Nebraska monsters

I went on a big, nerdy expedition to the Nebraska History Museum to see their exhibit on Nebraska oddities. I took a picture of their Fortean Research map. Here's what I found...



clockwise from top left:

Alkali Lake Monster

Alkali Lake is located in Nebraska. The Indians of this area told the white settlers of a creature dwelling in the lake. In 1923, J.A. Johnson reported in the Omaha World-Herald that he, along with 2 friends, saw the creature. He also states that he knew of 40 others who had also seen the animal. The 3 saw the creature while camping near the lake. The saw the creature 3/4 out of the water and about 20 yards away. They described the creature as being 40 ft long, dull gray/brown and a horn-like object between it's eyes and nostrils. They said it looked similar to an alligator but was bigger and heavier than an alligator. When the creature noticed the men, it thrashed it's tail about and then dove under the water.

Sasquatch

I have no link on this one, but for a few years Neal has been working on a documentary about this. His site is here and it has about a sentence about the documentary.

Ghost?

I don't know what the fuck this is. Is it a ghost? Cthulu's retarded brother? either way, it points to North Platte on at least one of its lines, signifying that some malformed thing was spotted there, and in Lincoln, Omaha and probably a reservation.

A cloud

That's right. A fucking cloud. I see clouds every day. I don't put them on a monster map, though, even when they look like that spider thing at the end of It. A Google search reveals nothing. Fucking Google. Start anticipating my thoughts! I don't care how vague the search "mysterious cloud" nebraska is.

A Mountain Lion

The mountain lion captured in urban Omaha is more likely to go to a zoo than to be released back into the wild, a state Game and Parks Commission official said.

I also remember a report of some black panthers in the Eastern end of the state from about 1993. I'm not talking about the Huey Long kind either.

Mothman

Jacques Vallee (Anatomy of a Phenomenon) found a letter from a William C. Lamb in the files of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center in Dayton, Ohio. Lamb gives some specific details: "on February 22, 1922, at 5:00 A.M. in Hubbell, Nebraska" Lamb was out hunting and "following mysterious traces when he heard a crackling noise followed by a high-pitched sound and realized that a circular object was flying above his head, masking the stars." Lamb ducked behind a tree and watched the object sink behind a depression, presumably landing. A "magnificent flying creature" then appeared, which landed like an airplane.

A Mutilated Cow

Larry Jurjens was checking his herd of about 100 cattle
Aug. 19, when he found a dead 11-year-old Black Angus.

Jurjens said the cow's left eyeball was removed, the bag and
udders had been removed and there was a large excision in the
rectal region. None of the internal organs were removed and he
said the cuts seemed to have been made with surgical precision.
The tongue had also been removed, with the incision made far
back into the throat.

A UFO

I have an entire folder of print offs about this. The most interesting is this one...

Galloping towards it with all their speed, they were astounded to
see several fragments of cog-wheels and other pieces of machinery
lying on the ground, scattered in the path made by the aerial
visitor, glowing with heat so intense as to scorch the grass for a
long distance around each fragment and make it impossible for one to
approach it.

If anyone finds out about the cloud or has any other links to provide me, I'd sure appreciate it.

I could have bought a lot of beer with that money

Last night, I was at a local bar talking to Robby about terrible movies, essentially, and the movie industry's push to make the Vatican an over-arching bad guy as of late, such as in J.J. Abram's Mission Impossible III and Ron Howard's The DaVinci Code. After commending me for my work in MI3 (I am Philip Seymour Hoffman, after all), the table got to talking about terrible movies when it dawned on me ... I have seen some complete and utter shit in theaters. So here is my embarrasing list:

Movies
Battlefield Earth
Confidence (to date the only movie I have walked out of)
FearDotCom (didn't hate it, actually)
Failure to Launch
The Family Stone
Twister (THREE TIMES!)
The Hot Chick
Unleashed (I didn't hate this, it's just far too ridiculous to be called good)
Deep Impact
Armageddon
Dante's Peak
Waterworld
Star Trek: Nemesis (seriously, what the fuck was that movie?)
Planet of the Apes remake
Tomb Raider
The Fast and the Furious
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
Anaconda
Godzilla remake
Independence Day
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Last Action Hero
Mortal Kombat
Street Fighter
Wild, Wild West
Speed 2: Cruise Control (to this day I haven't seen Speed)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake
Daredevil (can this be held against me if it was the cheapy theater and someone else paid?)
Spawn
The Flintstones
Anger Management
Titanic (AND I had to sit next to my grandmother during it, making for the most uncomfortable nude scene ever.)
Bio-Dome
Stealing Harvard
Orange County

I have listed 35 films, and there are at least that many that I have forgot. If a movie is, on average, $7, though, with inflation that is approximately $245 of money gone to movies.

The Ghostbusters are McCarthyist Homophobes

First of all, in this episode, "The Boogeyman Cometh," I must make my point first with photographic evidence. Note the comparisons between the Boogeyman and a certain poster-child for gay jokes, Liberace.




Funny ... they seem to have the same wardrobe. And though in the episode, they try to make it seem as if the Boogeyman is a menace who must be stopped, I am here to present speculation that this is not the case at all – that, in fact, the Boogeyman has been set up as part of a vast, right-wing conspiracy seeking to peg homosexuals as analogous to monsters, boy-hungry, slobbering beasts who need to be stopped, as the end of the episode proves, by nothing short of total destruction.

In the beginning, the Ghostbusters are sleeping after a day of fighting mob don ghosts, once again charicaturizing a set of people, in this case New York Mobsters. The specific ethnicity is never explicitly stated, but it can be inferred that it is either Italian or Jewish. In either case, there is a rampant charicaturization of the said ghost that rampantly runs as a stereotype.

Now, as the Ghostbusters, four grown men who all share a room, are asleep, their secretary informs them of a case ... two little kids are having a boogeyman problem.

Here's where our problems begin. As they formulate their plan, their stated goal becomes a clear-cut case of a witch hunt, or at least ex-gay programming. They decide they need to keep the Boogeyman, and the homosexual male in the process, in the closet. In fact, they need to drive him so far in that the Boogeyman, or the homosexual male, cannot ever possibly escape.

Now, some may say "The Boogeyman is just a monster who happens to dress like Dorian Gray. You're overthinking, John." But at this point, I ask you to look at him not as a solid character, but much like the Jewish/Italian mobster, we must look at him as a stereotype and an exagerration. They are trying to cull the dregs of the charicature barrel by feminizing his features with big lips, teased up hair and dandy-esque suits. Sure, to many it will simply look like a product of cheap Korean animation. But this is what it looks like to me ...



By forcing him into the closet, the Ghostbusters are enforcing a homophobic agenda, one they are ensuring they spread to the youth of America by making an example of the Boogieman. They aren't really busting ghosts at all – in fact, this is a witch hunt of the worst kind. Venkman, Spengler, Stantz and Zedmore are starting to look a little too in the end.

Now, of course, there is the fact that they aren't real characters. This, in fact, roots back to the writers and animators, and to their ultimate source of funding, which is probably Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan or the Illuminati.

But we must all be wary of the attempts by these four men who randomly run through the bedrooms of small children, and never let their hateful message indoctrinate itself in our minds. After all, for every Boogeyman that loses, that's one more win for the Pats.