It’s been a big week for news items you might not expect to see in a reputable publication like The Chronicle. Bigfoot? Ghosts in the museum? Three people filing to run for mayor of Vader? This isn’t the Weekly World News!
Here’s power rankings, which sets out to regain its position as the most nonsensical thing published upon these fine pages.
Bigfoot: Mitchel Townsend, a Winlock man and continuing education professor at Centralia College, theorizes that a pile of stacked bones with bite marks left by really big teeth out near Mount St. Helens and some big footprints means we’ve got proof of Sasquatch.
Townsend is writing a research paper for the scientific community, offering the bones to any scientist who wishes to examine the remains.
“The evidence stands on its own, you prove the evidence wrong,” he said.
Townsend is of the opinion that this hypothetical beast is part human, due to (takes deep breath) interbreeding between Native Americans and a giant ape some 80,000 years ago.
It’s all sort of a tough sell, obviously, considering:
(A) No one’s ever seen a Sasquatch and Google Earth exists
(B) If this theory is true someone would have HAD to “see” a Sasquatch, historically, at some point, if you get my drift (wink wink, nudge nudge).
(C) How many people were mating with apes to produce an entire sub-species that’s sustained itself for this long? Don’t tell me the hypothetical creature is immortal, because at that point you’re just throwing “magic!” in as an answer and this is a scientific discussion (I guess).
(D) I don’t buy the whole “person mating with an ape” explanation for Bigfoot. Sorry. Do the math. People get caught, you know, doing stuff with horses all the time (well, occasionally) and I don’t see any centaurs running around.
Ghosts: A group of ghost hunters and a few amateur enthusiasts toured the Lewis County Historical Museum on Saturday looking for — you guessed it — ghosts.
Spoiler alert: They didn’t find any.
South Sound Paranormal, the “experts” in this case, ran the show on Saturday and have plenty of experience in ghost hunting — but, obviously, not plenty of experience in ghost “finding.” Or is it ghost “catching?” What’s the ideal outcome of a ghost hunt? Is it like a safari, where the best hunters have mounted ghost heads hanging on the walls of their den, bragging to their ghost-hunter friends over glasses of Scotch and cigars at the end of dinner parties?
“Ah, yes, the Norwegian. Strangest hunt of my life! Tracked the spirit for days through the crawl spaces of a 19th-century Victorian. I set a trap, leaving my easily-frightened son, Gomez, in the attic for 18 hours and finally throwing my ghost-cuffs on him right as he was starting to wiggle his fingers and haunt my boy! I choked the afterlife right out of him!”
This isn’t the first group of paranormal experts to visit the museum. (Can there be such a thing? Can you confidently call yourself an expert in a field that studies something that’s never been proven to exist? It’s like a zoologist claiming his specialty is griffons or unicorns.) And this isn’t the first time a group of paranormal experts has left the museum with nothing to show for it. Maybe next time they should leave a dusty checkbook out in the attic and see if the ghost of Debbie Knapp floats in and starts writing checks out to “Cash.”
Unfilled Seats: The Lewis County Auditor’s Office held a special three-day filing period, ending today, for the 36 offices that received no candidates (among them: two city council positions in both Morton and Napavine, and a handful of fire, cemetery and water-sewer district positions). Any offices without candidates as of this evening will be removed from the ballot, and the incumbents have to stay in office until the next election.
A better solution: Make a list of voters who voted against the incumbent in the last election, throw their names in a hat, and draw out the next Packwood Fire District 10 commissioner or whatever. The auditor could send a process server out to inform them!
“Hey, Joseph Q. Johnson?”
“Yeah? Who’s asking?”
(Hands over Fire District name badge)
“Ha ha! You’re the new commissioner! No takebacks!”
“Ah, crap, I knew I shouldn’t have opened the door! I just got off the cemetery board!”
Side note: I already checked. I don’t live in the right spot to run for any of the open positions, which is too bad, as I’d make a phenomenal cemetery district board member. “They haven’t paid? Dig ‘em up!”
•••
Aaron VanTuyl is The Chronicle sports editor, but will soon be leaving to get a doctor’s degree at the University of Mount St. Helens in Bigfootology.
