Go USA

I know this photo made the rounds several years ago (in 2003, I suspect), turning up on blogs and webpages and in inboxes across the world. But I've never seen it accompanied by such trenchant sociopolitical analysis.

The marketplace of ideas has never been so bountiful.

Fifth Sign of the Apocalypse (From the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Dept.)

Once again completely blurring the line between truth and fiction, the U.S. military gives us the best reason so far for why Arrested Development should still be on the air.

I can just imagine Carl Weathers telling the Iraqi "actors:" "Take this discarded MRE packet and boil it with some water, and you got yourself a stew."

Call Me Scully

I recently had three weird things happen to me (and people I was with) that, were I more like Mulder, I would interpret as evidence of the supernatural. But I'm a born skeptic, so it's Scully all the way for me.

The Phenomena
First, Lee and I were having lunch Friday at a Mexican restaurant with Liz Rohan, who stopped by BG on her way back to Detroit from a research trip to central Ohio. About ten minutes into things, the salsa dish spontaneously moved two or maybe three inches. I thought I was hallucinating until Lee asked if anybody else saw it. And it wasn't just a casual inching; it was a sudden lurch.

Second, at the end of lunch, we all got up and Lee said to Liz, "Don't forget your glasses case." Liz said that the case, which was sitting right next to where her plate had been the whole lunch, was not hers and that, as far as she knew, it had not been there even a minute before. (I never actually saw the case, since I was by then at the cash register, but I know I--like Lee and Liz--never noticed it during lunch.)

Third, this morning around 5 or 6 a.m., the ceiling fan in our bedroom suddenly switched off, and at the same time the overhead light turned on. I thought either Lee or I was sleeping on the remote, but she reached over and found it right where it always is--on the nightstand.

Mulder: The Irrational, Fun, Fantastic Explanation
We were, and are, being haunted: Liz is doing some pretty fascinating work with the diaries of some departed souls, and the weird things started happening when she showed up. Somehow some of her strange archival mojo followed her up I-75 and into El Zarape. Then it rubbed off on Lee and me, since we were both really into what Liz had to say about the diaries and the family of men who wrote them. It makes sense if you think about it: few people other than Liz study men's diaries, even though men who keep diaries (especially diaries that are so cognizant of a wider readership, as Liz says these are) probably feel they have something to say to posterity. It's no wonder they're a bit restless in the afterlife. Or, at least, their publicists are.

Scully: The Rational, Dull, True Explanation
Scully would point out that, paranormal publicists notwithstanding, the ghosts would almost certainly have continued to follow Liz and, so, would have no interest in our bedroom ceiling fan. (What could Lee and I do to help them?) Besides, there's a rational explanation for everything we experienced:

• There was a lot of condensation on the bottom of the salsa bowl. I suspect that, as it dripped down the sides, it accumulated underneath until it reached a tipping point that allowed the bowl hydroplane across the no-doubt-not-level table. This would explain the sudden, lurching nature of the movement.
• I've been an adult long enough to know that even moderate amounts of stress, fatigue, or preoccupation could keep me from noticing a Ferrari parked in my living room. Just because we hadn't noticed the glasses case on the table doesn't mean it hadn't been there all along.
• This one's the easiest of all: being remote-controlled, our ceiling fan/light defaults to a fan off, light on position after the power is cut and then restored. We simply lost power for a second or so this morning, as the blinking digital clocks around the rest of the house attested later.

Postscript
Still, that's a noteworthy number of very unusual things happening within the space of a day and a half. I'm in my office now, after hours, and I'm watching my back.

After all, Scully may have had a reason for her skepticim. But she was also the one who always seemed to find herself alone, facing a bizarre and horrifying death, while Mulder made goo-goo eyes at the hot entomologist.

F***

I'm not exactly sure how old the "short version" genre is, but I like it.

Yes, I'm 37.

Overheard . . .

. . . as two people passed my office door just now:

"No. Nobody in my family grows hair on the backs of their legs."