Djinn and tonic

This week we've been looking at some pretty deep topics, such as the effects of dark matter on star position in the Milky Way, what causes some plants to be essentially immortal, and the discovery of mineral grains that predate the Earth's formation.  So it seems fitting to address next something that is, I'm sure, on all of your minds, namely: what do I do if my house is occupied by an evil djinn?

The djinn, sometimes spelled "jinn" or anglicized as "genie," are spirits who you find in Middle Eastern mythology.  While people who are in the know about such things make it clear that djinns are not inherently good or evil, they have the tendency to be swayed toward the evil side of things.  Muhammad supposedly was sent not only to bring the word of Allah to humans but to the djinn as well, but even so they have a reputation for having some seriously ill will toward the rest of us.  Folk tales from that region are rife with djinn living in "unclean places" and possessing humans (the outcome is seldom good).

So pretty clearly, this is a group of beings we should all be on the lookout for.  This is where a guy named Saad Ja'afar comes in.  Because he is the world's foremost -- perhaps the world's only -- professional djinn trapper.

My first thought on reading this was to say, "um... his name is... Ja'afar?  You have got to be making this up."  Because any of you with children will undoubtedly know that this is the name (although usually spelled "Jafar") of the evil Grand Vizier in Aladdin.  But apparently yes, the djinn trapper is indeed Saad Ja'afar, and his business (Pakar Tangkap Jin), based in Johor Bahru, at the southern tip of Malaysia, is who you want to contact if you're being bothered by scary blue guys who live inside lamps.

Zawba'a, one of the kings of the djinn, with some of his attendant djinn servants.  Which brings up the question of why so many of them are blue.  Are they cold?  Maybe they should try putting some clothes on. (From a late 14th century Arabic manuscript) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As far as Ja'afar goes, his rates are pretty reasonable.  For one djinn removal, he charges 200 ringgit ($48.75 at current exchange rates), and he can even work remotely.  "I don’t have to physically be there at the location to catch the ghost," Ja'afar says.  "Before this, the farthest I’ve captured a djinn was at Sabah.  We keep the spirit and djinn close to the mosque to encourage it to repent."

It bears mention that Sabah isn't exactly right next door to Johor Bahru.  The only way to get from one to the other is via a two-hour flight.  So it's just as well he can trap troublesome djinn without leaving the comfort of his home.  I wouldn't want him to have to fly all the way to upstate New York if we were having djinn trouble, because I did that flight before and it was kind of miserable.  Kuala Lumpur to New York City was a sixteen-hour flight, meaning you could watch a long movie, sleep for six hours, and you'd still have seven hours left to go.

I have never been so glad to get off an airplane in my life.

Anyhow, Ja'afar has a Facebook page (because of course he does), and on it he has accounts of his successful captures, including a spirit-realm battle he got in with a bomoh, a Malaysian shaman, who brought a djinn back into a house he'd just cleared.  I can understand how frustrating this must have been.  I face that all the time with my dogs tracking in mud on floors I just cleaned, and they're not even doing it using magic.

Apparently, once Ja'afar captures the djinn, he imprisons it in a bottle, which I guess makes sense given the whole genie-in-a-lamp thing.  So it seems like he's got quite a lucrative racket going.  He never has to leave his house, and all he needs is a supply of glass bottles and corks and a good schtick to tell his customers about how dire the battle was, but he was victorious and the djinn is vanquished, and he gets paid.

Almost makes me wish I had thought of it first.

*****************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Naked tectonics

Sometimes I think I don't understand my fellow humans very well.

I try my hardest -- in fact, you might think of this blog as a five-year experiment in parsing how people think.  And sometimes, I think I've got it, that I have Homo sapiens pretty much figured out,

But then, something will happen, and I'm back to wondering if I might not be some kind of changeling.  Because a lot of the stuff people do is just flat-out weird.

Let's start with an incident that happened on May 30 in the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Some tourists, who appear to have been from Canada and various European countries, had climbed with a guide to the top of Mount Kinabalu.  And once they got to the top, they decided to take off all their clothes for a naked group-shot.

