OMG! It’s Bigfoot! In a ménage à trois with E.T. & a chupacabra!

I'm not sure which end of the mole this is, but I'm entirely certain this is not some mythical beastie.

It’s 2011.  Video has gone from analog to digital, cheap-ass digital cameras today take better pictures than the expensive hoozit your dad had when you were growing up, and video cams can fit in your palm and record like eight years of video at a time.  So why can’t anyone ever get any really decent video of Bigfoot or the latest ghost to haunt some Spanish-moss draped Southern mansion?

When I started writing this blog I worried that I might not have enough funny stuff to write about.  It’s called Tongue of Dog’s Breakfast because I didn’t want to limit myself to a certain topic (like writing & publishing) and I’m a Pagan, so it just seemed natural to merge the dog’s breakfast with Shakespeare.  I began subscribing to a newsletter for paranormal/weird news because, even though I’m not much into the paranormal myself (despite the Paganism), I do incorporate the paranormal a lot into my humor writing, although you’ll never find any drop-dead-sexy vampires or angels or dangerously hunky werewolves.  I thought maybe this newsletter would provide me with funnier fodder than it has, and while I’ll continue subscribing to it – it did, after all, alert me to the Jim Morrison ghost story which I thought was very funny, mostly because it didn’t happen to me.

What I’m mostly finding, though, is that after like fifty or sixty years of weird-shit hunters combing every inch of the Goddess’s green earth seeking hardcore evidence for the existence of a variety of extremely shy mythical beasties, from chupacabras to the Montauk Monster, all we’ve got to show for it is yet another fuzzy, bouncing video of some sort of vaguely Bigfoot-shaped thing which could be Bigfoot, or it could be some guy in a monkey suit, or it might just be a Republican looking for a 2012 candidate who isn’t certifiably batshit insane.

I mean, this is the sort of lame-ass crap we’re still getting fifty years later:

Oh yeah, *that's* convincing.

Funny how in this day and age of satellite imagery and barely an inch of Earth left unexplored that we never run across any Bigfoot bones, baby Bigfoots or even any interesting Bigfoot scat.  Just more incredibly lousy footage that looks like it was shot by your grandfather.  While drunk.  Maybe Bigfoot in reality is just a big fuzzy blur.

Not necessarily a ghost girl. Although she's probably dead anyway.

Ghost pictures are a little more humorous.  At least when someone goes to the trouble of faking a really good picture, as opposed to getting all freaked out and thinking they’ve photographed something from Beyond when it’s actually the camera strap in the way or some condensation from a humid night.

But still, I’m disappointed.  Okay, I know there’s no such thing as Bigfoot but really, people can do a better job of faking stuff than this.  The original Bigfoot con job is a classic.  It’s allowed to be blurry and jostle-y because it was like 1967 and they were probably using the same old 35mm jobbie your drunk granddad used to capture all those

Kid, you can thank your dad for putting this on the Internet later when you're choosing his nursing home some day

embarrassing moments of your first poop all by yourself.  I mean cripes, today we can make better videos and upload them to YouTube than Hollywood puts out half the time, so why can’t we fake a better Bigfoot video?

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got a date with a Sasquatch.  Dark, jiggly, out-of-focus video proof to follow.

Monsters under the bed, monsters under the bridge

There’s a sea monster under the Brooklyn Bridge – or there was anyway before scavengers or scientists hie’d off with its carcass a few weeks ago.  If there was one live monster, there’s probably another, and it’s coming to eat my little brother!

At least that’s what I tell him.  I’ve been telling him monsters and other mythical creatures were coming to get him since he was five, when we vacationed out in the Hamptons with family (don’t be impressed, my relatives were there before it was cool) and I told my little brother

Rare photo of the Corkscrew Monster coming to get my brother

that there was a Corkscrew Monster in Gardiner’s Bay and that it ate five-year-old boys.  I went into detail about how it had a corkscrew for a nose that whirred and drilled through little children.

I don’t think he ever bought it.  He’d already fallen for the billa-billas & feeta-fattas hoax (don’t ask), the turning-him-into-a-fairy hoax (don’t ask), and convincing him that if he went on a spook house ride at a carnival that they were going to chop off his head.  So, he was fairly jaded by the time he got to kindergarten.

I should know about monsters.  I used to have them under my bed.  Well, not monsters specifically, these were way worse – alligators and poisonous snakes.  And it was an entirely plausible scenario too, because we grew up in Florida, which is mostly famous for its killer wildlife.  We had garden spiders that killed and ate

The typical garden spider on the Chardenet property in Orlando

toddlers.  We found a six-foot diamondback rattlesnake skin – sans snake – in the backyard.  We had a very angry opossum in the garden shed once.  And sharks.  Big, hungry, man-eating sharks.  Come to think of it, maybe that’s what I should have terrorized him with.  He’d have probably bought the sharks.  I remember I used to threaten to feed him to the jellyfish, but by then he was old enough to know that jellyfish only sting your weiner off.

