A lot of conspiracy-minded folks are a bit in a tizzy about a Weather Channel social media blitz today reminding people that we’re about to set our clocks back. The Weather Channel said to get used to eating dinner in the pitch black, along with the song “The Sound of Silence,” performed by Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon, playing in the background on their TikTok and other social media feeds.
It’s a poignant and stark reminder of the upcoming winter season and the time of darkness that we enter. But because we are who we are now, conspiracy theories are arising that The Weather Channel knows something we don’t. That they’re trying to prepare us for a mass blackout of the power grid or some sort of massive event in which people die by the millions due to darkness. Thrown in there for good measure is the Mountain Dew flavor Pitch Black, because apparently Mountain Dew may know something too.
Of course, the reality of the situation is that Daylight Saving Time ends on November 1, 2026, and we’re going to be setting our clocks back one hour. That means the sun will be setting earlier, the evenings will be darker, and many of us will be eating dinner with absolutely no sunlight coming through the windows. It’s something that happens every single year, and The Weather Channel seems to have simply found a rather melancholy and humorous way to remind everyone of it. There’s no evidence that they’re warning us about a massive power grid failure, an impending catastrophe, or the deaths of millions of people.
It’s interesting on social media, in the era we live in, you can’t do much without others reading way into things. A simple reminder about the clocks changing has somehow turned into a possible warning about the end of civilization. A song about silence suddenly becomes a clue, the words “pitch black” become a warning, and a Mountain Dew flavor somehow gets thrown into the mix as though the people making soft drinks are sitting on some sort of classified information about the future of humanity.
Perhaps if The Weather Channel warns us about eating dinner in bright light in the spring, people may worry it’s about an impending solar flare that will destroy the planet.
There is a certain sort of mundane horror of not knowing what images you appeared in.. and who the people are in the pictures that you have collected..
I have a bit of a ridiculous musing. I’m sure people have talked about this before, but it’s very interesting when you think about it.
Last night, just to pass some time on a fall evening, I went to a local theme park all decorated for Halloween. I snapped a couple of photos. One in particular got me thinking.
It was the Ferris wheel at the park.
When my son was younger, we would go there annually, and each year he would be dressed up in a different Halloween costume. Over the years, we accumulated a nice little collection of photographs of him in different Halloween outfits, all standing in front of that same Ferris wheel.
Here is one of my favorites!
So last night, being there alone, I snapped another photo.
Of course, I got a bit nostalgic and reminiscent about those years, how quickly time passes, and how things change.
But then I noticed something.
There were other people in my picture.
Other people dressed up for Halloween, some with elaborate facial makeup, others just families passing by, enjoying their own evening. And at that one particular moment, when I snapped that photo, those people became part of my phone’s photo collection.
I don’t know who they are. I will most likely never meet them or see them again for the rest of my life.
But I have their image.
And then I thought about something else. There were plenty of other people taking pictures and videos last night. So there’s a pretty good chance that somewhere, on somebody else’s phone, there’s a picture of me.
It’s strange when you think about it.
You really have no control over how many photographs of yourself exist.
You probably think you know most of the pictures you’ve ever been in. The ones you’ve taken yourself, the ones friends have shared with you, the family photographs, the school pictures, the weddings, the vacations.
But there are countless other photographs of you out there.
Maybe they’re stored on somebody’s phone. Maybe they’re sitting on an old thumb drive or computer, or they’re printed photographs tucked away in a scrapbook or a dusty photo album in someone’s attic. Somebody who may not even be alive anymore.
And there you are.
Standing in the background at a restaurant in 1997. Walking past a family posing for a picture at an amusement park in 2005. Sitting at a table behind a couple celebrating their anniversary. Maybe you’re just a blurry face in the crowd at a concert somebody attended 20 years ago.
For your entire life, in public places, you’ve been a background non-player character in somebody else’s story.
And the funny thing is, you’ve probably done the same thing to countless other people.
Think about all the pictures sitting on your phone right now. The vacations, the birthday parties, the weddings, the random photographs you snapped because something caught your eye.
How often have you actually looked at the people in the background?
Those people have entire lives. They have families, jobs, problems, celebrations, tragedies, memories, and stories of their own. Some of them may no longer be alive. Others may have been having the greatest day of their lives at the exact moment you took that picture.
Somebody else might have been having the worst.
And you’ll never know.
It’s almost a little haunting when you think about it. Somewhere out there, in a photograph you’ve never seen, you’re permanently frozen in a moment that meant absolutely nothing to you but perhaps meant everything to somebody else.
