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Darksides (plural) of the Moon!

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Hail Survivors,

I just got up. I was up very, very late monitoring the eclipse, the solstice and the effect that the conjunction of these two very important events was having on the space time continuum in general and the supernatural world specifically. I’m happy to report that most of us appear to have survived.

(Although there have been some disturbing reports of a “werepyre” phenomenon related to the eclipse here http://sethonsurvival.com/?p=605&cpage=30#comment-17154.)

(And even more disturbing, a dire shortage of sandwiches here: http://sethonsurvival.com/?p=605&cpage=30#comment-17168)

But at any rate, I hope that you all got a chance to watch the solstice lunar eclipse but in case you didn’t see it – or if like me your photos didn’t do it justice – the here is a good time lapse video of it. If you DID miss it it is only another 84 years until the next one in 2094, providing the world survives 2012 that is. Now 84 years is a long time to human but I suspect that there are a few vamps here that watched this one that saw the last one 1638.

Anyways enough blabbing, here’s the video.

Keep on keeping on.

Seth

DARKEST DARK NIGHT DECORATING TIPS

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Between dangerous Xmas shopping and zombie mall Santas it’s easy to forget the real danger lurking between you and all that Christmas turkey. We’re talking about the Winter Solstice. This year the longest, darkest night of the year  – for half of the world – will be 8.5 percent longer and darker due to the convergence of a full lunar eclipse. (Note to any Southern Hemispherians at this point – Please read this article upside-down.)

Whether you call it Winter Solstice or  “Alban Arthuan” or “Yule” December 21 in the northern hemisphere is always pretty dark, both literally and figuratively. Normally a full 18 hours of dark, scary thoughts like, what do I get her for Christmas? What did I get her last year? And where’s that crazy Icelandic Yule Cat and why does he always attack me ? Add to it this year an extra 1.5 hours of terrifying awareness like, Why is the moon turning red? Is it bleeding?

The answer is yes. No. Maybe. This solstice December 21 brings with it a full lunar eclipse. The first solstice lunar eclipse since 1554, according to NASA. Beginning around 1:30 am EST which is around 5:30 Universal Time, the shadow of the earth will swallow the full moon for some 72 minutes of celestial mayhem. I don’t want to alarm anyone but the last time this happened it wasn’t good! Remember 1554? Me either. NOBODY DOES! Sounds like a total blackout to me.  A dreaded Year of Darkness.

So how can we prevent this happening again? Well Oldentimers knew what to do in this situation. Those decorations are not just about annoying your neighbors. They have roots in survival – and preventing another year of darkness. Start by decorating your holiday tree appropriately. A traditional tree is not just a convenient gift stand, it’s a trap for dangerous spirits. You use it to lure the spirits of darkness indoors with a happy green tree decked with edible. This is very important. Traditional decorations included nuts, apples, muffins and long strips of bacon draped over the branches. In short, everything a spirit needs to stay warm and happy and out of trouble! Compare that to the Christmas trees of today. How many spirits will starve in those boughs, hung with glittering plastic balls and synthetic garlands? Do we really need to be reminded that any spirit with the MUNCHIES is a NASTY one? Take my word for it. Pop some damn corn, slap it on a string and get it up there *STAT!* You family is depending on you. Better yet, break out some bacon and drape it over the branches. That will keep them busy longer. Where do you think tinsil comes from anyway?

Xmas Bacon
Xmas Baconsil!

After you’ve fed the spirits, it’s time to pitch in on the annual Luring of the Light. Unless you really WANT to live in darkness for 12 more months? If not, then get out there and cajole the sun like your ancestors did. Remember, electric lights don’t count. Dust off that Yule log and haul it in and if you haven’t kept one from last year? First of all SHAME ON YOU!  With the annual fate of the whole world at stake all you had to do was save a piece of log. Was that really so hard? Now what? Maybe light a candle, preferably two.  There’s no hard data on how much light our star requires to make its encore, so every flame counts.

Take this advice and all should go smoothly again this Solstice. Spirits stay happy, the sun will return and we finish Christmas shopping on December 24 like the triumphant seasonal survivors that we have always historically been.

SOS: ZOMBIE SANTA TRAP

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Oh the mall, the mall, THE MALL. The sales, the bells, the Christmas trees, the shambling horde of festive zombies. This year may be the most dangerous shopping season ever, with new reports of canny zombies disguising themselves as your friendly neighborhood mall Santa. That’s right, zombie Santas appearing at malls around the world.

While the mall debate always heats up at this, the coldest time of the year, 2010 may be the worst one on record. With recent record-breaking retail numbers, it’s a banner year for mall zombies everywhere. Disturbing reports are trickling in from around the globe of a few zombies with a highly-evolved deceptive new feeding strategy. THE MALL SANTA DISGUISE.

What more efficient way for a zombie to procure an endless queue of tender, young brain material? No more extended staggering slow-motion hunting for these zombies. It’s like a brain buffet delivery. But better. Because young brains, as we all know, are a zombie delicacy, the equivalent of zombie veal. And zombies, who are well known for their excellent listening skills and their epic inability to feel pain, actually make passably good, very patient mall Santas. Even with really heavy kids and/or really long wish lists, the mall zombie Santa just grunts agreeably, looking for all appearances about like what you would expect from the average mall Santa! Right up until the moment he rips your nose off your face to get to your brain. A survivor managed to catch one on video, below:

So how’s the smart survivor to tell the difference between a zombie Santa and one who is maybe just hung over?

