We tried The Daily Crave Spicy Sriracha Lentil Chips and they’re pretty good. Extraterrestrials like the snacks and are apparently interested in cutting a deal with Jared Edy, who I think owns the stores. They want a piece of the action. They are bringing satchels of cash to the table along with proposals to cease and desist corn tassel abductions, which are old-fashioned in any case.
Their history of the corn tassel controversy is complicated. It’s based on the aliens’ misunderstanding of detasseling. In their corner of a galaxy far, far away, corn tassels are alive and kept as pets. They think they are rescuing the tassels by abducting them. They think walking corn fields to detassel corn, which involves yanking out the tassels at the top of the plant, amounts to cruelty to animals.
Time for the short story about detasseling from an Iowan who has done it. The tassel is the male part of the corn plant. It pollinates the corn ears, which are female parts. To make corn hybrids, farmers and seed companies must cross pollinate the corn. To make sure the right pollen from one type of corn gets to another, they must hire hundreds of people (often college students) to detassel the corn which isn’t earmarked (get it?) for cross-pollination.
I’ve done detasseling and it’s one heck of a chore. At the end of the day, my hands and arms were so sore I could barely lift them. I was exhausted, but when I tried to close my eyes at night, all I saw were endless acres of corn.
It turns out that careful explanations of what detasseling corn is all about on this planet cleared this up for aliens.
There are many stores across the country selling The Daily Crave chips. Several are in Iowa, mainly in the Des Moines area. That may be why some Iowans occasionally see UFOs.
This is an update on the attic, the hatch for which is in our garage ceiling. We haven’t heard any knocking noises lately.
Yesterday, the HVAC guys came to reattach the duct which somehow separated from the roof vent. They showed up at 7:00 a.m. and were pretty much done in 20 minutes. They charged close to $300, which Sena is still complaining about.
Now we’re wondering how the two repairmen fixed it without dragging another tall ladder into the attic. The picture suggests that reattaching the duct and the roof vent involved either levitation or aliens—possibly both.
The roof vent looks like it’s above the floor of the attic by about 12 feet. We couldn’t see exactly how it was done because we didn’t climb up the repairmen’s ladder. The view was limited by angle of the hatchway and the darkness.
I checked the before and after pictures (the after picture was taken by one of the repairmen) of the duct repair job. Sometimes paranormal images take a while to develop, a phenomenon well described by goofball UFO researchers high on intergalactic substances dropped by intoxicated aliens careening in out-of-control, souped up space ships blundering through one of the many wormhole vortices commonly located near fast food joints.
Sure enough, aliens were clearly involved in vandalizing the duct which they were too drunk to realize is not another wormhole but the connection between the kitchen exhaust hood and the roof vent. They looked dazed and confused.
After the repair, it sure looks like an alien was involved in climbing up the wall studs to reattach the high end of the duct. He’s obviously sneaking back down the wall. It looks like levitation is the key.
The big question is how would this creature know the city code covering proper ventilation duct installation? And another question is how did it get a job with the HVAC company?
The HVAC guys were astounded by how many nails were in the walls in the attic. They’re clearly visible. Somebody went wild with a nail gun. I’m not saying it’s aliens—but it’s aliens.
They also found a walkie talkie in the attic. We’ve never owned walkie talkies. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m guessing aliens were using them to phone home. Could that account for the knocking noises? Maybe they communicate by knocking through the walkie talkies, just to throw us off. I think they got the idea from Tony Orlando and Dawn: “Knock 3 times on the ceiling if you’re homesick….”
These and other questions await further analysis by goofball UFO experts. You’re welcome.
I heard a song called “Marfa Lights” on the KCCK 88.3 FM radio program, the Friday Night Blues Show with John Heim aka Big Mo. The lyrics mention the Marfa Lights, describing them as UFOs or flying saucers. It was the first time I ever heard a blues song mentioning UFOs.
I looked it up later on the web. It turns out there’s a town called Marfa in Texas where people see strange lights. Years ago (and maybe even nowadays) a lot of them think they might be UFOs or some other paranormal phenomenon, like ghosts. A couple of studies in 2004 and 2008 pretty much debunked them as automobile lights triggered by atmospheric changes like temperature inversions. Still, some people want to believe they’re something weird or cosmic.