The Brooklyn Bridge sea monster is probably just an Atlantic Sturgeon, but you have to admit it looks scary.  Kind of like a really long sea rat thingy or something.  I’ve always loved big-monster mythical creatures stories even though they’re invariably hoaxes.  The fact is, monster stories persist even into our enlightened times because, let’s face it, all humans have a deep-down desire to scare their little brothers and sisters.  It’s fun!  Okay, maybe not if they require years of therapy to get over it.  Then it’s just something to smirk about when Mom isn’t looking.

There was a Montauk Monster a few years ago that washed up on the beach just down the road from East Hampton where we used to stay.  Okay, it was probably just a dead raccoon but once again I sent it to my baby brother and told him that it ate old guys (he’s a few years past five now – and I’m older than he is so if he’s an old guy I’m an even older lady!  And anyway don’t look at me like that, I get to pick on him because he’s my baby brother!  And because of the firecracker in the cellar thing.  Don’t ask.)

I told him the Brooklyn Bridge monster was coming after him because I had passed on his GPS coordinates to it, but I think he still doesn’t believe me.  It doesn’t help that he lives in a landlocked town in Michigan, many miles away from the nearest Great Lake or the ocean.  The Brooklyn Bridge, Montauk and Corkscrew Monsters would have to take a Greyhound Bus or something to get to him, and who wants to ride a bus for like four hours or more just for lunch?

Then again, maybe he chose a landlocked town to thwart any monsters I might send his way.

<satisfied grin>  My work here is done.  MWAAAHHHHAHAHAAAA!!!!

Something That Would Totally Freak Me Out

Jim Morrison.  In my bed. Watching me.  I’d freak.

This supposedly is happening to a woman in Virginia who, along with her mother, moved into the former Morrison home.  The daughter – who looks like she probably isn’t old enough to even remember The Doors – says she was lying in bed and she looked over and there was the Lizard King himself, sorta transparent and foggy, staring back at her.  Some of the neighbours told them later that “Little Jimmy” used to live there (one neighbour doesn’t even know who he is – “Some musician or something?”) and you can just tell by the look on Mom’s face when asked if she’s jealous that Jim visits her daughter instead of her, that she’d only be jealous if it was the ghost of Frank Sinatra.

Turn me on, dead man. No wait, that was some other dead rock guy.

Okay, look, I know Jimbo was hot in his day and all, but he is – and I would like to emphasize this point - a totally dead guy.  Why is this woman not running out of the house screaming?  I know I would be, and I totally get why women thought Jimbo was a major babemeister.  But, you know, that was when he had a pulse and dropped a lot of acid and wrote really really bad song lyrics and stuff.

(Oh please.  Don’t look at me like that.  The man was about as much of a poet as a Vogon.  Just look at the lyrics for Riders on the Storm – does that not sound like it was written by someone tripping his ass off on the roof of a motel on Venice Beach?  Because that was, as a matter of fact, the conditions under which Jim Morrison wrote most of his song lyrics, which explains why they sound like they were written by a fairly weird ten-year-old.)

Man, all I know is if I rolled over and there was some dude lying next to me and I recognized him as Jim Morrison, probably the sexiest man alive in 1968 if People magazine was doing that sort of thing, I mean even if he was the younger pre-overweight, pre-Charles Manson’s-hair-and-beard Jim Morrison, I’d freak and be running so fast out of Virginia I’d be halfway through Ohio by now.

Look, I’ve put a lot of thought into this.  Not what to do when you wake up with a ghost, but why it’s a very, very bad idea to sleep with Jim Morrison.

This is, believe it or not, the basis of the novel I’m currently working on.  It’s inspired by my Jim Morrison-loving friend Elaine who ran into the Hard Rock Cafe here in Toronto a few years ago to take pictures of Monsieur’s boots when I told her I’d seen them there.

That’s all I can say for now.  And that no, it doesn’t involve anyone digging up his corpse and committing weird violations that would horrify even Jeffrey Dahmer.

I’m just saying, it’s a very bad idea to sleep with dead people.  Under any circumstances.

And if they’re invading your bed in the house that you and your Mom bought, a house that the dead guy hasn’t lived in since he was a teenager, he should stay the hell out of your bedroom, at the very least, and if he doesn’t, call in the exorcist.

I’d show Mr. some serious Mojo Risin’!

