Big Muddy 2: Mud in the Fog

As I've mentioned before, Mississippi has her fair share of people claiming to see things. That's not abnormal. Many people see things they cannot explain daily. I myself was surrounded by men with tentacle eyes requesting gluten-free cereals just the other day.

But we all must maintain certain stories, lest we go mad, though there are certain stories more indicative of madness than of coping with it.

One such story is the tale of Big Muddy. We've hinted at the existence of this Pearl River Monster, gleaned what we could from a single photograph that surely was not just a bird flying in front of the camera.

Part of being a cyptozoologist is adhering to the idea that your quarry is somehow different than normal animals. Otherwise, you'd just be a zoologist, some random schmuck investigating the near infinite diversity of arthropods, or other important animals, like tardigrades, or molluscs.

One of the lesser branches on the tree of life is the vertebrates. Our editors have a debate on if the planet rightfully belongs to the insects or the bacteria, with a third lobbying for coral reefs, but we feel that option three will be an evolutionary dead end in a matter of decades. Nevertheless, human beings feel that vertebrates are somehow important, no doubt in some sort of kinship display.

But amongst these oddities of nature, these creatures with a backbone (statistically speaking, they all live in the water, with a few in the jungle) - one is rare enough to perhaps not even exist, though this has not in any way dampened my enthusiasm for it.

BIG MUDDY.

Big muddy was last spotted just North of I-20, just South of Highway 80, in the iconic photography seen HERE.

New sightings have been reported near the Silas Brown Bridge. We present you with the evidence.
 

See the twin forms between the light poles and the bridge? Serpentine in nature, like the Loch Ness Monster!

This clear evidence (which is most certainly NOT, as some "skeptics' have claimed, "a pair of logs") shows us not one Big Muddy, but TWO! Serpentine heads, long bodies, moving as a pair! One moves with just the head above the water, as is common with the local water moccasin, the other moves with the entire body floating on the surface, as the common water snake.

The size must be 3-7 meters in length. We sent a reporter under the bridge. Reports that we did so at gunpoint can safely be discounted.

Not seen: Big Muddy. Seen: Fuzzy camera work and St. Elmo's Fire.

The clearly shaken photographer returned with clear photographic evidence that Big Muddy is not only NOT a log (would a log have vanished from the shot?) but also possesses strange paranormal phenomenon.

If The X Files (the last TV show we were allowed to watch) has taught us anything, it is that whenever you have one paranormal phenomenon, you should just go ahead and search for another, because you're on a roll, and clearly going to be right about that one, too.

Which is why, in the above photograph, we see the infamous "Bigfoot focus effect," the notorious camera malfunction that occurs whenever video or photograph equipment attempts to capture clear evidence of the bipedal ape in question.

Additionally, we see St. Elmo's Fire, a blue variety, lighting up the river. This is surely NOT just some camera effect due to the extreme lighting conditions, a drunken and fear-soaked intern forced to crawl under a bridge during flood conditions in the dark is perfectly capable of making such a difficult shot.

Therefore, thanks to these two pictures, we can safely overturn a century of zoological observation and safely assume that giant mystical snakes are the cause of the Big Muddy phenomenon.

The FaceSitting Gap

This is the high tech facility in which the 2014 "Pornography Gap" Disarmament Talks were held.

After our ground-dwelling recovery of Top Secret documents from the U.S. Strategic Quinoa Reserve, we at Pearl River Flow discovered a hidden American Patriot - General Dirk Mannberg. Our physics-shredding Alternate Reality Journalism (patents, lawsuits pending) discovered General Mannberg viciously defending Christmas in the War on the War on Christmas.

But General Dirk Mannberg's story was not over, and no U.S. journalist was going to be allowed to cover the Top Secret International talks he would be attending via Skype. Fortunately, one of our journalists is an illegal immigrant to a innavigable waterway, and therefore operating under no known flag or treaty. In fact, this status, that of hostis humani generis, or, as Dick Cheney says, "everyone," allowed him to cover the Joint US-EU Pornography Gap Disarmament Treaty.

This is his report. The editorial staff felt it may have been a bit much "sucking up," and it's probably hagiography, but we feel it is within journalistic standards.

Dirk Mannberg does have a torso, a pair of legs, a pair of arms, and his brain is located in a bone box on top of his neck. The similarities between him and mere mortals stops there, however.

General Mannberg runs five miles every morning before five in the morning and he does it carrying fifty pounds of rifle, grenades, and ammunition while under fire from automatic weaponry.

General Dirk Mannberg does not watch pornography or refrain from violence unless it is a requirement for his duty: Americaing. Dirk Mannberg turns any words he wishes into verbs, and as he says, "If you cannot America, I will America you right in the face until you learn how to America."

