Category: High Weirdness

Week 869: I really do think we just got the Mayan date system wrong

2017firehurricane GOES R

NOAA’s GOES-R looks at a bruised continent yesterday. Smoke from fires in the west. 3 hurricanes in the east. Not shown: earthquake in Mexico. DPRK missiles.

The 21st Century, Week 822

It’s all fun and games until someone changes their band name to H. Merle Haggard…

Le Butcherettes at Amoeba Hollywood on 17 Sep 2015

Uzumaki In Norway

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So in the end it appears that the Weird Giant Spiral of Norway was merely a failed launch attempt of Russia’s beleaguered Bulava ICBM, but for awhile there was some good solid confusion.

I didn’t believe it was anything other than a failed booster stage venting off gas or fuel, but I can only imagine just how amazing it must have looked. Here in Southern California we occasionally see similar strange formations from launches out of Vandenberg AFB but most of those launches are, er, successful so we really only get the corkscrew tail instead of an ominous blue spiral. I hope some higher res versions of this morning’s photos make it out.

I can’t be the only person that immediately thought of Uzumaki – a Japanese horror manga and movie about a remote town that increasingly obsesses over spirals to the point of hysteria and eventual doom.

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45 Years

One of the stranger photos to surface over the years…

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In the front, holding the plate of food: John Wayne. Standing in the back: Lee Harvey Oswald

I don’t quite want to be the person to write Weird Orange County, but there’s enough old-growth conspiracy in O.C. to fuel at least a couple of chapters. A photograph of OC’s Most Famous Resident and an assassination enigma is just the starting point… Oswald first reported for Marine Corps duty at El Toro where he became friends with Kerry Thornley. Thornley would go on to write a book about Oswald called The Idle Warriors – the only book written about Oswald before the JFK assassination. Thornley was also the main guy behind the Principia Discordia and the Discordian Society, later fanning the flames of paranoids worldwide who took a joke concocted in a Whitter bowling alley to inevitable and extreme conclusions.

The Prankster And The Conspiracy gets into the details. Thornley later found himself on the wrong end of Jim Garrison’s investigation with an indirect connection to O.C.’s Most Infamous Resident who just happened to be in Dallas that day.

The only thing missing from a county of flying saucers, assassination connections, corrupt sheriffs, and banking scandals is a crypto-monster, but perhaps O.C. could adopt Elsie the Lake Elsinore Sea Serpent from next door Riverside.

Weishaupt, we have a problem

It’s kinda sad to degenerate from being the world’s largest and most successful conspiracy to needing to hire an inexperienced kid in Knoxville. It’s just so difficult to get good help these days.

When Knoxville Police found 25-year-old Richard Anthony Smith, they say he was trapped in an air duct about 45 feet below the roof of the Knoxville Museum of Art.

Unusual enough.

But it’s what he said next–“Mission failed”–that would launch a tale of intrigue.

With help from the Knoxville Fire Department, officers pulled Smith from the air duct without injury. Then they asked him what he was doing.

A police report indicates Smith said he was a “special agent with the United States Illuminati, badge number 0931.”

His mission?

One from “Director Womack,” to “defuse and confiscate a Soviet-made MERV6SS-22AN warhead, with 14.5 kg of enriched uranium and a plutonium trigger, capable of delivering a 40-kiloton yield.”

Police say Smith believed the device was concealed in a blue, plastic cow sculpture in the basement of the museum.

Smith was the first to tell police he was off-course however–the police report indicates he got a phone call from his “agency” while in the air duct, saying they had made a mistake, as the bomb is supposed to be hidden in a museum in Memphis.

“Thank goodness he had a cell phone and was able to call 911 and got out without getting injured, because it could have turned out much worse,” said KMA Executive Director David Butler.

“You know everyone is laughing about it, and obviously concerned about this guy and his well being, and it was a serious situation, and we had to handle it as such,” said KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk.

The police report indicates Smith said he rappeled onto the roof from a CH2 Huey, but police believe he stood on an ash tray to get onto the stepped-design portion of the roof.

Smith called 911 himself, just before 4:30 Wednesday morning. He faces a charge of aggravated burglary.