Scary Business

Ever get a strange chill down your spine? Ever heard something go bump in the night? Today's entry in the Truth-revealing business is:

GHOSTS!

Instead of beating around the bush for a paragraph or two, I'll say it right up front: Ghosts are absolutely real. Up to now, this blog has been rather impersonal, with me just showing pictures and telling you stuff. Today I thought that it would be more interesting if I were to get more personal, and let you get some insight on the subject from someone with first-hand knowledge. So I went out and found a ghost, and convinced him to do an interview. So without further ado, I'd like to present

Baba Doodlius'

Interview with the Ghost!

Mr Ghost floating through the garden

Baba Doodlius: Good evening Mr. Ghost, and thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Actually, and I'm sorry if this offends you, but I can't tell if it's "Mr. Ghost" or "Ms. Ghost"...

Ghost: No offense taken, I actually get that all the time. You got it right, it's "Mr. Ghost", not that it really matters anymore.

BD: Why doesn't it matter?

G: I'm a ghost, dude, you can't have sex when you don't have a body. So it doesn't really matter if it's Mr. or Ms. Ghost, but technically I was a guy before so it would be "Mr."

BD: Ghosts can't have sex? Wow, that really bites. Is that the worst thing about being dead?

G: Come on, Baba, please don't use the "D" word. It's bad enough being dead without people reminding me of it all the time.

BD: Oh, sorry, I never thought that before. I'll rephrase the question: Is the "no sex" thing the worst part about being non-corporeal?

G: Yeah, that's probably the absolute worst part. I do miss some physical things like that - having sex, eating steak, drinking beer...

BD: Wow, no beer, bummer. So is there anything good about being a ghost?

G: Oh, sure, tons of stuff is good - in the first place, you save a buttload of money on travel expenses. I can go wherever I want for free - no gas money, no airfare, and I stay wherever I want, all for free! And no waiting in security lines! If I wanted to go to Tahiti right now, I'd just zap on over there! I'm pure energy, I travel at the speed of light! I can take a day trip to Tahiti! Hell, I could take a day trip to Mars. Actually, I've been there, and I can tell you that NASA is wasting their time - plenty of sand but no good beaches.

Mr. Ghost Travel Photos

Tahiti

Mars

BD: The speed of light, eh? Sounds pretty sweet. So if you wanted to go to Alpha Centauri...

G: Well I could go if I wanted to, but that's quite a trip so I don't generally go that far. It would take a year to get there, and to make it worth my while I'd probably spend at least a year there, and then it would take a year to get back. So I'd miss three seasons of "So You Think You Can Dance".

BD: You watch TV?

G: Of course I watch TV, everybody watches TV. Just because you're a ghost doesn't mean you can't veg out in front of the tube.

BD: What's your favorite show?

G: Sitcoms, mostly. I usta watch soaps, but they haven't had a really compelling story line since Luke and Laura.

BD: What do you do when you're not watching TV or travelling?

G: Oh, anything I want. Well, anything except sex and eating, but we've already covered that. I enjoy swimming, skydiving, surfing the web. I read your blog about Ghost Poo, by the way, and I'd like to thank you for not trying to pin that on me. People are always blaming Ghost Poo on me, and I get really tired of it.

Mr. Ghost swimming


BD: You're welcome, but my blog is for revealing the Truth, and I knew it wasn't you causing all that poo to vanish so I couldn't in good conscience tell the readers, all three of them, incorrect information. Anything else you enjoy?

G: Well, I'm a ghost, so I do the occasional haunting. We all do, it's in the manual.

BD: Who do you haunt?

G: Anybody I want to, really. If I see someone who needs to be taken down a peg, I'll give 'em a little scare. I haunted the heck out of the guy who cancelled "Charles in Charge".

BD: Who have you haunted recently?

G: Dick Cheney. Almost shorted out his pacemaker, too! You shoulda seen his face! I almost laughed my sheet off!

