Friday, February 15, 2008


Dinosaur Boy



(Click on image for larger view.)


I would like to give credit to the photographer who created this image but his name is missing from the back of the postcard. The location is listed: Hall Of Late Dinosaurs, The American Museum of Natural History, New York, U.S.A.

I can only guess at the date when the photograph was taken. The oversized postcard was never mailed; ergo, no cancellation date. I would guess sometime in the 1960s.

It’s obvious that the tyrannosaurus skeleton was put together by the old school of fossil experts. The skeleton shows T. Rex standing erect, tall, menacing. Nowadays the paradigm is that he ran around with his body pitched forward, tail sticking almost straight out. Sorry, that doesn’t impress me. That slumped forward appearance makes him look like some glam rock star camping it up on stage, shaking his butt.

Then again, when I was the same age as the boy in the picture, I was disappointed when I saw a tyrannosaurus skeleton in a museum up in Canada. Even though he stood tall - tail on the ground, claws ready to rip apart anything in his path - T. Rex wasn’t big enough.

I grew up watching movies like Gorgo. In that film a prehistoric monster is captured and taken to London to be put on display. From what I remember Gorgo was around three stories tall.

But his size wasn’t the main problem. You see, Gorgo was a baby. His mother, a full grown adult, shows up in London to rescue her son. She walks up to Big Ben and pushes it over with one good shove.

So after seeing Gorgo’s mom on the big screen at the drive-in, I wasn’t that impressed with the fossilized remains of real dinosaurs.

But as an adult, I know that there’s more to danger than the size of the critter. After getting my leg almost chewed on by an unleashed dog – something similar to a pit bull – I’m aware that little monsters are more than enough to handle.


Thursday, February 14, 2008


USPS MIB?



Uh-oh.

My letter to Supreme Commander James Moseley, perpetrator of Saucer Smear zine, was sent back to me.

Attached to the envelope was the label: RETURN TO SENDER UNKNOWN REASON UNABLE TO FORWARD

I double-checked the envelope. The address was correct; the proper amount of postage was affixed.

Did this mean that Jim evolved to a higher level of being (to borrow a phrase from the Heaven’s Gate cult) with an forwarding address? Or maybe he was upset because I wouldn’t reveal my true identity and he decided to cut all communications. (Then again, maybe Ray X is my true identity.)

A quick phone call revealed that Jim was OK. He was as mystified as I was why my letter was returned. Maybe, he speculated offhandedly, it was a conspiracy.

A man in black lurking within the bowels of the postal system, screwing around with my mail? (Maybe that’s why I didn’t get any valentine cards this year.)

Maybe. MIBs could be everywhere. After all, Mac Tonnies has mentioned at his blog, www.posthumanblues.blogspot.com, how his Fed Ex packages from Canada have been opened and then tagged with Homeland Security seals, as he mentions here and also here.

But most likely it’s just plain incompetence on the part of the post office. I noticed that while it jacked the rent to my small PO box by sixteen dollars a year, service still sucks. I have a PO box because delivery to my street address is second-rate. Sometimes I find mail for someone five doors down the street.

At the main post office, the postage stamp vending machine has been hauled away. That machine had been very convenient: you could use real money, coins or bills, to pick up one stamp or a whole book of them. A postal clerk told me that it was hard to find parts to fix the vending machine. Obviously, that was a good, practical purchase: buying a machine that can’t be maintained.

Now you have to use a credit card with the APC (Automated Postal Center) machine that replaces the stamp vending unit. There’s a spy camera hidden in the APC to record your image.

On second thought, maybe MIBs have taken over the Postal Service.