It is just this sort of dedication and punch-through-the-box thinking that makes Mannberg such a peculiar choice for this assignment. Recent developments in Britain are putting a very American interest at risk.

Pornography. This time, General Dirk Mannberg is doing the hard work personally, with his own hands.

A little background: England is seeking new rules outlawing specific acts in locally produced pornographic films. Most beloved - by everyone from Monty Python to Dirk Mannberg - is the hallowed English tradition of "facesitting," or as it's spelled in England, "fasesitting."

English facesitting is a venerable rite, passed down from ancient druidic practice, in which a fox would be grasped between the thighs of a priest or priestess, who would then mock the act of riding it around the village whilst women lashed him or her across the buttocks, throwing ale or wine in front of the panicking animal, while shouting admiration. It was a tribal rite designed to bring the community together for a long, hard winter.

Later, the Scots would replace the fox with the decapitated heads of fallen enemies, and later, soccer balls, and at some point live human beings became the norm in Ireland, though not if the Queen was asking.

This act found it's way (through soccer and cricket, mainly) to modern English society, which has given it the highest honour available to a British act or person: A Monty Python song.

General Dirk Mannberg understands the full history of facesitting, the intricacies of pornographies, and the English common law system. This last bit he regards as "Unconstitutional Communist claptrap," and he has peculiar views on the practice of not touching the Queen.

Spoiler Alert: He would touch the Queen if he was allowed to leave the United States.

For the final video conference, General Mannberg was flown to a secret location, from which we had to fight giant snakes and swim with concrete blocks around our ankles to reach the secure uplink facility. The photograph I took at the top of the page is the only known photograph of this top secret area in existence.

Inside, the mood was tense. Other world leaders were viewing acts of depravity that their citizens had financed, labored over, and loved. Naked flesh filled the monitors, sweating politicians and military men - hard men who normally showed no emotion other than Killing Joy, were even more terse than usual. Mannberg was the only one not monosyllabic.

"What you've got here, Prime Minister, is just like what we had on our hands with the Reds back when we were facing down the 'wheat or corn' question in the seventies with that peanut-loving idiot in the Hot Seat. What you need is Mutual Assured Masturbation." he said, addressing the Lord of Justice.

"I am not Prime Minister, General." The severe old man said. "I am Lord Justice Tafflesbury."

"My apologies, President Taft, but you've just about got yourself a pornography gap on your hands! This is nothing more than a race for the biggest fist! If you outlaw facesitting, you can be damn sure the krauts won't. You can't rely on a minimal deterrence here, you can't take the high ground, Your Majesties. If the Germans know you won't be putting any thighs over any faces in 2014, they'll strike first, and make you pay. And the Dutch will put anyone or anything into anywhere or anyone! Their whole culture is based on it! They are a filthy swamp-dwelling finger-plugging people, who..."

"Now wait, I..." The Jonkheer van Amsberg spoke up for a moment before Mannberg's unstoppable pace consumed his words.

"No, this is a good old fashion porn race. You've got to allow facesitting, if not for your citizens, as a deterrence to those who might seek to sell those videos in the United Kingdom!  And you've got to get it on video, because hot facesitting action is the only thing that separates us from the plummeting ruble and the decadent chaos of Hungarian pornography."

"When you don't have it, they will!" He pounded his fist on the table in a manner illegal in British porno. "When you think you're safe behind your walls of law and your prim and proper fucking and sucking, there are going to be innovators out there! They will be making pornography so goddamn good that militants will strap bombs to trains to stop it, and the Germans won't back down from that, the French might, but I remember England during the war, goddamnit!"

General Dirk Mannberg often remembers things from before he was born. When I asked him about this unique ability, he originally claimed that it came from "reading books," though I have never known him to use books for anything other than firestarters, makeshift bulletproof vest inserts, and bludgeoning weaponry.

When pressed (it is against official CNN rules to press political or military figures for information that might reveal them to be liars - a policy we at Pearl River Flow have yet to institute) Mannberg revealed that the entirety of his knowledge of British government came from watching Doctor Who.

"Never surrender." He said, saluting the screens as they turned to static. "I'm not saying we won't get... something... in our hair, gentlemen. But, depending on the breaks..."

In the darkness, Mannberg was left to consider his estimations, alone but for the songs and portents of a future where no young boy in Wales will be able to take pride in history. We at Pearl River Flow can only hope that the High Justice Lords and Baronesses take Mannberg's prescient warnings to heart, lest they endanger us all in a Europe of shifting pornographic alliances, uncertain BDSM arrangements, and a nightmarish outcome for everyone involved.


Pearl River Monster

EXCLUSIVE! CAPTURED ON FILM: PEARL RIVER MONSTER

I could - and sometimes do - go on at nauseating length about the wonders of nature. Nature has wasps that are basically sci-fi horror monsters, molecules that will eat your brain, intelligent mold, talking apes, prehistoric oddities at the bottom of the sea - and that's just on Earth. 

