Jefe's House

“I am not used to seeing the kind of tracks in my back yard like the samples I’m attaching here. Any ideas?  Looks BIG.  Gulp.”

So read the email I received last week from my close friend S. with 4 photos attached (the one above was also a Coast to Coast AM Photo of the Day on 1/27/11).  He lives in Franklin County, Ohio near Columbus, works in a highly visible profession and is too shy to post these images himself — but he’s also alarmed by the footprints he and his wife found in their back yard last week after the last big snowfall. Knowing of my keen interest in the ridiculous-yet-hard-to-explain, he sent them to me.

He’s been perusing BFRO’s site for sasquatch sightings in his area looking to make some kind of sense of this, but to no avail.

“The right track has blood on it — the right foot seems to indicate a foot injury,” his email continued.  “We are kinda freaking out.  We have spent hours combing through wild animal track books, trying to isolate and identify the tracks, hoping to come up with an explanation. WHOA.  Freaking.

S.”

He says the tracks crossed through his yard and stopped at a large tree.  Sadly there was no shivering juvenile squatch hiding in the tree when he looked up — but then where did it go? Did it fly away? Jersey devil? Mothman? My two cents — these aren’t sasquatch, Jersey devil or mothman prints; they’re clearly dogman prints. Perhaps it leapt from the tree onto another tree or onto his roof (he didn’t think to look there for more prints) and was gone.  (UPDATE 1/27/11: I just searched and found this regarding Ohio’s “Loveland creature,” a reptilian spotted in 1955 and 1972, so I’m switching my opinion from dogman to lizardman.)

They’re real. It’s not a hoax. Your theory?  He’s open to your explanations.

Alright. I will blow my own psychic trumpet – if I can reach it.  Here goes…

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Paris Hilton will become increasingly orange, and will be found dead from a cocaine-heroin cocktail overdose in the Malibu home of a close friend.

Martin Scorsese will make a new movie stereotyping Italians.

Robert DeNiro will phone in another comedy performance to keep the bills paid.

Woody Allen will make one more movie whining about the fact that his life is meaningless and his ego too fragile to take it just in case we haven’t been paying attention.  To prove his point, he’ll pull the negationist stunt of divorcing Soon-Yi and marrying one of his other children.

Charlie Sheen’s antics will continue to be hilarious. Oh, his TV show will also stay pretty funny.

Broadway will remain racially segregated, with investors maintaining that Separate But Equal works really well in theatre, so why tinker with it? Tourists will agree with them wholeheartedly.

Off Broadway will continue rolling out redundant domestic dramas about the trials and tribulations of white families, some of whom are struggling exploitatively with their homosexuality, some exploitatively with their children’s homosexuality, others with prescription drug addiction, still others with a general suburban ennui.  Hasn’t the gay community been stereotyped enough?

Off Off Broadway will remain the last bastion of truly cutting edge professional, noncommercially-driven theatre, which unfortunately most tourists either won’t learn about or will be too afraid to take their kids downtown or to Brooklyn  to see, or will continue in their mistaken belief that Off Off is synonymous with amateur.  To combat this, the tired phrase “Off Off Broadway theatre” will finally be dropped by the media and replaced with “independent theatre,” making it appropriately analagous to independent film.

BOOKS
Memoirs by overprivileged yet sheltered white ladies who traveled alone abroad for the first time, and had unlifechanging experiences which they contend were sublime, will finally stop being published.

SPORTS
NFL and SPCA legend Michael Vick, the OJ Simpson of animal abuse, will get caught in another imbroglio involving violent cruelty to a living thing weaker than himself, and it will involve illegal gambling. To help boost his reputation, Vick will open a Vick’s Pet Care pet-sitting service in Philadelphia.

JOURNALISM
“Aks” will become standard English for the proper way to spell “ask.”

The nonsensical “for all intensive purposes” will become an increasingly acceptable idiom, replacing the more traditional and more logical “for all intents and purposes,” which just sounds too old-fashioned even though it actually makes sense.

“Repel” and “repeal” will continue to gain acceptance as synonyms.

The nonexistent word “insiduous” will replace “insidious.”

No one will help us out of this mess, and schools will only reinforce these absurd grammatical changes.

AMERICA’S OBESITY CRISIS
The discredited 1970s’ 4-4-3-2 nutrition plan will be resurrected by the US Department of Agriculture as a normal, healthy diet given that most Americans adhere to it anyway. Did you know that pizza with everything is a healthy meal, containing items from the milk group, meat group, fruits & vegetables group, and breads & cereals group?  So is a Whopper.

WORLD
There will be continued violence in the Middle East. There will be continued violence in Africa. The sky will continue to be blue, the trees green.

European anarchist groups will continue to work together with increasingly sophisticated coordination, destroying the economic system, plunging us into their much hoped for post-apocalyptic, feudalistic society.  They will declare the date to be Year Zero. Farms will be seized and “collectivized,” after which mass starvation and gang violence will rule the day. Frazzled anarchist leaders will then call upon the police and military to restore order, and then they will request loans from multinational banks to rebuild all the roads, trains and hospitals they destroyed in order to liberate all of us.

POLITICS
Millions of working Americans will begin to feel and appreciate the benefits of Obama’s healthcare plan but will continue to complain that socialist Obama has screwed up the country.  Obama, unfazed, will prepare for a 2012 landslide reelection.  I also predict that I will be one of those voting for him again.

A major world leader will announce not only a cutesy belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials, but will insist with all seriousness during a press conference that he has seen ETs himself. The Vatican will immediately back him up. This will all be part of preparing us for 2012 when things are really gonna get all alieny up in here.

SCIENCE
Bigfoot sightings will become increasingly fashionable. A theoretical link between Bigfoots and the newly announced ETs (see above) will gain ground among top scientists.

Happy New Year, everybody. God bless us, every one.

[image via psychic-junkie.com]

I was thrilled to return to the verdant and lonely shadowland that is the New Jersey Pine Barrens for Labor Day weekend. Three days a’campin’ in the sasquatch-infested Bass River State Forest where I went a’hikin’ and a’fishin’. I kept a big pickerel and threw back a coupla baby cats along the squatchy shores of Lake Absegami.  No cryptids — neither a squatch nor his winged cousin the Jersey Devil (pictured right) — reared their ugly heads, and I searched in earnest, including a night walk around the lake and some daytime recon along the Barrens’ many isolated footpaths for my next visit.  Bigfoot had given me the brush-off, but I did find some sasquatch scat on the Batona Trail. Or was it a load of horse shit? I never can tell.     

More to the point, summer ended with a lovely weekend outdoors.  

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*[photos via coasttocoastam.com, cryptomundo.com, and me]

See?  I told you sasquatches are real.  I’ve known this ever since two friends and I had a Class B encounter with one a few summers ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains while sitting out late to watch the Perseid meteor shower.  Now finally there’s proof in what’s being called the McKenzie River video (you can watch the whole thing here).  The mysterious “McKenzie River figure” is most certainly a Bigfoot, this is indisputable. I’ve done my own thorough velocitogigantoanalysis (I slowed it down and zoomed in) and can confirm as much:

On second thought, I see a senior citizen day hiker (there are lots of ‘em, folks) with a cane wearing a yellow or khaki colored cap walking on a path along the riverbank.  Rats.

(Absurd how if two humans go by in a boat the Bigfoot community can’t first assume that a third figure enjoying the scenery from the shore might also be a human.  This is a well-traveled area with, yes, paths.  It might not be Grand Central Station but it’s a well-traveled area.)