Thanks to the prominence of a particular item in the news, I received an urgent message this morning from Beverley Crandall, Animal Medium.
Mr. Connelly, I have heard rumors in the town that behind closed doors, you use strange electrical forces to communicate with dozens of unseen living people simultaneously. I am not one to criticize. Your odd habit of invisible, mystical outreach sounds remarkably like my work with the departed. In fact, I’m hoping you can assist me on a case.
I’ll get right to the point.
When I heard that scientists were seriously discussing the idea of bringing a Wooly Mammoth back into the world through cloning, I rushed to the attic to retrieve a relic left there for me in 1939 by my erratic Uncle Erasmus. I was a mere infant at the time and understood nothing of what was going on, but he pinned a note to my diaper that said ‘When you feel it is time to call him, his remains are in the ivory trunk.” Said to be a jawbone fragment taken from the last living mammoth, the article in question is an extremely powerful artifact. I resolved to bring it to the séance that very night!
When I revealed my plan to the spiritual assemblage, it was agreed that we would pool our supernatural energies immediately for no task was more important than this – to ask the one vital question that was not being asked. With the light dimmed, I uttered the mystical incantations and we held hands as we stood around the shard.
Within moments a frigid breeze swept through the room, followed by the stench of a shaggy coat matted with filth and left to rot for ten thousand years. A low, reverberant grunting filled our ears. It was soft but capable of great power, like bulldozer, cooing to its love.
“Oh great spirit of the last departed Wooly Mammoth,” I called out into the darkness.
“Oh speak to us, great caboose of your kind! Are you prepared to walk the Earth again? For men are at work to bring you back into our world! Speak, oh Mammoth! Tell us, do you wish to return to this land of the living?”And then a great caterwauling erupted – an ear-splitting, trumpet-like thunderclap, followed by labored breathing, a rapid huffing that was reminiscent of a steam engine laboring up a hill, a massive timber-rattling groan like the toppling of a giant wooden structure, an indignant snort, a throaty cacophony of low burbling and gurgling sounds that made me think of the last drops of water being drained from a massive muddy pool, something that sounded surprisingly like a giggle, and then … silence.
Unfortunately, I realized at that very moment that we had no one in the room who was capable of speaking Woolibulli, the lost language of the extinct giants. In our rush to make contact, not only had we forgotten to get a translator, we had neglected to record the sounds or have them transcribed. My account of what I heard is, at best, approximate.
My first impression was that the response was negative. But again, not being a speaker of the alternately musical and guttural Wollibulli, I cannot be sure that I asked the question properly. I might have said something more like, “Oh Hairy Abutment of Yore, would you like to appear as a guest on ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’?”
Mr. Connelly, I hope you will use your mystical connections to parse these signals from beyond – signals sent with great vigor through the veil of time – so that we may finally know if reviving the Wooly Mammoth meets with the approval of the last in line of these long lost, round tusked wonders.
Sincerely,
Beverly Crandall
Animal Medium
What was the Wooly Mammoth saying?
Trail Baboon 
Wish I had a good response, but I’m not that cleaver.
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I’m absolutely sure it said “Please, please, clone two of me so I have someone to talk to.”
Oh, and “I’d also like to be cloned in Hawaii.”
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Cloned in Hawaii? Then he might also be saying, “make me a shorthair Wooly Mammoth.”
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Or in LA as a Mohair Wo0lly Mammoth.
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I’m thinking a nice shampoo and cut will do wonders!
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Thanks, Verily-I’ve had an image of a mammoth covered in perm rods in my head all day.
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I’m here to serve.
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Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro
Hatty told Matty, “Let’s don’t take no chance.
Let’s not be L-seven, come and learn to dance.”
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Excellent, Barb!
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
A front is coming through and my joints hurt. Where’s the ibuprofen?
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ditto. it’s zero and i think that’s the high for the day, dropping to minus 19 tonight. my rice-bag handwarmers are in the microwave and when i get back in from milking the bodybag warmer is going in! i’ll see if the Girls would like their jackets, but i think not until tonight.
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barb, do you have jackets for Mammoths as well?
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And how much ibuprofen would a woolly mammoth need for a clinical effect?
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I’ve got some cow aspirin yet; they’re about 3″ long and 1″ diameter… probably start w/ 2?
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Ben – they make “cow aspirin?” wow. i wonder how many grains in one tab? “when you have a cow-sized headache and extra strength won’t do it, take cow aspirin!”
bet that was fun to get down a big, ole cow’s throat.
i’ll take one, please. hands are hurting quite badly right now.
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ok, so you’ve run out of cow aspirin – by my calculations you’d need to give the mammoth 5925 baby aspirins to equal two cow aspirins (81 mg in one baby ASA and 240 grams in one cow ASA). expensive! always keep cow aspirin on hand – good plan, Ben. 50 cow ASA cost about $14 online – i can’t begin to calculate how much almost 6000 baby ASA would cost! so if you are taking baby ASA for heart health, take .00034 of a cow ASA instead and save a lotta money!
