Stories tagged England

God save the queen: From abduction, probing, and public ridicule.
Courtesy .kol tregaskesThat’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it? Right?

Aliens (space aliens) and America used to be like pizza and beer, adenine and thymine, Johnny and June; we were inseparable. We dissected them and hid their crash sites, and they mutilated our surplus cattle and probed our rural drunks.

And now they’ve crossed the pond to shack up with a foxier mistress with a more sophisticated accent: Lady Britannia.

Sure, there was that awesome sighting in Texas in January, but since then all aliens seem to care about is England. Apparently, it has been a crazy year for UFO sightings in Britain.

Dozens of reported UFO sightings across the country have got British extraterrestrial enthusiasts stammering, dropping their h’s, and constructing fresh tinfoil hats. Out of Cadbury egg wrappers. In their spare time, they’re working on theories for the increasing number of encounters, a favorite being aliens’ concern over global warming and what man is doing to the planet. I suppose the best way to warn humanity of the dangers of climate change is to zoom past small towns in the middle of the night, but I have a different theory—the aliens want to take over Earth, but it’s still too cold for them to comfortably inhabit the planet, so they’re idling their high-energy spacecrafts in our low atmosphere to release even more greenhouse gases. They’ve probably picked England because of the low number of firearms in the country—who needs to have the locals taking potshots at you all night?

Anyway, we’ve been dumped. Again.

Tags : UFOs, England, aliens, Britain

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Do you see what it's eating?: Fingers.
Courtesy lavendarladyThere’s big trouble in Little America (that’s what all the cool kids are calling England these days, that or “Olde America”).

It seems that Cambridge, Little America, is being invaded by black squirrels.

“Why is this a big deal?” you ask. I’ll tell you why. First of all, you have to keep in mind that most large, dangerous animals were hunted to extinction in England hundreds of years ago. So, while we North Americans are used to bears, wolves, mountain lions and cheetahs wandering our streets, it has been centuries since most Brits have had to deal with anything more dangerous that, say, a bunny. Squirrels, while often smaller than bunnies, can be slightly more dangerous—if necessary, a bunny can usually be avoided by going up stairs, or standing on a chair, but this won’t work for squirrels. The squirrel is, after all, nature’s monkey.

But it’s not the presence of squirrels alone that’s dangerous here. Cambridge had squirrels before, but these new squirrels are mutants. Mutant, melanistic, black-furred gray squirrels, and they are slowly but surely running the old-fashioned gray squirrels out of town.

Melanism, simply, is a genetic variation that causes skin, fur, or feathers to be consistently dark. It’s sort of the opposite of albinism. Black panthers, for instance, are just melanistic leopards or jaguars. Melanism is usually fairly uncommon in animals—if a species has evolved its fur or feathers to be camouflage within its natural environment, a melanistic individual might end up sticking out like a sore thumb and getting eaten before it can pass on its genes. This sort of selective pressure is probably less significant for your average city squirrel, and having black fur may not necessarily be detrimental, and other traits could determine a species’ success.

Red squirrels used to be common in Olde America, for instance, until the introduction of larger, more aggressive gray squirrel. Now red squirrels are largely extinct in Britain, except for certain small pockets in Scotland, forced out by the brutal gray squirrel armies. Oh, wait, something perfect just happened.

Right, so now the same thing is happening to the gray squirrels. There’s some evidence that in large cats melanism offers a certain amount of protection from viral infection, so it could be that the new melanistic squirrel population receives similar genetic benefits. It has also been suggested, though not yet proven, that the melanistic squirrels are more aggressive than their gray cousins due to higher testosterone levels.

Also, I just dug this link up the other day, but it seems appropriate here too. In Russia a couple years ago, there was a report of a pack of black squirrels killing and eating a big stray dog. A choice quote:

"They literally gutted the dog," local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. "When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

In short, it may be that Little America’s days are now numbered. Consider canceling vacation plans, or at least packing squirrel repellent.

Tags : black squirrels, squirrels, melanin, melanism, England, Little America

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Hitting the jackpot: Two treasure hunters with a metal detector recently uncovered this silver Viking bowl and a treasure trove of other artifacts in a farm field in England. Early estimates peg the find at worth more than $1 million.I make no apologies for taking every chance I can get to put Viking information on this blog.

Last week the British Museum announced the find of a huge horde of Viking artifacts a father-son team of treasure hunters. It’s believed to be the largest Viking find in the past 150 years.

The duo made the discovery going through a farm field in northern England back in January. Basically, their metal detector when berserk when it sensed the cache of coins and jewelry that was amassed more than 1,000 years ago in lands spanning from Ireland to Russia.

Starting to dig, the first thing they found was a silver bowl. Inside the bowl were a lot of other goodies, with some spilled out around the area. The entire find was slightly more than a foot underground.

When all was said and done, they’d found more than 600 coins, dozens of jewelry pieces, silver ingots and fragments of silver. Among the coins, there was a mix of Nordic and pagan images, showing a religious transition taking place in the Viking culture at that time.

Once all the pieces are studied, the British Museum hopes to make an offer to the treasure hunters to purchase some of the pieces. Preliminary press reports estimate that the find might be worth more than $1 million. In the meantime, they’re going out to keep digging, something they’ve been doing for years without nearly the historical success

Tags : Vikings, viking artifacts, England, horde

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