Crackpot Theory: Squirrel Survey Setup

The other day, a friend of mine was walking on her squirrel ridden college campus (Incidentally, her university really chose the wrong mascot. Forget the bird, those squirrels are everywhere.)  and she came across a squirrel with a small tag attached to its ear, presumably the kind of tag attached to animals to monitor them for scientific purposes.

When she brought the tale of this squirrel to my attention, her chief curiosity was what people could possibly be studying the squirrels for. Which, to be fair, is curious enough. But in thinking about that question, I stumbled upon a largely and far more hilarious question: how did they get that tag on the squirrel?

Many of you are likely civilized folks with actual attention spans, and as such have never tried chasing a squirrel with the actual intention of catching it while walking around town. I am not a civilized person, and I have no attention span. In my defense, my cross country team had a rule that if you saw a squirrel during practice and caught it, you would be done for the day.

No one ever got the day off via squirrel, incidentally.

Squirrels are not easy to catch in a straight chase 'em down sort of way. Largely because before you can do that whole "run your prey to death" thing that humans are apparently capable of, squirrels will just scamper up a tree and laugh at your climbing incompetence. Stupid squirrels.

But really, if you needed to catch a squirrel, how would you do it? Maybe you'd use a tranquilizer dart gun. Probably the easiest, assuming that you're not a crap shot. But this is a college campus. These days, they're a bit jumpy about guns, weaponry, or anything remotely shaped like guns and weaponry.

An amusing theory we came up with initially was leaving a bowl of food out for the squirrels and spiking it with some sort of tranquilizer. Sure, you'd probably also tranq some poor sap looking to score a free meal, but it's just a tranquilizer. I'm sure they'll be fine after a few hours.

But then we came up with another idea, and idea so impossibly ridiculous, that it must be true.

It goes something like this.

You see, as much as they like to walk around grabbing table scraps off the ground or out of our hands, squirrels are still largely tree folk. Sooner or later, a squirrel will climb a tree. As a sidenote, I'm going to declare that today's indisputable fact and put it in very large, bold font for the world to behold.

"Sooner or later, a squirrel will climb a tree."

 The best way then, to catch a squirrel, my friend and I decided, would be to don an elaborate but comically low budget tree costume, stand very still in the middle of the squirrel infested campus, and wait for a squirrel to climb you.

Once a squirrel takes the bait, the next step is to simply yell "SURPRISE MOTHERF*CKER" as you grab them in a full bear hug and then forcibly attach the survey clip to its ear.

One can only imagine the psychological impact this would have on the subject squirrel, as for weeks after it can't bring itself to climb a tree out of fear and mistrust for the very foundations of truth it once believed the world operated on. It's other squirrel friends would try their best to rehabilitate him, but oh the work they would have for them.

JET: Come on Phil, you can do it. Climb the tree.

PHIL: NO! YOU DON'T KNOW MAN! YOU WEREN'T THERE!

JET: Phil, Phil! Take it easy. Here, look. I'll climb the tree first, and then you can follow.

*JET climbs the tree*

JET: See? It's harmless.

TREE: SURPRISE MOTHERF*CKER!

Crackpot Theory: The Secret Superpower of Video Game Characters

Not to vindicate the daywalkers, but I probably need to get out more. I say this because for the past few days, I have been completely unable to stop thinking about my newest mortal nemesis, a collective of unspeakable operatives whose agents have ascended quite literally to the highest points of society. An enemy I share with an idiotic robot and an anthropomorphic warrior panda. I am referring of course to:

Stairs.

For those of you who don't know, I recently moved from a quaint, one story house in the suburbs to a very tiny room on the fourth floor of a building which has no elevator. That means that several times a day, I am going up and down four flights of stairs. Any time that I want to get food, go to class, or grab my umbrella because I didn't look out my window or check the weather before going down stairs, walking out of the building, and getting drenched by rain, I will be dealing with stairs. And that's just at home.

Of all the classes I attended throughout the week, not a single one of them is on the ground floor of the building it is in. I often spend my weekends in a two story house. I am on stairs all of the time.

But when I have some free time not being taken up by stairs, I often take some time to sit down, relax, and whittle away my troubles on the old Xbox. I'm a bit of a shooter man myself, and quite recently, I've been sinking a lot of time into Destiny.

And I've noticed, because of the fundamental way first person shooter gameplay works and because of the way the environments are designed, my in game character constantly finds himself sprinting up and down stairs without looking at her feet. I don't know about all of you, but I can't walk up or down stairs without looking out my feet unless it's an unnaturally slow pace.

Try it next time you're on a flight of stairs, see how fast you can do it without falling on your face. Don't look at your feet the entire time, and for added challenge, mime firing a gun at a bunch of alien robots. Ignore the funny looks you'll get, in a few seconds they'll completely forget your bizarre behavior because they'll be too busy  asking you if you need a ride to the hospital for that head injury you just sustained.

I'm sure there are more unrealistic aspects of games, all of which have been parodied extensively online. Why can we carry five weapons at once? Where are we keeping all this ammo? How does heavy breathing allow an otherwise ordinary marine to recover from gunshot wounds in seconds? Is that shopkeeper really oblivious to me robbing him blind just because I put a bucket on his head? All hilarious, all valid, and all well trodden ground.