BD: I'd sure like to see a picture of that!

G: Sorry, that one's classified.

BD: Darn. Anyway, that brings me to my last question before I let you resume your travels - why the sheet? Why do ghosts wear those sheets all the time?

G: Oh, they're awfully comfortable! I don't have a body, so it doesn't matter what I look like, and these things are just so flowy and convenient! Plus it saves tons of wardrobe planning - I don't have to think about what I'm going to wear for the day, I just grab the next sheet out of the closet and I'm done!

BD: Thanks for your time, Mr. Ghost.

G: My Pleasure, Baba. And one last thing... BOO!

BD: AAAAAAAAGH!

G: Sorry, couldn't resist. Old habit, you know.

BD: That's OK. Have a nice day!

Don't get stepped on

Hello once again, all you fans of the Truth! Today the Great and Powerful Baba Doodius will tackle a mystery nearly as pervasive and scrutinized as the Loch Ness Monster mystery that I have already reported on. This mystery is a little hairier, though: I'm talking about

BIGFOOT!

For eons, people all over the world have reported seeing the tracks of a large biped in remote areas beyond human habitation. By the size of the tracks, the creature who made them would have to be very large, probably over seven feet in height and over 300 pounds.



No, no, no - Shaquille O'Neal is NOT bigfoot (even if he is reported to wear size 22G's). As I already noted, Bigfoot is expressly reported to live in areas beyond human habitation, and for better or for worse, Mr. O'Neal clearly lives within civilization. So we have to look elsewhere to solve the mystery of Bigfoot.

So what evidence is there to support the existence of a large mammal hiding in the world's forests?

1) Blurry photos and even some films.


2) Bigfoot poo. (I swear I am not making this up - people have really reported this.)


3) Footprints. Lots of footprints.



I'll take these one at a time:

1) This is a still picture from a famous film. It is of a guy in a monkey suit trying to act like Bigfoot. In fact, every Bigfoot photo or video ever shot is of some guy in a monkey suit. They're not fooling anyone.

2) Bigfoot poo? Yeah, right - this was left in the woods by the drunk brother-in-law of the guy who took the picture. C'mon now, stop insulting our intelligence.

3) So we're left with all those footprints. There are so many Bigfoot footprints in the American west that you can't drive your huge SUV off-road without damaging your shocks running over all those damned Bigfoot footprints.

So where do all the footprints come from? In order to determine this, I had to do some old-fashioned detective work.

I analyzed every Bigfoot footprint ever found in the U.S. of A., and discovered that there was only one unpopulated place where a Bigfoot footprint has NOT been found - a really, really remote wilderness area northeast of Bondurant, Wyoming. Using my infinite powers of deduction, I determined that there would soon be a Bigfoot footprint appearing there, so I staked out the area with my trusty camera. To my utter amazement, I found the True Source of Bigfoot footprints:




GNOMES! On stilts!

Those darned little prankster gnomes are travelling the world with big, fake feet, walking around making Bigfoot footprints all over the place.

This should come as a surprise to nobody - gnomes are nototious for practical jokes. They hide your car keys, they turn on your sprinklers when you're out working in the yard, and they even started that "toilet paper shortage panic" in the '70's. I for one would like them to just cut it the heck out. Anybody with me on this?

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody out there?

The last secret I revealed was a doozy, but this one is even better. For millenia, humans have looked up at the stars and wondered "Is there anybody up there?" An even bigger question is, "If there is anybody up there, do they ever pop in down here for a visit?" Today I am going to reveal the secret that has spawned a whole cottage industry down here on good ol' earth, the Truth behind the existence of


SPACE ALIENS AND UFOs!


