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Douglas Chapman's
DOG DAYS
Fred and Pauline Lormor lived atop the pub they own in Glatton, England, but may not have been able to do so for much longer. Besides normal foods, their dog had consumed a TV remote control, earrings, live poultry, a sheepskin rug, bits of other rugs, a sofa and a door.The Lormers, however, claimed they would never part with their wonderful animal, and were prepared to put up with his expensive inconveniences. However, at one point they tried to hinder his depradations and put a muzzle on him--which he ate.
IF THIS IS MAN'S BEST FRIEND, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?
Jean Guillaume, 66, was driving his jeep in Ligny, Belgium, down a country road, when his spaniel jumped into the back seat and bumped a loaded shotgun. It went off, striking Guillaume fatally in the back, according to the police as quoted in the Vers l'Avenir of June 21, 1991. Many men have shot their dogs, but the reverse is far rarer.
LIGHTNING LIKE GIANT JELLYFISH
According to an article in the October 16, 1993 New Scientist, an electrical anomaly--previously thought dubious--has been captured on video by NASA researchers. Gigantic upward-shooting flashes of light, that come from the top of storm clouds, were captured on video during summer floods caused by a July 8, 1993 thunderstorm over Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa.According to Eugene Wescott and Davis Sentman, both of NASA, the lights were estimated as being 25 miles tall and 6 miles wide. "They appear brightest where they top out; typically about 40 miles high," said Wescott, adding, "so you have the jellyfish body at the top with tentacles trailing down."
A low-light-level camera in a NASA DC-8, operated by a team from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, recorded 19 brief flashes.
Amateurs have been reporting the controversial phenomena since 1886.
The present photographs, taken at one-thirtieth of a second, have proved the anomaly. Wescott noted that airborne team members missed it when aloft, but spotted it when studying their video footage.
WHO NEEDS NUKES?
One does not need nuclear weapons to cause intense blasts in the Earth's upper atmosphere, related an article in the February 1, 1994 Plain Dealer. These are already occurring in surprising frequency, without man's help.However, doomsday rocks, of more extreme power, only arrive once every 10 million years or so.
Orbiting military satellites have picked up evidence of these blasts.
Some 136 explosions in the higher reaches of the atmosphere were recorded by the satellites between 1975 and 1992.
But the book Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids says that 80 or more blasts may be taking place yearly.
Secret until recently declassified by the Defense Department, they have not so far been taken to be enemy bombs. They are caused by house-sized meteoroids speeding towards the Earth, which explode some 17 to 20 miles over the Earth. The shock waves and giant fireballs are not normally discerned on Earth.
Luckily very few of the speeding rocks are made of dense metal, so they rarely reach the ground. But one of those that did may have assisted in the destruction of the dinosaurs.
UPROAR OVER ALCHEMY
It was reported via UPI on December 22, 1993 that twenty-three leading professors at Texas A&M University asked through a petition that the provost remove John O'M Bockris's rank as distinguished professor of chemistry. "We believe that Bockris' recent activities have made the terms 'Texas A&M' and 'Aggie' objects of derisive laughter throughout the world among scientists and engineers, not to mention a large segment of the lay public," stated the petition.The brouhaha resulted from a recent Bockris project, said to be concerned with changing mercury into gold. The academics claimed that such alchemy was a fraudulent project. Though the project has been under examination by several of the school's internal investigations, Bockris has denied all wrongdoing. "I obviously wouldn't do something that was bonkers, would I?"
LOTSA BEAVER
In late March 1993, Tom Greene, the superintendent of horticulture in Moline, Illinois, said that the giant beaver was "quite strong." It had for several months been gnawing through birch trees and the Marquis Harbor Yacht Club marina docks in the Quad Cities area. The beaver, claimed to be 5 feet long and to weigh 80 pounds, had twice sprung a trap without being captured. According to an article in March 26, 1994 Chicago Sun-Times, there were many who called the creature "Nessie."One would imagine that those with a financial interest in the club, which suffered $1000 in damage, called it worse things.
REMOTE SEA MONSTER
Reverend Solomona and his son were fishing off the twin atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga in the Cook Islands when they spotted birds circling over an area. Thinking that this signaled the presence of fish, they sailed to the location.A creature, described as resembling a lizard bigger than a whale, jutted its head out of the water, terrifying the two, who went home. The Cook Islands News Daily, which reported it on September 29, 1993, said there were no further sightings.
GENE RODDENBERRY IN SPACE
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, finally travelled in space, but only after he died.His last wish had been to have his ashes flown in space. This was carried out on the space shuttle Columbia during October 1991, said Majel Barrett Roddenberry, his widow, at a Florida space banquet on April 26, 1994.
Brian Welch, spokesman for the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, revealed that this "was approved at the highest levels of the agency." He confirmed Ms. Roddenberry's account and told how Roddenberry's ashes were taken aboard "...as a personal effect of an [unspecified] astronaut."
MEDIA MONSTER CENTENARY
Dave Jewett, in his April 16, 1993 column "Ink" in The [Vancouver, Washington] Columbian, wrote about the April 1993 Pacific Northwest magazine's five-pager on reports over many years of a sea monster in that area.What interested him was that Norma Harris, his own newspaper's librarian, had, on the same day that the magazine arrived, located an item on a sea serpent that had appeared, nearly a century earlier, in the June 23, 1893 Columbian. Jewett quoted the item as follows: "The passengers and crew of the steamer Edith, on Puget Sound, saw a sea serpent the other day. Only its head and neck were in sight, so that its length could not be estimated. Its head was like that of an immense snake, and was about the size of a man's body, the neck was of equal size."
It "swam along with the boat for several minutes, and then turning suddenly started in the opposite direction at a great rate of speed."
Jewett found the simultaneous findings to be "an odd bit of timing."
Mixed Bag appears regularly in STRANGE MAGAZINE.
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