Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-14-2009

9 thoughts on “Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-14-2009”

1. The Dyatlov Pass incident was covered quite cogently, of all places, on cracked.com:
   http://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-with-really-obvious-solutions.html
   To wit:

   The Obvious Answer:
   So there’s six things that freak people out about this one:
   1. The no-tongued woman
   2. A mysterious orange tan on the dead bodies
   3. The ripped tents
   4. The hikers’ lack of clothing
   5. The crushing damage done to three of the hikers
   6. The traces of radioactivity
   The big fact that gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that the bodies weren’t found until weeks later. It’s not like somebody turned their back, then five minutes later all their friends were dead and half naked.
   That makes the missing tongue a lot easier to explain. As disturbing as it may be, the first thing a scavenging animal is going to go for is probably the soft tissue of an open mouth, especially if it still smelled like the burrito the hiker just ate. Laying out in the sun surrounded by white snow for days also accounts for the weird tan.
   The trauma and the destroyed tent points to an avalanche. Their state of undress can be explained by paradoxical undressing, a known behavior of hypothermia victims when their brains start to freeze and malfunction. In other words, it’s the kind of behavior you’d expect from a group of injured avalanche victims wandering around in the middle of the night in the freezing cold.
   What about the radioactivity? Or stranger details that turn up in some accounts, like orange lights in the sky? Well, there’s the fact that none of that stuff turns up in the original documents from the incident, and appears to have been added later by people who just can’t resist making things spookier than they are.
   It’s those later accounts that have stuck in the public memory, because so many of the original reports were destroyed (this was the Cold War-era Soviet Union, which treated casserole recipes as state secrets).

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2. Slavically opaque!
   Reacting strongly (but inscrutably) to that.

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3. I left a woman who believed that MMR BS. I guess science scares some hippies.

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   1. Were it only that simple.

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      1. It would be hilarious if thimoserol actually caused neurological effects in the centers of the brain that handle processing of causality and empiricism. The result increases one’s tendency toward paranoia and acceptance of pseudoscience.

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4. John Tesh is slavically opaque. He’s such a dancy little hobgoblin. Perhaps the most perfectly unself-aware entity ever to evolve.
   And who could doubt that his tan and springy mop are the products of alien DNA or atomic experiments.
   But what about the people who dress up and buy expensive tickets to his shows? This is a confusing thing. What is it they think they have gained?

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   1. Friends of mine worked for him in the past. He’s apparently a very nice guy and a good boss.
      His audience are Normal Americans who don’t actually like music but aren’t made nervous by his noises.

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      1. I still mix him up with Phil Lesh. I need a stalactites/stalagmites kind of mnemonic.

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      2. this is the best explanation of this phenomenon i have ever read
         SEE ALSO: billy joel

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