Do a little dance

If you spend any time on social media, you've undoubtedly seen the Serbian Dancing Lady.

She appears in short clips, taken at night, almost always when no one else is around.  She appears to be middle-aged, and wears a dress -- sometimes rather plain, sometimes ornate-looking.  She always starts out with her back to the camera, and is doing a dance with her arms outstretched, a kind of side-to-side shimmy that some have compared to steps from Balkan folk dances.  The person filming her approaches, calls out to her something like, "Hey, what are you doing?" or "Are you okay?" -- both, you have to admit, reasonable questions to ask someone out dancing alone in the middle of the street at night.  The Dancing Lady sloooooowly turns...

... then charges at the person filming her with a knife.

Here's a compilation of a few of the video clips:

She's always seen in the Zvezdara municipality, near Belgrade, we're told.  The police know about her and are "very concerned" but have been unable to apprehend her or even figure out who she is.  You are then solemnly advised that if you see her, you shouldn't speak, approach, or make eye contact with her.  

Just run.

I did a bit of digging, and I found out that claims of the Serbian Dancing Lady go back to 2019, when some probably deranged person was out in Zvezdara stumbling about and lunging at cars and passersby.  Some of the footage on YouTube and TikTok seems to date from these early sightings.  Then there's not much until this February, when a TikTok user called @aatc13 posted a clip of her with the caption "be careful guys," and in a couple of weeks it got 78 million views.

Explanations, as usual, vary.  Some people take the more prosaic approach that she's a violently insane person who somehow has eluded the police.  Others claim that she's an evil spirit, demon, or witch, and that if she pursues you, you'll never be seen again, which raises the awkward question that if that's true, who's posting the videos?

In any case, since the post in February, you can't get on TikTok without seeing a new clip of the Serbian Dancing Lady.  Some are just reposts, but what's struck me is that the vast majority of these are different people in different places wearing different clothing.  So are there multiple Serbian Dancing Ladies?  There'd have to be, to account for all these videos.  In fact, there are so many videos, with new ones popping up every day, that you get the impression the women in Serbia do nothing at night but dance by themselves on the street and wait for someone to come up and film them.

Serbian woman's boss: Here, can you get this paperwork done this morning?

Serbian woman: I'll try, but I'm pretty tired today.  Rough night.

Serbian woman's boss: Too much dancing?

Serbian woman: You got that right.  Spent six hours shimmying on the street, and not a single person asked me if I was okay.  I haven't had a good chase in two weeks.  Not gonna lie, it's kind of discouraging.

Serbian woman's boss: That sucks.  Well, better luck tonight.  

Serbian woman: Thanks.  I'm keeping my knife sharp, just in case.

The sudden alarming proliferation of different Serbian Dancing Lady videos is undoubtedly because the whole thing would be so easy to stage.  Unlike (for example) Bigfoot videos, you don't even need an elaborate costume; just a long dress and a scarf.  All you have to do is get a female friend to dance for a few seconds on the street while you video her, then have her slowly turn toward you and give chase while you feign alarm and run away.  Done.  Anyone could make and upload their own Serbian Dancing Lady videos in under three minutes, and that's even if they don't live in Serbia.

Not that I am in any way recommending this, mind you.

So my suspicion is that while the original 2019 video might be of some actual deranged person, the recent ones are very likely all hoaxes.  Just as well.  It'd suck if this spread to the United States, because we've got enough to deal with over here.  Last thing we need is demonic dancing ladies accosting people on the street.

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Heavy weather

I find it puzzling how few people actually understand weather.

Partly, this puzzlement is because I've always found it completely fascinating.  I spend a lot of time on Weather Underground and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sites, with the result that I frequently update my wife on the status of weather systems in Nebraska.  (Her stock response: "That's nice, dear.")

I cannot, for example, fathom how people wouldn't be intensely curious about videos like the recent time-lapse series taken of a supercell system in Wyoming, which all of you should watch right now:

What surprises me is how few people get beyond the "Oh, wow," stage with all of this.  I know that the first time I saw a photograph of a supercell -- which ranks right up there with a dry microburst as the most bizarre weather phenomenon I've ever heard of -- I immediately thought, "What could cause something like that?"  And asking this question led me to all sorts of cool places, like atmospheric convection and adiabatic cooling and evaporative cooling and wind shear.

Now I realize that this stuff gets complex fast.  To quote Garrison Keillor, "Intelligence is like four-wheel drive.  It enables you to get stuck in even more remote places."

But it's still awesome.  And weather is, after all, ubiquitous.  How you could be immersed in something all the time, and not want to know how it works, is mystifying to me.

All of this comes up because of two stories this week, both of which never would have been more than meteorological curiosities if it weren't for the fact that people tend not to know much about the weather phenomena that surround them all day, every day.  The first, which involves an admittedly odd cloud pattern called a "hole-punch cloud," or "fallstreak hole," had people speculating that the seeming "hole in the sky" (check the link for photographs) was one of the following:

1. A wormhole.
2. A flaw in the Matrix.
3. A sign that we're all living inside some kind of self-contained dome, à la The Truman Show, and the hole was sort of like the can light that fell out of the sky at the beginning of the movie.
4. A gap through which an angel was about to arrive.  Why an angel couldn't just come through the clouds without there being a hole, given that clouds are basically big blobs of fog, I don't know.
5. A portal to a different dimension.