Now, so far, I have nothing particular to criticize here.  When the weather gets hot, I tend to wear the legally-prescribed minimum amount of clothing, and back in my reckless 20s I would have been an odds-on contender for the Olympic Co-ed Skinnydipping Team.  That said, it bears reminding that we're talking Malaysia here, a country known for its conservative attitudes toward showing skin.  When I was in Malaysia two summers ago, I noticed some scantily-clad tourists in Taman Negara National Park getting the stink-eye from the locals, so I decided to keep my shirt on -- despite the fact that it was 95 F and so humid that you could just about drink the air.  I probably would have gotten away with it, but I figured that I had no special need to offend local custom, so I did what the natives did and kept all my clothes on.

But Mount Kinabalu is remote, and the only ones up there at the time were the guides and the tourists, so the ten tourists stripped down to the skin.  One of the guides objected, and he was told to "go to hell."

That would have been that, except for the fact that five days later there was an earthquake near Mount Kinabalu that killed eleven people.  And you guessed it -- a local government official has said that the earthquake was due to the naked tourists having offended the mountain.

The Deputy Chief Minister of Sabah, Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, said, "To me, when something like this happens, it is a clear connection of the incident to the earthquake that has brought about so much damage and loss of lives...  There is almost certainly a connection.  We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected...  It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly."

Right.  Because earthquakes have nothing to do with plate tectonics, or anything.  They are caused by naked people.  Which makes you wonder how the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America, the Anchorage earthquake of March 1964, happened, because I find it highly unlikely that there were many naked people outside in Alaska in March.  

But anyway, Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan said he vowed to have the tourists brought to justice, and was trying to find ways to prevent them from leaving Sabah.  And to further illustrate how serious he was, he mentioned that he'd known something bad was going to happen that day, because he and his wife saw a flock of swallows that morning.  

"At first I didn’t think anything of it, but after it went on for more than half an hour I knew something was not well," Kitingan said.  "I brought it up with my wife and we both agreed that something bad was going to happen."

So we have the beginnings of a scientific formula here, something like "swallows + naked people = bad."

But the story's not over yet.  Because in another weird filigree, one of the tourists, Canadian Emil Kaminski, decided to post one of the photos on his Facebook page.  Here's a screengrab, with the naughty bits blurred out in case (1) Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan reads this blog, or (2) the upstate New York hill gods are considering having an earthquake, or (3) there are any suspicious-looking flocks of swallows near my house:

Kaminski added, "It is not based in logic, but superstition.  I utterly do not care for superstition.  If local religion prohibits certain actions, then local believers of that religion should not engage in it, but they cannot expect everyone to obey their archaic and idiotic rules."

When someone responded that Kaminski and the others should respect local culture, he responded, "Fuck your culture."

Which is an attitude I can't really get behind.  I mean, I like being naked as much as the next guy, but if you go to another country, deliberately setting out to give offense seems like bad policy. 

On the other hand, I have to agree with Kaminski that the Deputy Chief Minister's statement is patently ridiculous.  When I read what Kitingan had to say, I said, "What century are we in, again?"  But then I remembered what Glenn Beck said last week -- that the torrential downpours in Texas were due to Governor Rick Perry's request that the devout pray that god end the devastating drought that the state had been suffering through.  And really, how is that any more sensible than what Kitingan said?

If the Texas storms were god's will, though, you have to wonder what kind of twisted sense of humor the guy has.  Because the rains and subsequent flooding have caused millions of dollars in damage, and killed at least 23 people.  "You want the drought to end?" god seems to have said, grinning in a nasty sort of way.  "I'll end your drought for you."

Be that as it may, I don't see the difference between Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan's claim that a bunch of tourists taking off their clothes on a mountain top caused an earthquake, and Glenn Beck's claim that a bunch of people praying caused a catastrophic flood.  What's next?  Major world figures deciding that thunder is caused by Zeus and Hera having a bowling tournament?

Oh, and in unrelated developments: senior Islamic clerics working with ISIS in Syria and Iraq have outlawed pigeon breeding as a hobby because "the sight of the birds' genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam."  Violators of the ban will be fined and publicly flogged.

