Members of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia went camping in the rugged Allegheny Mountain highlands of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area with GPS navigators, cameras, voice recorders and plaster of Paris to make casts of huge footprints, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported…

…The group took plaster casts of suspicious prints but didn’t spot the creature during the expedition last weekend.

Full article here >>.

The explosion of relatively inexpensive and powerful consumer gadgets has been called a major boon in the “democratization” of media technology. Things (films, games, music, books, software, experiments, prototypes, investigations, etc.) that once required tens thousands of dollars and crews of trained professionals can now be produced in a basement or backyard with only a few hundred bucks, some spare time, and a half decent computer.

Perhaps no other “industry” has felt this impact more than professional seekers of the paranormal. For only a relatively small amount of cash (or credit) and access to a Best Buy you can too can get yourself enough equipment to call yourself a “pro” mystery hunter and perhaps even get a reality t.v show while you’re at it. Personal Voice Recorder, err I mean EVP monitor? Check. Apparition Image Capture Device AKA a digital camera? Check. GPS? Fuck, you don’t wanna get lost in a haunted house do ya? Check!

However, can we really pass this shit off as “going high tech” anymore? You’d hope that by now the bar for “high tech” would have been set higher than mp3 players and cell phones. Not that I don’t appreciate how useful, productive, and even liberating these technologies potentially are; the fact that I can bitch with a straight face about how banal and ubiquitous they’ve become is actually something quite incredible. I’m just getting a bit tired of hearing “golly gee-whiz that’s so high tech” about anything that’s got more functionality than a potato peeler. A personal organizer/portable gaming system is simply not on the cutting edge anymore.

And to top it all off in true “paranormal investigator” reality t.v. show style, after playing around with all their “high tech” gear for hours, the only thing these wannabe yeti wranglers were able to successfully collect any sort of “evidence” with turns out to be the plaster of Paris cast – which is about as “low-tech” as you can get.

I do, but these days it seems we all more or less agree that the only people mysteriously disappearing in the warm waters of Caribbean are desperate Cubans headed for Miami. Such a shame. 

Although it was never solved, it appears our collective fascination with the mystery Bermuda Triangle has waned. Perhaps this is because like Bermuda shorts, pet rocks, and nerf balls the Triangle is just way too 70s for comfort. It’s embarrassing, like “God, what we’re we thinking?” Or maybe we’re preoccupied with other worries. Maybe in contrast to endless war and climate change, the idea of being sucked into some kind of inter-dimensional vortex never to be heard from again just isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. 

Or maybe it’s all just a testament to the success of affordable and reliable GPS service, who knows? It is a mystery after all.

Mysterious, doughy blob clogs sewer

City crews discovered the clog earlier this month after responding to complaints of blocked sewer lines downtown. Jones said crews opened a manhole at the Bates Street intersection and saw the clog – an oozing, white blob that looks like uncooked dough.

“We’ve tried punching through it, but each time we do, it just oozes back over the hole,” he said. “It really looks like dough.”

Check out the picture provided with the article.