A police officer pulled me over and asked, “Is everything okay, sir?”

I told him it was, then asked, “Why?”

He explained, “The way your were moving around in your seat, I thought you were have a problem.”

The squad made their way across the open desert.  Progress was achingly slow as the lone mine-sweeping operator encountered partially buried objects that he couldn’t identify.

“What the hell are they, L-T?” the Sergeant asked the new Lieutenant.

Shaking his head from side to side, the L-T responded, “I have no frickin’ idea.”

Sarge added, “Crazy as it sounds, they kinda remind me of desiccating whale carcasses.”

“Way the hell out here in no-man’s land?” the L-T challenged, “Don’t be…”

That’s when Muffin, the family’s house cat, buried the green plastic figures – along with its fresh turd – in the litter-box.

Ingersoll Lockwood, an author and lawyer, published several works between 1890 and 1896, including two children’s books and a dystopian novel.

“The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger” (1898) and “Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey” (1893) feature a young protagonist named Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, known as Little Baron Trump. Little Baron embarks on fantastical adventures across dimensions with dog Bulger and guided by Don Fum.

The tales bear striking parallels to our modern world, particularly in the context of the Trump family.

Little Baron Trump hails from a wealthy New York family residing in Trump Castle on 5th Avenue. It mirrors the Trump history, with Donald Trump and his son Barron once living in Trump Tower on 5th Avenue.

Lockwood’s final work, “1900: Or The Last President,” opens with violent protests in New York City after a polarizing outsider wins the 1896 presidency. The depiction of social unrest and the mention of the Fifth Avenue Hotel resonate with contemporary events surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency.

“That was a terrible night for the great City of New York—the night of Tuesday, November 3rd, 1896,” the book opens. “The city staggered under the blow like a huge ocean liner which plunges, full speed, with terrific crash into a mighty iceberg, and recoils shattered and trembling like an aspen.”

For reference, the presidential election in 1896 was between Former Governor William McKinley, the Republican nominee, who defeated former Representative William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee, following the Panic of 1893, and the political realignment that began the Fourth Party System in which political reform across the United States focused on defeating corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency.

Other Ingersoll books included Transparent Folk and the Rattlebrains, The Extraordinary Experiences of Little Captain Dopplekop on the Shores of Bubblehead (1892), and Wonderful Deeds and Doings of Little Giant Boab and His Talking Raven Tabib (1891.)

John Trump, Donald Trump’s uncle, also played a role in this narrative. An engineer at MIT during Nikola Tesla’s era, and was enlisted by the federal government to decipher Tesla’s notes after his passing.

Tesla is well-known today for his interest in time travel.

In 1895, while working on the time-space problem, he was nearly electrocuted to death by a machine involved in the experiment and reportedly succeeded, telling an assistant: “I could see the past, present, and future all at the same time.”

In 1943, the FBI called on Trump when Tesla died to review his papers. After three days, he told authorities nothing dangerous was in the files of the dead man.

In March 2006, Barron Trump, the youngest child of President Donald J. Trump, was born.

Draw your own conclusions.

While thumbing through an old Nevada history book, I happened on a story called “Washoe Giant Killer.” It brought back to mind the time when, with a TV news reporter friend, we started looking into the Redheaded Giants of Lovelock, Nevada. She and I were both intrigued by the remains of giant’s found around the world and especially how they might tie into our local ‘giants’ tales.

My intrigue was further fed by the surfacing of a colored photograph of what’s thought to be a gigantic hand print left embedded in a rock within on of the area caves. This picture shows someone hold an oversized knife next to the imprint and I wanted to learn who took it along with where and when.

 

As for the article, “Washoe Giant Killers,” the claim’s made that an Indian was fishing along the Truckee River between Vista and Wadsworth when confronted by a giant wanting the all the fish he’d speared. Members of the tribe eventually ran the giant off.

Later the tribe members decided to track the giant, eventually locating several camps and attacking them. Apparently the giants didn’t have weapons like bows and arrows, spears or flint knives and used large rocks instead to fend off their attackers.

To this day, both Washoe and Paiute elders can still point out large piles of rocks they say the giants amassed to defend themselves with. These piles can be found near Pyramid Lake, around Nixon, Nevada – but only with tribal permission.

While the Washoe say they vanquished the Giants, the Paiute say these Giants, whom they call the Si-Te-Cah or ‘tule-eaters’ were cannibals. Paiute legend also says these giants came from a distant island by crossing the ocean on rafts built from the tule plant.