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Thanks, Bib and Ben, I feel much better informed now!
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Mee Too. The things I learn here.
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There is a tool for putting pills down a cow’s throat.
(We raced through Wichita and came here but quite because the air felt so damp. By the radar it raced right in behind us.)
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biB, you need the balling gun to go with or have you got one for the goats? Open wide….!
It always made me laugh trying to imagine a cow with a headache needing an aspirin. Perhaps what I interpreted as orneriness in a cow was really just a bad headache?
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i do not have that particular piece of equipment – YET. i think the goat aspirin dose is 6 or 7 human aspirins. still no easy feat to get into a goat. although i’ve never had to try yet. but i did – LITERALLY – have a vet tell me to give a sick goat one aspirin and call him in the morning. he said she “might just up and die” and he wasn’t joking. never called him again. goat lived and i learned. this was early on when i had just gotten my first two for only about a month.
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My little chorus is actually singing Wooly Bully as part of a medly of “The Silly Sixties” this season. He may be saying Take me to where they’re singing my song. But let’s not, OK?
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wow, that sounds like a FUN chorus, BiR! gonna have that cool organ playing also??
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I think she was saying, “oy, my aching neck. I’ve been stuck in one position for a couple thousand years. You got yoga at your end of the time spectrum? A good downward facing dog would really feel good about now. When they bring me and my pal back (in Hawaii), can you make sure you have a mammoth-sized yoga mat ready? Oh, and a venti skim latte. Thanks. Kisses!”
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OT before we fly to Wichita to get a little ahead and not directly in line of fire of the storm: finished Hedgehog Elegance last night. In answer to a joking question, the Hedgehog says that the two greatest inventions of the English are habeous corpus and the lawn.
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ah, the lawn.
Safe travels, Clyde.
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And I loved Paloma’s response…”The hat, as a symbol of stubborn resistance to change.”
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Good morning to all,
I think the he is saying, “what are you going to do with me?” In deed, what is the plan? Okay, I guess they have research plans. Perhaps this might fit in with a genetic engineering project. There would be genetic material available that is not currently here. I think Dr. Larry Kyle might be able to think of some uses for this newly available genetic material.
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If I were a newly cloned wooly mammoth (and I’m not), I would want to stay as far away from Dr. Kyle as possible.
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Well, the I think the wooly mammoth would most likely not want to be too near whatever Dr. Kyle might create using wooly mammoth genes. I guess it might be best if the mammoth didn’t even get close enough to Dr. Kyle to allow him to get any mammoth genetic material.
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Dale, I think it’s significant that someone is finally onto your mystical talent, and has discovered the link between all these odd electronic characters!
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I got a phone call last year from an animal psychic. She wanted to comfort me, bless her. I had written an article about famous “outlaw” wolves, one of which was Rags the Digger. Rags had a thing for springing traps set for wolves, almost as if snapping them off was a sport for him. Then one veteran “wolfer” named Bill Caywood figured out how to use that to catch Rags, who had defied the best efforts of hundreds of wolf experts to get him. When Caywood trapped Rags, he had a disturbing moment. The old wolf calmly walked toward Caywood and offered its trapped paw as if seeking help. Caywood’s rifle misfired. Rags came closer. Finally the rifle worked and Rags fell, his muzzle touching Caywood’s boot. Caywood was almost in tears and felt like he’d shot an old friend.
Not to worry, said the animal psychic. She wanted me to know that the spirits of Rags and Caywood survive in the next world, and that they have made their peace. I thanked her for her concern and told her to give my parents a friendly shout the next time she was in that next place.
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Steve, I think that the psychic probably can’t contact your parents and I think you know this. On the other hand, how do we know that she can’t do this? When it comes to mystical things such as things psychics say they can do, any thing is possible, right?
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I figured, Jim, that I had nothing to lose by asking this woman (Muriel was her name) to reassure my mom I was okay! If she’d asked for money, I would have balked, but it seemed a harmless thing to do.
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Sounds to me like they had made their peace in this world (the wolf and the man, I’ve read your book, I have no worries on that score about your parents).
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What a sweet comment!
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“Hullo! Good morning to you, tiny creature! What are you, you hairless and fragile worm? Why is it so HOT in here? What have you done to the place? Where are all the lovely glaciers – it took so long to build them – where have they gone? I’m quite hungry actually. Where are all the trees? What are those metal things that look like pterodactyls stuck in the earth, moving up and down? Oil, you say? What is it good for? Heating the planet, you say? Too warm already, for my taste… say, where is my dear mate?”
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If he was speaking ~traditional~ Woolibulli, I believe he was saying, “Watch it now, watch it!”