All of which returns me to my initial point, which is that I don't really understand people at all.  Because if the members of my species really think it's logical to think that naked people cause earthquakes, and naked birds are offensive, then I'm back to wondering if I might be some sort of changeling.

Flight of the dead

If there's a group of people that I enjoy arguing with even less than I enjoy arguing with young-earth creationists, it's conspiracy theorists.

At least the young-earth creationists admit that there's evidence out there that needs an explanation.  Fossils?  Left behind by the Great Flood.  Genetic and morphological homology between related species?  Coincidence.  Light from stars further away than 6,000 light years?  The speed of light changes as it goes.  Or light stretches.  Or weakens.  Or something.

So, okay, they're wrong, about nearly everything scientific that you could be wrong about.  But at least they don't come up with batshit crazy nonsense for which there is no evidence, and then argue that your evidence doesn't exist.

Which is, by and large, the conspiracy theorist's favorite modus operandi.  Take, for example, the latest wacko explanation (if I can dignify it by that name) of the recent tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 by Ukrainian separatists: the whole thing was staged in order to force a confrontation between the United States and Russia, and the plane itself was being flown remotely and was peopled entirely by corpses.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

My first thought upon reading this was that the originator of this "theory" must have believed that the Sherlock Holmes episode "A Scandal in Belgravia" was a historical documentary.  What evidence, you might rightly ask, does anyone have that this conjecture is true, other than that provided by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Cumberbatch?

A statement that rebel leader Igor Girkin made that a number of the bodies at the crash site did not appear to be "fresh."

Well, if the plane I'm on gets blown out of the sky, and I fall 30,000 feet, I'm guessing I won't be looking my "freshest" at that point, either.  And afterwards, Girkin reportedly said that he could "neither confirm or deny" the claim.

But that was all it took.  The plane was full of corpses.  The whole thing was a setup.  This, despite the fact that one of the passengers on the doomed plane, Mohammed Ali Mohammed Salim of Kuala Lumpur, took a video of himself and other passengers getting settled right before the plane was preparing to take off, and uploaded it to Instagram along with the message that he was "a little nervous."

For good reason, as it turned out.

But no, say the conspiracy theorists, Salim's video itself is a fake, made hurriedly by the Evil Conspirators once Pillars of Sanity and Rationalism like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense began to figure the whole thing out.

Then, of course, we had the people who said that it couldn't be a coincidence that disaster has struck Malaysia Airlines twice within just a few months.  Maybe... maybe it wasn't a coincidence.  In fact, maybe MH 17 and MH 370, the flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean this past March were...

... the same plane.

At least, I think that's what is being claimed on this site, wherein we are treated to the following brain-boggling chain of thought:

How brain dead do they think we are??? 

Our previous articles have covered the MH370 who, when, where and why but not the WHAT. What happened to MH370 after they whisked it into the airport hangar at Diego Garcia? 

The WHAT question has now been answered. MH370 was remarked and became Malaysian flight MH17. It was flown to Amsterdam where it picked up passengers and flew over the western allied Ukraine where it "disappeared from radar" and was shot down and destroyed. The Russian government was blamed in order to alienate and inflame existing Ukraine tensions with Russia. Now who would want to do that exactly???? Duh... 

In view of the unlikely coincidence of two Malaysian Boing 777's being downed within 3 months of each other, there's undoubtedly a connection! 

Over 500 passengers have been murdered on board two "downed" Malaysian Boeing 777's within 3 months of each other. This is NOT a coincidence. 

Well, yes, actually it is.  That's what you call it when two events coincide.

Oh, and from March to July isn't three months.  But maybe I'm splitting hairs, here.

What gets me about this, and (in fact) what gets me about all conspiracy theories, is how the proponents of these nutty ideas think that an absence of evidence is actually a point in their favor.  No conclusive proof that the dead bodies at the MH 17 crash site were already badly decomposed?  Well, it must be true, then.  No trace whatsoever of missing flight MH 370?  It must have landed on Diego Garcia.

Which, of course, makes them impossible to counter.  Any evidence you can produce against their argument has been manufactured; any lack of evidence on their part is just proof of how sneaky these false-flag-loving illuminati are.

