There’s a fascinating bit of cryptozoology news I stumbled upon yesterday that I just had to write about. I’m going to keep this blog post short because the purpose of it isn’t to regurgitation the fantastical stories wrapped around this one but instead at people’s ignorance of a simple thing in today’s world CALLED GOOGLE!!!
Listen folks! I’m excited about crypto-stories as much as any fanboy of the strange and weird in this world can be–within reason. I love the stories, I love the legends behind them, I love the creativity. When I come across “news” though talking about these things as if they actually exist, my stomach turns a little because I just can’t comprehend that someone on the net can find news about something and not have the further curiosity to verify it. It’s paramount to reading a Twitter post saying that Steve Jobs died and reacting to it and spreading it as if it’s true.
VERIFY a story before you react to it. Hell you may get a post to rant about, like this one, instead! “If it’s too good to be true… then it must be good enough to believe” is what I always thought.
This crypto concerns a photo taken by helicopter “by a member of a visiting flood monitoring team” captures a 100-foot long snake the natives of Borneo call, Nabau. Nabao a snake with a dragon’s head and seven nostrils who can shapeshift into ANYthing–person, animal, plant, inanimate object.
Reading that “critics are concerned” that this photo in a fake or that “socially responsible groups” are demanding an increase to public awareness regarding the threat is ABSURD! If they were “critics” and “socially responsible” they wouldn’t be “ignorant” and “fear instigators”.
Furthermore, have I mentioned Google?
Crappy resolution skewed photo with a snake in it… clear real photo. Case closed. Unfortunate, but true.
Lets stick to marveling at TRUE legendary realities like the unearthed fossil of a 45-foot long, 1,140 kilograms, snake called Titanoboa (sounds like the name of a Godzilla enemy, but meh…) who ate crocodiles and giant turtles. It existed 60 million years ago and the fossils were unearthed in Cerrejon Coal Mine in North Columbia by Carlos Jaramillo form the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History.
The image used isn’t even the Borneo… it’s in the Congo region of Africa. After a couple different searches for images of the Borneo river only turned up muddy waters. I typed “rainforest logging” into Google and luckily got it on the second page. I went for the the core of this story that mentioned logging researchers. That image led to this page. That led me to type the CORRECT location of the photo in Google image search: “rainforest logging congo” which led me to the same image source but on the first page I find an image linking to this. The end of the tale is that I discovered a site called TinEye that ended up confirming the whole darn thing much quicker (I’ve done a search on the snake image above).
links for 2009-02-25
.
I love Sabertooth. I’ve always wished great things for the character–not sure why exactly since he is a homicidal lunatic with less than zero morals–but I’ve always WANTED there to be potential behind his role in Wolverine’s life. Also, let me be clear in saying I am not a Wolverine fanboy… I could care less about him actually. I’ve got absolutely NO interest as to what story arcs or promotional cameos Marvel wishes to shove him into and cram down our consumerist throats–it’s overwhelming the character in my opinion, and it’s tiring.
