Mosquitoes Big as Canned Hams

I’m terrified of bees. If there’s a bee within five yards of me and I am aware of it, I freak out like a tiny female child. When people see this, they usually have one of two reactions. They either assume that I am deathly allergic to bee stings and it is a matter of life and death if one is near me, or they just think I’m a pussy.

The truth is that when I was a small child, I watched as my mother was carried away by a giant bee. Not only that, but right afterwards, I got stung on the leg by a bee and it hurt like a sonovabitch. Really! Have you ever been stung? It sucks!

Popular culture is obsessed with how disgusting, creepy and weird insects are. Remember the flies in the Ring movies? How about the moths in Mama? Miniature monsters, some no bigger than a fingernail, covered with their crispy exoskeleton, crawling on, flying around, biting and annoying anything larger than they are.

Video games, like the fallout series, which takes place in a post apocalyptic world makes you fight giant bees and scorpions, mutated into raccoon-sized pests. The first two Bioshock titles gave the player the ability to drink a special drug and control a swarm of bees, sending them to sting and bite their enemies, distracting or killing them.

A few years after the disappearance of my mother I went on a camping trip with my father and a few friends in Missouri. The thought of mosquitoes as big as canned hams is more than a joke there. The bugs are fucking big, they wouldn't be able to comfortably land on you to feast. Each time they bite, it seems like they take a pint of blood, so three or four pricks and you could be a goner.

Bugs aren't just simple annoyances though, swarms of locusts can destroy a whole state’s worth of crops in a week. Enough termites and your house just might come crashing down around you. One tiny bug brought in on a boat from another country could cause havoc as far as crops and foliage is concerned. No wonder so many products are designed to rid our lives of these horrors.

I recall another lovely anecdote from my childhood that I bring you now. When I was young, I watched a movie where a giant spider destroys a town. The great thing about the movie was that you could clearly see the cart under the body that moved the spider ad the gears that made the legs move up and down. It was hilarious. It makes me think about how hard it is to represent such a reprehensible creature on film. Either bad computer generated graphics, bad makeup, bad delivery, something is always wrong with bugs in movies. Maybe it’s just because nothing i more horrible to us as the real terror that is insects.

Episode 21: Insects!

Meet the Beast: The gang talk insect movies including Arachnophobia, the Mist and Bug, and steroids in baseball.

Beast Duel: We play a new game called Dead Or Alive, and this week's Beast Duel: Antz vs. A Bug's Life.

Top 5 Scenes That Make Your Skin Crawl: We honor the octopus scene from Oldboy as our Hall Of Fame pick, Alain Delon is the best-looking version of Ron Swanson, and special guest Nely tells a story.

You Are Watching You

Remember the days when surveillance was difficult? Leg work was required to find out where your mark was at all times. You followed them around, you snooped through their things when they weren't around, trying to find out any little piece of information that could make your work and the overall reason for it, worth it.

Believe it or not, there was actually a time in history when having a camera pointed at you 24/7 was a bad thing. People feared the idea of someone they didn't know personally or at all watching them go about private things like eating, sleeping and bathing.

Yeah, I’m with you that shit is cray. Now everybody makes sure to upload their meals to tumblr, check in wherever they are, and update their friends, family and complete strangers with their every movement. Every time they update our phones and computers, they make it easier than ever to share, stream and upload our lives, second by second, step by step.

In the 2000's, cameras began being installed at intersections in major metropolitan areas all over the US. Of course, this made people freak out. Who could have access to these cameras? Would they be used for more than the red-light patrols they were explained away as? Is this the government overstepping their bounds and taking us one step closer to a police state where any wrongdoing is instantly punished?

Ask the people who have been fired from their jobs because they posted some nonsense on Facebook or Twitter and because they use their real name, they are held accountable for everything they say digitally in their irl lives.

Explain this to me, why does the government need to tap your phone and use drones to spy on you, when you willingly post everything about yourself to unprotected websites? So you know how easy it is to take away everything someone has by removing access to their Facebook page? All anyone needs is the email address of the account and they can create a new password in a matter of moments. Don’t you ever remember hearing all those stories in the news of [insert email provider here] being hacked and losing millions of users personal info? Yeah it happens all the time. How long until all those nudes you uploaded to share with one person are smeared across your grandmas timeline and you’re getting a call from your boss telling you to clean out your desk, they don’t need someone from their company posting pictures of themselves all over the interwebs?

So before you check in at McDonald’s and notify your stalker that you’re grabbing a quick cup of coffee, ask yourself why George Orwell didn't have an Instagram.

Episode 20: Big Brother

It's the Big Brother episode of the Beast Duels Radio Hour. Lock yourself in as we look at government conspiracies and control in films and possibly in real life.

Meet the Beast: The gang talk Big Brother, 1984 and what it's like to have rats on your face.

Beast Duel: The gang pose the question: Could R. P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest overthrow the government of 1984?

Top 5 Places You Wouldn't Want To Live: The gang talk dystopian societies they wouldn't want to live in and pay homage to the late, great Roger Ebert.

It Came From That Weird Guy's Basement

Have you ever walked out of your house and witnessed mayhem? Giant shoe prints smashed into the street. Homes partially knocked down. Your car smashed into a pancake of electronics and metal.