I like it weird ;)

Uh, sorry, this isn’t about my sexual proclivities.  I’m not sure if I even have sexual proclivities, as I’m not entirely certain what “proclivities” are.  I do, however, have a jones for anything weird and bizarre.  Not necessarily sexual things weird and bizarre either – I leave that to my e-mail friend A.Lizard in San Francisco who used to hang out in alt.tasteless back in the day and send me stuff on the weirdest sexual fetishes he could find.  He’s found some pretty weird shit over the years, including fetishes for guys who like seeing women consumed in quicksand, guys who like seeing women get stuck to the sidewalk or the floor, guys who like to see women being cooked and eaten, and my all-time fave, some dude who has fantasies of wrapping the late Roy Orbison (who, thankfully, appears to be alive in all of them) in clingfilm.  Or Saran Wrap, as us Yanks & Canucks call it.

No, I’m not going to link to all those.  I’ll give you the pleasure of Googling on them yourself   And interestingly, the sites he sent for that other stuff didn’t come across as nearly misogynist and brutal as you might think; at least in the ones he forwarded to me, the female models appeared to either be having fun or at least trying to keep a straight face.  (And it must be hard to look terrified when you’ve got a plastic apple in your mouth and are trussed up in a giant turkey pan being shoved into the world’s least-convincing oven.)

Anyway, I’m really sorry that Lizard got a life several years ago, because he stopped sending weird stuff.  Now he just sends really depressing articles about how Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are going to suck us all dry of blood, life force and money.  Or how Wells Fargo is planning to foreclose on anyone who owns a house anywhere in the United States, and toss them rudely out into the street while they hoover up the rest of that family’s money.  Including Obama’s.  Including Warren Buffett’s.  Even including Bill Gates’s, whose house is probably worth a helluva lot more than Buffett’s, who bought his for like $15,000 back when God was a child.

No, the weird stuff I’m into is, just, anything silly or funny or science fiction-y that might inspire me for a future novel some day.  Which is why I blogged about Atlantis the other day, when archaeologists thought they’d found it (again).  Or spiders that can make you horny (and then kill you).  I mean, that’s just really funny.  It reminds me actually of a plot element in a novel I haven’t come out with yet, although it doesn’t involve spiders, it involves another critter you ordinarily would never, EVER think of when it comes to sex, but I found a really bizarre ancient myth that provided the inspiration for what I hope will be the creepiest gorgeous villainess of all time.

I even began subscribing to a paranormal weekly newsletter in hopes that it would provide fun fodder for my already overactive imagination as well as weird blog posts but so far it seems to be just the same-old-same-old.  Grainy pictures of Bigfoot that could be practically anything (great gods!  We’ve been filming Bigfoot for like fifty years and today we have wicked high-tech ultra-zoom cameras and killer satellite technology and still Bigfoot looks like he could be, well, almost anything except Bigfoot.) Or ghost videos which I figure almost anyone can produce now with a little photoshopping.  Still, just this week the newsletter asked, “Is Nibiru approaching?”  And I was all like, WTF, who is Nibiru, and is he really hot???”  But unfortunately, Nibiru is simply some planetary body that is either a mysterious planet (if you ask the Nibir-rubes) or a complete delusion, if you ask the scientists.  And if they’re wrong, Nibiru is going to wreak utter destruction on Planet Earth.  However Nibiru may not have time as the repeatedly no-show Rapture has been rescheduled for May 21st of this year, with the end of the world slated for October 21st.  Might want to pack an extra set of clothes on May 21st as supposedly the Lord likes to take his Elect up in their birthday suits, because in most locations October’s going to be a bit chilly for flying around in the Full Monty.

(Not that I expect to be Raptured.  Nor do I expect to bite the big one next to John Cusack while the world goes to pieces on December 21st, 2012.  No, I anticipate, after the life I’ve led so far, that I will most likely be reincarnated as a much lower life form, like a cockroach or a reality TV star or, worst of all, a Republican.)

What I mostly want is weird stuff.  REALLY weird stuff!  LOTS of really weird stuff!  (And not necessarily sexual, either, unless it enables me to come up with a more farked-up scenario than I did for that aforementioned villainess – and let me tell you, that one really took the biscuit.  I mean, I felt compelled to add a piece at the back saying, “I know that was really farked up and I didn’t invent it myself, blame some ancient dead guy!”)  Like, my fave weird story from this week was Iran claiming to have built a flying saucer that looks remarkably like a movie flying saucer.  I have to admit, I just love Iranian President Ahmadinejad. He’s so delightfully stupid, and we haven’t had any world leaders providing the liberal-biased media with really good sound bytes since George W. Bush left office.  In Ahmy’s Holocaust-denying, gay-free Iran, cleavage can cause earthquakes world, he’s way better than Hugo Chavez, who just tends to sound like a froth-at-the-mouth uber-Marxist idiot.

Then again, you just never know where the next inspiration may come from.

Just consider this a warning.