Column SFF Bestiary A Microgallery of Pull-Your-Leg Cryptids A quick look at some legendary creatures of folklore and tall tales… By Judith Tarr | Published on September 9, 2024 Photo by Sharon Waldron [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Sharon Waldron [via Unsplash] Cryptids are, by definition, creatures that dwell beyond the threshold of conventional science. People who hunt them and profess to study them live in hope that their chosen quarry will somehow, someday, produce incontrovertible evidence of its existence. Cryptozoology, by its nature, relies on the power of faith. Many cryptids seem to resolve into misidentifications of known species. Some appear to be memories of extinct animals. Others may turn out to be known animals living far outside of their usual range. Once in a great while, one may actually be found, with great and appropriate fanfare. And then there are the creatures of folklore. Tall tales. Whoppers and leg-pullers designed to catch the gullible and raise a good laugh at the local watering hole. Humans do love their stories. They also love to pull pranks. Hoaxes are an ancient art and craft. P.T. Barnum exhibited the Feejee Mermaid as “proof” that the mythical sea creature actually exists. (It was the top half of a monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish.) Maybe that was part of the inspiration for the notorious and persistent tale of the jackalope. This North American classic purports to be a cross between a pygmy deer and a jackrabbit. It’s quite straightforward: a jackrabbit with antlers. Images of it show up all over the continent, particularly in the mountain West. According to the lore, it’s vanishingly rare; it only mates during electrical storms. It has superpowers: for example, it can catch bullets in its teeth. And it can sing. Just ask a cowboy who has harmonized with it around a campfire.  It’s a joyous hoax, a myth with a wink. Apparently it originated in Douglas, Wyoming in 1934, when taxidermist Ralph Herrick and his brother Doug attached a set of deer antlers to the preserved carcass of a jackrabbit.  What started as a couple of guys having some fun on the job turned into a huge thing. The brothers founded a cottage industry, turning out whole lines of taxidermied jackalopes. The town of Douglas embraced it; it became their signature attraction. To this day, they’re issuing jackalope hunting licenses by the thousands, and jackalope postcards are a staple of roadside rest stops all across the West. Eventually, the whole of Wyoming embraced it, and it’s become a symbol of the state. That’s not all there is to the story. It turns out the jackalope is not entirely, or exactly, mythical. There is a disease that afflicts rabbits, that causes hard, hornlike growths on their heads. It’s called the Shope papilloma virus, and it’s a real thing. There’s even a specimen in the Smithsonian.  The same can’t be said of one of my favorite cryptic cryptids, the mighty Squonk. This is the diametrical opposite of the Jackalope for looks and personality. It’s an older tale, concocted, it’s said, in the nineteenth century and recorded in a Very Serious Tome published in 1910, William T. Cox’s Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts—because what’s a Very Serious Tome without a Rather Long and Compendious Title? The Squonk, according to Mr. Cox, was once widely dispersed throughout the continent, but its range has shrunk to the hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania, in and around the Poconos. It’s fearfully ugly, piglike in shape and size, with a loose, wrinkled, warty skin. It spends its life in hiding, weeping over its own ugliness.  Hunters, we’re told, have managed to capture it, but once confined, it melts into a puddle of tears. Which is one way to explain why there’s no physical evidence. Stuff it into a bag and all you’re left with is a damp spot and a sense of the futility of it all. That’s magnificent in its lugubrious way. Who wouldn’t love a creature so perfect for what it is, with such a wonderfully evocative name? Squonk. Say it with me. Squonk. I’ll close this gallery with one last wonder of the world. It’s a mouse. A mouse that howls like a wolf. That hunts scorpions, and smites off their tails, and laughs at their venom. It howls as it hunts them and sings as it kills them, and it eats them for breakfast. I’m not making this one up. It’s called the grasshopper mouse. It lives in the deserts of southwestern North America. It’s an honest for real carnivorous mouse that howls at the moon, and it really is resistant to the venom of the Arizona bark scorpion, which can kill a human.  Watch the video. It’s wild. You might even say legendary.  No wonder cryptozoologists keep their hopes alive, with creatures like the grasshopper mouse to show us how truly amazing this planet can be.[end-mark] The post A Microgallery of Pull-Your-Leg Cryptids appeared first on Reactor.