All of which kind of makes me pine for a nice rip-roaring argument with a young-earth creationist.  Ken Ham?  Kent Hovind?  Andrew Snelling?  Anyone?

Damn.

Elegy for an unpredictable universe

I was asked not too long ago how, as an atheist, I cope with tragedy.

"I don't see how you could possibly find a way to understand loss and grief," my friend said, "without some sense that there's a larger meaning in the universe."

In some ways, of course, I don't.  Not only do I not believe there's meaning in the universe (at least not in the sense he meant), I don't understand loss and grief at all.  I experience it, all too deeply -- I've lost both parents and a beloved grandmother, not to mention friends and colleagues.  It's impossible to live 53 years without going through the sorrow that comes with knowing that you will never, ever see someone you care about again.

But it is when the magnitude of the loss is amplified -- as it was yesterday with the announcement that Malaysia Flight 370 was almost certain to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board -- that we struggle hardest to wrap our brains around what has happened.  How could the world be so built, we think, that something like this could occur?

It brings back one of the formative books of my teenage years, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  This book chronicles the search by the 17th century Franciscan monk Brother Juniper, who is shocked when a bridge in his Peruvian village collapses, killing six people.  He is a devout man, and is certain that god must have had a reason for bringing those six onto the bridge, and no others, in time to die when the cable holding the bridge aloft snapped.  So he traces the life history of each of the six, trying to see if he can discern a pattern -- to see if he can read god's mind, determine what it was that led those particular six people to die when hundreds of others crossed the bridge daily and survived.

In the end, of course, he fails; and he concludes that either god's mind is too subtle, too deep to parse, or else there is no pattern, and things simply happen because they happen.

 It is a devastating conclusion.

Brother Juniper's search for meaning in apparent chaos is the genesis, I think, of religion, not to mention other worldviews perhaps less sanctified.  When you think about it, conspiracy theories come from the same place; a desperate need for there to be a reason, even a dark one, behind all of the bad stuff that happens in the world.  It seems that many of us would rather there be an explanation -- even if, in Christopher Moore's vivid turn of phrase, it involves "heinous fuckery most foul."  Better that than the universe being some kind of giant pinball game.

And in extremis, even we atheists still look for explanations, don't we?  Faced with tragedy, the first thing I've asked is, "Why me?", as if there is some answer to that question that is even possible given my philosophical worldview.  But it's a natural inclination, and seems to be universal to the human condition.  It is this aghast recognition that the world could treat us this badly that was captured in the starkly beautiful painting by Eugène Delacroix, depicting a Greek woman looking at the ruins of her home after her town was sacked by the Turks:

Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Sometimes there is no reason, no pattern; the world's machinery seems to work much of the time without any regard to us at all.  I flew Malaysia Airlines a year and a half ago, from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong, and arrived there safely; two weeks ago, a similar bunch of passengers, expecting (as I did) nothing more than a few hours of tedium, ended their lives in the turbulent waters of the Indian Ocean.  And if you think that the phrase "there but for the grace of god go I" hasn't gone through my head more than once in the last few days, you're sorely mistaken.

Of course, for an atheist, that phrase is only a metaphor, and perhaps not even a very good one.  I don't have the recourse of falling back on "they're with god now" or even "god has a plan."  All I'm left with is a sense that the universe is a strange, chaotic, and unpredictable place, full of beauty and goodness and love and pleasure, and pain and danger and fear and death, sometimes meted out in unequal parts and in ways that I will never really comprehend.  But I do know one thing: we need to be more conscious, right now, about the gratitude and compassion with which we treat the people around us.  None of us have any idea how many minutes we will be given; none of us have time to waste.  Hug your loved ones, your friends, your pets -- hell, hug total strangers if you want to.  There is nothing certain about tomorrow, so you damn well better make every second of today count.

As Thornton Wilder put it in the last line of The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead; and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

The disappearance of Flight 370

Well, I'm happy to say that The Weekly World News has been supplanted as the world's first and foremost disseminator of bullshit.  The crown has now officially been passed to Natural News. 

