The pacifier melted out of the snows that had been shoveled from my driveway, onto the stone wall in front of my house.

At a site called Paranormal News, the latest forum discussion focuses on the question: “What’s the difference between the ‘Watchers’ and the ‘Nephilim’?”

Well, I’ve been wondering about that for a long while, of course. Sadly, you can’t read the forum entry unless you’ve got a membership, and I don’t have a membership on Paranormal News.

I’m hoping you can help me settle the matter here, with a poll. You pick the answer that makes the most sense to you, and then we’ll get closer to heart of the question: “What’s the difference between the Watchers and the Nephilim?

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The nominees for the Dumb Idea Of The Day are:

A: The book Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer
B: The remake of the 80’s movie Fright Night
C: The Facebook Page, “MY SISTER SAID IF I GET A MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON”

…or, nominate your own.

“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.”

So read the words you can find on an earth-tone t-shirt or on a bumper sticker affixed to the Saab at the community market. The cited source: a Dakota proverb.

You’ll have to forgive me for being sufficiently irreverent, but had that Dakota spent any time in the woods or near a stream or in the snow? Tracks get covered up all the time in nature. It’s more like we’ll be known for a year or two, max, by the tracks we leave.

Oh, I know, it’s a metaphor for the impact humans make on the universe. But even on that metaphorical level the proverb doesn’t hold. I mean, who was the Dakota who said that? Exactly how much did Exxon spend on promoting its political agenda last year? You can’t answer either question; one answer is lost to the fogginess of time and the other is lost to the obscuring shroud of secrecy and creative money shuffles.

Forever is a long time, and this is a big, big world we live in. We don’t make any impact off this planet, frankly, and the impact we make on this planet is not by the discernable tracks of individuals but by the depressions and gouges and pavings of collectivity. We won’t be remembered, but we will leave a fair mess.

I was searching for information about the poison delivered by the spur of the platypus this morning when I came across a curious abstract for an article in the Journal of Hand Surgery:

“The platypus (ornithorhynchus anatinus) is a furry duck-billed mammal that inhabits the waterways of eastern Australia. The male may reach 60 cm in length with a 20 cm beaver-like tail. We report the case of an American naturalist stung whilst trying to study the male in the wild. This resulted in an intense local reaction. Warning signs should therefore be erected at air and sea ports warning tourists of the dangers of these venomous Australians.”

Warning signs at airports cautioning tourists about “venomous Australians”? The platypus isn’t a very common animal, and it doesn’t hang out in places where most tourists to Australia would go, so I thought at first that this overreaching abstract must be some kind of satire, an April Fool’s joke of some kind.

It is not. Author Michael A. Tonkin is for real, and has written other case studies, such as Acute Calcific Tendinitis in the Hand and Wrist. Coauthor J. Negrine is also a genuine medical researcher, having written unforgettable favorites such as Synovial chondromatosis in the distal interphalangeal joint.

No one should handle live a platypus without taking extreme precautions. Getting jabbed with a platypus can cause severe swelling and excruciating pain that even high doses of morphine can’t beat, and the pain can last for months. Still, there isn’t much chance of a jabbing taking place – many cases of platypus attacks happen when platypus researchers are handling their subjects, taking measurements and “samples”. So long as tourists to Australia avoid such activities, they’re probably going to be fine, even if there are no warning signs up at the airport.

Would you like to own a piece of a genuine stargate, an artificial portal between worlds that defies the limitations of space and time we take for granted? Well, then you’ll need to invent a stargate. As far as we know, there never has been an actual stargate created, though there have been plenty of science fiction stories that feature them.

The lack of any actual stargates is not stopping scifi site IO9 from offering a piece of one as a prize. “Win An Actual Piece Of The Pegasus Stargate”, they offer, if you just leave a convincing comment describing why you ought to have the piece. “We’re giving away a piece of a real Stargate!”

What’s actual is that the piece is a piece. The Pegasus Stargate isn’t an actual stargate. It’s a prop from a defunct science fiction TV series. Besides, it’s just a piece of the stargate. It wouldn’t transport you to another world, even if it was a piece of a real stargate.

Of course, we here at Irregular Times don’t even have contacts at that distance from consequnce. We can’t get you a piece of the set of a canceled television series. I can, however, offer you a piece of a Jovian Post-Imperial Hyper-Cognitive Translator Array, being held for us by a kid named Jimmy who lives down the street from me. It looks suspiciously like a bunch of toilet paper tubes held together by duct tape. Alien civilizations have a funny way of defying expectations, don’t they?

One of the most neglected of the Greek goddesses was Eris, the goddess of trouble. In fact, it was the neglect of Eris that led to the greatest story ever told, the story of the Illiad and the Odyssey.

Eris was the only goddess not invited to a wedding party, and she was so angry at the slight that she decided to crash the party anyway, and bring along, as was her wont, a package of trouble. The trouble came in the form of a golden apple, with the phrase inscribed upon it: “For the most fair”. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite claimed the apple for their own (really, shouldn’t Athena, as the goddess of wisdom, have known better), and so they called out for a judge to settle the dispute.