But I don't think anyone has ever dealt with the full ramifications of stair sprinting in first person shooters. So, to that end, here's a picture of Master Chief tripping down a flight of stairs.

Damn Covenaaaaaaaant!

Crackpot Theory: The Infinite North Korea Theorum

As I'm sure most of the free world is aware, North Korea is an interesting place. It's pretty poor, technologically lagging, full of Stalinistic policies so Stalinistic Stalin himself would demand freedom, and its run by an inarguably eccentric man-child. In the 50s, Korea had a big political split that to this day hasn't been mended, necessitating the "North" in its name.

 Despite repeatedly insisting it wants to destroy us all and become the dominant species, most of us sensible nations are content to pat its cute little head and reply "Of course you will, dearie," every time it threatens Armageddon so that we can focus our attentions on countries with more oil.

Like those. Those'll do very nicely.

It was while pondering this, the existence of an ongoing space war between humanity and a bunch of long game playing space, and the presence of surface to space planetary railgun in our backyard that I and my good friend Gamma One came to one, obvious, undeniably fact.

Our planet is the North Korea of the galaxy. 

While you pick your jaws up from the floor, I will elaborate. As previously stated, North Korea is pretty poor, comparatively speaking. A lot of people within its borders seem to be going hungry, or so I'm told from the Grade A journalism that is The Interview. In the past people have attempted to alleviate this by doing what people always do, send in aid. Unfortunately, North Korea is pretty notorious about not being so gracious with accepting aid.

This seems, at least to me, to be a pretty foolish position to take, up there with shooting yourself in the stomach and then punching anyone who offers to stop you from bleeding to death. But hey, to each their own, right? Because now, I want you to picture this:

A galaxy full of space faring, interplanetary traveling, alien civilizations. Some civilizations are bit better off than others, there are a few unstable military regimes and downright horrible places to live. And then, in that one corner of the galaxy, is that planet. 

You know the one I'm talking about. So woefully behind in technology they've only occasional been to their own moon. Full of starving people, poor as poor can be, and incredibly hostile to outside cultures. You've heard rumors of people who visit the planet being locked up in government facilities, never to be heard from again because they're being interrogated and tortured and experimented on. The governing bodies run by eccentric man children. In the 50s, it had a big political split it still hasn't mended. 

The government of the planet insists it is capable of going to war with the rest of the galactic superpowers, and puts out streams of propoganda attesting to this that also paints outside cultures as hostile forces out to destroy them and their way of life.

Luckily, these days, most of the galactic community is content to ignore this backward bizarro world, patting its cute little blue head and saying "Of course you can, dearie" every time it threatens War of the Worlds so that it can focus on planets with more magic space elements.

Like this one. This'll do very nicely.

Some planets do try to send in aid to the poor, starving people of Earth, but the local government is pretty bad about accepting aid from outside civilizations, so- you see where I'm going with this.

For all the looking down on North Korea we here on planet Earth do, there is a proportionately equal amount of looking down on Earth being done here in the Milky Way. And it doesn't stop there, for it also follows that just as the Milky Way looks down on Earth, so does the local galaxy cluster look down on the Milky Way. And just as the local galaxy cluster looks down on the Milky Way, so too does the universe look down on our local galaxycluster. And just as the universe looks down on our local galaxy cluster, so too does the multiverse look down on our universe!

Best of luck with coming to terms with that.

003 out.

Crackpot Theory: Sharknado Explained

For those of you who don't know, Sharknado and its sequel, Sharknado 2: The Second One are two of the absolutely dumbest, most horrendously written and shot movies ever, of all time. It takes the "so bad it's good" trope to extremes never before conceived by human imagination. I couldn't stop smiling while watching either of them, even when the sequel was just a tad in love with itself.

Full disclosure, at time of writing, I actually haven't watched the sequel in its entirety. It was late at night when we started watching it, I had somewhere to be in the morning, and I wasn't about to be late because I stayed up watching literally the dumbest thing to be called entertainment since that brick in Phineas and Ferb.

But from what I did see, the movie seemed to be hinting that these sharks that were falling through the sky were in fact intelligent, actually seeming to recognize particular humans as targets and perhaps even bent on revenge. This idea was so much more stupid than the existing stupid premise that I had to concoct a justification for it or less lobotomize myself with the TV remote.

And in doing so, I struck brilliance. For you see, in the last days of World War Two, what few Nazis remained used their last bits of science to escape capture by transposing their consciousnesses into the bodies of sharks. Then they spent years breeding new, equally intelligent Nazi Sharks, all the while plotting their revenge against the allies.

This plan would eventually manifest itself as the Nazi Sharks built Nazi Shark machines that could control the weather. It was this, and not the previously theorized global warming, that caused the freak weather patterns necessary for the sharknado storms to form. And so, the Nazi Sharks used their Nazi Shark machines to create freak weather patterns that they could ride inland in order to attack United States coastal cities!

Think about it. It all makes sense now doesn't it? What everyone thought was just a really stupid disaster movie was in fact...and equally stupid Nazi conspiracy movie!

It's a theory, anyway. Cheers.