How had you slept through this? You marvel at the sheer panic and catastrophe as you yank your smartphone out of your pocket and pull up your favorite social networking site to see countless posts about a fifty foot tall robot destroying most of (insert town here).

The creature has since disappeared.

Come at me, bro!

Whether it’s a backyard inventor down the street, attempting to construct a machine to wash his car, do the laundry and change the channel on his TV, a psychotic engineer bent on world domination or a pervert who decided to mess around with the computer brain of his RealDoll, the danger of man-made inventions running amok and wiping man off the face of the earth is a totally realistic fear in our modern day society. In the real world, the cute, eighteen inch tall robot you see dancing on the morning news could actually end up being your taskmaster or your murderer one day. One moment you could be watching a showcase of a new robot designed to seamlessly cook, prepare and sell you a burger in under a minute, and the next you could be picking your teeth up off the floor and hear the screams of people watching the same machine carrying your girlfriend as it climbs the side of the Empire State building.

Ultimately, everything made by man does have the potential to be evil and destructive because that is the nature of man as well. Everything we have created to build and to better can be used to destroy and worsen anything around it.

Even with countless video games, movies, television shows, books and comics focusing on the extermination of the human race by out of control machines, I would assume that more of humanity is fearful of a zombie apocalypse than an all out war with machinery. I myself would say that one of those options is slightly more plausible in our current, technology driven age than the other. Rather than keeping your favorite crowbar or katana close by, I’d advise 24/7 access to a Super Soaker as a more reasonable preparation.

This guy is ready.

Of course, you could ignore this article as silly fantasy and go on with your life. But if one day you wake up to find your legs missing because your roomba ate them in your sleep, don’t come crying to me about it. You brought it all on yourself.

Episode 19: Man-Made Monsters

Join the Beast Duels Radio Hour as we talk about the world's most nefarious man-made creations. We talk Frankenstein and one of our favorite Korean flicks, The Host. Then we put the Host up against two unworthy adversaries in this week's Beast Duel. We cap it all off with our Top 5 Man-Made Monster Scenes Ever.

Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, email us at BeastDuels@gmail.com and check us out at facebook.com/BeastDuelsRadioHour for honorable mentions and more info on the show!

Five Reasons the Cleveland Torso Murders Were Mob Hits

Between 1935 and 1938, twelve dismembered, decapitated torsos were found in the Cleveland Flats. A few different suspects were tossed around at the time, but still today, there is no concrete evidence of who committed these crimes or why. After reading up on the case, I see it as a series of mob hits. Here are five reasons why I think so.

1. Unidentifiable Victims

Twelve corpses are considered to be the work of the same man or woman. Of those twelve, ten of them remain unidentified either because parts were never found or because what was recovered was a mess. That sounds like the mob’s MO to me. The mob originated things like cutting off the head and hands so if the corpse was discovered they wouldn’t be identified which would remove the link to the killer and the motive. It’s also a lot easier to transport and dispose of a body one piece at a time.

2. Hidden Pieces

The limbs, heads and bodies were discovered in lakes, swamps, boxcars and trash cans. “Hiding spots” have been used by the mafia for years. It’s a good strategy, make the pieces hard to find so maximum deterioration and decomposition can make a corpse unrecognizable. This is the second part of preventing identification, allowing the murderer to escape without anyone being able to track them.

3. Even More Bodies!

So I mentioned that there were twelve victims credited to this killer above. The truth is, there may be as many as forty victims stretching from Cleveland, through Youngstown and into Pittsburgh, all places where the Cleveland Mob operated during the time of the murders. Detective Peter Merylo says that some of these other twenty-eight victims may be prey of the same killer. Say a bigger man is spotted in the area where some of the corpses were discovered, why not send him to take care of some work in another town for a little while? He wasn’t updating his facebook status that the boss was sending him to take care of some factory workers back east.

4. Mob Problems

1935-1938, the timeframe of the twelve canonical murders of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was a very tumultuous time for the Cleveland Mafia. Not only was then current Don, Frank Milano fleeing to Mexico to avoid tax evasion charges, but his successor, Alfred Polizzi ended up being indicted on the same charge by the middle of the 1940’s. Could some of these victims have been used for small errands and hit jobs, then taken care of to avoid any loose lips or snitches?

5. Why Not?

for tours and sell out days in advanceIt’s fun to think everything is mob related. Come on, we live in America. We’re obsessed with the mafia here. Every year movies, television, comics and songs are made glorifying and vilifying the seedy underbelly of America’s Crime Families. If it wasn’t for our infatuation with the mob, Geraldo wouldn’t still be on television and Alcatraz Island wouldn’t charge thirty bucks a tickets .

Episode18: Mob Bosses!

The gang unleash the new studio with their episode on Mob Bosses. Join in as they talk about the best mob bosses in cinema, their strengths and how to defeat them.

Then, in this weeks Beast Duel, the guys figure out who would rise to the top first: Vito Corleone, Tony Montana or Frank Lucas.

Finally, the guys talk about their Top 5 Movie "Hits" Ever; those scenes in which people have pissed off the wrong guys and end up getting whacked. And we introduce our Hall of Fame pick this week with a legendary hit from The Godfather.