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Perfect–
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in his turban 🙂
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So . . . what did the wooly mammoth say? He/she might have said, “Uhhh, so you guys got a bathroom? I’ve been holding it for just over ten thousand years!”
Or maybe he/she said, “ONE? You made ONE? So like I’m the ONLY wooly mammoth in the world? You guys never read about Noah’s Arc, that part about all the animals two by two? You guys are something else!”
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Morning…
This raises a bunch of questions for me about physics and the surreal and all sorts of things…
Would this be the first contact in 10,000 years or are they existing on some other plane in time? If it’s the first contact I know my first question would be ‘Where am I?’ Followed by ‘Where’s my wife or mother?’
And if they’re in another plane already… more like ‘What’d you do with my girlfriend? And who the heck are you?… You’re where? For what? With who? ‘
OT-… I seem to be having trouble with my electronic self this week… first with my BlackBerry and today NetFlix shipping isn’t seeing the same list I’m seeing on my computer… Something’s afoot my friends!
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Full Moon.
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I think the first thing that he would ask would be “Got any sabertooth tigers around here?”
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Not totally OT, but a little swerve. I absolutely agree w/ Hamlet “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
BUT, how come more psychics don’t win the lottery?
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Their code of ethics prohibits them from buting lotteray tickets.
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Why can’t they but just one lotteray ticket?
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Psychics have been given their gift to help others, not for mere personal gain. I imagine they would consider taking this unfair advantage to be a sullying of the gift.
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It’s a self-defeating philosophy. Eventually, because they would constantly win, they would be the only ones playing the lottery. So, they would only be getting their own money back.
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snort
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http://www.thelinemedia.com/features/stanthonyfallslab11911.aspx
Dale’s in “The Line Media” again today. Very nice, Dale.
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agree!!
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Thanks, Jacque, for the heads up.
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Thanks Jacque. That was a fun assignment!
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The first article you posted got my attention and I put myself on the mailing list for the publication. I was impressed with the local nature of the ‘zine. I don’t always have time to read it, but when I do I enjoy it. They had a great biking article recently, too.
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Yes thanks for the link – fun read! Good on you Dale.
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Totally off topic – but maybe it’s related since it involves an extinction…my favorite custard/ice cream place, Liberty Custard, on Nicollet Ave in Minneapolis is closing at the end of the month (for those of you who came on the field trip to the Russian Museum – this is the place we went after the museum). Apparently they have sold to someone who will maintain it as an independent restaurant – but it won’t be Liberty. Sorrow. Silver lining is that I guess the custard machine was sold along with the building…but will the new owners have Frosty Paws in the cooler for the neighborhood dogs, too? And will it still be just as charming?…And will frozen custard still be on the menu?…sob sob sob.
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Boo hoo is right. Are they actually open now? Maybe, since we’ve had more than one Babboon Congress there, we should have one last fling?
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Their web site says they are open through 1/28. May need to drown my sorrows in a pint or two of frozen custard…might soften the blow to have a Baboon or two there with me. Definitely will have to bring Daughter a couple more times in the next two weeks. She will be sooooo sad.
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OK, 4 pints a day at $10 x the rest of the month??? I could fill up the freezer that way!
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Noooooooooooo….
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So let’s cast our own claymation version of the film.
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OK, I’ll bite – what film?
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The claymation version of the mammoth in this blog. Sort of in the style of Wallace and Grommet. The mammoth in the mud seemed very claymation to me.
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Cheeese, Mammoth!
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The big guy had to have been in pain …. headache, bellyache, sore throat, jock itch – you name it! Therefore, I submit:
Brudder bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime,
His sister had anudder one she paid it for a lime.
She put de lime in de coconut, she drank ’em bot’ up
She put de lime in de coconut and called de doctor, woke ‘im up.
And said, “Doctor, ain’t there nothin’ I can take?’
I said, “Doctor, to relieve this belly ache.”
I said “Doctor, ain’t there nothin’ I can take?”
I said, “Doctor, now lemme get this straight,
You put the lime in the coconut, you drink ’em bot’up,
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink ’em bot’ up,
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink ’em bot’ up,
Put the lime in the coconut. You’re such a silly woman.
Put a lime in the coconut and drink ’em bot’ together
Put the lime in the coconut, then you’ll feel better.
Put the lime in the coconut, drink ’em both down,
Put the lime in your coconut, and call me in the morning,
Woo–ain’t there nothin’ you can take?
I say, woo–to relieve your belly ache,
You say, well woo–ain’t there nothin’ I can take?
I say woo–woo, to relieve your belly ache,
You say yow–ain’t there nothin’ I can take,
I say wow–to relieve this belly ache,
I said “Doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take,”
I said, “Doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take,”
I said, “Doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take,”
I said, “Doctor you’re such a silly woman.
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Excellent, Donna!
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