Jerome is the President of the American Geographical Society, and his passion for geography is unfathomable. The only information that I have retained from his class, besides the image of the house his parents conceived him in, was about the Tsavo Maneaters.  The wikipedia article and Dobson’s stories differ slightly, but I prefer to rest my faith in Dobson, because I love his love for the truth and for geography.  Anyways, the story goes like this:

Right around 1900 ad some railroad workers were working on the Kenya-Uganda Railway.  Little did the helpless workers know that they were being stalked by two maneless male lions!  In the night these two maneless male lions, named the Tsavo Maneaters, would kill the men while they sleeped, drag them back to their den, and licked their skin off, drink their blood, then eat them.  The workers even started building thorn fences but the lions managed to somehow crawl through them.  According to Jerome that is.  These maneless male lions eventually killed 135 of the workers before they got caught and killed.  Engr. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson is the man who finally tracked and killed the wild beasts.

This wild tale has also been the basis of a major hollywood film, titled The Ghost and the Darkness.  The name comes from what the locals had named the two lions, one was the Ghost and the other was the Darkness, and I am still trying to figure out how they could tell them apart.  The movie, made in 1996, stared Val Kilmer, and won an Oscar for Sound Editing.  So even though I haven’t seen it personally, I am willing to bet that it is exceptional.

Here is a picture of the dead and stuffed lions:

It may also seem like I enjoy unconventional videos.  Videos about weird and crazy things that don’t make sense.  This is not really true but sometimes it is.

So, I have decided to share with you some of the stranger videos I have found on YouTube.  You may have seen some of them before, but I hope after watching them you will have discovered at least one new reason to weep for humanity.

Number One:  How to grill steak without a grill

This is was put up by the user masaokis, and is just one in a long line of videos that offer helpful everyday tips.  He does have some witty banter during the course of the video, but your real focus as a viewer should be put on the absolutely disgusting state of his apartment.  I watched all eleven minutes of this with my face scrunched in disbelief.   About halfway through I started laughing at how ridiculous it was.  He literally lives in a dumpster.  It is a dumpster with two bedrooms and a kitchen.

His other videos are just as good and I highly recommend them.

Number Two:  The biggest advantage of the electric cigarette

Don’t ask me how I discovered this because I honestly do not remember.

This guy knew how to create a work of art.  I think it is the culmination of the choice of music, his singing, the shaving cream on his face, and his reaction after inhaling the nicotine that makes this thing WORK.  I love it.

Number Three:  peanut butter man

I found this one when I was searching for peanut butter-related videos for my article on George Washington Carver.

I don’t know if this is some sex fetish I don’t know about, but something about it is oddly alluring.  I assume there was a cameraman otherwise he would have gotten peanut butter all over his camera.  And those chomping noises he’s making…AH.

Number Four:  Iced Tea:  That Magical Elixir

This video was actually deleted a few months ago, but some die hard fans were able to retrieve it from the Internet Recycle Bin and put it back up.

It’s a simple premise.  The guy shows you all how to make a good iced tea.  But..errr….just watch it.

Number Five:  Weird Cartoon gives insight about reality

This video is differs from the others in that it is actually really dark and creepy and weird.  Watch it with the lights off or something.  I stumbled across this some time ago and it has never left my thoughts.  Claymation by itself is creepy…you don’t have to bring demons into it!

Youtube Profiles that deserve some recognition for being strange

When I posted the videos A Fork in the Eye and We Tied Up Nathan a couple years ago, I didn’t realize it would attract people from underground S&M and choking societies.  I have gotten numerous emails and video comments discussing how hot the choking in my videos is.  Of course I was creeped out, but I also delved into this underground world of strangeness to investigate.  Here are some of the stranger YouTube profiles I’ve encountered.

stranglingme

I found this guy through another guy named “PleaseBeQuiet” who friended me on YouTube after watching A Fork in the Eye.  Unfortunately, PleaseBeQuiet deleted his profile (which consisted of nothing but movie clips of women getting strangled).  Stranglingme, luckily, follows suit, and his videos consist of men wearing leather gloves strangling each other.

conradcigarspipes

This guy is awesome.  He has over 6,500 videos of him smoking a pipe.

He rarely says anything, and when he does, it’s just the name of the video.  All he does is smoke tobacco pipes!  You should peruse the collection if you have time.

AlexanderRodchenko

This is the most puzzling YouTube channel I’ve ever come across.  This guy has uploaded more that 24,000 videos, which has to be some sort of record.

The thing is, the videos aren’t really videos.  They are just four minutes of solid color with a tone buzzing in the background.

Make sure your speakers aren’t on very loud.

Every single video is like this.

That is Logical Conclusion #26504.  Personally I like Logical Conclusion #13007 better.

I figured it has to be a robot doing all of this nonsense.  No person could do this.  I hope.

If you don’t remember…well, it was awesome.

The exact same situation happened in Dublin or some place a few weeks ago (minus Brendan Fraser and the mummy monsters).  A double-decker bus drove under a low hanging tree branch, and, well…here…

I guess the driver forgot he was pulling double-decker duty today.  BUS CRASH

If no one was hurt: Aww yeah that’s awesommmme.