It's not that the competition wasn't stiff.  The Weekly World News has had some doozies.  (My all-time favorite TWWN headline: "Santa's Elves Actually Slaves From The Planet Mars.")  But Natural News has edged them out, on two bases: (1) they have better writers, so their stories actually sound plausible and therefore sucker more people, and (2) they have mastered the art of distributing bonkers "news" stories via social media.

At first, it was just health stuff (and their site is still sub-headed, "Natural Health News and Scientific Discoveries").  And as such, they confined themselves for some time to articles telling you about how Big Pharma is trying to kill us all, how you can cure cancer with lemon juice, how putting onions in your socks draws out toxins, and how you won't get heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or old age if you eat Indian gooseberries.  (You thought I was going to say I made those up, didn't you?  Well, ha.  Those are real article topics from Natural News.  Teach you to make assumptions.)

But now, they've branched out.  And because of this, we have a monumentally screwy piece of journalism, to wit: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared because it... disappeared.

[image courtesy of photographer Aero Icarus and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup.  Disappeared.  "Poof."  Or "zap," or whatever noise you prefer your teleportation device to make.  And admit it: it's not really that surprising.  Given that we're talking about the loss of a huge passenger jet, it was only a matter of time until the conspiracy theories started flying around.

Author Mike Adams does it right, I have to give him that.  First, it's hammered into our brains how MYSTERIOUS and BAFFLING it is that the plane vanished (words to that effect appear dozens of times), and then we're offered a possible explanation:

This is what is currently giving rise to all sorts of bizarre-sounding theories across the 'net, including discussions of possible secret military weapons tests, Bermuda Triangle-like ripples in the fabric of spacetime, and even conjecture that non-terrestrial (alien) technology may have teleported the plane away.

But no, Adams says, that would be ridiculous.  We couldn't believe that without evidence.  Instead, he asks us to believe the following:

The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't. If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.

If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever control it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. That thought is a lot more scary than the idea of an aircraft suffering a fatal mechanical failure.

Righty-o.  Because planes have never disappeared before, or anything.  It's not as if there's a list of 122 airplane disappearances that have never been resolved, right there on Wikipedia -- 36 of them since 1966, when black boxes were required on commercial aircraft.  It's not as if there is precedent for it taking a long while to locate wreckage -- such as the remains of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, which took three years to recover.  (The black box was finally found under 13,000 feet of water in the South Atlantic.)

Marginally more plausible theories have been trotted out, mostly centering on some kind of Chinese-led terrorist attack designed to get rid of one or more people who were on the plane.  To that, I can only respond: why the hell would the Chinese blow up an entire airplane to get rid of a few people?  The plane was headed to Beijing, fer cryin' in the sink.  Couldn't they have just arrested them when they got there?  It's not like the Chinese are shy about doing that sort of thing, after all.

So, then, you might ask: what do I think happened to the plane?

Are you ready? 

I don't know.  There's no evidence at the moment, and in the absence of evidence, that's what we say.  It's not that hard, really -- say it after me:  I don't know.  It might have been an equipment malfunction; it might have been a terrorist bomb; it might have been shot down by someone on the ground.  It might have been any number of other things.  We don't have any information yet, so any speculating is kind of pointless, and it sure is a little premature to start talking about alien teleportation.  But that didn't stop the commenters on the Natural News article from writing stuff that was, if you can believe it, even loonier than the original article:

Why Does Mike Adams not offer any speculation about The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing charging Israel with genocide? Also the Former Malaysian Prime Minister until 2003 who once stated 9/11 was a false flag and it's Jews that run the world. The plane being fitted with the Boeing uninterruptable autopilot system?

The possibility exists that this plane instead of moving towards the ground has moved away from the ground. In other words it has moved into outer space. It is beyond Earth orbit because it would have been detected in orbit by some instrument. This would explain why the black box signal is not detected.

Have you seen LOST!!! What if this is just like LOST! The radiation from Fukishima [sic] is probably changing the sky now too.

Mike is blessed with a unique ability to analyze, rationalize and discern evil. For those who want Mike to ignore politics, remember that millions more innocent people have been murdered by governments than from toxins in their food.