But say that perhaps the truth was not interesting enough for your tastes? Say you wanted a little extra icing on that infinitely large and delicious cake? Well in that case you'd be interested the frayed flier that washed up on the shores of Belhaven Beach:

Consider a career in the exciting world of cryptozoology!

Dear Readers - I have. What you see above is the culmination of my hunt. The hunt for Big Muddy - the Pearl River Cryptobionoid.

Big Muddy: Totes Exists, You Guys

I mean, I got a picture. That's good enough, right? Shouldn't the Discovery Channel be down here with some big beards and cameras? I've even got the beard, Discovery Channel - in case you're looking.

It's not like a news agency would push a story with less than a picture, is it? What? Just some dudes talking? That's all it takes?

Now, it's not just any random yahoo who saw this unlikely creature. Nope, it's Paranormal Investigators - aka "unicorn hunters." They have a very easy job, because what they're looking for can be conjured up with a bit of imagination, and the desire to not look into things very hard. You may recognize this as the exact opposite of investigation, unless you're a policeman investigating internal misconduct or really rich people. Then, you might have a cushy position here in Mississippi waiting for you when you retire!

So, back to my cryptobionoid. Or cryptid? Seriously? Cryptid? That's lame. I think I'm going to stick with cryptobionoid.

My cryptobionoid (pictured above) is "Big Muddy." In order to prove he exists, I am going to use the same airtight logic these crack investigators employ. There's only two non-crytobionoid things that could make that image: A giant anthropomorphic catfish, or a boat. It's clearly not a boat, so therefore it's Big Muddy.

It's better evidence for Big Muddy than our Vicksburg Swamp-Ape evidence which consists of what can only be a bear or some sort of human-like ape. It's not a bear, so... bigfoot.

Call me back when people don't have feet anymore.

Proportionality and Relativity

Is that you, with no opinion on the current situation? I have bad news.

No trash jokes or weirdness in decay today, dear readers. The world hasn't been very funny lately.

In case you've been living down in the depths of the wood of a disused railroad bridge, the world has taken a shit on us all once again. It's a revelation that surprises me not at all, but turns out - the police are criminals with the courtesy to wear a uniform so we know who they are.

Trust that reporting, fungus. The scumbag devil-dogs who call themselves journalists and reporters on the doomtubes and scat-sheets have taken up the most racist of narratives to frame this travesty of justice. Maybe it's because that's all they understand, or mayhaps they're just pandering to their audience, the aged and terrified who hide from the world behind walls, guns, and poorly trained soldiers.

This is additionally painful to me, you journalist scum. Do you know what I have to do to learn about what the fuck is going on here in America? I have to read twitter. (We're on twitter. You should follow us!) I have to read comments on websites. I have to trust the BBC.

Shameful behavior all around, America. Pretending we're not racist, when I walk through the neighborhoods with sewage in their yards and garbage on the streets. Rich white neighborhoods, I tell you not.

The cops - and this is just in the United States - killed about 4,800 people from 2003 till 2009. Ebola only got about 400 worldwide. They're more dangerous than terrorists if you're American.

Cops are still better than the flu, which kills a couple of small towns worth (24 thousand or so) of people every year here in the U S of A. So they've got that going for them. People don't take their flu shots, but people do worry about Ebola and terrorists.

It's an iron-clad law of human communication. The more important the fact, the less likely we are to share it. The more likely it is to kill us, the less likely we are to worry about it. The more deadly the threat, the less worrisome it is.

....so I guess it's good we're all worried, then, isn't it?

Shine on, crazy blue box.



Rejected Buzzfeed Articles

We tried to burn this barrel, but my compatriots didn't quite understand fire-building technology.

In the sun scorched wastelands south of the old dump, where no man dares tread, lie things that should not see the sun, secrets that twist the minds of men. Also, the city has some real estate out there for storage, which is a good idea, since property values are low, and it's a reclamation project, and the EPA offers generous grants on brownfield restoration... oh, wait, where was I?

Things that should not be!

Weird apparitions smoldering underneath oilslick waters. Tangles of hose and concrete spilling forth from the vegetation.

No, really.

Things down there are wretched and unholy, but the worst of these things I have uncovered came from the most unholy of world-ruining mental ichor.

Buzzfeed. That which haunts the men who once believed that the dark tower of slavery and gibbering madness was the Huffington Post, that word on the clotted tongue-stumps of those who whisper the vacuous shibboleth "Upworthy."

One billion dollars. That is the value of this noise that feeds. Well, close to that. One billion dollars by HuffPo rounding techniques.

But yet despite the evidence you would gather with but a few quick clicks, there are things that Buzzfeed nor Huffington Post nor Upworthy will push out onto the internet.