Maybe you were smiling. Maybe you were having a bad day. Maybe you were just walking by, completely unaware that someone had pressed a button and preserved that particular second of your existence forever.
So the next time you have a chance, take a peek at some of your old photographs. Look beyond the people you know. Look at those background players, whether they’re at a park, a restaurant, a wedding, or just walking down the street.
Look at their faces and ponder their stories.
Because all the photos you have of yourself tell a story of you, but little did you know, someone else’s story was playing out in your background.
Humperdinck revealed how he got rope and pre-planned revenge on a nurse..
The man is 90.. and he decided it was time to reveal something that the world never knew.. Also because of this, many people are just finding out that Humperdinck has a podcast!
On his show, he spoke about his time at Leicester’s Groby Road Hospital Sanatorium, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
When speaking about the treatments he endured, he described having “to stay on your back for I don’t know 8 weeks,” without attempting to sit up or “do anything strenuous,” in addition to getting “an injection with a needle about this big in your butt” every morning.
More..
“There was one lady nurse who was, I don’t think she liked me very much because of the injection that she gave me, she really hurt, and I used to scream at her and I used to ask for somebody else. They wouldn’t give me anybody else, but this lady was very bad, and she was really hurt, and I had big blue marks.”
After she continued to hurt him with every injection, Humperdinck thought to himself, “When I’m a little better I’m going to do something” and be a bit “mischievous” to get back at her.
“I said to my friend in the next bed, I said, ‘I’ve got to get some rope. I get some rope,'” he said. “So we got this rope, and when the nurse came around in the morning before doctor’s rounds, I got the nurse, grabbed her, tied her hands behind the back, put her in the empty bed next to us, covered her up.”
He said when the doctor came by for his rounds, “he knew that I was responsible for that..but he ignored it” and “just walked straight by.”
Humperdinck spent six months in the sanatorium after he started coughing up blood during a concert in Manchester. After initially receiving a diagnosis of “a bad throat infection,” his mom told the doctor ‘I’m not happy with that. Not when I see blood,’ and demanded an X-ray.
The new HULU documentary on the 2016 clown panic is fun but misses the mark on a few points.. Our review for your reading pleasure..
We wanted to like this.. but..
Remember 2016?
What a year of chaos it was. Between a contentious presidential election, growing political divisions, and the continued rise of social media, America was seemingly losing its collective mind.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, we had clowns and a lot of them.. Clowns lurking in the woods, clowns appearing alongside roads, clowns reportedly chasing people, and clowns allegedly threatening children and causing schools to go into lockdown.
It was a really weird moment in American pop culture, and now, a decade later, Hulu has decided to revisit the entire thing.
Clown Panic, directed by Ed Perkins and produced by Jonathan and Simon Chinn through their production company Lightbox, is a new documentary examining the great clown hysteria of 2016. It is certainly watchable, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
First, there’s an abundance of hardcore dramatizations that seem to be overdone for the moment. Sure, some of the encounters were genuinely frightening, and there were legitimate concerns at the time, but the documentary seems to want to make the situation more sinister than it actually was. The flashing strobe lights and loud out of no where sound effects… are a little too much..
There are some good parts, however, including interviews with people who claimed to have experienced clown encounters that year and police departments that attempted to investigate the reports.
There’s also a considerable amount of politicization of the clown situation. Sure, there’s always pop culture and geopolitics intertwined in moments in time, and 2016 was unquestionably a year of chaos that likely led to the clown situation becoming more chaotic. But this whole clown thing was not only relegated to communities that were disadvantaged, despite what the documentary seems to suggest. It happened in small towns, suburban communities, cities, and just about everywhere else. It wasn’t limited to one socioeconomic group or political persuasion.
And while I think there’s certainly an argument to be made that the political atmosphere of 2016 contributed to the hysteria, I don’t think the documentary really hits the nail on the head as to why the clown sightings themselves were ultimately political in nature. There’s a difference between something happening during a politically chaotic time and that something actually being political.
One interesting part of the documentary involves Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks, who talks about how the situation became much more serious once it started affecting our kids in schools. When schools began going into lockdown and parents were suddenly worried about clowns threatening their children, people really got up in arms. And understandably so.
The better aspect could have been a comparison of 2016 to the 1980s Satanic Panic …
How many of these clown sightings were actually real?
We know that some of them were. There were people dressing up as clowns and deliberately frightening others. There were arrests, criminal investigations, and even incidents involving threats against schools. But a considerable number of the original sightings were never substantiated, and some of the more frightening stories turned out to be completely fabricated.
