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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Bad news from the future

My current work-in-progress (well, work-in-extremely-slow-progress) is a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that I swear wasn't inspired by the events of the last year and a half.  Set in 2035, it chronicles the struggles of five completely ordinary people to survive in a hellscape that has been created by an all-too-successful rebellion and war, that one character correctly calls "burning down the house you're locked in" because the resulting chaos is as deadly to the rebels as to the people they're rebelling against.

I suppose it's natural enough to assume the future is gonna be pretty bad.  I mean, look around.  The United States is gearing up for another catastrophic heat wave, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and so much of the western U.S. is on fire that the smoke is making it difficult to breathe here in upstate New York.

I try to stay optimistic, but being an inveterate worrier, it's hard at times.

Albert Goodwin, Apocalypse (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

If the current news isn't bad enough, just yesterday I ran into not one but two people who claim to be time travelers from the future who have come back somehow to let us know that we're in for a bad time.

The first, who calls himself Javier, goes by the moniker @UnicoSobreviviente ("only survivor") and posts videos allegedly from the year 2027 on TikTok.  "I just woke up in a hospital and I don’t know what happened," he says.  "Today is February 13, 2027 and I am alone in the city."

How he's posting on TikTok in 2021 if he's stuck in 2027, he never explains.

However, I must admit the videos are a little on the creepy side.  They do appear to show a city devoid of human life.  On the other hand, everything looks like it's in pretty good shape.  One theme I've had to deal with in my own novel is how fast stuff would fall apart/stop working if we were to stop maintaining it -- the answer, in most cases, seems to be "pretty damn fast."  (If you are looking for a somewhat depressing but brilliantly interesting read, check out the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which considers this question in detail.)

So either Javier showed up immediately after the rest of humanity vanished, or else his videos are just an example of a cleverly-edited hoax.

I know which I think is more likely.

The other alleged time traveler goes by the rather uncreative name @FutureTimeTraveler, and also posts on TikTok (apparently this is the preferred mode by which time travelers communicate with the present).  And he says our comeuppance is gonna be a lot sooner than 2027.  He says it will come at the hands of seven-foot-four-inch aliens with "long, distorted skulls" who will land on Earth on May 24, 2022.  They're called Nirons, he says, and come in peace, but humans (whose habit of fucking up alien encounters has been the subject of countless movies and television shows) decide it's an invasion and fire on them.  This initiates a war.

So we've got an alien race who can cross interstellar space fighting a species who thinks it's impressive when a billionaire launches himself for a few minutes aboard what appears to be a giant metal dick.

Guess who wins.

Interestingly, this is not the first case of an alleged time traveler talking about future attacks by Nirons.  Another TikTok user, @ThatOneTimeTraveler, says the Nirons come from Saturn and we're going to get our asses handed to us.

So, corroboration, amirite?  Must be true!

I figure I'm doing my civic duty by letting everyone know that they should get themselves ready for a rough ride.  We've got the Nirons coming next year, then everyone vanishes five years after that, and if that's not bad enough, in 2035 there's a massive rebellion that takes down civilization entirely.  (Yes, I know that (1) it's impossible to have a rebellion if everyone disappeared eight years earlier, and (2) the rebellion itself is part of a novel I made up myself.  Stop asking questions.)

Anyhow, I figure knowing all this will take our minds off the fact that we seem to be doing our level best to destroy ourselves right here in the present.  I'm hoping I at least live long enough to meet the Nirons.  Sounds like they'll probably blast me with their laser guns immediately afterward, but you know how I am about aliens.  If I'm gonna die anyway, that's a fitting end.

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

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

Bad moon rising

It's been a good while since I've written a post about a story that's just plain loony.

Maybe it's because here in the United States, it's not so funny any more because the loonies appear to be in charge of the place, led by a man who spent ten minutes in an interview bragging about how he had successfully passed a test to detect dementia.  ("The doctors were amazed," he said.)

But yesterday I ran into a story that was so completely wacky that I would be remiss in not bringing it to your attention.  As with so many strange things lately, it began on TikTok, the bizarre social media site wherein people upload short videos of themselves doing dances or singing songs or whatnot.  Me, I don't honestly see the point.  It was ages before I was even willing to get on Instagram, and mostly what I do there is upload photographs of my dogs, my garden, and stuff about running.  (If you want to see pics of my dogs etc., you can follow me @skygazer227.)

Be that as it may, TikTok is wildly popular.  It has remained popular despite allegations that the app contains some kind of spyware from China.  TikTok users have been credited with reserving hundreds of seats at Donald Trump's Tulsa rally and then not showing up.  And apparently, it is also the host of a "vibrant witch community," which is called, I shit you not, "WitchTok."

But this is where things start to get a little weird.  Because a rumor started to circulate on "WitchTok" that a group of "baby witches" had put a hex on the Moon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luc Viatour, Full Moon Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unclear how the rumor got started, but once it did, it gained a life of its own, spreading to those estimable conduits for bizarre bullshit, Twitter and Reddit.  When the elder witches who were panicking about the thing tried to find out who these alleged "baby witches" were, they were unsuccessful.

For most of us, this would have been sufficient to conclude that there was nothing to the rumor, and to say, "Ha-ha, what a silly thing I almost fell for, right there."  But no.  The apparent absence of the "baby witches" could only mean one thing, they said: the hex on the Moon had backfired and killed all the "baby witches."

Well, with all the "baby witches" dead, surely that would put an end to it, right?  If you believe that, you don't know how social media works.  This made the rumor spread faster, with other witches claiming that they were the ones who'd hexed the Moon, not the "baby witches," and next they'd go after the Sun.  Some said that not only was the Moon hexed by these evildoers, but so were the "fae," the non-human denizens of fairyland, and admittedly this would be a pretty nasty thing to do if the fae actually existed.  One Twitter user, @heartij, cautioned that all this was walking on some pretty thin ice.  "Upsetting deities is the last thing any rational practitioner would want to do," they said, and I can't disagree with that, although none of this seems to have much to do with anything I'd call "rational."

@heartij added rather darkly, "the people behind the hex are more than likely being handled accordingly."

Others said that there was nothing to worry about, that the Moon was perfectly capable of withstanding being hexed, and that everything would settle down once the stars went into a better alignment.  "The Moon is a celestial being which controls us," said Ally Cooke, a trainee priestess.  "We’re currently in a new Moon that takes place in the sign of Cancer, which explains why so many practicing witches report disconnects with the Moon or personal odd feelings, but they’re confusing them with evidence for malpractice.  This new Moon is centered around releasing, and Cancer is a water sign, so emotions are running high at this time."

Makes perfect sense to me.

My first inclination upon reading this was to point out that through all this, the Moon has continued to circle around the Earth completely unchanged, and in fact not even looking a little worried.  But upon reading a bunch of the posts from WitchTok members and commenters on Reddit and Twitter, it became apparent that they're not saying anything physical has happened to the Moon.  It's all just invisible "bad energies" and "negative frequencies" aimed in the Moon's general direction.  But my question is -- forgive me if I'm naïve -- if (1) the hex itself operates by some mechanism that is invisible, and (2) it hasn't had any apparent result, how do you know it happened?

I guess we're back to "personal odd feelings."  For whatever that's worth.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I find it a refreshing change of pace from stories about elected officials who studied at the Boss Tweed School of Ethics and a president who thinks you get extra points for successfully saying "person, woman, man, camera, TV" from memory.  Compared with that, witches trying to stop other witches from aiming invisible hexes at distant astronomical objects is honestly a welcome diversion.

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Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

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