So, the reason that they haven't found the wreckage yet couldn't be the fact that the Gulf of Thailand, where the plane disappeared, is fucking huge?

Nope.  Has to be a "new, mysterious force that plucks airplanes out of the sky."

Look.  I'll grant you this:  I don't know what happened, either.  (Cf. what I wrote several paragraphs ago, and then asked you to say along with me.)  The difference is, I don't pretend that I do, and I don't have any interest in getting people all freaked out over idle speculation that will almost certainly turn out to be false.  But I'll go this far -- if it does turn out to be a "new, mysterious force," or aliens, or time warps, or the fact that the Bermuda Triangle decided to go on vacation in Southeast Asia, I'll happily publish a retraction.

It'd be nice to receive the same from Mike Adams if, on the other hand, I turn out to be right -- but I'm not expecting it.

Footprints, skulls, real estate, and musical theater

My prognostication earlier this year that Melba Ketchum's failure to demonstrate that she had a sample of Bigfoot DNA would be an end to squatchery was apparently wildly wrong.

Ketchum's embarrassment of a scholarly paper, and her subsequent meltdown, evidently discouraged no one in the cryptozoological world, although it did generate a number of highly witty comments (my two favorites were "I guess she didn't Ketchum" and "Melba is toast").  But judging by four stories this week, the folks who believe that our hairy cousins populate the remote areas of the world are still undaunted.

First, we have a report from Malaysia that a set of 200 footprints belonging to a Southeast Asian Sasquatch were reported from the village of Kampung Kepis Baru.

Now, my first thought was: I was just in Malaysia last August, and the Bigfoot waits until now to show up?  There I was, chasing birds, and I could have been chasing proto-hominins.  Best of all, it would have been chasing proto-hominins in the tropics, which is definitely preferable to freezing my ass off in the Himalayas.  But sometimes you don't get this kind of break, however richly you deserve it.

Be that as it may, the guy who discovered the footprints, a rubber plantation owner named Adnis Pungut, took the following photograph:

So, my next thought was: really?  That's your evidence?  Couple that with the following quote from the article:

The footprints were all the same size and according to reports from Pungut based on the prints it could be assumed the creature who made them had two legs and weighed more then [sic] 100kg or about 220lbs.

220 pounds?  Wow, that is one impressive creature.  I can't think of anything that could be an upright, bipedal creature that weighs 220 pounds except for a Malaysian Bigfoot.  Unless, possibly, it could be an overweight American tourist wearing flip-flops.


Next, we have a real estate company called Estately, Inc., which has compiled a list of the best and worst states for Sasquatch to live.  Unsurprising that Washington comes first, especially given that Olympia Beer Company is offering a million-dollar reward for anyone who captures a Bigfoot alive.  This is followed by Oregon and California, but the fourth state is kind of mystifying.

Ohio?

Apparently, according to the article, Bigfoot has been sighted in Ohio 234 times, making it rank fourth.  Who knew?

If you're interested, Florida came in dead last, probably because of the general "if it moves, shoot it" attitude of a significant percentage of Floridians.

But I do have a question about all of this.  What earthly purpose can a real estate company have for compiling such a list?  Is it trying to attract cryptozoologists?  It seems like kind of a small target audience.  Selling real estate to Sasquatch himself also seems to me to be a losing proposition.  So however you cut it, it's kind of bizarre.


But not nearly as bizarre as our third story, which comes out of Ogden, Utah, where a retired private detective named Todd May claims to have found a fossilized Bigfoot skull.  May apparently has had Bigfoot sightings while hiking many times, according to the article:

May says he found the item about six weeks ago near the mouth of Ogden Canyon while he was on a dig looking for fossils. He said he was sort of drawn to something he could see sticking out of the ground and it seemed like just a rock but he went ahead and began to dig it out. He said at first he couldn’t tell exactly what it was because it was face down but once he got it completely dug out he could see the face perfectly. May believes this 70 lb object that he has recovered is a fossilized Bigfoot skull and says he has also had Bigfoot sightings in the same area on multiple occasions.

