ada recalls, "I once found a family-size bag of Boritos taped under the lid of the toilet tank. Then another was stuffed into the heating duct. I found that one last winter when our house started to stink of burned cheese. He hid bags everywhere: at the bottom of the dog food bag, in flour jars, in the legs of his Sunday slacks, in a hollowed out radio, inside a teddy bear, and he even cut a hole into his mattress. He went crazy destroying things to make hiding places for those damn chips."

As Frank would soon discover, those "damn chips" where not just tasty, but genuinely addictive. After two years of constant Nacho Cheese Boritos consumption, Eric Gross' face and teeth have become permanently stained orange with nacho cheesy goodness.

After attempts to remove the facial stain with steam cleaners, pressure washers, Palmolive, bleach, Ajax, steel wool, Oxi Clean, baking soda, and three walks through The Softy Suds Car Wash failed, Frank finally turned to family friend and chemist, Hudson Ernest. Frank's hope was that Hudson would be able to uncover the chemical makeup of the orange pigment in order to design an effective cleaning agent.

What Hudson discovered was nothing short of shocking. He found that an unlisted ingredient in the cheesy chips is diacetylmorphine diamorphine, known more commonly on the streets as heroin. The heroin is added to the nacho cheese chips in small enough amounts as to be undetected during the legendarily stringent FDA inspections, but potent enough to ensure the repulsively ravenous consumption demonstrated by little Eric Gross.

A close examination of the words "Nacho Cheese Boritos" also reveals a disturbing case of subliminal advertising designed to guarantee their selection from grocery store shelves.

Consumers are unwittingly being hypnotized by the insidious anagram "nacho cheese boritos = choose 2 eat heroin."

As physician of neuroscience, Dr. Petra Krycek explains, "It is simply the nature of our logical cerebral cortex to seek out patterns and reorder to find further order. The makers of Nacho Cheese Boritos are clearly exploiting this natural obsessive compulsive proclivity."

The combination of the heroin additive and the hypnotic advertising have combined to create dual vector addictive ploy to bolster sales and produce legions of 'NCB junkies.'

The makers of Nacho Cheese Boritos declined to comment on Hudson Ernest's chemical analysis or Eric's obvious addiction.

To date, Frank and Ada have been unable to remove the nacho stain marring their young son's face and teeth, but are optimistic about a new concoction of borax, lye, ammonia, lamb intestine, and eye of newt, a recipe they received from new age healer, Sunbeam Epoxy Starlight.

All this Librarian can say is . . . Choose 2 Read Library Conspiracies.

--Katherine O'Brien-Smith

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Instaneous Lap Pet Combustion




It is a serious problem that not many people are aware of. ILPC as most specialists call it is a rare phenomenon that occurs due to over zealous petting of a lap pet. The friction builds up between the person's hand and pet's fur which can become more unstable than nitroglycerin. All it takes is a small spark of electricity and BOOM your cat or dog goes up in flames.

There are two people that were willing to tell me their stories for this post.

The first story's photo is the above photograph. Q (as she wanted to be known as) had her twin sister take the photo of her prize winning poodle Fee-Fee. It was taken just after winning the Glendive, MT grand champion showing for the third year in a row and as Q says "Putting that Bitch Gigi, in her place!" Q was giving Fee-Fee her celebratory pat down when her twin shuffled over in nothing but her socks and tried to give Fee-Fee a pat on the head. "Next thing you know, Fee-Fee's on fire! and still the show dog, calm as can be and waiting the judge's inspection of her rear end. Naturally I had to get a picture of this for the family Christmas card before putting out the flames." I had asked Q what she did for Fee-Fee's burns and she replied, "Honey all you have to do is let the animal lick its wounds with a bit of Tabasco sauce on it. They'll stop sure as a bum on a quarter." After that I felt it was time to leave Anson, ME




This next story is a bit disturbing as it results in an entire room catching fire. Shirley is a bit zany. Shirley lost most of her mental faculties and so she spends most of her time sitting in front of a blank wall screaming at dancing leprechauns and explicit elves. This type of activity is a damaging environment for ILPC. It tends to increase the chances of an outbreak and for Shirley's case caused her staring wall to burn down. Shirley's lap cat is named Dog after her last pet that died of unknown causes. From what Shirley’s home nurse explained to me Dog had learned over the years not to upset Shirley or try to get off of her lap without permission. "Poor old Dog just sat there on fire and let Shirley continue to pet it. At one point it looked like Shirley would smoother the flame but then she'd go to scratchn' the cat and send sparks everywhere that's how the room caught fire." The fire department would release a statement saying, "The unnatural collection of dried onion skins, newspapers and the odd assortment of open aired cans of bacon fat was disaster waiting to happen." I asked Shirley’s home nurse why she didn’t do anything but she explained she doesn’t get paid to put out fires and she all pointed out that it was her that took the photo. To this day Shirley still believes it was the elves that started the fire.

