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Lyle Zapato

Tree Octopus Mural In Spokane

Lyle Zapato | 2019-02-25.8530 LMT | Art | Cephalopods | Cascadia | Nature

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).

Lyle Zapato

Ajooba Kudrat Kaa: Yeti I Love You!

Lyle Zapato | 2015-01-02.9580 LMT | Entertainment | Retro

Happy New Year again! Here's a 1991 Bollywood film called Ajooba Kudrat Kaa (English: The Magnificent Guardian) about a young girl, Sasha, who befriends a Yeti and helps save him from yetinappers. Skip ahead to 1:06 in the clip above for the song and dance number, "Yeti I Love You!"

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Lyle Zapato

Woodrow Wilson In The Clamp Of A Yeti

Lyle Zapato | 2015-01-01.0000 LMT | Simulacra | Politics | Retro

Happy New Year! Here's US President Woodrow Wilson being delimbed by a Yeti with the help of a knight monster (representing the Cotton Trust and the Steel Trust, respectively), by Rudolf Herrmann, from a cover of Die Muskete (1916-03-30), an Austrian humor weekly.

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Lyle Zapato

Why There Are No Tree Octopuses On Okinawa

Lyle Zapato | 2011-05-15.6920 LMT | Cephalopods | Art | Nature

Unlike here in Cascadia where octopuses live in the trees and are preyed upon by Sasquatch, on Okinawa, hominoids are arboreal and fear octopuses.

Three scared Kijimuna in banyan trees, menacing octopus in water below.

The above painting by Matthew Meyer -- part of his A-Yokai-A-Day series that you can buy as a print -- depicts Kijimuna in trees fearful of an octopus threatening to climb up after them.

Kijimuna (キジムナー) are a species of arboreal island hominoids native to Okinawa. Their diminutive size compared to Sasquatch, Yeti, etc. is probably a result of insular dwarfism and their partial baldness a likely adaptation to the subtropical climate. They live mostly in banyan trees, but will venture onto the ground to go fishing or interact with Humans. Human-Kijimuna relations have been strained in the past due to arson and flatulence. Human Okinawans often accuse Kijimuna of mischievousness, but this is probably Human chauvinism; we rarely get to hear the Kijimuna viewpoint in Okinawan media. (For more on Kijimuna, see Chicago Okinawa Kenjinkai's Kijimuna page or the Japanese Wikipedia.)

But what's the deal with the octopus? In his blog post about his painting, Meyer partially explains:

One final fact of note about kijimuna — they loathe octopuses! I am so far unable to discover why they hate them so much, but the lowly octopus is the one thing they cannot stand. Kijimuna will avoid them at all costs, so keeping octopuses around is a fairly foolproof way for humans to avoid potential kijimuna-related troubles.

I think Meyer has inadvertently shown in his painting the reason for octopusophobia among Kijimuna: a dispute over territory and resources.

As I have noted before (see: "The Ara-Eaters: Tree Octopuses Of Polynesia" and "Nicharongorong: Tree Octopuses of Micronesia"), octopuses in the South Pacific are drawn to trees, and many have adopted arboreal or semi-arboreal lifestyles. On Okinawa, this arboreal niche has already been occupied by the Kijimuna, denying octopuses there the "green embrace" they so desire.

Octopuses are persistent and determined creatures. They would simply not abide not being able to tentaculate through the banyans, nibbling on the figs. (Athenæus in his Deipnosophistae relates that besides olive trees Mediterranean octopuses [polypus] "have also been discovered clinging to such fig-trees as grow near the seashore, and eating the figs, as Clearchus tells us, in his treatise on those Animals which live in the Water." [Source.] Presumably Pacific octopuses would likewise be fond of banyan figs.) Octopuses are also greedy (a trait noted in Japanese culture -- see: Kure Kure Takora), so sharing the trees is not an option.

Kijimuna, hanging as they are in the way of the octopuses' sense of Arboreal Manifest Destiny, would surely attract octopodous belligerence. It's not unreasonable to assume that centuries, perhaps millennia, of stealthy attacks and attempted incursions into their trees would have instilled in the Kijimuna a healthy, and justified, paranoia about octopuses.

