It never fails.
There are certain laws of physics that scientists never bother to explain. Whenever I'm working by myself, if I start to sing, someone WILL walk by. Whenever I'm cleaning a bathroom, if someone walks in, they WILL go into the stall I was planning to clean next. Whenever people see Woody, they WILL say something to the effect of "Wow, he's huge!" Whenever I'm in the room with a baby under a year old, it WILL start to cry.
I'm in the camper again this week because Cindy's mom is coming to visit. So when I came inside this morning, there were two children there that I don't know. One was a little boy named Tison (or maybe Tyson) who looked to be about two years old. He kept calling me "Mommy," but didn't say much else. The other was a baby girl named Chloe, who was, Rob told me, four months old. There was a movie playing called Race to Witch Mountain, but I didn't really get to see much of it because Noah kept talking. Okay, so I saw it, mostly, but I didn't hear it. Then Noah climbed in my lap and started shoving his head into my neck and forcing my chin up till it hurt. He kept doing it, even after I kicked him off my lap. Little bugger.
Rob put Chloe down for a nap, then left for a few minutes to go get tires or something. And of course, while he was gone, I heard Chloe wake up and start crying in the other room. So I went in and picked her up and brought her back into the living room, and she quieted down for a minute or so. She grabbed my thumb in her little hands and I was amazed at how long and thin her fingers were. I told her she had very pretty hands, and then she screwed up her face and started screaming. And then she stopped and farted real good. Then she started screaming again.
When Rob came in less than five minutes later, I was going, "I'm sorry! I broke it! I can't turn it off! Why's it making that noise? How do I make it stop?"
I don't like babies.
In other news, I got to talk to Jack yesterday! He started quoting at me some blog posts I had written about a year ago. It's really weird having old blog posts quoted at you by someone who read them maybe once or twice, six or eight months ago. Anyway, talking to him actually made me feel a lot better, and despite the fact that my stomach's still upset, I feel a ton better about life in general. But then, even with this stupid medicine I'm taking, I feel great one day and then bleh the next, and then great one day and bleh the next. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of happy medium??!?!!
I also had some extra time at work today (imagine that!) and I stumbled upon a Wikipedia article about the Dyatlov Pass incident. Apparently, back in 1959, nine people were hiking in the Ural mountains and something happened. Nobody really knows what. When they found the campsite, the tent had been ripped--it looked like from the inside. The temperature had been sub-zero, but the people had apparently run off without even bothering to put on shoes or clothes. They found some of the hikers in their underwear. Most were shoeless. There were no signs of a struggle, no footprints in the snow besides their own. They found five bodies pretty quickly. Three looked like they had died coming back to the campsite, about 150 yards away from each other. One had a slight fracture on his skull, but the detectives dismissed it, saying it was nothing fatal. Those five had died of hypothermia from being outside in the sub-zero weather without being dressed appropriately. But when the other four bodies were found, one had major skull damage, and two had their chests crushed with the force of a car wreck--injuries that couldn't have been caused by a human due to the force required. The fourth had had her tongue cut out. A few of the bodies had high levels of radiation on their clothing.
Talk about intense!
Even weirder: People who had been camping some fifty kilometers to the south reported seeing strange orange spheres in the sky on the night of the incident. Other people, including the military and the meteorology service, had reported similar spheres during the whole of that month (February) and the next.
Due to the absence of a guilty party, the incident was eventually dismissed, and it was concluded that the hikers had died due to an "unknown compelling force." (insert scary music here)
6 comments:
Dad thinks you got the crying magnet gene from him. I think that UFO incident is freaky.
I'm not too keen on babies myself.
As to the Dyatlov Pass incident, it's just one more case of the media hyping the mundane. The only real puzzle is why someone ripped the tent. Did a fight break out, did someone break some really bad wind and the tent zipper was stuck? Did a bad case of diarrhea strike someone? Those are the real puzzling questions. Everything else can be explained perfectly well.
The people all died within about 8 hours of their last meal. Assuming they had a normal supper, that puts their death sometime in the wee hours. It's dark that far north in February. So picture it.
Something (unknown) drives someone to rip the tent. Okay, it's now cold. They are camped out in the open, way below zero, windy, it's a half-mile to the woods and the closest shelter from the wind. A couple of them go to start a fire, but it's dark. It's hard to find dry wood in the winter in the dark. The fire doesn't take in time. They start suffering from hypothermia. A well-known side-effect of hypothermia is a feeling of heat. Many hypothermia victims in other situations have peeled off their clothes. A couple of them start back to the tent, but don't make it. A couple of others, fully dressed in winter garb, either out looking for their comrades or looking for shelter now that the tent is ripped, wander off in a different direction and fall down a ravine. The only injuries were among those found in the ravine: the cracked rips and broken skulls, perfectly consistent with injuries sustained in a fall, even a short one, onto rocks, where the bodies were found, fully clothed. The winter clothing would cushion the skin from abrasion and cuts, but the rocks would definitely crack some ribs and skulls.