No one from the wedding party wanted to accept the role of judge, given that any judgment would involve angering two goddesses, while making only one goddess happy. So, the goddesses looked out the window, and spotted a shepherd boy bringing his goats along the road outside. They ordered the shepherd boy to be brought in to serve as judge.

That shepherd boy was no ordinary shepherd, however. He was Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. He was working as a shepherd because a fortune teller had told Priam that the boy would cause terrible trouble. So, King Priam packed Paris away to the countryside, which is exactly where he had to be to cause the trouble in the first place.

Hera told Paris that if he gave her the apple, she would give him the greatest kingdom on Earth. Athena told Paris that giving her the apple would be rewarded with the gift of wisdom. Aphrodite, on the other hand, promised to make Paris the most beautiful man on Earth, and to give him the most beautiful wife as well. Wouldn’t you know it – Paris chose beauty, and was given the ability to steal away the most beautiful woman on Earth, who was already married to King Menelaus over in Greece. Thus, the Trojan War began.

Eris was at the foundation of this great epic. So, why doesn’t she get more attention. Why are repeating the mistake of the people at that wedding party?

Online, Eris.com, Eris.us. Eris.org and Eris.tv have all been registered at some time, but have now been left to go to the online equivalent of the weeds. Eris.net is the only Eris domain name left. It’s held by Eris Networks, and consists of nothing more than the following graphic, and a link to info@eris.net.

The Eris Networking graphic consists of a the yin-yang design from Taoism, with a pentagon on one side, and a golden apple on the other side. We know where the golden apple comes from, but what’s the pentagon for? Furthermore, there’s some Greek lettering on the apple, but I can’t decipher what it means, not knowing Greek.

Can anyone help me decode the meaning behind this symbol?

It has been reported that a man driving home through a city park in New Orleans saw a sort of troll thing. It had yellow eyes and big sharp claws on the ends of its hands, and a tongue that was too large for its mouth, yet contained within that mouth by terrible fangs.

In addition to this, the monster was claimed to have either gills or matted hair along the sides of its head. This is where the story falls apart for me. How would gills and matted hair look at all alike, unless the driver couldn’t actually get a close look at whatever he saw, which might well have been a person in costume, given that a parade had taken place close by earlier in the day? How could a driver see that a creature’s tongue is too big for its mouth, but not distinguish gills from matted hair?

At the dinner table last night, my 9 year-old son turned to me and said, “Hey Dad, guess what? People think that the Mothman was probably a sandhill crane or an owl that got into an electrical power plant and was changed.” I didn’t really know what to say, except for a confused mutter of “Well, I don’t think that the Mothman is real. They never found any evidence that it actually existed.” My son reassured me that it was all true.

Later on in the evening, after he went to bed, I found a book from our local elementary school library in my son’s backpack. Its title: Mothman – The Unsolved Mystery, by Lisa Wade McCormick.

My son had drawn the following, folded in its pages:

I’m familiar with the reading education idea that it doesn’t matter what kids read, so long as they’re reading something. My 9 year-old son, however, doesn’t lack for good materials. He’s happy to read just about anything, so why not supply him with quality reading materials at school instead of babbling nonsense about urban legends?

I wouldn’t be upset if my son were learning about tales of the Mothman and alien Greys, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, as examples of modern mythology, the survival of the human storytelling instinct. Yet, that’s not what Mothman: The Unsolved Mystery does. It offers the following “facts”.

“Mothman Fact: Many people said Mothman’s eyes cast a spell on them. They could not stop staring at the creature’s red eyes”

“Mothman Fact: Hundreds of people around Point Pleasant also said they saw UFOs. Some of them believed Mothman was an alien”

Strictly speaking, these are facts. People said these things. People believed these things. The way these facts are worded, however, leads a young reader to believe that the existence of Mothman is a fact.

Fact: People say and believe all kinds of weird things. Fact: I want my son to get an elementary school education that helps him to distinguish between facts and beliefs, rather than confusing the two.

“America is ready for another revolution!”

That’s what a speaker said at the pay-to-play luxury Tea Party convention in Nashville this weekend. But is it true? Is America ready for another revolution?

You tell us. Which of the following have you done to prepare for another revolution?

__ Had a family conference to arrange for brother to fight against brother
__ Stockpiled guns to go run off and fight in a militia for one side or the other
__ Enough food and water set aside in case of seige
__ Guest room set aside for lodging soldiers
__ Dollars converted into rebel Tea Party currency for when the revolution is over
__ Don’t Tread on Me flag ready to be unfurled

Perhaps I’ve missed some aspect of this revolution, though. Is there something else you’ve done to get ready to revolt?

I’m going to run the risk of offending the families of amputees here, but I’ve just got to ask the question: What the heck is the point of National Limb Loss Awareness Month?

Really, aren’t the people who have lost their limbs plenty aware that they’ve lost their limbs? Do they need to be reminded where that arm of theirs went to?