The last picture doesn't have a story other than being the reason I started this investigation. I have a hobby of exploring condemned homes that have burnt down for unusual trinkets that have been misshape by fire. While on one of my outings I discovered a clear spot in the center of what looked to be the family room where I discovered this grizzly scene which made my heart yearn to discover how something like this could happen. What I found was what appears to be a group of four to five small kittens or what remains of the kittens and I can only guess that the mixture of their cuteness, carpet and socked children gave birth to my first case of ILPC.



For the sake of the animals please educate your grandparents and family members that are a bit crazy when it comes to their pets.

You've been warned...

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

SAT Test Cracked by Two High School Students

Students across the country may get to breathe a sigh of relief when it comes to the dreaded SATs. It seems months of stressful, diligent studying by over-achieving know-it-alls, and last-minute, caffeine-fueled cramming by lazy, back row slackers may just be a thing of the past when it comes to this standardized test. Two Hawthorne High School students claim to have "cracked" the SAT test by uncovering a guessing method with an accuracy rate of 91%.

It all began when, H.H.S. student, Finnegan Brewer received his first round of SAT scores in the mail. He was confused, yet pleasantly surprised. As he explains, "I was confused, yet pleasantly surprised. I opened up my scores. I got a 728 [out of a possible 800] on the critical reading section. I was happy because that's a great score, but at the same time I was really confused. There's no way I scored that high. That section was really boring. I'm more of a graphic novel guy, and there weren't any pictures so I just hurried and guessed. I spent the rest of the time drawing pictures of boobs on my standard issue, two sheets of scratch paper."

When Finnegan told his best friend and fellow H.H.S mathlete, Lester Cromwell of his unexplainable high critical reading score, Lester's analytical antennas were buzzing. "When Finnegan told me the story of the guessing, and the boobs, and the really high score, my analytical antennas were buzzing. He told me he had used the chant 'Inka binka, bottle of ink. The cork fell out and you stink' to guess; whatever choice 'stink' landed on he chose. Well because we are both highly respected mathletes, we just had to look into this guessing method."

What followed was a rigorous and highly scientific study of four guessing methods, using four different childhood chants:

1. Inka binka bottle of ink. The cork fell out and you stink!

2. One spot. Two spot. Zig zag tear. Pop-die. Pennygot. Tennyum. Tear. Harum. Scare 'em, rip 'em. Tear 'em. Tay. Taw Toe.

3. One potato. Two potato. Three potato, four. Five potato. Six potato. Seven potato more.

4. Eenie. Meanie. Miny. Mo. Tell me the answer 'cause I don't know.

Finnegan and Lester paid 40 "total burnouts, with no future" $2.00 to take the SATs each using one of the chants to choose their answers. Each burnout would choose the answer the last word in the chant landed on. The results were startling.

The ten burnouts using "Inka Binka" received an average score of 1486 [out of a possible 1600]. This score is only 216 points less than the required test score for acceptance at Harvard University. The other three chants fared less well with an average score of 690, though this score is still high enough to get into most state junior colleges. Surprisingly, "Eenie. Meanie. Miny. Mo" was disastrous with an average combined score of less than 196, despite the fact that the chant promises to "tell you the answer."


"When we saw the results, we were shocked," tells Finnegan. "That's when we put on our forest green mathlete sweaters, grabbed our graphing calculators, and went to work analyzing the "Inka Binka chant."

What the boys discovered was an underlying mathematical relationship within that chant that led directly the the Golden Ratio. When the boys divided the number of syllables in the chant by the total number of choices, then multiplied that number by 2 (the type of pencil required to take the test) and then divided that number by the number of letters in the chant ((X/Y) x 2)/Z), the result was the number 1.6180339, the Golden Ratio.

Some experts believe the Golden Ratio is the fundamental essence of the universe; a number which guides all that is natural and inevitable. It is, most simply put, the key to the universe. It is because of this natural mathematical relationship between elements of the chant and the test itself that the magical Golden Ratio ensures an almost perfect selection of the correct answer.

All this Librarian can say is . . . Inka binka bottle of ink. The cork fell out and the SATs stink!

--Katherine O'Brien-Smith

UPDATE: Finnegan Brewer and Lester Cromwell will be delivering their paper "The Golden Ratio and the SATs: What they Don't want You to Know" at the annual Freshmen Publication Conference this Saturday at Harvard University, where both boys have been accepted after studying for the SATs for three hours the night before and using the "Inka Binka Method."