BLOTCHZILLA

The hot summer months are traditionally known as “slow news” days in the journalism business. But newspaper writers are paid to write so that partially explains how so many “non news” and downright lies and hoaxes have crept into our history.

Take for example H.L. Menken’s “A Neglected Anniversary.” It was published in the New York Evening Mail in 1917. He claimed that the bathtub had been introduced into the United States in 1842, the first ones having been made of mahogany lined with lead.

He wrote that the bathtub was greatly opposed by most Americans until President Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House in 1850, making it more broadly acceptable. The article was entirely false as Menken himself later admitted:

“The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity ... Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”

As recently as 2008 a Kia TV ad referenced the story with no mention of its fictional nature.

I sincerely believe that in this era of “over educated sophomores for life” population there has never been a better time for hoaxes. So now is our chance for CHS54 to make the history books.

Blotchzilla creeping over the horizon of Mars (top middle)

The mars robot successfully landed only days ago and already there’s talk of a mystery “blotch” just above the skyline of the first image of the red planet that appeared only on the first picture sent back to earth from “Curiosity.”

It had disappeared from all other pictures subsequently received on earth.

(cue Twilight theme)

Close up of Blotchzilla

It is my pleasure as humble webmaster of CHS54.NET to announce that using a propriatary technology
known as "Wildcat Imaging" we have captured  the first high resolution picture of  Blotchzilla.

"Face" on Mars

Blotchzilla  now joins the mysterious "Face" on Mars captured by the ROVER Robot in the annals of Martian literature.

Now, on to the next mystery:

Some of us may be in this picture  from the early '50's but
WHERE WAS IT?

I don't know, do you?

-Ed