On the same evening I heard the song, I watched an episode of Ancient Aliens which is one of those shows which has a paranormal theme, mostly involving aliens. They talked about a blind seer named Baba Vanga, whose predictions about the future are thought to be 80% accurate. The speculation by the hosts of the show is that Baba Vanga might have been tapping into a phenomenon called the Akashic Record.
Encyclopedia Britannica on the web says the Akashic Record is said to be a “…compendium of pictorial records, or ‘memories,’ of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time.” (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Akashic record”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Jan. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Akashic-record. Accessed 13 August 2022.)
It’s not a physical thing, but it sounds like an ethereal public library. The Ancient Alien enthusiasts suggest that anyone can access it, even aliens (of course!)—if you have a current, valid library card and don’t have any overdue books or have at least paid up all the fines you owe.
In fact, there are a lot of entries on the web claiming you can access the Akashic Record just by formulating a clear question, like “What does Kellogg really put in those so-called all natural Kashi Granola Bars—and what exactly is Pyridoxine Hydrochloride anyway?”
Then you have to get into a pretty deep meditative state, which is nothing like mindfulness meditation. You need to ask really specific questions and insist on talking to the head librarian if you start to get the run around about certain resources being on reserve only for high-level professional mediums who charge outrageously high fees to search the record for you.
People want to believe. That’s why you can even find a WikiHow with detailed instructions for tapping into the Akashi Record to check out any of the episodes from the first season of the X-Files.
The Akashic Record might even have the Cliff Notes on what is going to happen to humans in the remote future. Ancient Aliens guys seem to spin this a couple of different ways.
One is a version of the matrix theory, which means that we’re living in some kind of computer simulation run by aliens who set this up with a special code or script that absolutely must be followed—meaning that the future is strictly determined. That would be bad because it sounds like it ends with a tremendous nuclear explosion on Mars, which humans eventually colonize but then can’t get along with each other because there are not enough rib joints for both humans and aliens.
The other future scenario is that humans evolve into beings who can tolerate indefinitely prolonged deep space exploration and go planet-hopping for the rest of eternity looking for Douglas Adams’ restaurant at the end of the universe. Forget getting in if you don’t have a reservation.
Maybe the question for the Akashic Record keepers should be pretty basic.
The other night I watched a show I’ve seen 3 times and it still makes me want to cry. It’s the Heavy Rescue 401 episode with Bear the heavy wrecker operator with the Ross company who lets an 8-year-old boy diagnosed with cancer hold the steering wheel and pull the horn as they take a drive around the farm where the family lives.
They hug and it’s tough to tell whether Bear is comforting the boy or the other way around. I guess it’s both.
I saw a Facebook page about the boy, who succumbed to cancer a few years ago. People are still leaving warm messages.
I watch a fair amount of TV and I make fun of most of it, including the paranormals. They’re pretty formulaic, re-investigating decades old cases that never get solved about alien visitors in spaceships, leaving behind evidence that goes missing from government storage warehouses. Because it gets lost, nobody has to explain why there is a notable lack of any convincing evidence for what most UFOs are and who might be flying them.
I can’t generate much emotion for the paranormals. I mostly laugh at them. How can you lose or throw out physical evidence of UFOs and aliens so many times?
“We need to make more room in here; can we toss something in the trash compactor?”
“Sure, get rid of those photos of military personnel taking selfies with aliens driving UFOs and drinking beer. That’ll make room for the 400-page binders of the syllabus for the graduate school course ‘Effect of Chimpanzee Eyebrow Dandruff on Prime Interest Rates During the 20th Century.’”
One of paranormal shows did an extensive review of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO, the one shaped like a macadamia. No wait, it was shaped like an acorn. It was dark and brooding, full of intrigue, veiled threats, and an alien pilot. As usual, evidence was lost.
Did you know Kecksburg throws an annual UFO-themed party? They just had the 17th Kecksburg UFO Festival just last month, replete with something called a burnout contest, fireworks, and crafts. The people of Kecksburg aren’t letting the government conspiracy get them down. They’re more than happy to let the paranormal producers visit because it gives the town leaders a chance to draw more tourists to the area.
I get a kick out of Men in Black (MIB) too, and I won’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the first one and the first two sequels. In Men in Black, Agent K shows the new recruit, Agent J, a special universal translator and says MIB is not even supposed to have it and says, “I’ll tell you why. Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.”
