There are some people who think the chupacabra more rightly resembles a lizard and dog hybrid of some sort, owing to its reptilian skin texture and hairlessness.  Mythological accounts insist that the chupacabra is a vampiric beast that sucks the blood of cattle and even human beings, and captures unattended children.  It’s really spooky stuff when you consider it.  I don’t want them to be real, do you?  But if they are, have you ever thought what you would do if you were unfortunate enough to stumble upon one of these legendary monsters?  I have.  I think that first I would try really hard to scream at it.  I have heard that if you find a bear in the wilderness, you scream at it really loudly, wave your arms and stand up on your tip toes to make yourself seem dangerous and large. If you do succeed, the bear will go away and leave you alone, so why not a chupacabra?

“Because, nimrod, a chupacabra is not a bear,” said one chupacabra hunter. “That is like comparing apples and hamsters!  You must not be so foolish as to think you can escape a chupacabra just by making silly sounds and puffing your chest out.  If a chupacabra comes along, you will first of all probably never see it coming.  It will be on you within seconds, ripping at your flesh with its freakish claws, breathing the stench of doom from its nostrils before it attacks your throat!”

Well, isn’t that reassuring?  I was honestly hoping for something a bit more empowering from an expert chupacabra hunter.  But really, how many hunters do you know of who have ever successfully tracked a real, live chupacabra?  Not anyone that I know ever has done so.  Not even the one who seemed to know it all in the quotation above.  Still, if I did see one, I think I’d rather try the screaming technique.

An American dermatologist, Dr. Gaspari, went to Indonesia to meet Dede,  and determined that the young man suffers from the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), or common warts, but due to an abnormality in Dede’s immune system, he is unable to fight them off the way most people successfully do.   He is thus unable able to hold down any sort of job, even taking calls for adt orders or simply driving a taxi cab.  Below is a video the demonstrates his extreme condition.  Although Dr. Gaspari hoped to cure Dede of his affliction with simple vitamin A, surgeons are now looking into options to help remove the growths.

“I think he is planning to donate one of his livers next, to buy one of those delicious new Macbook Airs,” said Lilian Bean of Chicago, Il. She works for a company that makes a good business security system a priority.  We think this might not be far off the mark, since the poor lad seems to have a real penchant for expensive toys made by Apple computer — but our dear Ms. Bean doesn’t seem to realize that humans have only one liver, and therefore, young Zheng would have a difficult time of selling even part of the one he has.

Another emailer wrote in to explain it this way:

“Zheng is in the parts business, so he’s probably moved on from kidneys to something more interesting like stem cells, blood platelets, lungs, eyes, appendixes, tonsils, arms, testicles, teeth, toes, fingers, and other stuff.  The problem is, this kid’s learned too young that there’s money in the parts industry and all he had to do was sell a few appendages to get the expensive electronics he thinks he needs.  That’s not a good message to be sending our youth.  More and more people will use the same tactics, and before long we’ll have teenagers running around all over the world missing most of their stuff.”

There was another scientist named Erika Schagatay who was in the south of China and then working with sea nomads.  She was studying their lifestyle habits and their diving response when she noticed that the Moken children were able to pick out small brown clams that were nestled next to brown stones of about the same size and shape. She was amazed that the children could do this using only their natural underwater vision, given that she herself could not even distinguish the shells while wearing expensive diving goggles.

It appears that the refractive power of the eye’s corneal surface, a key to clear vision, is greatly reduced underwater in most people. The divergent densities of air and water are causes of the problem.   Look for more information about the Moken sea gypsies in your direct tv tv guide.

According to Lane Bryant standards, plus sizes are 14-28.  Lane Bryant is a retail chain specializing in plus sized women’s clothing, so they should know what they are talking about, yes?  Well, yes and no perhaps.  For instance, if you visit their website, you will observe that many of the models of the plus sized fashions depicted in their photography do indeed appear to be the sizes they advertise, while others seem precariously thinner than what most ordinary people accept as overweight or plus sized.  Take the swimsuit section there on the website:  some of the women are quite fluffy, while others are obviously defluffed.  By that, I mean that some of them simply do not look the part for anyone needing plus sized clothing.

Then, we arrive at the really big question, the proverbial elephant in the room, if you will:  what, exactly, is so wrong with a woman wearing a size 14?  Granted, at my height of only 5’4″ that would make me very large.  But many women are taller than 5’7″ and on them a size 14 is just not that “big.”  The standards have been set unrealistically high by Hollywood, the media, and yes, even women themselves regarding each other.

So, Plus Size?  Really?  I think this is a classic case of “America: Get Real.”

In the mythological tales from ancient Greece, mermaids were beautiful but treacherous sirens who called sailors to their deaths in choppy waters by singing enchanted songs. In German folk and fairy tales, the sea maidens were believed to have lived in a castle at the bottom of the River Rhine. Still other ancient legends suggest that mermaids were once ordinary, land living maidens who were taken into the ocean by mermen.  How in the world did these legends get their start?

“I’m thinking these were likely to have been tales told by sailors long ago, to explain things they saw but couldn’t interpret,” said Valesh Carei, a linguist and historian.  ”Ocean travelers would see a manatee, or maybe a sea cow, and it might have appeared more human-like than other sea dwelling mammals.  They do have to come to the surface for air, for instance, and they have other attributes that set them apart from fishes.”  That is a bit far fetched, some would argue, since a full grown manatee weighs around 1500 lbs and is 9 or 10 feet long.  I’d hate to see the human female one of those looked very much like.

Also, you might consider that many sailors had a liking for rum.  Regular sailors too, not just pirates.  Combine a few rounds of rum with a rowdy lot of sailors on a foggy night at sea, and you’re bound to have some interesting sights reported.  That could also have been the case, as evidenced from the proliferation of fairy tales originated by sailors and seafarers around the world.

Still, the fact that there are similar legends all over the planet, and that some people do still seem to report contemporary sightings would seem to lend credibility to at least a few of the reports. Myth Status:  UNKNOWN.