Lyle Zapato

"In The Lair Of The Space Monsters"

Lyle Zapato | 2011-03-28.7910 LMT | Cephalopods | Hollow Earth | Retro | Entertainment
Lyle Zapato

The TRUTH About The Tree Octopus

Lyle Zapato | 2011-02-10.8908 LMT | Cephalopods | General Paranoia | Technology

The Mainstream Media wants you to ignore the Internet and listen only to their lies. That's why they want you to believe absurdities like that tree octopuses don't exist or that Belgium does. And who is behind all this? Bill Gates and the moneyed pharmocrats. Judy101101 -- who apparently has melded with the Internet to become one continuous YouTube monologue -- explains:

Meanwhile, METAtropolis: CASCADIA continues to prove itself a prophetic work as Erin of Snarke pleads with the august body of Science to invent a tree octopus that she can have as a pet:

Rest assured, Erin, that ZPi's Sasquatch biotechnicians are hard at work reverse engineering the tree octopus genome so we can not only provide Sasquatch and the international hominoid market with ample, uninterrupted, ethically-neutral supplies of vat-grown tree-octopus meat, but also the Human market with the cutest, most telomere-stable tree-octopus clones science can abomineer. (Unfortunately we've had a few setbacks since Sasquatch hair keeps getting in the Petri dishes, contaminating the results, and our focus-grouping showed no market interest for howling, hairy tree-megapuses.)

Lyle Zapato

Review: Spooky Washington

Lyle Zapato | 2010-10-24.8380 LMT | Cascadia | Cephalopods | Paraterrestrials | Entertainment
Spooky Washington by S.E. Schlosser

Spooky Washington: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore is part of the Spooky series by S.E. Schlosser, which collects Schlosser's retellings of ghost stories and folklore from around North America. This entry is all about the Cascadian prefecture of Washington. There are 26 short stories in total -- all assigned to a particular town, city, county, mountain, region, etc. -- and each is illustrated with a scratchboard drawing by Paul G. Hoffman.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, "Ghost Stories", is obviously all about ghosts. In general I don't find ghosts all that interesting (so-called "spectral phenomena" are usually just psychotronically induced hallucinations caused by malfunctioning mind-control devices or standing resonance waves -- deflector beanies will keep them from bothering you), so I wasn't that captivated by these stories. Your mileage may vary. (Spoilers ahead, but these all contain well-worn ghost-story tropes you'll see coming a mile away.)

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Lyle Zapato

... And An Octopus In A Christmas Tree

Lyle Zapato | 2008-12-26.2760 LMT | Cephalopods | Nature | Cascadia

James from Seattle/Olympia writes in with a discovery he made in his Christmas tree:

2008-12-25: "Pacific NW Xmas tree Octopus"

Just letting you know, we spotted this adventurous tree octopi feeling particularly festive.

Xmas Tree Octopus

Sometimes tree octopuses hitch a ride in Christmas trees harvested from farms on the Olympic Peninsula. When its tree is being jostled violently, a tree octopus will hunker down deep inside the branches near the trunk and camouflage itself to look like bark. This is a defensive mechanism to protect it from wind storms and sasquatch trying to shake octopuses to the ground. They may stay hidden like this for days after a particularly violent shaking, such as experienced by Christmas trees when they are chopped down and transported.

Many octopuses have a natural instinct to decorate their lairs with attractive baubles, and O. paxarbolis is no exception. When it finally comes out of hiding and explores its tree, finding it covered in shiny ornaments and sparkly lights, it will become so mesmerized by the baublely abundance that it'll hardly notice that its tree is sitting in some human's living room.

Scandinavian immigrants considered it good luck to find a tree octopus in their Christmas tree. Granted, that's because they like to eat them. But for us more enlightened cephalopodophiles, we can consider it a sign of good luck that the species hasn't yet gone extinct.

And to keep it that way, please remember to remove any octopuses you find before disposing of your Christmas tree. They can be put in a shoe box -- with a bit of moist branch to make them feel comfortable and some tinsel to keep them distracted -- and taken to your nearest chapter of the Friends of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus for reintroduction into the wild.

Radical Sasquatch

HOWL: HUMANS KEEP DEAD HOMINOID IN FREEZER!!!

Radical Sasquatch | 2008-08-13.1150 LMT

HUMANS HAVE A DECEASED HOMINOID AND THEY PLAN TO SHOW ITS CORPSE TO OTHER HUMANS THIS FRIDAY DURING A GHASTLY "NEWS CONFERENCE"!!!

Humans MATTHEW WHITTON and RICK DYER claim they found the Hominoid victim already dead in NORTHERN "GEORGIA" (this is the Human name for an area in the SWAMP APE STOMPING GROUNDS, not the other area Humans also call "GEORGIA" in the ALMASTY FEDERATION -- HUMAN SQUEAK IS LIMITED SO THEY MUST CONFUSINGLY REUSE NAMES!!!) Instead of reporting the corpse to the PROPER SWAMP APE AUTHORITIES, they took it to their den and, like HUMAN PSYCHOPATHS often do, put it in a "FREEZER" -- a SMALL, COLD BOX that Humans use to store FROZEN FOOD!!!