Of course, all of the furor was founded on the fact that hole-punch clouds have a perfectly natural explanation, usually that an airplane (or, much less commonly, a meteor) disrupted what was uniform cloud cover, leaving a temporary hole through the clouds.

No Matrix, wormhole, or angels required.

Second, we had a story from the wonderful site Doubtful News that blamed the unusual (and destructive) rains that have hit Serbia in the past week on none other than...

... HAARP.

Yes, we have not seen the last of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, that favorite bête noire of conspiracy theorists -- despite the fact that HAARP closed last year and is currently being dismantled.  It's been blamed for everything from tsunamis to earthquakes to tornadoes to hurricanes, and now... floods:

Many of my contacts in Serbia have spoken of whispered accusations that the unprecedented flooding and unusual weather patterns in the last few years have something to do with the US’s HAARP system. According to one website: “A Serbian journalist was advised not to write about a HAARP installation near Belgrade. After series of texts regarding HAARP antenna system near Barajevo (Belgrade municipality) and application of this ELF system in Serbia the journalist of newspaper Pravda has received a phone call on Monday evening around 10PM from unlisted phone number. The voice on other side of the line gave the journalist a “friendly advice” to stop writing on HAARP...” 

Would it be surprising if the US, after unleashing neo-Nazis in Ukraine, unleashed flooding in Serbia? Those in the know would probably say no.

 And there's a reason for that, you know?  Like the fact that HAARP couldn't even cause floods when it was running, much less now, when it isn't?

Of course, every time there's a catastrophe, people want an Explanation, not just an explanation.  It's not enough just to talk about weather systems and frontal boundaries and atmospheric moisture; there's got to be more.

But dammit, it'd be nice if people would start with the weather systems and frontal boundaries, rather than starting from ignorance and going downhill from there.  If you want to comment intelligently on anything, it helps to know some of the science behind it first.

Okay, I'll calm down, now.  Back to my happy place.  NOAA.  I see that there's a low-pressure center over Manitoba at the moment.  Isn't that cool?  Isn't it?

That's nice, dear.

Vampires in Serbia, unicorns in North Korea

Today, we have two stories in from people who evidently need to review what the definition of "mythological creature" is.

First, from Serbia, we have news that the town council in Zarozje has issued a vampire alert, and has gone as far as to suggest that all residents hang garlic on their doors.  [Source]

Apparently the vampire in question is one Sava Savanovic, who in times past lived in a mill next to the Rogacica River.  Savanovic was reputed to drink the blood of people who came to use the mill to mill their grain, a move that you would think would have been bad for business.

Be that as it may, Savanovic eventually died, possibly of blood poisoning (ba-dum-bum-ksssh), and the mill was sold to the Jagodic family.  At first, they were afraid to use the place, for fear of disturbing the dead vampire (so we might also need to refresh them on the definition of "dead"), but soon realized the tourist potential of owning a mill that had vamipiric associations.  But they were afraid to do any renovation on the building itself, not wanting accidentally to uncover anything with fangs -- and now the roof has collapsed.  And this, local townsfolk believe, has pissed off Savanovic, and he's going to exact revenge by going around and drinking some more blood.

You'd think that local government officials would tell folks to take a chill pill, but no.  Zarozje mayor Miodrag Vujetic said, "People are worried, everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people.  We are all frightened."  He also advised using garlic, resulting in a run on garlic sales in local markets, and added, "We have also reminded them to put a Holy Cross in every room in the house."

Well, that should take care of the problem, I'd think.  I'd hope that when a few weeks have gone by and Savanovic hasn't shown, and no one in Zarozje has been exsanguinated, everyone would heave a great big sigh of relief, have a good laugh at themselves, and say, "Wow, what goobers we've been, believing in vampires and all."  But it'll probably go more like the joke about the guy who, every time he went to a friend's house, would close his eyes, raise his hands, and chant, "May this house be safe from tigers."

After this happened several times, the friend finally said, "Look, you don't have to do that.  There aren't any tigers anywhere near here.  There's probably not a tiger within a thousand-mile radius of this house."

And the guy smiled knowingly, and said, "It really works, doesn't it?"


Then, from North Korea, we have a report that some "scientists" have discovered a secret burial ground... for a unicorn.  [Source]

One of their early kings, King Dongmyeong, who was also known as King Dongmyeongseongwang because "Dongmyeong" was thought to be too easy to pronounce, was supposed to have ridden on a unicorn.  And now the Korean Central News Agency, the official media outlet for the North Korean government, has "reconfirmed" that the burial site for King Dongmyeong's unicorn exists, in the capital city of Pyongyang.

They haven't released any photographs of bones, or (better yet) a skull with a horn.  Their proof, insofar as they've been willing to discuss it, consists solely of a claim that at the burial site, they found a marker that said, "Unicorn Lair."

Well, that proves it to me.

The problem, of course, is that the KCNA is kind of famous for making bizarre pronouncements.  Remember all the hoopla about earthquakes and weeping birds and atmospheric phenomena of various sorts when Kim Jong-Il died?  So it's not like they've established much of a reputation for sorting fact from fiction.

Oh, and there's also the thing about King Dongmyeong having not been born in the usual fashion, but having been hatched from an egg.

Anyhow.  We seem to have yet another example of people believing weird stuff based on essentially no evidence, something that has become sort of a theme on this blog.  I have to admit that it'd be nice to stop running into new examples of this phenomena.  Even though it would put me out of business, just having humanity be a little more rational would be a move in the right direction.  Now, excuse me while I go saddle up Pegasus for the flight to work.