Zapato Productions

Back in 2005 I posted this image from a WWII pin-up calendar/poster:

Miss November, 1944

Perhaps you wondered, "What did the Army do with all those Japanese-microplane-spray-attack-protection covers after the war?" Well, it turns out they sold the surplus to civilians as "Amazing All-Over Rain-Covers". Here's a 1948 ad extolling their (apparently 106) uses:

Click to see the full ad at the Digital Comic Museum...

Biggest variety of uses of anything you ever owned! Impress your date by picnicking and canoeing in the rain! Awkwardly shuffle through the rain-drenched masses like cocooned vermin! Never again suffer the embarrassment to your male ego of having your gal use a newspaper to keep her party dress unruined! Any rain-avoidance-based thing is possible with the Amazing All-Over Rain-Cover!

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There seems to be a recurring theme in Japan of primates driving would-be tree-octopuses back into the sea. I've already covered tree-dwelling hominoids called Kijimunaa that guard the mangroves of Okinawa from the constant threat of octopus invasion, and monkey military retaliations against forest-melon-raiding octopuses, but here's an example on a much larger scale...

(Click for Flickr set with more stills...)

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The Washington Post reports that the Washington Monument suffered damage during Tuesday's 5.8 earthquake in Virginia:

The National Park Service says the Washington Monument may have suffered cracks near its top during Tuesday's earthquake, and the monument could be closed indefinitely.

Park service spokesman Bill Line said there appear to be cracks "at the very, very top" of the 555-foot tall structure, and structural engineers were being brought in Wednesday to conduct a close inspection.

They're claiming that the cracks are in the stone, but, as is known to most paranoids and little understood by the throngs of orthonoid tourists who stare up at it in mesmerized obliviousness, the "very, very top" of the monument is actually an aluminum pyramidion.

The Washington Monument's aluminum pyramidion before (left) and after (right) the 1934 installation of augmented "lightning rods" (actually psychotronic attenuators). (Photos by Theodor Horydczak.)

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There are now tree octopuses in the popular indie game Minecraft!

Well, sort of... some Minecraft modders just posted a plugin for the third-party Bukkit server modding system that allows players to summon a tree octopus by placing a gold block on top of a tree.

The tree octopus is actually a stock Minecraft squid, but the game's squid only have eight appendages, so they can't really be squid and must therefore be octopuses (then again, they also have teeth, so perhaps we can't rely on anatomical accuracy.)

The mechanism to summon them was inspired by my advice to a young reader asking about tree octopus donations. However, the modders (or at least one of them, Camcade) seem to be confused about what I wrote and think it's a scam:

The website instructed people to help save the tree octopus by putting money up in the trees so that the tree octopuses could make nests out of the bills. Of course, this was a scam just to get people to put money in trees for other people to take.

We here at ZPi have always advised handing bills directly to tree octopuses, not just leaving them in trees where unscrupulous passersby may deprive needy cephalopods of nesting material. If some shady website is advising you to just throw money into the woods, please report it to your local chapter of the Sasquatch Militia.

It has been theorized that species of tree octopuses around the world originally took to the land, and eventually the trees, in search of tasty vegetation, such as ara flowers, tree pitch, and olives. The Japanese have a similar theory: octopuses came into the forests in search of monkey melons. Unfortunately for these would-be tree-octopuses, the monkeys fought back.

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Reuters is reporting that the Goldman Sachs Group, the government-welfare-supported investment bank often unfairly likened to a vampire squid (unfairly to the innocent squid), has been stockpiling a million tonnes of industrial aluminum, equal to a quarter of the global reported inventories, in a string of warehouses in Detroit that they control. By slowing the release of aluminum supplies to manufacturers to a trickle, they're able to artificially increase prices while at the same time trading aluminum on commodity markets. They're also profiting on warehouse rent.

At least that's the official outrage that we're supposed to fume against. But could Goldman Sachs' moustache-twirling greed and the media-prompted hisses sure to follow be merely theatrics produced by the Forces of Mind Control to lay the groundwork for government regulation of aluminum supplies as a way to keep paranoids from being able to make AFDBs and aluminized bunkers?

Perhaps.

But it might also be that Goldman Sachs has decided to become a serious player in the international mind-control club, operating at a level heretofore reserved for governments, secret societies, and paraterrestrial agencies.

By amassing a quarter of the world's supply of industrial aluminum -- a primary component in the construction of psychotron cores, casings, and control nubbins -- they can interfere with the global mind-control-device market, choking the supply of psychotronic arms to any mind-control competitors, while building their own arsenal at a greatly reduced cost.

But even more worrisome is the very real possibility that they could melt all the aluminum down to construct the world's largest psychotron core, one capable of bouncing examesmers of psychotronic radiation off the ionosphere, blanketing the Earth exclusively in Goldman Sachs' own mind-control signals and even drowning out signals from HAARP. Detroit would be the place to do this, what with all the available space and abandoned manufacturing facilities.

In either case, paranoids should continue to be bullish on aluminum foil and discarded aluminum cookware as a hedge against whatever Goldman Sachs is up to.