They then contacted known CRYPTOPERVERT and SASQUATCH STALKER, TOM BISCARDI, seeking to publicize the event to other CRYPTOPERVERTS and HUMAN SICKOS who want to LEER AT OUR DEAD!!! They have even CRUELLY AND SHAMELESSLY released photos of the victim IN THE FREEZER!!!

I LACK SUFFICIENT HOWLS TO CONVEY MY OUTRAGE!!!

The IDENTITY and TRIBALALITY of the deceased is UNKNOWN, as is the CAUSE OF DEATH, but I suspect HOMINOIDICIDE!!!

SASQUATCH MILITIA has offered its services to the local Swamp Ape authorities in recovering the body, which the CRYPTOPERVERTS claim is being held in a "secure location, under armed guard"! If, once the body's location is known, it cannot be recovered, it -- AND ANY HUMANS IN THE VICINITY -- will be given a PROPER BURIAL under a MOUNTAIN OF BOULDERS!!!

UPDATE (2008-08-19): I have just heard howl that the Humans who have the corpse are now claiming that IT WAS ALL A HOAX!!! I, for one, DO NOT BELIEVE THIS CLAIM!!! MATTHEW WHITTON, RICK DYER, and TOM BISCARDI foolishly misjudged the reaction from the Sasquatch community to their STEALING OUR DEAD and are now trying to cover it all up to avoid SASQUATCH RAGE!!! Sasquatch Militia foot soldiers have been deployed to Georgia since last week in search of the Humans' CORPSE CACHE so that the deceased may be recovered and returned to his or her loved ones, and the guilty Humans BROUGHT TO JUSTICE!!! But now the Humans are on the lam and spreading unlikely rumors that the corpse was just a FUR SUIT of some sort! Why would they flee if it wasn't a REAL corpse!? THEIR FLEEING CLEARLY SHOWS THAT THEY ARE GUILTY OF HOMINOID CORPSE SNATCHING, OR POSSIBLY WORSE!!!

CORPSE SNATCHERS, HEAR MY HOWL!!! Return the deceased Hominoid to the Sasquatch Militia or local Swamp Ape authorities and you may yet get out of this with YOUR LIMBS INTACT!!!

WE ONLY SEEK CLOSURE!!!

Lyle Zapato

Michael Menkin Offers Aid To The Welsh

Lyle Zapato | 2008-07-20.5120 LMT | Paraterrestrials | Mind Control | Fashion

My colleague frienemy in the fight against alien mind control, Michael Menkin -- the inventor of the thought screen helmet, a Velostat-based technology that blocks the non-psychotronic telepathic communication used by paraterrestrials from the Reticulum constellation -- has offered his help to beleaguered Wales, where UFO sightings have become commonplace. Menkin's thought screen helmets (instructions for which he offers for free on his site,) will prevent the Welsh from being abducted by the UFOs, a risk that is increasing daily:

Mr Menkin said given the level of UFO activity over Wales, people should make a thought screen. He said: "The people in Wales will benefit by making their own helmets.

"Everybody would be a lot safer if they had one in the house. There seems to have been more reports (of UFOs) lately in Wales and Scotland and the western half of the British Isles."

Unfortunately, it seems that Reticulan agents and/or mind-control victims have already infiltrated local ufological groups and are spreading FUD against thought screen technology:

But Margaret Fry, of the Welsh Fellowship of Ufologists, dismissed the thought screens as "ridiculous".

Mrs Fry, from Abergele, in North Wales, said: "I have seen UFOs, but I don't believe in crackpot ideas like this.

"It's ridiculous. People in the Welsh Federation have been investigating UFOs for 40 years and none of us subscribes to this nonsense."

Meanwhile, the local hominoid community has offered its support of Menkin's foreign aid work. "THE WELSH ARE MINE!!!" howled Brenin Llwyd, from Cader Idris, in North Wales. "IF SILLY HATS KEEP PUNY HAIRLESS GREY SKY-THIEVES AWAY, SILLY HATS THE WELSH SHALL HAVE!!!" Brenin Llwyd went on to announce that he will begin canvassing Snowdonia, handing out informative fliers explaining the UFO abduction risk, as well as the construction and use of thought screen helmets. He will also continue to abduct children for safe keeping until the Welsh can properly defend themselves.