There are lots of theories about UFOs and space aliens. Most people have heard of Roswell, New Mexico (USA) and its citizens' claim to have had a genuine alien spaceship crash in near their town in the 1940s. Crop circles seem to be sprouting faster than the actual crops. Stories of UFO sightings are so commonplace nowadays that people hardly raise an eyebrow when they hear of another one. Practically everybody and his dog has seen something unexplained in the sky, and many people even claim to have been kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard their spacecraft, and had their anuses probed by curious extraterrestrial perverts. So what is the truth behind all of these sightings and stories? The Truth is..

Extraterrestrial life does exist!

And I'm not talking about microbial life, like the stuff NASA has been rolling robots all over Mars trying to find. I'm talking about serious life, intelligent life, with full-blown civilizations consisting of billions of inhabitants. There are veritable bucketloads of highly advanced civilizations throughout the Universe! And what's even better,

Alien Spacecraft also exist!

Literally thousands of these extraterrestrial civilizations have accomplished the amazing achievement of building spacecraft capable of interstellar transportation. They've got stuff so advanced it would make the nice folks who wrote Star Trek episodes say "Holy shit! Why didn't I think of that?".

So all those UFO sightings on earth are really extratrerrestrial spacecraft just dropping by for a cup of tea and a little recreational cow mutilation, right? Not so fast there, Stanton Friedman. I said that alien spacecraft exist, not that aliens actually go out of their way to fly them here.

The sad fact is that this little planet isn't nearly as interesting as humans think it is. Sure, it has some nice spots here and there, and a few of the local critters are pretty cool, but for the most part this is a rather ordinary, uninteresting planet unless you grew up here. All those citizens of those highly advanced civilizations have waaaaay better stuff to do than stop by a boring, technologically backward planet for the sheer pleasure of peering up the local's buttholes and drawing pictures in their barley fields. No, they have to work pretty hard to make the payments on their new interstellar Hummers and Lexuses, and would much rather spend their downtime visiting Uncle Bloogjooper over on planet Zort*. You know, the one over by that nebula, near that little star cluster.

(Video of actual alien visitation)

So enough with the UFO sightings already. If you want to meet the neighbors, you figure out how to go visit them. They'll find you much more interesting then.




*Not his real name. Also not his planet's real name.

A personal favorite of mine

Howdy all you fans of mystery solving. Welcome back!

Today I am going to reveal a secret that has had so much speculation for the last several thousand years that its really amazing that nobody has hit on the truth yet, even if just from random guessing. It seems that everybody and his dog has had a crack at solving this mystery, but nobody has figured it out yet - until now! I am referring to

THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS!

Not to slight any other pyramids built in various locales throughout the world, but today I will only discuss the best known pyramids, those, of course, being the really big ones in Egypt.

Among the theories of pyramid construction are the following:

1) They were built by space aliens tooling around in UFOs
2) They were made of concrete, poured rather than piled up
3) They were built by just the Egyptians themselves, with raw muscle power and engineering skill

These theories, of course, are all ridiculous. They were not made out of concrete, and plain old Egyptians, despite their considerable engineering skill, didn't have the aggregate muscle power to pile up all those rocks in a few hundred years. Clearly they had help, making the space aliens theory the most promising, and oddly enough, closest to the truth. However, there was nothing unidentified about the flying objects that helped the Pharaoh and friends build these artificial mountains. I, Baba Doodlius, via a variant of my patented Reverse K.E.G. Process, have travelled *back in time* with my trusty camera to obtain photographic evidence of the REAL method of Egyptian pyramid construction:

(As usual, click image for larger view)


The Egyptian pyramids were built by enormous birds!

If you just think about it for a minute, this makes perfect sense. If you look at Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, it's top heavy with pictures of birds:

, among others. Then take a look at some statues of one of their more important gods Horus. They actually made some statues of this guy that were 20 feet tall, which is a little scaled down from the actual birds that helped build all their large structures but still pretty big. Lastly, just think of the shape of a pile of bird poo as it builds up over time - it looks rather like a pyramid!