The Paiute also say the Si-Te-Cah waged war on the tribe as well as their neighboring tribes and finally, after years of warring, the tribes united against the giants and began to hunt and kill them. They chased the last remaining giants into a cave and once cornered, the various tribes took turns manning a fire at the cave entrance, suffocating and burning alive the Si-Te-Cah.

The tribes then sealed off the mouth of the cave. They were all but forgotten about until 1886, when a mining engineer named John T. Reid heard the tale from the Paiutes while prospecting near Lovelock. They eventually took him to see the cave.

Reid was unable to begin digging himself, but in 1911 a company started by miners David Pugh and James Hart began excavating the cave’s guano deposits. A year later, an official excavation began through the University of California, with another taking place in 1924.

 

Reading through the expeditions notes from both digs, they recovered thousands of artifacts including the mummified remains of ‘several red-haired giants’ and a pair of 15 inch-long well-worn leather moccasins. In a 1931 article, with an accompanying photograph, published in the Nevada Review-Miner, a couple of giant skeletons were found buried in a dry lake bed close to Lovelock.

The notes describe the remains as measuring eight-and-a-half and 10 feet in height,  and mummified in a way similar to those of the ancient Egyptians. This brought me to think that these remains could be Nephilim – the offspring of the ‘Sons of God’ with the ‘daughters of men,’ as spoken of in Genesis.

 

Three days before being told to ‘drop it,’ I found myself standing in a private home of a woman who had some of the most unusual artifacts I’ve ever seen in my life. A skull, larger than a basketball and a mandible so big that it literally fit around my jaw, with the mandibular joints extending beyond the back of my head.

The woman, a caretaker of these items, had been given permission to show me them as long as I didn’t disclose where they were being kept and didn’t try and take photographs of them. I immediately agreed to both conditions, knowing that it had to be a tribal elder with some formidable clout who gave the caretaker permission.

Following my person viewing, I was standing in the checkout line of the Spanish Springs Walmart, when an extremely large man, obviously Native American in origin, quietly stepped behind me a whispered, “Drop it or else.” As I turned to look at him, he walked away and out of the store without even looking back.

Instantly, I knew he was talking about the Red Headed Giants of Lovelock. And while I can’t state for a certain fact that her departure was part of all this, a short while after I was warned-off, my friend left her job as a TV news reporter.

The young couple saw the wedding dress in the window of the secondhand store and Arekkusu thought it perfect. So she and her fiance, Kairu decided to go inside, so she could try it on. After the shop owner retrieved the garment for Arekkusu, she told the bride-to-be that the dress brought bad fortune in the past to the women who’ve worn it.

“What do you mean, ‘bad fortune?’” Arekkusu asked the old lady.

“I have sold this same dress three times now,” she explained, “And it keeps coming back, the women always broken-hearted.”

Arekkusu laughed off the tale and hurried to the dressing room. Slipping on, Arekkusu looked in the mirror, where she saw herself change. She found she could hardly breathe, the air around her stale and cold. That’s when Kairu heard her crying.

“What’s wrong,” he asked through the closed-door.

“The dress makes me look hideous,” Arekkusu sobbed, “Like a Gila monster or an iguana.”

Kairu, thinking Arekkusu was suffering from pre-wedding jitters, said, “No you don’t.”

“Oh, yes I do, maybe I look more like a komono dragon” Arekkusu argued, “I don’t even look half as cute as the female ogre from the movie ‘Shrek.’”

“What are you talking about?” Kairu responded, adding, “You’d make a burlap sack look gorgeous!”

“You think so?” she asked nervously.

“Open up and let me look at you,” he gently pleaded.

Cautiously she unlocked the door. And though Kairu was not ready for what he was seeing, his future bride covered in brownish scales, her eyes like round pale-yellow moons containing deep black slits, he remained steadfast.

“When I asked to marry you,” he calmly answered, “I meant it for all time – for bad or good.”

Then Kairu reached out, taking her by the hands, and gently pulling her to him, he kissed her sweetly. As they embraced, Arekkusu softly began glowing and in that glow, she returned to the young woman she had been before putting on the dress.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the shop owner commented, taking their money. The couple simply laughed and walked out the door, arm-in-arm and garment in hand.

Arekkusu and Kairu knew that the secondhand wedding dress was now forever-altered by their firsthand love. And as for the old woman who owned the secondhand store? She never saw the gown again — in fact the old woman and her store vanished as soon as the pair turned the corner.