Is there any benefit to providing awareness of the potential of limb loss to the rest of us? Need we warn, “That leg of yours could fall off any minute now,” or “Hey kids, put that guillotine away before somebody’s body part gets chopped off”?

Is it, perhaps, that the purpose of National Limb Loss Awareness Month is to bring awareness to people in Congress to provide money to medical organizations that deal with limb loss? If so, then they ought to just be honest and call it National Limb Loss Lobbying Month.

Of course, what Congress ought to do and what Congress actually does rarely meet. So, Congressman John Duncan introduced H. Res. 1056, a resolution expressing support for designation of April as National Limb Loss Awareness Month, into the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday. What if this legislative passed? What would you do to observe this month? How would you become aware of lost limbs?

Given that the government and business offices that ordinarily make much of the news have been closed for a couple of weeks now, journalists have been filing generic end-of-year and end-of-decade retrospectives for a while, filling space until the news cycle starts up again. When I came across the comic book cover you see below, I decided I’d do these puff pieces one better, with a double retrospective, looking back at how people in 1978 thought the beginning of the decade that just ended would turn out: With a crash landing at the bottom of an ocean on an alien world, of course.

In the year 2000, “On a planet totally covered by water, Dan Dare and the seven-man crew of an Eagle craft are spinning out of control into a deepsea trench. The Eagle’s main reactors are useless… and the trench is twenty miles deep!… Not even the Eagle’s reinforced hull can withstand the pressure of twenty miles of ocean!”

I think we can all remember where we were when this story hit the news. I hate it when my Eagle craft’s main reactors are useless.

Michael Salla has a PhD is in Government studies, from the University of Queensland in Australia. How he’s applied that degree is rather unorthodox. He studies what he calls exopolitics – the political dynamics of contact between Earth politicians and aliens from other worlds.

Salla’s latest work is an attempt to uncover secret contacts between Barack Obama and representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations. Salla says that he has three independent sources that confirm the story. One of these he names Source A, while the other two sources remain completely anonymous.

“The similarities in these independent reports gives reason to conclude that an ongoing program of secret meetings involving senior military personal from the U.S. Navy and other military services with one or more extraterrestrial civilizations is underway,” Salla reports. As I look at Salla’s writings, however, the only similarities are that the alleged government sources remain anonymous and that the government is alleged to be contacting non-humans from somewhere out in the nearly-infinite reaches of the universe.

The first story Salla describes claims that the U.S. military has been meeting with two species of extraterrestrials. One species is referred to as the Reptilians, because the creatures look like reptiles. The other species has been named the Conformers, and are supposed to be a silicon-based life form – an idea I remember hearing about in an old Star Trek episode about a misunderstood oozing creature in an alien mineshaft. It is suggested that a face-to-face meeting between Barack Obama and the Reptilians and Conformers has been arranged, and may have already taken place.

A second source describes a meeting on remote Pacific islands two months ago between a representative of the Obama White House and aliens from the binary star system Zeta Reticuli. A web site purporting to channel messages from the Zetans indicates that extraterrestrials are fond of asking rhetorical questions, such as “Do you think our eyes got so large because our sun was bright?” and “Do you suppose we dove into the sub-structure of our planet just when the atmosphere became poisonous, due to our wars?” These Zetans are also known as “greys” or “ebens”, and are described as looking like the aliens from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The third source Salla cites tells yet another story, saying that the Navy has been meeting with extraterrestrials who look just like human beings.

What stands out from these stories are the inconsistencies, rather than the similarities. If there really was some contact with extraterrestrials and our government, then whistleblowers would provide similar, independent descriptions of those extraterrestrials. Yet, the whistleblowers Salla describes cannot agree whether there is one extraterrestrial civilization or two, or whether the aliens look like humans, reptiles, or weird skinny distortions of the human forms from a planet viewed through hypnosis by self-proclaimed psychic humans.

It should be noted that the community of people who believe in extraterrestrial contact with human beings is not at all united behind Michael Salla’s accounts. One source, an encyclopedia about the Zeta Reticulans written by Maximillien de Lafayette, puts Salla in the category of “Bad Guys”, accusing him of spreading “anti-Star Visitor disinformation”. Apparently, trust is alien to these people.

A year and a half ago, radical preacher Loren Davis began spreading a collection of rumors about Barack Obama. These rumors claimed:

- Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim
- Barack Obama is part of a secret conspiracy to complete the agenda of the September 11 attacks
- Barack Obama and his family in Kenya are a socialist political powerhouse behind the recent violence there

Barack Obama has been President now for almost 11 months, so there’s been enough time for the truth about his political character to emerge. So, how well have the rumors from Loren Davis held?

- No information suggesting a Muslim identity for Barack Obama has emerged. In fact, Obama has coddled right wing Christian extremists like Rick Warren.
- There has been no terrorist attack executed with help from the Obama White House.
- There has been no surge in Kenyan violence, either in Kenya or here in the United States.

Loren Davis got zero out of three correct. So, why haven’t we heard a retraction from those Republicans who worked so hard to spread the rumors last year?