Clearly, birds were very important and inspirational to the Egyptians. Now we know that the reason for this is that a flock of humongous birds actually helped the Egyptians build their monuments, temples, and tombs. Birds, as the wise, ancient Egyptians knew, are way cool.

This post was not in any way influenced by the fact that I'm a bird. Have a nice day!

Thanks, and here is the cockroach

Oddly enough, somebody actually read this blog. The Universe gets stranger by the day.

Anyway, thanks to the readers and especially those who left nice comments. That's appreciated.

And I had one request for the picture of a medium-sized Texas cockroach eating a Volkswagen New Beetle, so here's that:



Sorry, but I couldn't get a shot of one of the REALLY big cockroaches - they get ornery when you take their picture, and I didn't want to lose any limbs. My camera is pretty nice, but it lacks the grenade launcher attachment.

Tune in next time, when the Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius reveals the truth behind another Mystery of the Universe!

The Mystery Solving Goes International

Hello again folks, and welcome to today's installation of the Baba Doodlius Mystery of the Universe Solution Center! Today I'm taking on an International mystery, one that has plagued farmers in Puerto Rico, Mexico, the United States, and several South American countries for decades. Recently this mystery has spread as far as Russia! Of course I'm talking about the legend of

EL CHUPACABRA!

The Chupacabra, translated literally from Spanish as "The Goat Sucker", is a beast that has been reported all over the globe. This critter's modus operandi consists of removing all the blood from farm animals, and since its earliest reported favorite meal was goats it got its now-familiar moniker.

So what, really, is a Chupacabra? Is it a fearsome vampire? A demonic space alien? Could it even be some cruel prankster with a Shop-Vac?

To get to the bottom of this mystery, I decided to do some personal sleuthing. Rather than relying on somebody else's grainy photographs (like in the earlier Loch Ness Monster mystery), I packed my trusty camera and took a trip to Texas, home of a fair number of Chupacabra reports. (Technically I should have gone to Puerto Rico, where most Chupacabra activity is reported, but the airfare was a killer!) I camped out near a bunch of goats and waited for my prey. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting for a Chupacabra to appear (it must have been *at least* 30 minutes!), I took the following series of amazing photos that, for the first time in journalistic history, show a Chupacabra attack *In Progress*! (Click any image for a larger version)

A happy little goat

Uh-oh, here comes a Chupacabra!


Slurrrrrp!


Well that really sucked.


You may doubt your own eyes when you see this incontrovertible evidence of the Chupacabra's real identity, but c'mon folks, have you ever been to Texas or Mexico or Florida or the Caribbean? The bugs they have down there periodically interfere with Air Traffic Control radar. Heck, the cockroaches have been known to eat Volkswagen New Beetles (I have a picture of that too, if you wanna see it). So really, the true identity of El Chupacabra shouldn't come as such a shock.

If you go outside today, don't forget to wear your Chupacabra repellent!

One you know you have always wondered about

Your first reaction to today's topic will be "I've never wondered about that". But remember, I am the Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius, and I know all, so I *know* that you actually *have* wondered about this, even if you've only witnessed it once or twice in your entire life. I am referring to the phenomenon known as the

GHOST POO!

Not everybody is familiar with the terminology, so I'll explain: a Ghost Poo is a poo that you feel coming out of you, and you hear its little splashdown in the toilet, but when you stand up and look at it (yes, you know you look before you flush, just admit it - I know *all*, remember?) there's no poo in there! You *know* you made a poo, you felt it, you heard it, and >POOF< no poo is there. It's a Ghost Poo! Theories abound concerning what happens to Ghost Poo. Some say that the Ghost Poo rips its entry into the water so perfectly, like Greg Luganis, that it zips directly into the pipes without the need for a flush. Some say Ghost Poos are abducted by aliens for top-secret poo-related experiments. There is even a theory that Ghost Poo is literally supernatural, and that it crosses over into a higher plane of poo existence.

