I was never a big comic book reader when I was a kid, mostly because there just wasn't any place to buy comic books.  But I found this article interesting and the conclusion kind of fascinating.

Elf with a Gun was created by Steve Gerber, who is also known for creating Howard the Duck and other oddball comics.

The armed elf would simply show up in various of his comic books, kill someone, and that was it.  No explanation, nothing ever brought to a conclusion.  These violent elvish interludes were not even a part of the stories in which they appeared.

But later in interviews, Gerber explained it.

[Gerber revealed] that the Elf was nothing more than a backhanded metaphor for the chaotic and inexplicable nature of everyday existence, the "beast in the jungle" that you can spend a lifetime planning for but which still comes as a surprise or maybe never comes at all.

Via meine kleine fabrik.  More here.

At viewzone:

Using volumes of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a major project to survey the sky in infrared light led by the University of Massachusetts, the astronomers are answering questions that have baffled scientists for decades and proving that our own Milky Way is consuming one of its neighbors in a dramatic display of ongoing galactic cannibalism. The study published in the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way, so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the bigger Milky Way.

Except--as the article goes on to reveal--"our" Milky Way (or Mutter's Spiral, as some know it) is not "ours."  We are actually part of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.

Interesting.

It's not often that I read an article that reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft and James McMurtry at the same time.  In fact, I think this would be the only time.

Some scientists tried watching animals with infrared video cameras, and they discovered something new about the California ground squirrel:

It's Californian ground squirrel versus rattlesnake in a potentially lethal showdown. But the squirrel has a secret weapon that until now has remained invisible to the human eye.

The ground squirrel heats up its tail then waves it in the snake's face - a form of harassment that confuses the rattler, which has an infrared sensing organ for detecting small mammals.

This defensive tactic remained invisible to biologists until they looked at the animals through an infrared video camera. Now they believe that many other animals might be using infrared weaponry to ward off potential predators.

Young California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) are easy prey for snakes, so protective adults harass the predators while puffing up their tails and wagging them.

Graduate student Aaron Rundus and his supervisor Donald Owings of the University of California, Davis, wondered how this might affect the snakes’ interaction with the adult squirrels. So he borrowed a $35,000 infrared camera from another scientist and spied on squirrel-snake stand-offs.

He saw the adults’ tails heat up, presumably due to increased blood flow, when they were warning rattlers away – making the squirrel appear larger to the snake’s infrared organ.

Confronted with a gopher snake, which has no infrared sensory organ, the squirrels wagged their tails but didn’t bother to warm them up first.

Tests with robotic squirrels confirmed that a warmed squirrel tail made rattlesnakes more likely to act defensively, say Rundus and Owings.

The squirrels themselves do not see in infrared, so they cannot see another squirrel's tail heating up. But the snakes can, proving that the squirrels have evolved a specific way to deter rattlesnakes.

“It taught us to focus on the perceptual world of the animal we’re studying” rather than thinking only of human perceptions, says Rundus.

Amazing.

P.S. Robotic squirrels?

One of my favorite weird phenomenons is when unexplained stuff falls from the sky.

Perkasie, Pennsylvania:

Jim McClelland It looked like someone took a cooler full of small ice cubes and just dumped it across the ground in the backyard. It was just all spread across the dirt. At first he thought it was hail ... but when it didn't melt and he picked it up ... he knew that wasn't the case.

A couple of chemists are going to attempt to analyze it.  But for now, it's a mystery.

There is, in Philosophical Transactions, 16-281, an account of a seeming cereal, said to have fallen in Wiltshire, in 1686 said that some of the "wheat" fell "enclosed in hailstones" but the writer in Transactions, says that he had examined the grains, and that they were nothing but seeds of ivy berries dislodged from holes and chinks where birds had hidden them. If birds still hide ivy seeds, and if winds still blow, I don't see why the phenomenon has not repeated in more than two hundred years since.

--Charles Fort

A what now?

They uncovered a pistol, a buoy knife, whisky flasks, a set of false teeth, two dog skulls and a blade from a set of sheep shears.

I see. So it floats, I guess. Interesting little article, however, about archaeologists who are digging up an old outhouse. "But it's not that bad," he said.

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Don't tell me not to squeeze the Charmin.

A police officer was shot with his own Taser by a woman visiting his home, authorities said. Officer Charles Jeffers told investigators he'd stopped to use the restroom at his home Sunday night while on his way to investigate a burglary. He let a woman he knew into the house, leading to her accidentally shooting the Taser, according to a police report.

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Sometimes these things just happen.

A hunk of metal that crashed through the roof of a home has NASA, Federal Aviation Administration and New Jersey Transit officials scratching their heads.

The man who lives in the house was watching television Tuesday when he heard a crash and saw a cloud of dust. In the next room, he found a hunk of gray metal, 3 1/2 inches by 5 inches, with two hexagonal holes in it.

