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"Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these alligators for pets. Macy's was selling them for fifty cents; every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown & reproduced, had few of rats & sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror."
- Thomas Pynchon - V
A favorite legend of mine as a child, that there were alligators in NY sewers, and that one day when I grew up I'd go and hunt them.
Of course no one believed me, and even I don't remember how I came by the fact, only that I was ridiculed nonstop for spreading the news.
But you know, you grow up, and I didn't even think to go hunting alligators in NY sewers when I was there last year. Foolish me. But reading my urban legends guidebook I'm inspired again...
Especially by the note:
According to May, sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators in 1935, but neither May nor anyone else believed them. "Instead, he set men to watch the sewer walkers to find out how they were obtaining whisky down in the pipes." Persistent reports, however, perhaps including the newspaper item discovered by Coleman, caused May to go down to find out for himself. He found that the reports were true. "The beam of his own flashlight had spotted alligators whose length, on the average, was about ten feet."
May started an extermination campaign, using poisoned bait followed by flooding of the side tunnels to flush the beasts out into the major arteries where hunters with .22 rifles were waiting. He announced in 1937 that the 'gators were gone. Reported sightings in 1948 and 1966 were not confirmed.
Read More: Sewer Alligator's on the Wikipedia
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Now I'm a bit skeptical, it's true, and the spirit of skepticism suggests, even demands that I be open to his ideas and not dismiss them outright.
And they're curious ideas indeed, and he's doing the research. He's charming, well spoken, and has that steampunk style that seems entirely natural and unaffected. Do I agree with his conclusions? Well, not necessarily, I don't know, but I'm glad there are people out there investigating these things.
More here: Wiki on Dr. Michael Persinger, Laurentian University, at Wired.
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And there's this theory from this Aussie that suggests that our intent - our real intent - is expressed by hidden messages encoded backwards in our speech. It sounds like Mumbo Jumbo, but he's charismatic and seems to have attracted quite a few followers, and if you think about it it just might not be that far out....
Similar to Backmasking, only whereas in backmasking the record producers or artists deliberately encode messages backwards in records, Reverse speech suggest that these messages are encoded - backwards - by our subconscious.
Make up your own mind: Reverse Speech (Google search, choose your links carefully...)
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From radiolab, the idea of Cosmic Habituation - which attempts to discover why researchers, upon repeating a new experiment, often find that the initial results are diminished or vanishing.
Links: Radiolab, Nature, The New Yorker
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