In Greenville, South Carolina, where some of the earliest widely publicized reports involved clowns allegedly attempting to lure children into the woods, police investigated but couldn’t find evidence supporting the claims. Elsewhere, people were arrested for making false reports or issuing clown-related threats.
A lot of the videos that were reportedly organic at the time were most likely completely inorganic and created by content creators before content creating became the massive industry that it is today. People were beginning to understand that frightening someone, staging a bizarre encounter, and uploading the footage could generate thousands or even millions of views.
One of the earliest viral clown appearances, a character named Gags in Green Bay, Wisconsin, turned out to be a promotional stunt for a horror film. In other words, what appeared to be a mysterious clown lurking around a community was actually part of a manufactured publicity campaign.
Going to the panic of the 80s, that is where the real comparison remains..
During that period, people became convinced that satanic activity and elaborate conspiracies were occurring throughout American communities. Some people genuinely believed what they were reporting, others repeated rumors, and some allegations were simply fabricated. It made shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue.. The consequences of the Satanic Panic were obviously far more serious, but the way fear spread from one community to another has some similarities to what happened with the clowns in 2016. The Satanic Panic also in part gave us Marilyn Manson…
Fast forward to ’16: Some people really did see clowns. Others may have thought they saw clowns because they were already frightened by what they were seeing on television and social media. And perhaps others simply wanted to be part of something.
The idea that people wanted to be part of this national phenomenon, even if they weren’t. Maybe they wanted a little prestige or notoriety. Maybe they wanted to be interviewed by a local television station or have their story shared thousands of times on Facebook. Or maybe they just wanted to say something happened in their community because everyone else seemed to be experiencing it.
And suddenly, reporting a clown sighting, even if one never occurred, became a way to participate in this bizarre cultural moment.
That’s not to suggest that everyone who reported a clown was lying. Far from it. But when you combine genuine encounters, staged videos, fabricated reports, mistaken perceptions, and a population already on edge, you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a nationwide panic.
And social media was more than willing to help spread it.
There’s also the question of what actually happened to all these mysterious clowns. The truth is that there was never one grand investigation that solved the entire phenomenon. Some cases were resolved, some people were arrested, and other reports simply faded away without any evidence that a clown had ever been there in the first place.
The clown phenomenon DID NOT simply end in 2016!
While the documentary seemed to constrain the clown panic to one year, there have been random clown uprisings in the years since, although considerably lighter in nature. There were additional incidents in 2017, and in later years, including 2021 and 2023, clown-related rumors and frightening videos continued circulating online. Not all of these were new encounters, of course. Some were recycled footage, old stories, and outright misinformation.
The phenomenon also wasn’t exclusive to the United States. Countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand experienced their own clown scares during the original hysteria. In some ways, 2016 wasn’t necessarily the end of something but the beginning of a strange new chapter in internet folklore.
That is what this documentary misses.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the clown hysteria wasn’t the clowns themselves, but the people who were frightened by them, the people who created them, and the people who wanted to be part of the story whether they had actually experienced anything or not.
It was a fascinating example of how quickly something can spiral out of control when social media, mainstream media, public fear, and people looking for attention all come together.
All that being said, Clown Panic isn’t a bad documentary.
There are some genuinely interesting interviews, some good archival footage, and a few perspectives worth hearing. It’s also refreshing that someone decided to focus on a really weird moment in pop culture that seems to have been largely forgotten despite how much attention it received at the time.
I just think the documentary was so focused on finding a deeper political and sociological meaning behind the clown situation that it overlooked some of the more obvious explanations for why it became such a phenomenon.
Was it a reflection of the political chaos of 2016? Perhaps, at least in part.
But was it also a combination of staged videos, genuine pranks, social media notoriety, mass hysteria, and people who simply wanted to be part of something?
I think there’s a much stronger argument for that.
The real story of 2016 wasn’t that clowns were suddenly appearing everywhere. It was that Americans had become convinced they were..
For several days now the president of the United States has decided to post different AI videos of animals attacking human beings. Today he switched gears..
President Donald Trump sparked a wave backlash after posting an AI-generated video of himself wrestling and cuddling a tiger just hours after sharing real footage of a young British man being fatally mauled by one.
Trump first posted footage Tuesday from the attack at Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster, England, where 23-year-old William Chapman died after entering the enclosure of a tiger named Altai.
No, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that Lanmaoa asiatica opens a portal into the tiny-people dimension.. but what if it does!
Due to social media life cycles, a lot of people are constantly about Lanmaoa asiatica.. it all sounds completely made up until you realize.. it’s not.