So, without further ado, here's a picture of May with his prize:

Um, Mr. May?  I hate to break it to you, but that is not a Bigfoot skull.  That is a rock.  I have to admit that it looks like a very sad rock, but it is a rock nonetheless.  You can now join Melba Ketchum in the "Sorry, I Don't Think So" department.


Our last story, though, is an encouraging one.  Just because the evidence for Bigfoot is pretty much nonexistent doesn't mean that he can't have his very own musical.

Yes, folks, Sasquatched: The Musical opens on July 9 at the New York Musical Theater Festival.  Billed as a heartwarming story about "about a Sasquatch named Arthur who gets lost in Columbia National Park and befriends a young boy named Sam," the play tells the tale of how they "encounter oddball locals, dodge a TV crew on the hunt for Bigfoot, and bust out into songs to help move the story along."

The songs include "Shake the Camera and Run" and "Eight Feet Tall and He Smelled Like a Skunk." And, for the record, I didn't make either of these titles up.   Arthur the Sasquatch does have some solos, but according to playwright Phil Darg, they are "dignified" and "not really show tunes."

I know I'm relieved about that.  This sounds like it's all about dignity.

So, anyway, that's the news from the world of cryptozoology.  And I thought squatching was a dying pastime.  Little I knew.  Apparently there are plenty of Sasquatch enthusiasts out there, still misinterpreting evidence, hyping Bigfoot for publicity, and writing musicals.  And I guess if it keeps you entertained, there's nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't have a Melba-style freakout if people laugh at you.

A study in tropical colors

As my regular readers know, I just got back a couple of days ago from a two-and-a-half week trip to Malaysia.  I thought it might be interesting to step aside for a day from my usual agenda of lobbing verbal bombs at the woo-woos, and give a few of my impressions of this country.

I was drawn to Malaysia by the birds.  I am a fanatical birdwatcher, an avocation that I am more and more beginning to think of as being some kind of benign mental disorder.  The trip was an organized excursion put together by Birdquest International, a UK-based company that specializes in taking people to where the birds are.  So everyone on the trip shared my obsession -- all seven participants, and the two guides.  We shuffled along the trails in a tight, silent little pack, binoculars in hand, scanning trees and underbrush, listening for unusual calls or songs -- and then launching into action like a SWAT team when one was seen:  "Bulbul!  Olive-winged!  Large tree with round leaves, in foreground, nine o'clock, moving left!"  And everyone would swivel around to find the bird, and one by one you'd hear, "Got it, thanks!" and every once in a while a "Dammit!  It flew!"

But the birds were spectacular.  The grounds of the lodge where we stayed in Taman Negara National Park were frequently graced by four or five Crested Firebacks, a pheasant species that looks like it's ready for a fancy costume ball.  Not all of them were that easy; it took us several hours of work to locate the elusive Garnet Pitta, a bird that has been called the Jewel of the Rain Forest (photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

We never, ever were without our binoculars, except when we were sleeping.  We wore them at meals, during rides in the van from one locale to another, and when we were hauling our luggage around.  And all it took was the cry of "Bird!" to stop us from all other pursuits and hoist the lenses into the air to see what might have flown in.

Of course, it's not that that was the only attraction to Malaysia.  It's a stunningly beautiful country, with huge stands of pristine rain forest, enormous trees draped with lianas and ferns.  A botanist would go mad here from the diversity of plant life.  I pride myself on my knowledge of plants, and I only recognized perhaps 10% of what I was seeing.  Take this strangely-shaped leaf for example:

No idea what it is, other than "cool."  Because of the thin soils, most of the trees have these sculpted buttress-roots, that never failed to remind me of Old Man Willow from The Lord of the Rings:

Besides the biology of the place, there's the culture.  The food was always interesting, and often delicious.  We had a hundred different takes on curry, most with coconut, a food I heartily approve of.  I finally got to try durian, the famous spiky (and smelly) fruit of Southeast Asia.  Durian has such a pungent smell that it is illegal to open one on public transport or in a hotel room, and I found first-hand that the smell clings to your skin and clothing for hours.  What does it smell like?  Let me quote food writer Richard Sterling: "Its odor is best described as pig shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock."  Anthony Bourdain, even though he likes the stuff, says that after eating it "your breath smells like you've been French-kissing your dead grandmother."  So, of course, I had to try it.  And... I thought it was delicious.  The flavor is kind of indescribable -- musky, sweet, creamy, a little oily.  But definitely wonderful, and like nothing else I've ever tasted.