The missing tongue? Heavy winter clothing protected the bodies from hungry winter animals out scavenging, but the exposed face would expose the mouth and its smells, making that the most likely place a hungry critter might try to lift a snack.
The radiation on the clothing is anomalous. First, it wasn't detected until months later. Some say it could have come from the thorium used in lantern mantles used since World War II, although it may be doubtful that hikers would have carried such heavy gas lanterns. But any weapons testing or any other event which would irradiate clothing would definitely have burned skin, even through clothes, and no burns were found. Plus, any other source of radiation which would irradiate clothing would have definitely left a residue somewhere else in the environment. Tests found no radion at all anywhere around the site for miles. No way could a secret military operation or even aliens have cleaned up an accident site that good that quick. Nope, the clothes had to be contaminated somewhere else, like, maybe, while undergoing testing during the investigation...?
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As to the footprints... out in the open, it may have been windy, covering up the outbound footprints, but later, the freezing survivors may have crawled, or otherwise left a deeper, more long-lasting, track which followed them back towards the camp they never reached. Wind, sun, everything, has a way of covering up snow footprints after a couple of days, and it was over a week before anyone came looking for this group.
There is a report of orange tans and gray hairs by funeral attendees. This could be explained by enbalmers trying to make the bodies look good after having been thawed out from two weeks in the freezing temperatures.
The orange spheres are translated as pink, pinkish, red, red-orange, orange, and yellow, depending on who did the Russian translation. It is interesting to note that 1959 was a peak sunspot year, and aurora borealis were rampant. The direction the witnessess all pointed to (for the spheres) was north in every instance, regardless of which direction it was from their location to the incident location. Circular or spherical aurora are fairly rare, but I think that explanation is more plausible than UFO's, especially since there is no other evidence of a UFO.
What is still ususual is that nine people died, and there is no way of knowing who cut the tent at first, or why. I don't buy the "emergency panic evacuation without time to dress" theory. These people were all experienced hikers and woodsmen. They were most likely sleeping with heavy clothing... sleeping bags, if they had them, in the 1950's weren't as warm as they are today and you needed to sleep with something on besides your BVDs. Since sleeping bags weren't totally universal back then, bedrolls would have been even colder, especially for the kind you carried on your back. Again, these are experienced hikers and cross-country skiers used to being out in the winter. They would not have been spooked by a bear or even a mountain lion, not in a group of NINE. I can't believe that five of them left in their underwear. The investigation was concluded by May, long before the snow melted. I'd bet money that once the snow was gone, clothing would have been found out in the track somewhere.
Or, maybe but far less likely, once the tent was cut, they really did evacuate in their skivvies in a hurry to get to the woods and build a fire to keep from freezing. Just before real hypothermia sets in, there is a feeling of panic followed by a feeling of heat. Together they mess up your mind.
So what caused the first person to cut the tent? There are no known major predators like mountain lions or bears around, no evidence any of them were eaten by such an animal, which in the wintertime would surely have taken advantage of a 9-course ice-box dinner. So who cut the tent and why? That, to me, is the only unanswered question.
The fact that all nine perished is what makes it intriguing. For all 9, experienced as they were, to meet such a tragic end, leads me to believe there may have been some interpersonal human-relations situations that already had everyone on edge, not thinking clearly, disturbed, distracted, or otherwise not able to use their common sense, experience, knowledge, and survival skills.
If you want another nice mystery, look up google information on the Tunguska explosion in 1908. They've never found any trace or residue from whatever that was except some rare metals consistent with modern electronics, which didn't exist back then. No crater, no fragments, no pieces, no nothing. Where did the pieces go?
But if they were as experienced as you say, don't you think that ONE of them would have realized it was hypothermia and said, "Wait a minute, put your clothes back on"? And why would wild animals eat one tongue and no other part of any of their bodies?
Not to mention that the fatal injuries were on bodies found at 300-600 something meters from the "campfire tree".No mention of any falls,cliffs,dropoffs,or ravines in the area.
And Tunguska sounds most like an air-burst explosion of a meteor.Explains the lack of any real fragments left over.Then again the Arizona Crater never had any sizeable fragments either.The impacts are so energetic that the object gets almost completely vaporized leaving only trace amounts in many cases.
And besides....Jodie Foster is right in "Contact":Ellie Arroway: [to a group of children] I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?
And a bit of Monty as well:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY
Captain: Cool video. Yes, I understand the relative size of space. The LintMonkey's grandpa is a trained professional astronomer, and he has instilled in the family an appreciation for how vast space is. If the Sun were a softball, the earth would be the size of a fruitfly's wing, and it would be about 50 feet away.
This scale boggles the mind.
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