That’s why it helps to watch some other TV shows, the ones with heart where real people who are not acting but living do the mundane things which are seldom the most treasured of miracles. They remind you of the better human qualities like humor, kindness, love, generosity, gratitude, and the experience of sorrow that can sometimes humble a species which often suffers from overweening pride.
We know you’ve been waiting for Sena’s next Bigfoot safari and it turns out aliens from the third galaxy on the left have been dropping them into Sand Lake at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area.
The aliens shoot through a gravel road type of portal and beam their Bigfoot pets who’ve outgrown their homes into Sand Lake. They eat like growing teenagers and the interdimensional highway is a convenient way to get rid of them. It’s a good thing they can dog-paddle to shore.
The uptick in Bigfoot sightings probably has a lot to do with the incoming hordes of invasive insects, including the most recent pest, the Spotted Lanternfly. It’s not hard to figure out why. Bigfoot creatures eat the bugs by the handful.
What’s not so clear is where the Spotted Lanternfly actually comes from. Oh, I know the official report is that they’re from China, but that dodges the conspiracy theory by many people (I don’t know them personally) that the Iowa State University (ISU) Extension agents are cultivating them on the sly. Their website downplays the whole affair and says you can send them specimens preserved in hand sanitizer if you’re interested, but nope, there’s no infestation.
Sure; tell that to Thompson Aero, Inc, which has been dusting crops and park woods areas around the city lately, using what they want people to think is Neem Oil Spray. You can buy a product called Neem Oil spray at Walmart. They sell it claiming it kills the Spotted Lanternfly.
In fact, our sources reveal that the opposite is true. Neem Oil actually nourishes the bug and increases their reproductive capacity. The ISU Extension office is in on it because the real goal is to increase the population of Bigfoot creatures (who like Spotted Lanternfly more than beef jerky) in Iowa because the states in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Wisconsin are snatching up all the tourism trade. You didn’t know it was all about money?
This whole business is run by the ISU Extension, which is why it’s called Area 41. Don’t buy into the hogwash about the name pointing to this being an ongoing April Fool’s Day joke.
There’s such a thing as the Freedom of Information Act and those in the know (who I don’t know at all) found out about this scheme. They planned a Storm Area 41 similar to the Storm Area 51 Raid in Nevada in 2019. That was said to have started out as a joke—and then really crapped out.
Anyway, Sena is keeping an eye out for Bigfoot. I can’t promise that she won’t launch another expedition in the future. Even the men in black with their big-ass neualyzers can’t stop us.
ZAP!
You know, I don’t think there’s any such thing as Area 41 or Bigfoot either. Hey, I just saw a tall guy and a pug both wearing black suits walk by my window. The pug was singing “Who Let the Dogs Out.”
That’s weird. It’s way too hot outside to be wearing black suits.
We have to get the UFO thing under control, and it’s going to take more than mass produced tin foil hats. I watched a couple of paranormal shows the other night and saw The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and The Proof is Out There hosted by Tony Harris.
I poke fun at The Secret of Skinpicker Ranch and The 200 Proof Moonshine is Out There, but not in malice. It’s because they are funny. Just to let you know, I think they’re both pretty good entertainment, although I favor The Proof is Out There because of the skeptical approach.
As usual, Tony and his experts politely debunked a few alleged paranormal phenomena and used a sense of humor doing it. I’m still not sure why Tony calls the current series the Skinwalker Edition. He never really investigates what the skin picker cast members are up to, which usually involves saying “What the bleep” after seeing the odd orb or two and occasionally having fainting spells.
I think Tony gets green screened into a couple of pictures and videos of the Skinpicker Ranch in northern Utah where it’s located and politely comments about what the cast is up to on the show. I cannot understand why an astrophysicist, Travis Taylor, is on the show, other than to try to give it credibility for the pseudoscientific approach. However, Dragon (played by Bryant Arnold), who is just a security guard, gets more camera time than Taylor.
That said, I think it’s way past time to get a better understanding of these Unidentified Frying Objects (UFOs). We’re talking about an astral chicken here, who is anatomically altered to function as its own wormhole vortex. I think the White House has been aware of the alien poultry cloaca portal vanguard (APCPV) for decades.