Well the Monstrometer can help but the area scan will likely not be 100% reliable due to the proximity of so many other mall zombies. Understandably you may not want to administer the biometric scan at all. In this case, your best clues may come from the kids themselves. Watch them very closely. While it’s very normal for kids to kick and scream on their way to slaughter –  I mean Santa – it’s also normal for this kicking and screaming to eventually cease, as the child senses the barbaric seasonal ritual coming to an end. By the time it is actually over, most child will be very happy to leave, often showing no signs of visible blood or brain material on their faces.

Now with a zombie Santa of course, this is not the case. The screaming and crying will suddenly intensify as the Zombie Santa bites into the center of the child’s face. By most reports zombie Santas go straight for a child’s nose as this cartilaginous protuberance provides softest and easiest access to the brain, through the hypothalamus.

If you do encounter a dangerous Zombie Santa, do not draw attention to yourself by attempting to neutralize him by yourself.  Remember you are on their turf. And above all, do NOT give him your Christmas list. He’ll only ooze on it.

We’ll deal with this more in Sunday’s blog post. Until then, keep on keeping on this holiday season.

Unicorn Cow in China?

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Who’s defying the natural law of bilateral symmetry now? Why it’s a cow! An alleged mono-cerotic bovine born in northern China. But is this in fact a unicorn cow?

I was contacted last week by self-proclaimed “AOL Reporter,” David Moye  to investigate the appearance of a so-called “unicorn” cow in China. Apparently this cow has been causing quite a stir among the locals who trek from miles around just to wish on its most prominent horn, the one in the center of its head.

I told Mr. Moye of course I would check it out  (I had to deliver a pizza to Chinatown anyway so I thought hey might as well)  but I warned him that many species on earth proudly sport a mono-horn throughout their lives, from the beautiful Narwhal with its eight to ten foot long spiral horn to several species of horned insects. My point being that the species we have come to think of as true unicorn is much more than a horned beast.

A true unicorn, as we all know, is a proud and dangerous killing machine with dangerous or curative properties in its majestic mono-cerote. Since antiquity the unicorn horn has been used to cure disease, determine the innocence or guilt of accused criminals at trial and – little known fact – a single ride on the unicorn’s back is said to restore virginity to regretful girls in advance of marriage.

Not to mention recently, unicorns being deployed in the ongoing fight against zombies. Likely due to persistent rumors that a single goring through the temple can cure ZSE. But that’s another story.

Before you read Mr. Moye’s story on AOL (link below) which he MOSTLY got right, I would like to tell you what really happened in China. After several days on a bicycle, Mr. Jia himself stopped to pick me up in his red Buick Excelle and took me right to his farm in Baoding, where a handful of villagers were already lining up to touch this alleged unicorn cow. I got in line behind a man missing one hand and an attractive Chinese girl who seemed to have absolutely NOTHING wrong with her… so you know why she was probably there! Of course I did not point this out to her.

Plan A was to simply scan the cow with The Monstrometer – but I got about halfway through the questions with her before realizing, I had forgotten to ask Graham to program the Monstrometer for unicorns.  (Lucky for me, the cow didn’t seem too offended when the answer came up vampire.) So I had to resort to Plan B – interview the line-up of miracle seekers “PRE” and “POST” unicorn cow caressing, to see if they had in fact been granted relief from their afflictions by her magical monocerotic properties.

Unfortuntely though my Mandarin is even rustier than my Cantonese – and don’t even get me started on my Min! Point is, I couldn’t understand a word of it. Which leads me to the obvious conclusion that this is NOT in fact a unicorn cow, as any REAL unicorn cow would have obviously provided these supplicants the transcendent ability to communicate their condition to me. Not to mention the ability to count to three. Which is the number of horns the cow ACTUALLY has growing out of its head!

But I still wish I could have stayed long enough to see that girl ride that cow.

The link to Mr. Moye’s article about the alleged unicorn cow is here:

http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/chinese-unicorn-cow-horns-in-on-fame/19737389

And now I’m wondering if should add “UNICORNS” to the Monstrometer, just to avoid this kind of confusion in the future.

Winners Announced for the Seth On Survival 2010 Ninja Day Contest

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Good news Survivors! We have not one but four winners of the Seth On Survival 2010 Ninja Day contest!

Jmich, Andie, Teg and Gabriel Castillo are each going to receive a complimentary Seth On Survival T-shirt. Hope it helps you keep on keeping on! Now all you have to do is send me an email with the size of T-shirt that you need and an address that I can mail your shirt to and then it will be up to the the chthonic deity that lives in the bottom of your local mail sorting room as to how long it takes for it to arrive. You also have your choice of any colour you like… as long as it is black.

Now you may be wondering how they could give four different answers and all be right well it is like this… Ninjas as you probably know are very stealthy, in fact right now as you are reading this there is probably one in your kitchen eating the rest of that bag of chips that you didn’t finish yesterday, the point is, as Survivor Andie correctly pointed, that no one, not even me, knows how many ninjas are actually in that picture. There was one that I found and took a really close up picture of but my flash didn’t go off and my lens cap may or may not have been on at the time and in any case it was a really really close up picture as that particular ninja was kicking me in the head when I took it. Further to that there may or may not have been an additional 16 to 40 ninjas hiding behind the first ninja so as you can see they are all right! Well at least as far as I can tell

So congratulation to the winners! I am looking forward to having another contest in the near future.

Seth

For more info see the original contest post here: http://sethonsurvival.com/?p=524

Ninja Day

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Ninja Day again. Remember ninjas are very dangerous and your best survival strategy is to avoid them. Best way to avoid them? Learn to spot them. Train your ninja spotting skills below.

How many ninjas are hiding in the picture below?

How many Ninja's are hiding in this picture?
How many ninja's are hiding in this picture?

Submit your answers in the comments below. One lucky winner will receive a Seth On Survival T-Shirt, highly effective survival wear with special scent masking properties making it far more difficult for ninja to track you.