Here then, beyond the ken of sanity, are the things that Buzzfeed would not print.

.....I was going to make this joke, but robots did it already.

 

Wonderful Local Coffee Shops - A Rundown

Local coffee shops have a certain appeal for having products that you can't find anywhere else. What Starbucks offers Red Dog and dead mussels? None of them. NONE OF THEM.

Apparently, people don't like washed out pictures of dead animals and washed-up litter taken by an unwashed lunatic, so in order to increase blog traffic I've decided to follow the lead of several popular blogs and review coffee places. Local coffee places. And shower, but I still can't figure out how that's going to come across on the blog.

Local coffee shops. To be honest, I don't like them. The coffee they serve leaves enamel on the teeth and is entirely nonflammable. They usually have a lot of racoons out in front, to clean up the litter.

You don't get racoons out front at Starbucks. That's why I don't go there, either. A good coffee place will have racoons out front, either to greet you, or clean up litter. They understand that at Cups. All the locations. Faithful racoons.

You cannot kill a man with a scone from Cups, not without chemical propellants, which they DO NOT SELL. Do NOT ask the man behind the counter for such a thing. The scones are not as hard and lethal as a proper, British scone. A proper scone has a hardness of almost 2 on the Mohs scale, right up there with gypsum, but while you can burn and break down gypsum to make Plaster of Paris, you cannot do that with a scone. Scones can form Plaster of London, but that's something not even racoons will eat.

Above: The source of most scones, also where Starbucks gets the water for coffee that will not under any circumstance remove paint. If it removed paint, I'd go there. Good coffee should be mostly lethal.

Now, for a good, lethal scone, you need to go Seattle Drip. Unfortunately, they're mostly up in Madison, where I'm wanted for a variety of crimes against taste. But, you can fire one of those scones through a brick wall.

Finally, there's Koinonia, a nice place you can go that's close to Town Creek, which easily puts it into the top tier of local coffee shops near gar-filled creeks that can back up without warning and flood wide swaths of the city.

This concludes my informative, if informal, review of Coffee Shops in Jackson.

If you have any comments or questions or corrections to make, please just throw them in the river.

Election Interview: Blue Heron, Jackson, MS

"We" interviewed this blue heron, asking her about the upcoming Senate race between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel

This is an interview between the staff of Pearl River Flow and an adult female blue heron we found fishing in the bayou between the levee and 1-20, at the end of Pearl Street. Names have not been changed to protect the Ardeidae, which is not an endangered species, and is quite common.

PRF: "So, you're a large bird with a long neck and legs that makes her living fishing in shallow water with a harpoon-like beak. Do you think that your ambush style of predation really fits in with either candidate?"

Blue Heron:  "Well, I have to say that in a lot of ways I'm quite conservative. The first heron-like birds showed up in the fossil record about 45 million years ago - it was after the dinosaurs got real small, like I think government should be. But it wasn't until the Miocene era that we really got our "feet in the water," if you get the joke there."

PRF: "I didn't realize you were joking. I'm so sorry. So, which candidate takes up issues most important to you?"

Blue Heron: "Well, I'm pretty big on the issue of crustaceans and small fish in shallow, evaporating pools. That's kind of my thing. I hear that McDaniel sometimes goes to shallow pools and thrusts his face into the mud, opening his outsized beak at the last moment to grasp his prey, before tossing it down his throat whole."

PRF: "I'm pretty sure Chris McDaniel doesn't do that."

Blue Heron: "Are you?"

PRF: "...no. But I'm sure he doesn't have a beak."

Blue Heron: "Well, on the other hand, Senator Cochran was in the navy. I'm a navy woman myself."

PRF: "I didn't know that. How do you feel about military spending?"

Blue Heron: "I'm sure it's a reflection of some sort of insecurity. Both candidates seem dead set on it. For McDaniel, it probably has to do something with his immense age."

PRF: "For the record, Heron, Mr. McDaniel is almost half the age of Senator Cochran."

Blue Heron: "Oh. Well. You all live too long anyway. He's what, 90?"

PRF: "Mr. Cochran is 76."

Blue Heron: "No, the other guy! Sweet mother of egrets, can people live to be 76? How old is McDaniel? 75?"

PRF: "According to our records, he was birthed in a nightmarish conglomeration of blood and ichor a mere 41 years ago."

Blue Heron: "I'm so glad I lay eggs."

PRF: "So, who will you be voting for in the runoff?"

Blue Heron: "Oh, I can't vote."

PRF: "On account of you being a bird? Why, that's speciesist, specious, and outrageous! I won't stand for it! None of evolution's beautiful creations deserves to be left out of the decision-making process in the most powerful nation on Earth!"

Blue Heron: "Oh, no, it's because I don't have a valid ID."