I also ran face-first into sambal ulek, which I have renamed "Malaysian Death Sauce" because I had no idea how freakin' hot it was until I had slathered it all over my breakfast.  Now, I'm from southern Louisiana, and have a very high (probably genetic) tolerance for pepper, and this was hotter than anything I've ever eaten.  It was only my hatred of losing face amongst comparative strangers that kept me from dumping my plate and taking a second serving with three drops (rather than three heaping spoonfuls) of the stuff.

And speaking of hot: Malaysia is also the other kind of hot.  The temperature varies from blazing hot, all the way up through sauna and right into the realm of pressure cooker.  I was constantly wringing wet with sweat, and I usually have a high tolerance for hot weather.  In the highlands (we spent four days at Fraser's Hill in the Cameron Highlands of central Malaysia) it was a bit cooler, but that's like saying that "compared to a blast furnace, a bread oven is comfortable."  It was still near 100% humidity, and I think the temperature only dropped below 80 F for a brief time at night.

The heat and humidity also encourage a variety of animal life, and not all of it is of the oh-look-at-the-cute-little-monkey type.  Malaysia has leeches.  Terrestrial leeches.  These live in the leaf-litter of the forest floor, attach themselves to your shoes, and then crawl up your pant leg in search of dinner.  Most of our party got bitten at least once -- I was one of the only exceptions, probably because I daily doused my boots in high-strength insect repellent, to the point that by the end of my trip my boots were composed of 5% shoe leather and 95% DEET.  If I ever get rid of those boots, I will probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement.  But I didn't get bitten, unlike poor Linda, a retired nurse from Oakland who got bitten about a dozen times and constantly had large bloodstains on her socks, pants, and shirt.

One of the most curious things about Malaysia was the pervasive role of religion.  61% of Malaysians are Muslim; we saw many veiled women, and daily heard the chanted call to prayer broadcast over speakers.  But 61%, although a majority, means that there are plenty of other beliefs; there are substantial numbers of Hindus (whose brilliantly-colored temples were often seen on our van trips), Buddhists, and even a few animists amongst the Orang Asli, or aboriginal settlers of the peninsula.  But the Malaysians are, by and large, a people amongst whom the adherence to some religion is taken as given, and who have a big focus on decorum and morality.  I saw a few tourists who were showing more skin than was considered proper -- women in short-shorts, men who were shirtless -- and saw more than one skew glance being given to them.  I wore shorts on occasion (while not actively birding in the forest; wearing shorts in the Malaysian forest is like waving a sign in front of the leeches that you're open for dinner) and wondered if the tattoo on my leg would attract any negative attention.  I didn't notice any, but you have to wonder what the more conservative citizens think of some of the foreigners they see.

Last: Malaysia is far away.  It took over 24 hours in the air to get me there, and it is exactly half a day off from my home time zone; when I Skyped with my wife, in the places where wifi was available, I was always had the vertigo-inducing awareness of being on the opposite side of a giant spinning ball.  When it was day in New York, it was night in Malaysia, and we had to plan to meet -- as she was getting ready to head to work, I was getting ready to head to bed.  On the way back, I took the longest nonstop flight in the world -- Hong Kong to New York City/JFK.  Sixteen hours in the air.  And although I had no travel mishaps whatsoever -- not so much as a five-minute departure delay -- I do wish I had not been on the special Screaming Toddler Flight.  I've never been so glad to get off a plane.

So, anyway, those are a few impressions of my first visit to the continent of Asia.  I came away with an impression of a friendly people, a commitment to protecting their beautiful environment, and 199 "life birds" -- species I'd never seen before.  I survived sambal ulek and durian, and all in all, had a wonderful time.  Still, it's nice to be home, where the temperature is mild, breakfast sauces don't burn your face off, and you can walk in the woods without being bitten by leeches.