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