QUOTE
The skinny on Alabama& Big Foot
Huntsville Times - Sunday, May 31, 2009
November 2008, Morgan County: "Ohio-howl type vocalization for several hours in early morning near Lacey's Spring."
December 2007, Franklin County: "Deer hunter hears possible vocalization and watches a tall dark figure near Russellville."
Those are two of the most recent reports from the archives of Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which tracks the national movements of the 10-foot, ape-like creature Big Foot. BFRO's record of Alabama sightings stretches back to April 1938 in Calhoun County, as reported in a newspaper article headlined "Hairy Wild Man Sought in Swamp."
On closer inspection of the septuagenarian record listing 55 Big Foot sightings, I couldn't help but notice the 80 percent decline in eyewitness reports over the past year - from 18 listings in 2007 to only four in 2008.
What could be the cause of this sudden drop, I wondered. The first thing that came to mind was the environment. Could that omnivorous, 500-pound "thing" known as Big Foot be an endangered species because of global warming? I set out to solve this hulking mystery.
Last month, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine blamed obesity for climate change. They concluded in a study that every overweight person is responsible for an extra ton per year of carbon dioxide through his or her respiration and the production of extra food to feed that person.
"Moving about in a heavy body is like driving a gas guzzler. The heavier our bodies become the harder it is to move in them," proclaimed the medicine men. According to the report contained in the current edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology, high rates of obesity cause up to one billion extra tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. The globe's fattening population needs 19 percent more food for its energy requirements.
That's an embarrassing statistic for Alabamians.
Here's the skinny: By CDC measurements, Alabama in the past four years moved from the No. 1 fattest state in the nation down to third place, with heavyweight champion Mississippi now at the top, followed by West Virginia in second place. Louisiana is rapidly gaining on the Cotton State to take the bronze. By anyone's reckoning, that's a lot of CO2 dispensed into the atmosphere, albeit Alabama's share is comparatively shrinking.
Diet programs are based on intake and burning of calories, metric units of food energy released as heat to run our bodies.
Calories exhausted into the atmosphere are relatively benign compared to carbons. Where the accumulation of carbons causes a greenhouse effect trapping heat, super-heated calories rise above it all, settling in the thermosphere in the layer where the space shuttle orbits. There is speculation certain shuttle propulsion maneuvers create an ozone hole, dumping calories onto neighboring states, such as Mississippi and Louisiana.
Fortunately for corpulent Alabamians, there are calorie burning programs to take your breadth away. The most visible is the 10-week Scale Back Alabama statewide campaign held the first of each year to encourage the population to get healthier by losing weight and exercising.
That takes me to the two-foot footprint of bubba Sasquatch. The reduction in Big Foot sightings is not for environmental reasons or the rumor that Al Gore ceased roaming the Alabama foothills of the Appalachians in hairy disguise to warn of global warming.
I conclude that the success of Alabama's weight reduction programs has expanded to include Big Foot, now a bony caricature of a creature that hardly anybody notices anymore. So, if you hear an Ohio howl on your next walk in the woods, it's most probably one of hunger.
Don Palmer of Madison is one of The Times' community columnists for 2009.
Huntsville Times - Sunday, May 31, 2009
November 2008, Morgan County: "Ohio-howl type vocalization for several hours in early morning near Lacey's Spring."
December 2007, Franklin County: "Deer hunter hears possible vocalization and watches a tall dark figure near Russellville."
Those are two of the most recent reports from the archives of Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which tracks the national movements of the 10-foot, ape-like creature Big Foot. BFRO's record of Alabama sightings stretches back to April 1938 in Calhoun County, as reported in a newspaper article headlined "Hairy Wild Man Sought in Swamp."
On closer inspection of the septuagenarian record listing 55 Big Foot sightings, I couldn't help but notice the 80 percent decline in eyewitness reports over the past year - from 18 listings in 2007 to only four in 2008.
What could be the cause of this sudden drop, I wondered. The first thing that came to mind was the environment. Could that omnivorous, 500-pound "thing" known as Big Foot be an endangered species because of global warming? I set out to solve this hulking mystery.
Last month, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine blamed obesity for climate change. They concluded in a study that every overweight person is responsible for an extra ton per year of carbon dioxide through his or her respiration and the production of extra food to feed that person.
"Moving about in a heavy body is like driving a gas guzzler. The heavier our bodies become the harder it is to move in them," proclaimed the medicine men. According to the report contained in the current edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology, high rates of obesity cause up to one billion extra tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. The globe's fattening population needs 19 percent more food for its energy requirements.
That's an embarrassing statistic for Alabamians.
Here's the skinny: By CDC measurements, Alabama in the past four years moved from the No. 1 fattest state in the nation down to third place, with heavyweight champion Mississippi now at the top, followed by West Virginia in second place. Louisiana is rapidly gaining on the Cotton State to take the bronze. By anyone's reckoning, that's a lot of CO2 dispensed into the atmosphere, albeit Alabama's share is comparatively shrinking.
Diet programs are based on intake and burning of calories, metric units of food energy released as heat to run our bodies.
Calories exhausted into the atmosphere are relatively benign compared to carbons. Where the accumulation of carbons causes a greenhouse effect trapping heat, super-heated calories rise above it all, settling in the thermosphere in the layer where the space shuttle orbits. There is speculation certain shuttle propulsion maneuvers create an ozone hole, dumping calories onto neighboring states, such as Mississippi and Louisiana.
Fortunately for corpulent Alabamians, there are calorie burning programs to take your breadth away. The most visible is the 10-week Scale Back Alabama statewide campaign held the first of each year to encourage the population to get healthier by losing weight and exercising.
That takes me to the two-foot footprint of bubba Sasquatch. The reduction in Big Foot sightings is not for environmental reasons or the rumor that Al Gore ceased roaming the Alabama foothills of the Appalachians in hairy disguise to warn of global warming.
I conclude that the success of Alabama's weight reduction programs has expanded to include Big Foot, now a bony caricature of a creature that hardly anybody notices anymore. So, if you hear an Ohio howl on your next walk in the woods, it's most probably one of hunger.
Don Palmer of Madison is one of The Times' community columnists for 2009.
