You know you're having a bad day when...

You're bicycling down the road and all of the sudden you're knocked out by a corpse thrown from a speeding car.

True story.

Gun control laws are totally useless...

I read the following and thought, there's no amount of safety laws you can have to protect people from guns.

Glasgow, Ky, Oct. 21 -- Luther Johnson, a young farmer living in the southern
part of this county, blew into the muzzle of a shotgun early this morning to see
if it was loaded. It was.

Actual death notice published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 22, 1899

Lookalike?

I swear to God I just saw Tommy Chong walking down the street in downtown Maysville, Kentucky. I was like, that guy looks familiar, where have I seen him? As he got closer, he said, "Hey, dude. What's up?" and it was spot on, Tommy Chong! If it's not the real Chong, then he has a doppleganger because even his voice was perfect. If something shows up in the paper tomorrow about Tommy Chong visiting Maysville, remember, you heard it here first.

Weirdest moment in TV history, 20 years ago today

The weirdest moment in TV history took place 20 years ago today. During the November 22, 1987 broadcast of Doctor Who on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW-11, a mysterious person wearing a Max Headroom mask broke in, hijacked the signal, and broadcasted the following bizarre clip:



I shit you not.

Neither he nor his accomplices have been found or identified to this day. I have to say, this is probably the most effective "don't do drugs" message ever broadcast on television.

More on the incident

Public school system, pwned by church revival!

Hmm, methinks someone in the local area wants to send a big F-you to the folks who believe religion has no place in public schools. Nothing says screw you like an old fashioned Baptist Tent Revival right on school property : ) Great plan: Forget school levies to pay for textbooks, the Gideons will provide them for free! I'd probably be more concerned about this if it weren't so funny, and so BAM-in-your-face-Darwin!

I thought we made up the Oxford ghost

This is weird. I seriously thought we just made up this story, so imagine my surprise when I found a reference to the Oxford Motorcycle Ghost in a book I'm scoping to buy. I've been meaning to get around to reading Weird Ohio since it came out in 2005. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. It's partly written by Loren Coleman, an expert on oddities who just happens to also be a really nice guy. Though I don't know him personally, he sent me an email about a blog post I wrote way back when (a different blog). Read everything he writes, starting with Cryptomundo.com.

I'm off track. So anyway, back in high school I was sitting around with some friends talking about nothing when the conversation got around to an urban legend about nearby Oxford, Ohio. I went to Colerain High School in Cincinnati. Oxford's not too far off, about a 45 minute drive. It's a college town so, you know, we spent a lot of time up there.

So we're just sitting around talking and someone says up in Oxford there's a ghost of a motocyclist that will show up, but only under very specific conditions. The specific conditions are that you have to go to Oxford-Milford Road, drive around the bend there, pull into the first drive to the right, turn off your lights, return the short distance back to the bend with your lights off, flash your lights three times, flash your brights three times, and wait. All of this must be done after midnight. Eventually you'll see a single headlight come over the hill (the ghost on the motorcycle). There was some backstory to the ghost as well, but I don't remember it. Something about lost love and whatnot. It didn't matter to me. I just wanted to see the ghost.

My friend Chris Walker and I figured we'd go up there that night and check it out. It was a school night and I was like 15 or something, so I had to sneak out of the house. My friend had a driver's license but no car. What we ended up doing is stealing my parent's van for the night — Hi Mom! : ) (The things we confess only after the statute of limitations have expired, heh).

Now here's the weird part: The whole thing is actually real, or at least it was for us. We showed up. We did the little ritual thing. We waited. Sure enough, a short time later there comes this single white light — a headlight obviously — floating over the hills where the road would be in the dark and stopping not too far from where we were parked. Suddenly the white light changed to red and headed back in the opposite direction, dropping over a hill and disappearing.

It - f-r-e-a-k-e-d - us - out!

So much so that we sped out of there going at least eighty miles an hour, so fast that we accidentally hit a post at the side of the road, smashing one of the rearview mirrors.

It's one of the weirdest things I've ever personally seen. Over the years I figured, you know, right timing to just happen to be out there when a living person rode by on a motorcycle. I even thought maybe there's a conspiracy where some guy waits for idiots like us to show up and flash our lights, just so he can ride around on his moped and freak people out. To be honest, though, I have absolutely no idea what it was, just that we saw it. I didn't even realize this thing was so widespread. And yet, here it is. It's in the book. You can check it out yourself.

P.S. Sorry Mom about the broken mirror and blaming it on drive-by teens : )

The easter bunny hates you

if (u celebrate e) {
     print "Happy Easter";
} else {
     print "Happy Spring!";
}

20,000 Leagues Under the Ohio River

So a few months back (December), local city workers pulled a three foot alligator out of a dumpster downtown near the Ohio River. It was dead, but no one knew for sure how it had got there. It was probably a pet that someone tossed after it died, but I was joking with some friends about the possibility that it had crawled out of the Ohio River and into the dumpster for warmth. You know the old story: A kid has a pet alligator and flushes it down the toilet. The alligator grows into a huge beast living in the sewers. You never know.

I was wondering if that was even possible, so I poked around online to see if any alligators actually have been found in the Ohio. I got more than I bargained for. Not only have people found crocodiles and piranha-like tropical fish in the Ohio River over the years, last August they pulled an octopus out of the river. That's right, an octopus. And not just any octopus, this octopus was six feet long! It was caught by an Indiana man looking for catfish in the Ohio River across from Louisville.



No bullshit, check out the news article.

I've tossed a few beers back before and waded in the Ohio looking for driftwood with my dad. I don't think I'll be doing that anymore.

Oh, the title. Well, according to according to Cincinnati's CityBeat, there's an urban legend that a submarine was once spotted in the Ohio River as well. There was at least one eyewitness to the strange event. "Back in 1961, I saw a submarine, honestly," says Janice Forte of the Cincinnati Historical Society. "We were just standing down by the river and somebody says, 'My God, look at that!' It was not submerged, and it was headed north. Nobody wrote about it in the papers, that I saw. It was really strange."

Huge octopuses + submarines = Jules Verne