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Vice President Kamala Harris will meet former President Donald Trump tomorrow night for a debate hosted by ABC News, and she could not have chosen a friendlier forum for their first encounter. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that, of the Big Three evening newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight has been the most positive towards Harris and the most hostile to Trump. MRC analysts reviewed all 100 campaign stories that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight from the day Harris entered the race (July 21) through September 6, including weekends. Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters or other non-partisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the Vice President. As for Trump, our analysts found just five clearly positive comments, vs. 66 negative statements, for a dismal 7 percent positive (93% negative) spin score. Our measure of good press/bad press omits partisan comments, as well as “horse race” assessments about the candidates’ poll standings and prospects. So while viewers of ABC’s World News Tonight certainly heard negative comments about Harris during these past six-and-a-half weeks, all of them were from Trump, his campaign team, or other Republicans — never from reporters or nonpartisan sources. At the same time, while our spin score similarly excludes all Democratic soundbites about the Republican nominee, ABC’s reporters and anchors either jumped in to criticize Trump themselves, or broadcast negative comments from non-partisan sources to impart a heavily negative spin to the former President’s coverage. [For more on the methodology, scroll to the end of this article.] During these same weeks, both the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News also delivered highly positive coverage for Harris, and mostly negative coverage for Trump, yet not as extreme as we found with ABC’s World News Tonight. Employing the same methodology, coverage of Harris was 94% positive on CBS, and 71% positive on NBC — historically good press, but not as good as the 100% positive press she received on ABC. As for Trump, his coverage was 77% negative on CBS, and 86% negative on NBC — extremely hostile, but not as dreadful as the whopping 93% negative coverage he received on ABC. Our study also found other ways that ABC’s flagship newscast aided the Democratic nominee:   ■ ABC’s World News Tonight never labeled Harris as “liberal.” Both CBS and NBC correspondents confirmed Harris’s ideology early on in her campaign. Back on July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang said Harris “has a liberal voting record that could be balanced with a more moderate VP.” Three days later, NBC’s Liz Kreutz identified Harris as a “self-described progressive prosecutor.” But as of September 4, ABC’s correspondents had yet to call Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.” Instead eight stories included brief clips of Republicans (usually former President Trump) calling out Harris’s liberal record. ABC’s reporters and anchors also never criticized Harris’s handling of issues such as the economy or the border. While there were few criticisms of Harris’s policies and ideology on CBS and NBC, they weren’t entirely absent. “Harris is providing few details on her plans, which one nonpartisan group says will add $1.7 trillion to the deficit,” NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez told viewers back on August 17. “And both Republican and Democratic economists have argued against government price controls.”   ■ Unlike ABC, both CBS and NBC occasionally showed voters who oppose Harris. Even during the early, highly-positive honeymoon coverage of Harris back in July, evening news viewers occasionally saw voters who didn’t like the Vice President. Reporting in Georgia back on July 30, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed a voter, Ben Wilson, who “blames both Biden and Harris for high prices.” Wilson said he was upset by “everything from gas prices to, you know, eggs, the cost of living, everything.” More recently, Nightly News viewers on September 4 saw a voter in New Hampshire declaring his preference for Trump: “Harris will be four more years of misery.” Yet no such voters were ever included in ABC’s evening news coverage, although they seemed to have no objection to showing pro-Harris voters, such as the fangirl who popped up on the August 18 World News Tonight: “We’re so excited about the Harris/Walz ticket and the hope and the joy.” CBS and NBC both found critics of Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor. “Some progressives called out Harris for being too tough on crime, but conservatives criticized her for being too lenient,” CBS’s Nikole Killion told viewers in an August 22 profile of the new Democratic nominee. No such criticism — from either the right or the left — was shown on ABC’s World News Tonight.   ■ Promoting Trump’s controversies, hiding Harris’s. Back on August 3, both CBS and NBC briefly let their viewers know that Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, had committed adultery during his first marriage. Correspondent Natalie Brand explained on the CBS Weekend News: “Emhoff in a statement obtained by CBS News said that during his first marriage, he went through some tough times on account of his actions and took responsibility in the years since.” Neither network treated Emhoff’s transgression as a big deal, yet ABC didn’t offer up even a second of coverage to this negative story about the Vice President’s husband. Instead, ABC’s Selina Wang that night explained how Harris had “officially lock[ed] up enough votes to become the presumptive Democratic nominee,” and talked about her ongoing search for a running mate. World News Tonight certainly wasn’t shy about giving oxygen to what they presented as Trump controversies. The network talked about Trump’s comment questioning Harris’s race in four different stories, for a combined 3 minutes, 48 seconds of coverage. ABC offered up three different stories (3 minutes, 30 seconds) talking about the kerfuffle following Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate those killed in the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the network hit Trump on his comments contrasting the Medal of Honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on two different nights, tallying up to a total of three minutes, 14 seconds of coverage. “Tonight, Trump still facing criticism....” ABC’s Rachel Scott touted on August 19, three full days after her newscast’s initial coverage of the remark. ABC provided no such scrutiny for Harris’s flubs. Prior to the Vice President’s August 29 interview with CNN, ABC had only allowed six seconds to the idea that she was ducking tough questions. World News Tonight devoted less than a minute of airtime (59 seconds) to the fact that Harris became the Democratic nominee without facing voters in any primary or caucus. Yet on eight different occasions, the network toasted the “historic” nature of Harris as the “first black woman and first Asian American,” as correspondent Selina Wang celebrated back on July 21. “The final night of the Democratic National Convention, and it will be an historic one,” ABC’s David Muir echoed a month later, on August 22. “Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black woman and Asian American set to accept a major party’s nomination for President.” +++++ Tomorrow night’s debate will be moderated by David Muir, the weekday anchor of World News Tonight, and Linsey Davis, who anchors the Sunday edition of the same broadcast. Muir holds the title of “Managing Editor,” which means he can review all of the field reports used on his newscast and assure that they are fair to both sides. Based on the record of the past six and a half weeks, Muir’s newscast could hardly be more one-sided in its approach to the 2024 presidential campaign. It does not augur well for the potential fairness of tomorrow’s debate. METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included. As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.  

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The first batch of Nvidia RTX 4070 GDDR6 graphics cards are now out in the wild, but they bizarrely have the same price as the existing models with GDDR6X memory. That makes these cards ones to avoid as things stand, so you’ll need to check exactly which card you’re buying if you’re looking to pick up an RTX 4070 right now. Until recently, the Nvidia RTX 4070 was our top choice as the best graphics card for most people, thanks to its decent ray tracing performance and sub-$600 price. It’s since been usurped by the new Nvidia RTX 4070 Super, but it remains a solid choice if you’re looking for a mid-range graphics card right now. That is, of course, if you buy one with a decent memory configuration. Continue reading Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 graphics cards are slower and too expensive MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ review, Asus ROG Raikiri review, Best gaming motherboard