The reality of Ghost Poo is actually very simple and explainable by science. But in order to get to the reality of Ghost Poo, I must first make a brief jaunt into a cutting-edge area of modern physics, String Theory.

String Theory, in essence, is an attempt to explain all of the itsy-bitsy particles known to science. Particles like the electron and the proton are known to most schoolchildren these days, but modern scientists know of an entire alphabet soup of particles like fermions, muons, pions, boobions, honkions, and bajeebions. String Theory explains that all these exotic particles are actually vibrating strings, so small that not even an eagle with a microscope can see them. The tough part about String Theory is that in order to make the heinous theoretical mathematics work out, there have to be at least 10 dimensions in the Universe, and puny humans can only perceive 3 dimensions of space and one of time. So the theory says that the "extra" dimensions are really there, but they're so small that not even the aforementioned eagle can see them.

This theory is exactly correct.

So now you're probably beginning to see how String Theory is inexorably linked to Ghost Poo. When the Ghost Poo disappears, it does not really disappear - what really happens is that, due to a rare anomaly in the space-time continuum, all of the poo particles are spontaneously folded into the "extra" dimensions that are undetectable by humans. The Ghost Poo is still there, you just can't see it! You know it's still there, though, because generally just enough poo particles remain in your detectable dimensions so that you can still smell it, and that smell is definitely poo.

That's one more mystery of the universe down the toilet, courtesy yours truly, Baba Doodlius.

Back to the Bigger Picture

I hope you enjoyed that last brief dip down into the world of the mundane and practical. Today we're going back to look at a phenomenon of grand scale and then we're going to tie it back down to earthly experience. I am referring to

BLACK HOLES!

Yes, Black Holes, those Einsteinian entities that roam around the Cosmos gobbling up planets, stars, and even entire galaxies like huge extraterrestrial Pac Mans. (They even make that "wokka-wokka-wokka" sound if you listen closely enough, which of course you can't, becuase if you got close enough to hear it the thing would eat you - it's a defense mechanism.)







(Artist's conception, not actual photograph)







There's not really a question anymore whether these things exist or not - of course they do. There's so much evidence to support their existence that there are actually 12-year-olds who have detected them with their homemade backyard telescopes. So this entry isn't about whether they exist or not, or even if they prefer to eat red supergiants or white dwarfs (most of them like the red ones best - they taste like M&Ms; that's a bonus secret, no extra charge). Today's secret is about the lesser known black holes, the small ones that hang around right here on earth instead of way out in space.

"But there aren't any black holes on earth" you say. Ooooooh, so now look who knows everything! Aren't you clever. But you're wrong, there *are* back holes right down here on earth. Fortunately the little ones aren't nearly as hungry as their big brothers - they don't tend to eat everything around them.

The defining characteristc of a black hole is that nothing can get away from it - matter and light get sucked right in, and even the laws of mathematics and logic break down once caught in its grasp. Now I think you see what I'm getting at here, and it's something you've always suspected: Earthly Black Holes exist right behind the eyeballs of politicians and similar political hacks! And the more successful the politician/hack, the stronger the black hole!

Just think about the last statement you heard from a U.S. presidential candidate (you can't avoid them if you're in the U.S.A, and you can check the web if you're not). It wasn't illuminating at all, and it made no sense whatsoever. That's because the black hole devoured all the light and logic! These mini-black holes snuck into the heads of those candidates and now you'll never hear anything remotely useful out of any of them! They're sneaky little suckers.

If you're not convinced yet of the truth in this dissertation, just watch Fox News for 10 minutes - there's a higher concentration of black holes there than anywhere else on earth. Enough said.

So keep your eyeballs peeled for little Pac-Man-looking things sneaking around in the dark, and listen for that telltale "wokka-wokka" - little black holes are trying to sneak into your head. If they get in, you'll never make a coherent statement again. But on the plus side, you'll have a nice future in politics!