Every college has got one of these places, I’m sure.  It’s the overpriced, dank little store in the student union that carries over processed foods and Powerade.  I stumbled down the Underground’s aisles looking at all the bright wrappings and bags, trying to find the perfect meal to satisfy my hunger.  It was a long and perilous journey, and I picked up and touched dozens of items of food before I finally found one to my liking.

The New York Deli Style Philly Cheesesteak sandwich.  I found this sandwich in the freezer next to the hot pockets and mini pan pizzas.  It looked like it could be tasty, so I picked it up and brought it to the cashier.  The entire time I was wondering how bad it would be on my arteries.

HOT SANDWICH.  Meaning it’s no good cold.  Meaning you’ve got to eat it RIGHT AWAY.  And that is what I hastily prepared myself to do.

It turns out that it is really, really simple to prepare this cheesesteak.  You unwrap it slightly, then put it in the microwave for four minutes, and that’s all.  Two years of college has taught me that any food which can be prepared this easily is usually very unhealthy for you.   Surprisingly, the sandwich is only 420 calories (but I think it had 75 grams of fat or something like that….but no one really knows how much a gram of fat is anyway).  To summarize, it wasn’t the unhealthiest thing I have ever eaten.

My stomach growling, I unwrapped the sandwich.

This thing was frozen solid.  It was like a cold brick.  I could have thrown it through a car’s windshield or bludgeoned somebody to death with it.  It was like a snowman’s turd, it was.  I tried to lift the top piece of bread so I could inspect the cheese, but it wouldn’t budge.  I’m pretty sure the sandwich had been constructed at some factory in Pennsylvania about seven months ago.  Would this deep freezing affect the taste?

Also I read the directions wrong.  I unwrapped the sandwich all the way, and I wasn’t supposed to.  I was only supposed to tear a little slit out of the wrapping.  I did my best to tie the whole thing back up and I slipped it into the microwave.

Microwave for four minutes!  Sure I can do that!

This microwave had a rotating plate in it so I didn’t have to turn the food myself.  Unfortunately, the wrapping of the sandwich unfolded while cooking and wedged against the top and bottom so it stopped turning after a minute.  This made the sandwich cook very unevenly.

After four minutes it was still cold, so I put it back in for an additional three minutes.

After three more minutes, the sandwich was STILL frozen so I put it in for two more minutes.

After two more minutes of microwaving, there was STILL ice in the middle, so I threw it back in and punched in a very admirable time of four minutes.

After that ended, I decided to just eat the thing and not worry if it was cooked all the way through.  It had already microwaved for a solid thirteen minutes and I wasn’t going to wait any longer.  Maybe my microwave just stinks.

I’ll be honest.  I didn’t think the Philly Cheesesteak looked very good.  I didn’t think it would be worth all the hassle.  I lifted the top piece of bread to finally get a good look at the cheese.

That cheese looks pretty good I mean OH MY GOD IS IT STILL FROZEN?!?  In this picture you can clearly see little ice crystals covering the meat.  My microwave never had a problem microwaving stuff before, so I put the entire blame on the sandwich.  I cursed the sandwich rather loudly out of frustration.  I wanted to rip it apart with my teeth (eat it basically).  I also found it ironic that this Philly Cheesesteak, advertised as a HOT SANDWICH, was actually impossible to heat up.

Here is what the other side looked like.  It was rather unevenful.  Just frozen meat and bread.  And some little black specks of unknown origin, but hey, whatever.

I lifted it to my face.  The cheesesteak looks pretty good in this picture actually.  Almost like a real sandwich.

I took a very large first bite, and I burned my tongue.  The ends of the sandwich were really, really hot because of the long microwave time.  I had to spit out the bite into my hand and keep it there until it cooled, and then I put it back in my mouth and ate it.  And you know what?  It was actually pretty good!

The cheese and steak mashed together perfectly, and it made all of my un-burned taste buds tingle with delight. It tasted pretty authentic (not that I’ve ever had a real Philly cheesesteak from Philly).

The sandwich got cooler temperature wise as I ate down to the middle.  I got one rather nasty bite that tasted like a meat snow cone, so I switched and started eating the other end.  It was very tasty and satified my hunger in a most formidable way.

Here is the part of the sandwich I couldn’t eat due to ice.  I thought about microwaving these remnants and eating them, but for some reason I never ended up doing it.

The whole room stunk of cheesesteak for three days.  It was a good thing at first, but by the afternoon of the second day it turned into a bad thing.  I had to use a lot of Febreeze to get rid of the smell.

Jack’s Take

The New York Deli Style Philly CheeseSteak was a very delicious late night snack.  Although it was a little greasy, and a little frozen, I very much enjoyed it and will eat it again some day.  I recommend you try it out.

