Cats have many different ways of communicating, but the meow is every cat's go-to vocalization when it wants to tell us something; be it, "I'm hungry," "pay attention to me" or "I just took a dump, go clean it up." However, far from the one-dimensional barking sound that dogs use to communicate, cats are like living stereo equalizers that are able to fine tune the pitches and tones of their meows... so they can better manipulate you into doing what they want.
A recent study has shown that people subconsciously can tell the difference between a pleading or soliciting meow and a run of the mill, casual one just by listening to sound clips taken from different felines in different situations. The subjects said the soliciting sounds came across as more urgent and less pleasant than a normal meow, much like the cries a human baby makes when she's hungry.
In fact, further studies have proven that a cat's cry for food or attention shares a remarkable similarity in frequency to a baby's cry. It's not coincidence- it's pure, kitty evil genius.
Using their expertise in Soviet-style subliminal advertising, cats adjust their purrs and meows to include this frequency which then prompts their owners into responding to them more quickly. Like well trained animals ourselves, we respond because, not only is the sound annoying to us, but it also stimulates our natural instinct to immediately nurture anything that sounds like our offspring, even if it is covered in fur and named Mr. Bojangles.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Amount...Armoir..Armor funyon? Seriously what the hell are you going for here?
Traditional African healers believe that amafufunyana is a kind of spirit possession brought about by witchcraft, and is responsible for driving countless youths mad as well as exploding spellcheckers everywhere.
The perceived method for this bewitchment is weird on its own: it's accomplished by pounding ants that have been feeding from a grave into a poisonous paste that the victim must ingest. But the outcome is even weirder: once they've ingested the grave-ant pudding, the victim begins to hear voices... coming from their own stomach.
Often these voices actually speak a different language from the victim. Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, for example, have reported hearing voices speak Zulu, and vice versa.
And the stomach voices don't just want to talk about the weather or last night's episode of Lost. No, they get very aggressive and begin issuing orders. They've been known to threaten seizures, demand tributes, request acts of violence and, if that's not crazy enough, there have even been a few situations where a case of the stomach-dickheads went viral: at a junior high school in Africa, one outbreak of amafufunyana had over 400 children reporting swollen stomachs and bizarre behavior.
The children ran out of control, rolling their eyes, babbling and striking out uncontrollably at anything around them. One teacher later reported that, upon squeezing the children's stomachs, she could clearly hear the Zulu voices claiming to possess said children.
Might be going out on a limb and suggest that the auditory hallucinations have something to do with eating huge portions of poison ants. As for the schoolchildren all joining in on the act, that sounds like good old-fashioned mass hysteria, since among humans, crazy is more contagious than any disease.
Also, at this point one might be starting to think there's a hidden part of the human brain that just wants an excuse to fuck shit up and blame it on ghosts.
The perceived method for this bewitchment is weird on its own: it's accomplished by pounding ants that have been feeding from a grave into a poisonous paste that the victim must ingest. But the outcome is even weirder: once they've ingested the grave-ant pudding, the victim begins to hear voices... coming from their own stomach.
Often these voices actually speak a different language from the victim. Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, for example, have reported hearing voices speak Zulu, and vice versa.
And the stomach voices don't just want to talk about the weather or last night's episode of Lost. No, they get very aggressive and begin issuing orders. They've been known to threaten seizures, demand tributes, request acts of violence and, if that's not crazy enough, there have even been a few situations where a case of the stomach-dickheads went viral: at a junior high school in Africa, one outbreak of amafufunyana had over 400 children reporting swollen stomachs and bizarre behavior.
The children ran out of control, rolling their eyes, babbling and striking out uncontrollably at anything around them. One teacher later reported that, upon squeezing the children's stomachs, she could clearly hear the Zulu voices claiming to possess said children.
Might be going out on a limb and suggest that the auditory hallucinations have something to do with eating huge portions of poison ants. As for the schoolchildren all joining in on the act, that sounds like good old-fashioned mass hysteria, since among humans, crazy is more contagious than any disease.
Also, at this point one might be starting to think there's a hidden part of the human brain that just wants an excuse to fuck shit up and blame it on ghosts.
Monday, May 9, 2011
To die for...
Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide? Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones lying around. Something insane.
Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.
We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.
At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?
Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.
We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.
At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Happy rainbow fun-fun forrest.
Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.
What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?
More than 500 friggin' people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.
The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.
Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"
In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies. In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on any given day. WARNING, NSFS (Not Safe For Soul).
By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.
What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?
More than 500 friggin' people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.
The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.
Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"
In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies. In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on any given day. WARNING, NSFS (Not Safe For Soul).
By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.
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