Experts say it's manmade, but nobody can say where it might have come from.

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Classic: "but there was something amiss."

Firefighters drove to a vacant house on Tuesday, cut holes in the roof and walls, and broke windows to test their tools and their proficiency.

The problem? It was the wrong house.

They were supposed to be two blocks away at a house slated for demolition.

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In Beaufort, South Carolina, we have a case of self defense and bad timing.

A 19-year-old man picked the wrong time to shoot at two brothers, opening fire just as they got ready to do some target practice, police said. Antoine Robinson was shot once in the arm during the shootout around 4:15 p.m. Monday, Beaufort County deputies said.

Robinson pulled up to the Beaufort home, got out of his car and started firing at brothers Rodmond Singleton, 24, and Titus Singleton, 18, authorities said.

The brothers said they were getting ready to shoot target practice and grabbed their guns and fired back, hitting Robinson once, deputies said.

"Licensed to fire the guns"?

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And finally, yet another fox rampage, this time at a Salisbury, Maryland steakhouse.

A bizarre fox attack at a Salisbury steak house had patrons and employees jumping and scrambling for cover.

The attack happened near closing time Thursday, when customers encountered a wild fox in the parking lot. Feeling threatened, they ran inside the slow-release door at Chef Fred's Chesapeake Steakhouse, Bar & Grill. The fox followed them inside.

For some reason I found this article very interesting.  The giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest:

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.

Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range is deep in impenetrable forest.

But despite the difficulties, a handful of scientists have succeeded in studying the animals. Early speculation that the apes may be some yeti-like new species or a chimp/gorilla hybrid proved unfounded, but the truth has turned out to be in many ways even more fascinating. They are actually a population of super-sized chimps with a unique culture - and it seems, a taste for big cat flesh.

They use tools, they aren't afraid of humans, and though they haven't been seen actually killing a big cat, they have been seen eating big cats.  They also aren't afraid to sleep on the ground.  Interesting and strange.

There has been a spate of alleged crypto-critter sightings in the area of Basra, Iraq.  The creature is supposed to attack people at night.  Cryptomundo covered it here, and later followed up here.  It's called "Garta," or "the muncher," and conspiracy theories are abounding through the area that U.S. or British troops have concocted this creature in their super-secret crypto-critter laboratories, only to release them around Iraq and cause general terror and mayhem.

(Cough).

However, the good people of Iraq can rest easy.  Major Mike Shearer (a U.K. military spokesman), has stated (with what must certainly be the quote of the week):

We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

Well. Isn't that a relief.

Strange in San Antonio reports that a cougar was recently spotted in the San Antonio area.  Many years ago, cougars ranged widely over this whole area, but this is the only sighting I know of in recent times.

I blogged about my own cougar sighting before.  You can read it here, if you want.

When they become available, that is.

Its rock-hard surface can take a full-on assault from a baseball bat, yet remains flexible enough to allow you to kick, leap and roll with perfect ease. Crafted from cutting-edge science, its unique molecular structure means that while providing armoured protection against crude concrete and even barbed wire, it remains light enough to allow you to run at high speed.

This story in the Sunday Herald is about Richard Palmer, who invented something truly marvelous and was ignored by polymer industry bigwigs because what he did was impossible.

And yet it wasn't.

In 1999 Palmer sold his house and car, moved into a friend's spare bedroom and did it himself. Providing funding out of his own pocket, he kick-started the process in a garage lab, calling in academic help from friends where needed and pushing d3o to the point where it was ready for production.

Today the material they said couldn't happen is fast becoming a common component of cutting-edge protective equipment, with the d3o brand beginning to feature in a range of winter and motor sports products worldwide. It has been adopted enthusiastically by the likes of US Olympic ski team, the four-times Everest climber Kenton Cool and Olympic cyclist Craig McClean. Industry observers predict the miracle cloth could be earning annual global revenues of $2 billion within five years.

Since you are reading this blog, I can guess what you might be pondering.  I was pondering it, too.

While he intends to continue developing and enhancing his revolutionary new material, Palmer's Brighton-based development lab team has already produced a range of other products. They include a rigid Frisbee that folds like a soft handkerchief when you catch it, and the world's first bullet-proof wallpaper, a lightweight protective covering that absorbs and contains the deadly shrapnel generated when a projectile pierces most buildings.

At last, my dreams of a folding frisbee are answered.  But seriously, this brief article is a story of an outsider who almost didn't make it because he wasn't part of an industrial establishment.

And a Batman suit is no longer fiction.  Imagine that.

But seriously, there may have been a reappearance of the cougar in Maine.  Cryptomundo has all the info on it.  A bit of fur from the alleged beast is going to be DNA tested.

This could explain previous livestock kills that have been blamed on the "Maine Mystery Beast."

Previous and related posts here and here.