There are not enough tin foil hats to go around, people. Besides, they are a waste of good aluminum foil wrapping paper, which should be reserved for the resistance fighters when it comes time to roast the invaders. Don’t blame me when you get caught; you’ve been warned.
What we really need is a large coop to confine these galactic free range cluckmeisters. We need to toss the so-called Unidentified Frying Objects, which are actually alien cloaca black hole benders, into the skillet and add poultry seasoning. You want them to be golden brown.
It’s important to be committed to the goal, even when their hired thug abductors which commonly look like little green men (the small grays are the custodians). The abductors tend to be easily tricked into setting you free if you find a decent BBQ rib joint for them. Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City is a good choice. They also do chicken.
Okay, so the title sounds familiar but it’s wrong. And why does it matter? For the record, the actual quote is more like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It comes from philosophers in the Middle Ages. Before I get to the point of all this nonsense, I have to tell you I was shocked to find an actual equation formulated by a guy named Anders Sandberg that can help us find the answer—if we ask the right question. Sandberg says we can get the right answer if we reformulate the question. This would mean you can’t use the head of the pin, but should use the point.
That makes so much sense. Why didn’t I think of that?
Anyway, Sena found an article (“Humanity Will Need to Survive About 400,000 Years if We Want any Chance of Hearing from an Alien Civilization”) that says something called the Drake Equation shows that it’ll take about 400,000 years before we have contact with an alien civilization. The Drake Equation tries to estimate how many Communicating Extraterrestrial Intelligent Civilizations (CETIs) there are. The equation has been called flawed because of the unpredictability of quantifying the probability life may appear on a suitable planet. It’s a matter of conjecture. I don’t get the math, but the concept is interesting.
Now the author of this blog post (it’s actually a WordPress blog called Universe Today) cites a study from a couple of researchers that essentially ask a different question, mathematically speaking. The researchers think of this as a thought experiment and give a rather pessimistic outlook on the whole thing.
Now look back at a 2016 New York Times article, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens,” an opinion piece written by astrophysics professor Adam Frank. He is more optimistic about the Drake Equation and cautions us to “…ask the right question.”
You’ll have to subscribe to the New York Times if you can’t read Frank’s full opinion piece in one sitting. Not that I have any dispute with him, but this reminds me of Agent K in Men in Black who praised supermarket tabloids as having the “Best investigative reporting on the planet; read the New York Times if you want, they get lucky sometimes.”
Again, the math is beyond my little pinhead, but Frank was a lot more optimistic about contacting aliens. It sounds like the outlook on this depends a lot on how you set up the equation. Get the point?
Now, haven’t these guys checked the news and watched the paranormal TV shows? Are they not aware of the large population of UFO watchers out there? One source says that Canadians are spotting up to 3 UFOs a day.
Hey, aliens even stop to admire our lawns. Giorgio Tsoukalos, AKA, the hair guy, from Ancient Aliens would say the aliens contacted us a long time ago. So, why do we need the Drake Equation?
That’s why we need to ask the right question. So how many times do aliens grab their groins while rapping unintelligible lyrics on the point of a pin?
That’s right; the answer is zero—aliens don’t have groins. You’re welcome.
We took a walk on the Terry Trueblood Trail yesterday and were struck by a goggle-eyed looking Tree Swallow, which was caused by the angle of the sunlight and the shot direction—we think. It reminded us of a big-eyed alien.
Partly because I’m kind of a Star Trek fan, I think many common birds have fascinating features which can make them seem almost alien. For example, the Common Yellowthroat has a weird call, which one author has described as “witchity-witchity-wichity-witchity” (Birds of Iowa: Field Guide by Stan Tekiela). We just managed to catch it–the bird’s call, not the bird.
The Eastern Kingbird is well known for its Klingon-like aggression. The Red-wing Blackbirds tend to dive bomb you if you get too close to their nest.
It was good to get outside. There are a lot of people who get credited with the quote “Keep looking up.” The one I remember is Jack Horkheimer, who used to host the public TV show Star Gazer.
Remember my post last month on dancing aliens causing my TV remote to make clicking noises all by itself? Well, despite changing batteries, the clicking noises returned, only a couple of days later. The thing clicks even when I’m holding it in my hand but not pressing any buttons. I don’t know what causes it, but the probability that aliens are involved is really low.