It’s a mushroom eaten in southwestern China, particularly Yunnan Province, where it’s known as jian shou qing. Apparently it’s delicious.
There’s just one small problem.
You better cook the thing long enough.. if you don’t, you might start seeing little people.
And this isn’t just a hallucinogenic mushroom that makes people see random things. We’re not talking about the usual psychedelic experience — colors changing, walls breathing, strange patterns appearing or somebody seeing a dragon dancing across the ceiling.
No.
Little people. Like the smurfs..
Tiny humanlike figures have been reported walking across plates. Climbing furniture. Marching around rooms. Going underneath doors. Sometimes dozens or even hundreds of them, apparently existing right there alongside the normal world.
They’re known as Lilliputian hallucinations, named after the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels.
People in Yunnan are so familiar with what can happen when these mushrooms aren’t properly cooked that making sure they’re thoroughly prepared is simply part of eating them. Researchers have described restaurants where timers are used before the mushrooms can be eaten, with diners being warned about what could happen if they don’t wait long enough.
Hospitals in the region have treated mushroom poisoning cases involving these hallucinations, and researchers have documented this strangely specific recurring experience.
If ten people took some random hallucinogenic drug, ten wildly different experiences might be expected. One person sees geometric patterns. Somebody sees a dragon. Somebody thinks the ceiling is melting.
But with this mushroom, one particular theme keeps showing up:
Little people.
Not everyone who becomes sick from the mushroom sees them, so that part shouldn’t be exaggerated. But among people who experience hallucinations, reports of tiny humanlike figures have appeared often enough that researchers have specifically taken notice.
Which brings us to the completely scientifically irresponsible portion of today’s program.
What if the mushroom isn’t making people see things that aren’t there?
What if it’s temporarily allowing people to see something that’s.. already there?
Maybe somewhere beside ordinary human perception — fourth dimension, fifth dimension, sixth dimension, take your pick — thousands of tiny people are going about their tiny lives while completely unaware that we’re here.
And every once in a while somebody in Yunnan doesn’t cook the mushrooms long enough, looks down at the kitchen table and suddenly realizes:
No, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that Lanmaoa asiatica opens a portal into the tiny-people dimension.
But until scientists figure out exactly what is happening inside the human brain when this mushroom is eaten undercooked — and why such strangely similar imagery keeps being reported —
Some of us who hate modern decor now have a health reason to oppose it!
Welcome to a real horror: Modern decor may be causing more harm than good!
A large team of researchers from institutions across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and Canada has published a detailed review arguing that visual discomfort, the headaches, eye strain, nausea, and perceptual distortions that some people experience in response to certain visual stimuli, has a measurable, physical basis in the brain. The paper, published in the journal Vision, pulls together decades of research across neuroscience, architecture, lighting design, and psychology to build a unified theory of why some things are so hard to look at, and what can be done about it.
It argues that the human brain evolved to process the natural world efficiently. When it’s forced to handle the highly repetitive, artificially sharp, and often flickering patterns that dominate modern urban environments — think fluorescent-lit offices, car headlights, striped acoustic panels, or the dense text of a printed page — the researchers argue it may drive greater neural activity than it should, potentially placing excessive demands on the visual cortex.
That metabolic overload, they hypothesize, may be what triggers discomfort, and in people with pattern-sensitive epilepsy, it can provoke seizures.
We are trying our best to make logical sense of this one.. but we keep failing to comprehend.
Retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward provided expert analysis on the US-Iran standoff on Fox News .. While appearing on the segment, Harward suggested that President Donald Trump had time on his side and was leveraging both the blockade and sanctions to put pressure on Iran.
But no one really listened to him since his appearance sparked speculation that he was wearing a mask.
But seriously..
Here is the full video from the Fox News YOUTUBE page..
Note that comments have been turned off..
It is just weird. I have no idea what we are looking at.. and you don’t either.
A logical part of your brain could say it was a medical issue.. bad makeup.. a necklace.
Or the long standing conspiracy that people just wear masks is right..
Mainstream media outlets around the world have already admitted that advanced mask technology is real and boast that most people can’t even tell the difference between who they’re watching.
Watch this psychologist remove his disguise mask and reveal his true face.
There are some folks who believe there is a logical explanation for this…
I think I figured out the Robert Harward “CIA mask” thing.
I was doing some cross comparison between other interviews…
As I was scrolling back-and-forth at the apparent shadow being cast by the apparent “CIA mask” in his neck, it became clear that the shadow was mirroring his… pic.twitter.com/jb7JQSHjY2
