Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Dig: History's Mysteries


I wish I could tell you that the nifty rhyming title of this post was a John original, but there is a TV show on Discovery or the History Channel (imagine that!) of the same name and it kind of stuck with me.

Anyway (or "Anyways", if you prefer), I dig pondering all those ancient mysteries about pyramids, Stonehenge and Bigfoot. I'm also going to put conspiracy theories under this umbrella: Who killed JFK? Did we really land on the moon? Don't get me wrong - most of the theories that are out there surrounding those two examples are pretty out-there but that's kind of what I like about them.

So, below are a few cool mysteries and my observations on same. For the sake of brevity (I'm sure you're disappointed...), I may do some combining and condensing:

Stonehenge:
Is it just me or are those some big-ass rocks those people were moving around?! That's just one angle of this deal - how did they move those big-ass rocks? The other angle is - what the hell are those big-ass rocks doing laid out like that? I could probably do some research to better educate my vast reading audience on how the big-ass rocks are laid out just right to capture the rays of the sun at the Summer solstice, etc. If I would take a few minutes to google "Stonehenge", I could make some insightful and intelligent comments about the whole deal - but that would be silly. Instead, I'm just going to summarize it by saying the whole thing is pretty twisted. Did they get it right the first time or did they have to let three or four Summer Solstices (try saying that with a mouth full of peanut butter!) go by and move the big-ass rocks a little bit each year to get it right? How about the aliens? Did they use their spaceships and some kind of space-crane or space-ladder to put those big-ass rocks there? What the hell were they even doing it for in the first place?! About the only reason I can think of to spend that much energy on something like that is if there is nothing good on TV. Again, I say it's just plain twisted.

JFK Assassination:
I've been to the spot where he was shot. Kind of creepy. There is a little thing in the road that marks it. If you look "back and to the left" (Seinfeld reference!), you can see where Lee Harvey Oswald (Note the use of all three names. Killers of this caliber - no pun intended - are often referred to with all three names. John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman.) shot him from the Texas School Book Depository. Grassy knoll is there too. On a related note, I had a grassy knoll once - a little penicillin cleared it right up! Yeah, so Oliver Stone presents a convincing case in his movie that there was more to the whole thing than Lee sitting in the window waiting for the limo to come around the corner. Ollie presents enough information to create some doubt in my little brain about the whole Warren commission report. And I'm OK with Ollie manipulating my gray matter like that. I don't think it's terribly important to know for sure who killed him anymore. Back in the day, it was certainly important to understand why in the world Jack Ruby made sure that old Lee wasn't able to speak up. Was Jack such a patriot that he must avenge the death of his president? I think not. Now, I just think it's cool to speculate. Even the boys on Mythbusters did a show about it!

Jon-Benet Ramsey Killing:
Killing a kid is just really awful. Plenty of theories out there but someone just plain old got away with it.

Landing on the Moon:
How many people have been on the moon? I'll give you a hint - If you bought a dozen doughnuts, each moon-lander-dude could have one. Of course, it would be tricky to eat it with the whole space suit thing going on, but that's beside the point. Some dolts out there think that the whole landing on the moon thing is staged. They use "evidence" like inconsistent lighting in the pictures, the funky zero-gravity walk that the moon-dudes use and the lack of stars in the background of the pictures to suggest that the whole thing was shot in someone's basement like a bad snuff film. Not sure what they are saying is the motivation for doing this. Believe me, a lot of cogs and widgets and stuff have to work pretty darn well to get a guy from Florida to the moon and back so I'm not saying it's easy. Cripes, we have enough problems making a decent car (see Ford Pinto, Chrysler K-Car and the Yugo) let alone a friggin' rocket! However, my glass is half-full today and I'm going to stick with the idea that, sure enough, we played a little golf on the moon.

Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and that goofy Woodpecker in the Everglades:
Love Bigfoot! How can you not? He was even on The Six Million Dollar Man. If you're on The Six Million Dollar Man, you have definitely arrived! Unfortunately, I don't think he is really out there. As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago a guy admitted to faking that movie clip that supposedly shows a She-Bigfoot walking through the woods. Now, that guy might be from the Jack Ruby school of buzz-wreckers but I'm inclined to agree with him: there ain't no such thing as Bigfoot. There are plenty of people who have "seen" Bigfoot or even a whole herd of Bigfeet and have casts of their footprints and stuff but, just like people who have "seen" UFOs, they often live in trailers and use words like y'all, yonder and seen (instead of saw) so they can't be trusted. Same deal with the Loch Ness Monster. I know Loch Ness is really deep and everything but I just don't think old Nessie is down there. As far as that stupid bird in the Everglades (or wherever) goes, perhaps if those people put as much effort into curing cancer we could save a lot on our public healthcare costs.

UFOs:
This one's a toughie. Fox Mulder was convinced that there were lots of UFOs flying around out there and I really liked The X Files so I'm having a hard time discounting his theories. And Close Encounters of The Third Kind was really cool, especially when Richard Dreyfuss was sculpting the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes. I've never seen a UFO or an alien (although there is a guy at work who is way freaky!) so I don't have definitive evidence that they exist. At the same time, "swamp gas" and "weather balloons" are used to explain weird crap in the sky all the time and that seems pretty flimsy to me. After all, what the hell is swamp gas? Sometimes after eating a big burrito, I get a little swamp gas but no one ever thinks that a UFO is flying out of my ass! More like a UFO flew up there and crash-landed! Just like I don't think that Bigfoot is really out there in the woods, I'm going to have to conclude that we are alone in the universe. I know it sounds egotistical but I'm like that. Everyone gets all in a lather about finding water on Mars and how it could support intelligent life. Well, I'm here to tell you that we got boatloads of water here on this Big Blue Marble and we got some real dumb-asses around here so don't let a little agua fool you into thinking that Mars would be a good vacation get-away!

So there you have it. You can draw your own conclusions but remember, if you use the word "yonder", you can't be trusted.

1 comment:

Kim C. said...

There's a video on youtube where a guy demonstrates how Stonehenge could have been built w/o the use of advanced machinery, etc. He uses nothing but a few buckets of concrete, a couple of small rocks and a big wooden lever to move rocks that weigh several tons.
It's on the left sidebar of my blog or you can easily search for it on youtube. It has a totally self-explanatory name, something like Building Stonehenge.