That reminds me of the upcoming government report on UFOs this month—which will probably be delayed and not contain any evidence proving aliens exist. I used to say that I can’t prove a negative, meaning that I can’t prove the non-existence of things like aliens, Bigfoot, and tasty fruitcake.
It turns out I’m probably wrong about that. There are philosophers out there who say you can prove a negative, although not with absolute certainty, but through induction. One of them is Dr. Steven D. Hales, who wrote “Thinking Tools: You Can Prove a Negative” in 2005. Dr. Hales is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA. It was published in eSkeptic, the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society and Think (vol. 10, Summer, 2005) pp. 109-112.
I got by in my freshman philosophy class in college, but I can follow Dr. Hale’s article fairly well. My college professor worked really hard explaining inductive reasoning. Dr. Hales does it effortlessly and he has a pretty good sense of humor.
Therefore, inductively speaking, there is no such thing as tasty fruitcake.
There’s this great line in the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” After Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is captured by the military and he has been briefed by scientists, he gets a little upset and says, “Well I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy!”
I feel like Roy about this UFO thing that’s now being called UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). The UAP Task Force is supposed to give some kind of report on this sometime this month. Reports of UFOs (I’m going to keep using that term) have been going on for years and they’ve been getting more complicated lately as stuff gets declassified about them.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about the UAP Task Force report. I have trouble understanding small stuff, like dehumidifiers for example. Sena bought one the other day, one with a 40-pint capacity. Sena asked the salesman how many pints there are in a gallon. The guy asked his smartphone the question—and then said “2”.
OK, I admit I’m no whiz kid in math. But even I could get the right answer by duplicating what he did. I asked my smartphone, for the first time, mind you. I had never tried that feature. It clearly and audibly gave the correct answer of 8 pints in a gallon. I’m not sure how that got messed up at the store. Sena also asked if the dehumidifier had a filter. The salesman said he did not think so. There is a very large, flat filter visible to the naked eye on the rear of the unit that just snaps in and out of place.
And don’t get me started about the operating instructions for the timer on it. I know it’s not a clock. The instructions tell us how to program the timer to turn the thing on and off by using the arrow buttons. They go on at length about how to program it by pressing the Timer OFF or Timer ON, either when the unit is off or on. They tell you to press the arrow buttons left or right to increase or decrease the Timer by 0.5 or 1.0 hour increments up to 24 hours. You set both Timer OFF and Timer ON and the green lights come on, indicating it’s programmed.
What they don’t tell you is that you can’t program multiple time intervals. You can make it come on and go off for one interval. It does that by counting “down the time remaining until start.” What they also don’t tell you is that you need to set both by using time zero as the starting point. If you set Timer ON for 0.5 hours FROM NOW (say time zero is 7:30, meaning you want it to come on at 8:00), and you want the unit to turn itself off after 4 hours, you need to set Timer OFF counting from 7:30, not 8:00.
A clock would have been nice—and clear instructions as well.
So, I want someone with authority to give me the straight story on UFOs. I want to know who’s in charge here. I have my doubts that I’m going to get straight answers if you can’t get them from a guy selling dehumidifiers who doesn’t even known how to use his own smartphone.
Anyway, I found this website called Metabunk and it debunks a fair amount of UFO phenomena. It’s run by Mick West. I can tell it’s fascinating, but I really don’t understand much of what he and others discuss. It’s over my head (of course, since almost everything is). A lot of the language is technical since a lot of what we’re seeing and hearing about UFOs can be misunderstood because, let’s face it, some of this stuff is faked and some of it is ordinary. There are many camera, CGI, and puppet-type tricks which can be applied to give the impression of strange, alien spacecraft. See the extensive post, “How Do You Stage UFO Photos and Videos? Let Us Count the Ways.”
But Metabunk isn’t just about debunking; it’s also about understanding science and technology. When I watch Ancient Aliens or similar TV shows, I really don’t have to do much thinking because they’re mostly speculative. It helps to see something which challenges that view; see West’s article, “The aliens haven’t landed: Why you should be skeptical of recent reports on UFO sightings.”
Maybe he’ll post about dehumidifiers and dehumidifier salesmen. They can’t be from this planet.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 