MICHAEL PHELPS: SASQUATCH

Could anything be more obvious? Apropos of our previous post, Bigfeet walk the world in the guise of regular humans, exhibiting certain glaring traits that make it clear that they're not all they seem. In the case of Olympic water-splasher Michael Phelps, who this past weekend won the world record for most gold medals at a single Olympics (answer: eight or so), the signs could not be clearer. The freakish metabolism, the lanky, newly clean-shaven frame, the outsized ears that could give someone a black eye if they're standing next to him when he removes his swim cap: these are all telltale signs of the Sasquatch. The so-called corpse touted by Georgian crackpots may have been a hoax, but the living thing was more triumphant than ever before as it was broadcast via every possible medium to a worldwide audience.

If the physical characteristics are not enough to convince a hardened skeptic, we would merely like to point out the savage beating administered by Phelps to the former world's record holder, Marc Spits, during a celebratory U.S. Swim Team event in Beijing on Sunday. While most commentators used the occasion to refer to Phelps as a "sore winner," they were merely ignorant of the ancient Sasquatch tradition of respectfully bloodying a vanquished enemy in honor of a nobly fought battle. Though most latter-day Bigfeet find private or largely symbolic ways to embody this ritual, some occasionally fail to keep their ancestral spirit under wraps - just witness Edward R. Murrow's berserk 1954 attack on Joseph McCarthy, in which the Senator from Wisconsin fractured a leg, lost part of his left ear, and had his appendix forcibly removed by Murrow's subtly clawed hand.

This of course begs a question that has haunted Apocryphists for many generations: what if Bigfeet were to rise up as one to overthrow the governments of the world? On this front we are happy to set the reader's mind at ease - unlike their evil counterparts in hidden pervasiveness, the Vikings, Bigfeet are largely peaceful creatures who want nothing more than to excel in a human's world. They are not leaders by nature, but rather mavericks that prefer using their free time to retreat into the nature from which they arose and uprooting trees for use as backscratchers, rather than planning any kind of power grab or coup.

However, this brings up a far more intriguing possibility: what if the Bigfeet were to rise up against the Vikings in a subterranean war of strange proportions? Could this secret battle be waged beneath our noses even today, in the guise of world political events? Were there any Vikings working behind the scenes in Beijing to undermine Phelps' record streak of wins? And will Phelps and his fellow Sasquatches band together to enact bloody revenge for this attempted slight?

Only time will tell. But until then, the answer is: almost certainly yes.

FROM BAD TO NORSE

The dearth of recent news stories on the subject of Vikings is a troubling trend that we feel obligated to address. Most people consider Vikings to be little more than a bygone race of Scandinavian sea pirates that roamed Western Europe a thousand or so years ago before their reign of sack and pillage was brought to an end by the mass embrace of Christianity in their home region. These people are dangerously deluded, in dire need of being smacked around, shouted at, and quite possibly spat upon.

One of the primary misconceptions of the modern world is that the Viking menace is past. The truth is that there is a direct line of descent between Vikings and modern terrorists. Bereft of their dragon-hulled battleships, many of them migrated inland. Some wound up in Middle East, where they have stoked havoc for nearly a millennium. Others sat around in Central Europe scratching their asses until the circumstances were promising for Fascism. Still others wrote operas about Vikings, in which Viking stories were sung in Viking costume by Viking singers. But despite the fatness and femininity of some of these performers, their singing did not spell the end of the Viking era. In fact, Vikings continue, in their guises of regular, everyday people, to have a profound impact on the workings of recent history.

As such, please study, memorize, and tremble in fear of this list of "Five Events in Recent History That Were Actually Caused By Vikings - Yes, Vikings!"

1. THE BOER WAR - When a group of Edwardian Vikings decided that they wanted to terrorize the Southern Hemisphere for a change, they went straight to South Africa and subjugate the British, who were in turn subjugating the Dutch Boers, who were in turn subjugating the Zulus, who were in turn subjugating the lions, who were in turn subjugating the giraffes, who were in turn subjugating the the mimosa trees, who were in turn pretty much screwed. There were no victors.

2. COMMUNISM - Originally a shiny, happy philosophical system of shared resources and equality devised by the world's first hippie, Carl Marks, Communism could very well have served as a solution to the world's ills were it not for the Vikings who secretly overthrew the Russian Revolution and decided that it would be a lot more fun to kill millions of people and turn the verdant greenlands of Siberia into a crappy prison camp.

3. THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL - Vikings have a known propensity to disguise themselves as corrupt politicians and sabotage the system from within. During the reign of President Harden G. Warning, whose cabinet was lousy with them, Vikings accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from the tea lobby in exchange for the promise to affix a giant handle and spout to the Capitol building in Washington, DC. (In a planned double-cross, these accoutrements would, at the final moment, be replaced with classic Viking horns that would cast their pointy shadows across the Mall for generations to come.) When the scheme was discovered, the Vikings were unceremoniously kicked out of Washington until the next President was sworn in.

4. ISHTAR - Unhappy about their portrayal in such historical films as Erik the Red-Faced, Kill All the Vikings! and Wild Strawberries, the Vikings decided to strike Hollywood in its most tender part: the money. Infiltrating the studio establishment, secret Viking producers created a bizarre proposal for a buddy comedy starring the aging comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who play songwriters at the ancient temple of the Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, Ishtar. Though the film fared poorly at the box office, it failed to destroy the entertainment-industrial complex of the United States, as originally intended.

5. 9/11 - What were those deadly airplanes if not Viking vessels of fearmongering and attempted conquerment? Sure, they didn't have dragons emblazoned on the front, but that was merely practical - the Viking-descended members of Al-Qaeda would have loved nothing more than to paint some scary teeth onto the noses of those jets, only by doing so they would have been caught before liftoff.

And what are they up to right now? It is believed that a group of Vikings has joined the Steampunkerism movement's attempts to revive the corpse of Queen Victoria, in the hopes that a new British Empire would give them something more interesting to conquer than the amateur crap being thrown down by the current United States government. Of course, the Viking scourge has grown so diffuse in the generations since its acme that it is difficult to imagine them banding together and traumatizing the world en masse. Still, Viking sleeper cells are present in every nation of the world, and it is only a matter of time before one of them dons their ceremonial helmets, drinks an assload of grog, and starts swinging a battle-axe at your friends and relations. Look sharp!