Grade: B

After being on the road from Denver for a solid 4ish hours, Prairie Dog Town was a welcomed adventure…

We arrived and saw all the cute little prairie dogs running around the grounds…

Aww how cute a momma and baby prairie dog together…

Then, “Oh My God! What is going on!? Did she just jump the baby?”…

…nothing good can come of this…

The baby was left decapitated and the momma went back into its hole.

In the foreground is the bloody headless baby prairie dog, and its mother.

Needless to say- I was absolutely horrified.

But we paid good money to see the WORLDS LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG, so we continued on…

pretty typical western Kansas

Roscoe the Miniature Donkey was awesome

Six legged cow and the only other people at Prairie Dog Town

Wild Turkeys are pretty sweet

Just in case you ever wanted to see a Green Mutant

I’m not sure what about this bird makes it a green mutant.  I suppose it does have a faint green glow around it.

buffalo are also pretty sweet, and delicious from what I hear

Then came the reason for me begging to go to Prairie Dog Town during the entire 5 day trip…

Jack and the WORLDS LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG

Me and the WORLDS LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG

I’m sorry, I know I just ruined all the fun of driving through western Kansas and wondering what the
WORLDS LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG looks like, but come on- its totally awesome.

It’s made from concrete, and sources have told me that it didn’t used to be painted.

So worth the money, mainly because I did not pay for it.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11444 (for more information)

In celebration I decided to make some Valentine’s Day cards!  Feel free to send them to your loved ones.

All right, that’s all for now!  Catch you guys later.

I don’t know if you have seen this already, but the guy that threw the shoe is being honored in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.  A Baghdad-based artist made a huge shoe statue out of copper and fiberglass as a tribute to the pride of the Iraqi people.

The shoe statue was taken down shortly, however, because in Iraq you aren’t supposed to display government property that has political bias.

The shoe statue intrigued me and I decided to search for more giant shoes.

I’m not quite sure what is going on in that picture.

This shoe-house playground thing is in India.

That’s kind of cool I guess.

This shoe is an actual full-sized house!  It’s located in Hellam, Pennsylvania off of the Lincoln Highway if you ever want to visit.

This was really a strange update.  Rather pointless.

Stay tuned for other stuff!

A more awesome, more sweet, more bodacious guy has come into the mix.  And he looks like this:

This is Mr. Rob Awesome.  He’s sporting a killer six pack, manly pecs, a bottle of Grey Goose, an ace of spades in his bandana, a gun in his underwear, a new issue of Star magazine, and lots of shiny bling.  This is the most awesome picture ever taken of a person.  He has pursed his lips together as if to say “Yeah, I know.  What are you going to do about it?”  The pursing of the lips is usually an effeminate action executed by partying college girls for Facebook pictures, but Rob Awesome has taken it and turned it into something manly.

This is Mr. Rob Awesome’s car.  It is awesome.

This is his other awesome car.

This is him thinking about how awesome his Transformers motorcycle is.

Rob Awesome is awesome.  I think I am going to start dressing like him (I will save money on shirts!).  I’ll need a gun too.

We used Farmland’s Hickory Smoked Bacon.  It was the heavy duty pack.  There are 40 pieces of bacon in it.  We only used 12 of them in the quilt.

Laying down the foundation of the quilt.  I felt like an artist.  My medium was meat instead of marble.

It’s started to look a little bit like a quilt.

A super sweet close up.

Someone took a picture of my cat, so here she is.  She seems mighty interested in what’s happening over on the counter.  Sorry kitty!  You can’t have any.  Only men.

We decided to cook the bacon quilt on the stove rather than in the oven, mostly because we forgot it could be cooked in an oven.  This was the beginning of our downfall.

We weren’t really sure how to move the quilt to the frying pan without losing any bacon.  We eventually decided on using two spatulas and our hands to make the move.

We ended up losing one piece of bacon on the journey.  All things considered, it was a successful move despite the casuality.

We forgot to turn on the oven fan and it got really, really smokey.  The smoke tasted like hickory.

It was then we ran into a slight problem.  We weren’t sure how to flip the whole thing at once.

We spent about five minutes stabbing it with spatulas before we finally found a way to flip it over.  The bacon started becoming more and more loose, and it wasn’t cooking evenly.  Pretty soon it snowballed into disaster.

I’m not sure how it got to this point.  It really is ugly.  I guess we just didn’t weave the bacon tight enough and it imploded on itself.

This was supposed to be the meal of men.  It turned instead into a meal of embarrassment.  The bacon quilt had turned into regular bacon.

We did manage to salvage it however.  In the breadbox we found homemade biscuits.  We sliced them open and made bacon biscuit sandwiches.

The bacon biscuit sandwiches were brilliant, and almost erased the memory of the failed bacon quilt entirely.

Jack’s Take

Our attempt at the bacon quilt was not successful.  However, some very imporant lessons were learned (like use the oven instead of the stove).  Also, we discovered bacon biscuits.  Bacon Biscuits are awesome.

C-

We will be trying this again later.  Stay tuned.

- jack

Depressed Paul Bunyan is a comic strip drawn by Jack Brungardt every other other every weekday every every other month.