Soldier Ant 

You've probably heard of Spring-Heeled Jack, the white-oilskin wearing, madly laughing, blue-flame-spitting demon that terrorized Sheffield for the greater part of the 19th century. Did you know that he reportedly came to the US following his dissapearance there?

I've always kind of admired Jack's style. His preferred attack? The aristocratic bitchslap. And his preferred escape? Bounding from rooftop to rooftop. Man, if I could get away with that combo, I'd've left a trail of stinging red cheeks in my lifetime, lemme tell you..

Here's a nice quick recipe for making your very own Hand of Glory, although I personally wouldn't recommend it.

"Preferably the hand was cut off during the eclipse of the moon. Afterwards it was wrapped in a shroud, squeezed of blood and pickled for two weeks in an earthenware jar with salt, long peppers and saltpetre."

Here's a nice gallery of architectural elements from England featuring The Green Man.

The Green Man is a common motif in European architecture -- he's widely believed to be a pagan figure dating from antiquity, said to represent the fertility of the soil.

Many have noted the similarities between the Green Man and the Egyptian resurrection god Osiris. (Plenty of others have extended the comparisons to our own Judeo-Christian resurrection god Jesus, but that'll be a whole 'nother posting.)

It's a distinct possibility that the Man is Osiris himself. Persecuted underground by the Roman empire and the early Christian Church, Osiris-worship has ever since taken the form of architectural homage, good-luck gravings, and sprightly garden-gnomes.

The Green Man is just one of those small, rare things that makes our world that much richer.

On a strangely twisted Web-jaunt this evening (with stops at the Philadelphia Experiment, the Illuminati and Nikolai Tesla's home-made earthquakes), I somehow ended up on Mike the Headless Chicken, and he's perhaps the most incredible story of the night. (And the one that comes closest to being verifiable!)

Mike was kind of an amazing, if somewhat alarming bird. But I was glad to find out that he was "examined by the officers of several humane societies and was declared to have been free from suffering." Which is really all we want for our freakshow poultry displays, right?

Here's a nice, if too-brief, history of the clown, dating from clowning's early origins in jestery:

"One day the king glimpsed himself and a mirror, and saddened at how old he looked, started crying. The other members of the court decided they better cry as well. When the king stopped crying, everyone else stopped crying as well, except Nasir Ed Din. When the king asked Nasir why he was still crying, he replied, 'Sire, you looked at yourself in the mirror but for a moment and you cried. I have to look at you all the time.'"

"JACK IN THE GREEN (The Hidden One - The Cylenchar) The Woodland spirit who, like the Wood-Wose or Wild Herdsman, guards the greenwood. He appears in many kinds of folk art, as a multi-foliate head peering through the keaves. Like the Sheela na Gig, he was especially portrayed in church decoration, usually as a roof-boss, where he was a constant reminder of earlier beliefs."

...and...

"Two years ago, a coven of wiccans in the city had a May Day ritual in which they consumed a punch created by their high priest. This punch, which he called 'Jack in the Green' contained several varieties of alcohol with several varieties of herbal narcotics, including wormwood and valerian. All those who consumed the punch became very ill. Two were taken to hospital when they fell unconscious and could not be wakened."

Tee-hee. Stupid Wiccans.

That is all I am saying.

In the months leading up to Yuri Gagarin's single-orbit flight around the Earth, there may (or may not) have been a number of less succesful Russian space-shots. This site chronicles the losses, and even offers audio samples, purported to be the dying exhalations of an unknown cosmonaut.

I've spent a fair amount of time at DIA lately, but I've yet to notice any of this weird shit. Next time I travel there, I'll have to take a more careful look:

An African woman in colorful native garb; a Native American woman who's heritage the airport's art supposedly celebrates; a blonde girl with cupid bow lips, a Star of David on her chest and a bible in her hands. Each lay dead in open coffins for your viewing pleasure. A burning city, children sleeping on piles of bricks, a line of mourning women in rags with dead babies, limp in their arms. A huge, looming military figure in a gas mask brandishes a sword and machine gun. Part of an actual note written by a child interred in a Nazi death camp. Strange words embedded in the floor with no explanation about what they mean. Welcome to Denver International Airport!