Something a little more practical

Howdy all you blog readers. (All three of you.) It's time for Baba Doodlius to reveal another Secret of the Universe! Today I'll take a step away from all the pie-in-the-sky theoretical stuff and focus on something more practical. I'm about to unlock a mystery that may save you countless hours, several doses of Prozac, and about 200 gray hairs. I am referring to the great secret of

THE CHAIN LETTER!

I'm sure you've seen a bazillion of these. You're reading this on the Internet, so you must use e-mail, and anybody who uses e-mail has received at least 327,951 copies of various chain letters. These beasts claim things like "If you don't forward this to 100 of your closest friends you will get hangnails, gout, Restless Leg Syndrome, and gingivitis." And on the plus side, "If you DO forward this to 100 of your closest friends, you will find a $1,000,000 bill on the sidewalk and Katherine Heigl and/or Matthew McConaughey will call you and ask to have sex with you."

I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, but these chain letters are not for real. Those bad things are not going to happen if you don't forward on a boatload of copies - hell, Restless Leg Syndrome isn't even a real disease, it's just something a pharmaceutical company made up so they could put out a bunch of scary, irritating TV commercials, sell you a bunch of useless pills, and rake in a few more millions (there's a bonus secret -no extra charge!). Conversely, the really good stuff similarly will not happen if you DO send out a bunch of copies. C'mon now, seriously, aim a little lower, folks - maybe Paula Poundstone or Rob Schneider will want to have sex with you, but not any A-listers.

So stop worrying! You don't have to come up with a list of 100 e-mail addresses. You don't have to compose a personalized intro. You don't have to waste one more minute of your valuable day on these chain letters. Now aren't you more relaxed already? Ahhhhh!

Have a nice day!

The one that started it all

Howdy again folks. The Baba Doodlius Mystery Solving Service is once again open for business (rather like Scooby Doo and the gang, except I don't get to drive a green 1971 custom painted conversion van).

Today's mystery is a real doozy, the one that started the entire mystery business - and I mean that literally. Of course I'm referring to

THE BIG BANG!

People ask all the time whether the Big Bang really happened. It's a valid question, naturally, since all most folks have to go on with this one is the word of a bunch of scientists with large, expensive toys. Since they need to *pay* for all those toys somehow, they need to come up with some justification for why it should be *somebody else* who should be doing the paying. So would it be morally beyond these science-types to just make up a cool sounding story to convince investors (mostly from various governments) to open their wallets? The answer to that is: Absolutely not. They're just as fallible as the rest of us. Hell, I'd make up a cool story if it would get somebody to buy me lunch!

Fortuantely, in this case the scientists didn't have to make up a cool story - they're right, there really *was* a Big Bang. In fact, I hereby present you with a brief History of the Universe in which the Big Bang plays a very prominent part:

1) The Big Party (Mr. Universe meets Ms. Cosmos there)
2) The Big Open Bar (at which they get loaded on rum & cola)
3) The BIG BANG
4) The Big Morning Sickness
5) The Big Shotgun Wedding
6) The Big Natural Birth (Mrs. Universe would not recommend this)
7) The Big Potty Training
8) The Big Wedgie (from that bully Parallel Universe in grade school)
9) The Big Zit (on Prom Night)
10) The Big Virginity Loss (time sped up significantly during this brief period)
11) The Big Batchelor's Degree (in History, naturally)
12) The Big Scary Job Interview
13) The Big Mind-Numbing Corporate Career (time slowed down significantly during this period)
14) The Big Mid-Life Crisis (complete with procurement of The Big Sports Car)

That brings us to modern day. The Universe is currently middle-aged, and looking forward to The Big Retirement, followed by The Big Rambling Story To YoungUniverses, and probably The Big Shady Acres Assisted Living Facility.

There you have it. The Big Bang is real, and it eventually allowed all of us to enjoy this entertaining blog. You're welcome!