Pacific Northwest Legends: A Natural History is a 2015 mural project in Spokane, WA by Justin Gibbens with assistance by Will Bow that includes a panel dedicated to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (and obviously inspired by the poster I made):

There are 7 other panels, 7 x 17 feet each, that showcase "historical and contemporary cryptids that inhabit the collective imagination of the Pacific Northwest", including: Sasquatch, Thunderbird, Skin-walker, Pacific Merman, Ogopogo, Jakalope, and Ozwald the flying monkey.

The mural is under the BNSF rail tunnel on S. Post Street (Google maps link -- Google's street view doesn't currently show the tree octopus panel very clearly since it's along the lane Google's car didn't go down).

Earlier this month, the BBC reported on an unusual car accident in Devon, UK:

Crash driver 'swerved to avoid octopus'

A driver who swerved "to avoid an octopus" before crashing has been arrested on suspicion of drug-driving.

Police were called to the A381 between Malborough and South Milton in Devon, where they found a vehicle upside-down in a ditch on Tuesday evening.

The 49-year-old driver was checked over by paramedics before being arrested.

Officers, who tweeted about the incident, said they found no evidence of an octopus on the road.

Octopuses are not unheard of in the seas off the south coast of England, but this particular cephalopod would have had to crawl more than 3 miles (5km) over hills and fields to find itself in the path of a car on the A381.

Although authorities blamed the driver's octopus claim on drugs, I believe this was in fact an actual sighting of the long-thought-extinct Devon hedge octopus (Octopus saepeitineris dumnonii).

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Youtuber LockPickingLawyer provides a dramatic video demonstration (embedded below the fold) of the dangers of gallium contamination to aluminum: A small amount of body-temperature-melted gallium placed on the scratched surface of a solid aluminum lock body will render it breakable by hand.

I previously covered gallium rot and the dangers it poses to AFDB-users on this blog over a decade ago, so this should not be news to any informed paranoid. But take this as your decennial reminder to keep gallium away from your psychotronic deflection tech. If it can do this much damage to thick cast-aluminum in only a few hours, imagine how quickly it will eat away the foil layers of your beanie!

Aluminum-lined bunkers are not safe either if attackers can find openings to drizzle in gallium, so remember to inspect your bunker walls for cracks and gaps and seal them with silicone caulk.

As LPL points out in the video, contamination by hand could spread the gallium rot to other aluminum items. Don't let anyone touch your AFDB as their fingers might be coated with gallium residue.

While aluminum's naturally forming oxide surface should protect you from sudden beanie disintegration, any scratches or mechanical stress fractures that occur after contamination could let the residue seep in. For added protection against the gallium-grubbied paws of mind control agents, consider spraying your beanie with latex paint.

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As I've explained before, it's advisable that paranoids make their own AFDBs instead of buying ready-made deflective head-gear since such "solutions" may contain embedded psychotronic circuitry designed to allow through, or possibly induce, mind-control signals favorable to the manufacturer.

Aluminum foil sold for cooking purposes is generally considered safe for anti-psychotronic use, as any embedded psychotronic circuitry that might have been added at the factory will become apparent with the intended orthonoid use, leaving behind suspicious patterns on the surface of foods cooked in the foil. Those wishing to keep their mind-control plots a secret would want to avoid the questions these patterns raise, so they shy away from tampering with the household aluminum supply.

However, many paranoids are still leery of over-the-counter foil. All it would take is one rogue, incautious psychotronic intrigant with access to the foil supply-chain to render an AFDB ineffective -- or even outright complicit in the wearer's mental subjugation. This is where the idea of making your own aluminum comes in.

Locally sourced, artisanal, organic proto-AFDB in goopy stage (aluminum hydroxide).

Fortunately for the paranoid community, Cody of the YouTube channel Cody's Lab has posted a video showing how to refine aluminum from scratch. All you need is a source of aluminous clay or feldspar; some plastic buckets and bottles; a crock-pot; some hydrochloric acid, lye, and cryolite; a furnace capable of reaching 1000° C with a graphite crucible; a 6V, 40 Amp power supply with jumper cables; a carbon rod; a fajita pan; and lots of patience.

His video embedded below provides all the info you need to truly go off the psychotronic grid. Watch it before the ATF shuts him down on spurious pipe-bomb charges.

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(Click to enlarge.)

A Taste For Honey (1941) is a murder mystery novel by H. F. Heard, also known as Gerald Heard, whose works I've covered a number of times now.

[Spoiler Alert] Sidney Silchester, a man with a taste for honey, moves to the rural English village of Ashton Clearwater for some peace and quiet. Mysteriously, no one in the district is able to raise bees except for one secretive man, Mr. Heregrove.

A true honey fancier, Silchester won't buy the stuff sold in shops, so he makes arrange­ments with Here­grove's wife to secure a regular supply of real honey, until one day she turns up dead, stung to death by her husband's bees.

With his honey reserves dwindling and hearing that the coroner had ordered Heregrove to destroy his hives, Silchester is forced by his mellivorous appetite to go inquiring about an alternate honey source. He is drawn by a curious sign to the home of a new arrival in Ashton Clearwater, one Mr. Mycroft, who is interested in beekeeping, but only for studying bee psychology, not producing honey.

Mycroft tells Silchester that he was recently attacked by a particularly venomous breed of bees and that Heregrove is responsible. Mycroft has deduced that Heregrove has bred his bees to attack other hives to eliminate the competition. Little did Silchester realize he's embroiled himself in a deadly plot to corner the honey market of Ashton Clearwater!

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Hypothetical alien octopus by Wayne McLoughlin, from theories of Gene Bylinsky.

I previously blogged about V. A. Firsoff's Life Among the Stars, which, among other things, explained how tree octopuses may one day become a spacefaring species. Life in Darwin's Universe (1981) by Gene Bylinsky, with illustrations by Wayne Mcloughlin, covers similar ground, asking what shape intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe may take under Darwinian constraints using Earth species as analogies. Of course it includes octopuses.

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There's a new webseries called Pacific NorthWEIRD "chronicling the strange, supernatural, and eccentric happenings of the Pacific Northwest". Their premier episode is about the mysterious Mima Mounds near Olympia, WA (map):

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Sarah McAnulty and Andrea Suria, two Ph.D. students at the University of Connecticut, are working to understand how the immune system of Hawaiian Bobtail Squid is able to mediate the symbiosis between the squid and its bacterial symbiont, Vibrio fischeri:

The Hawaiian Bobtail squid has a glowing bacterium that lives in a specialized organ on their underside. As the squid swims at night, the bacteria glow, preventing predators from detecting the squid's silhouette against the moonlight. Squid immune cells are able to distinguish beneficial from harmful bacteria and know to kill only harmful bacteria. Our lab researches how the immune system makes this decision.

But the squid are hungry little guys who need lots of shrimp. So they (McAnulty and Suria, not the squid) have taken to crowdfunding site Experiment (like Kickstarter, only for science). Here's their project page, "How do Bobtail Squid choose their glowing bacterial partner?", and their video pitch:

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The body of a Cumbrian rocktopus (Petroctopus cumbrianus) was discovered by litter-pick volunteers last month on top of Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England.

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