He drives by it nearly everyday — it being a grotesque statue-like figure of a dinosaur, but it wasn’t to long ago when Kevin watched a thunderhead built into a sizable cloud, north of him. He could tell it wasn’t going be a wet storm like the one the day before, so he continued to sit outside on his front porch.

Suddenly the cloud came alive with a long, bright streak of lightning jumping from it’s side. He felt the hairs rise on his body and heard it crash into the house with a deafening roar. Within seconds, Kevin knew something more than a simple lightning strike to the building was wrong.

There was an outrageous racket happening inside his home and as he opened the door to investigate, the large picture window of his front room exploded outward. With that explosion came the large head and shoulders of a green beast covered in feathers and a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex – and the thing eye-balled Kevin as if he were it’s next meal.

Though he hadn’t done much running in recent years, Kevin sprinted from the porch as the T. Rex busted through the rest of his living room’s front wall. He made it to the corner before looking back. Kevin could see the green dinosaur stopped, smelling his neighbor’s pink roses; then eating the buds, thorns and all, before returning to the chase.

By that time Kevin was racing down the side street to the main roadway. He found himself amazed at how slow the big lizard was in real-life. Nothing like the one’s portrayed on the TV or big screen. Those leathery bastards were quick, running down their human prey in seconds flat. He was also surprised at his endurance and the speed in which he’d managed to cover the distance from his destroyed home to the main road.

Unfortunately, he was losing steam and Mister T. Rex was gaining ground on him. As he willed himself to continue running, Kevin heard several vehicle’s squeal their tires as drivers either slammed on their breaks or crashed trying to avoid hitting the brutish nightmare chasing after the hapless man.

He had all but given hope of continuing to out pace the monstrosity, when he heard the behemoth smash through a wooden fence on the opposite side of the road, to dine on a barking dog. Kevin turned to watch the frightened canine escape through the damaged fence line and disappear into a nearby field.

Next thing Kevin knew, a bolt of lightning danced across the sky, striking the abomination. There was a blinding, white flash and a crashing accompaniment of thunder as Kevin sailed backwards into a roadside ditch. It took him a few seconds to recover, before he could climb the bank and see what had become of the monster.

To his delight, the thing had shriveled to a quarter of it’s size and was now a charcoal gray, it’s iridescent green plumage burned away. He could tell by it’s hideous white smile and vacant eye-sockets that the would-be man-eater was dead. Kevin spent the rest of that day, all night and most the next morning trying to explain how his sweet, gregarious little parakeet had transformed Frankenstein-like into a gigantic prehistoric dinosaur.

Granddaughter insists Grandpa carry Little Dolly. Though embarrassed, Grandpa does so without complaint. After playing in the park, Granddaughter wants to pick blackberries, so the pair pluck ripened berries till noon.

Scared of rustling in the bushes, Granddaughter wants to go, believing it’s Zombies. They hurry home. Granddaughter takes a nap. Grandpa visits Facebook.

Grandpa realizes he’s forgotten Granddaughter’s Little Dolly. Heading to the park, Grandpa recalls Granddaughter’s zombie-fears. Grandpa finds Little Dolly where he left her. Walking home, Grandpa doesn’t think anymore of Zombies or Granddaughter’s Little Dolly.

However, Little Dolly — now a Zombie — has both on her mind.

Jasper fingers the trigger in desperation. He knows the numbers are a fraud before starting. Ninety-six-cents makes a big difference in the life of a man with no job, little money, less pride.

He thinks, “I can’t.”

Jasper also knows that there is nothing he can do about it. He looks at his shoes. He could walk away, but again that would do nothing. So Jasper decides to end it, no more debating, no further argument, nothing but the act remaining. He exhales, squeezing the trigger.

The gas pump thunks to life — the numbers racing by too fast to count.

In August 2016, I posted an article about foreign refugees being resettled in Northern Nevada. I was roundly criticized, including being called an Islamophobe, for pointing out how these people were not being properly scrutinized, setting up the possibility that they could bring acts of terror to the state and the U.S.

Well, here is an update…

Over the last few weeks, the Reno Police Department received reports of “several instances” from women who’ve been followed by unidentified men. And in at least one local news report, the female victim told law enforcement she’d been followed by more than one unknown male.

The majority of these instances have happened in the parking lot of large retail businesses during normal business hours. Nearly all the suspects are described as wearing an earpiece or using a cellphone and appeared to be working in coordination with another group of men in the area.

In fact, there are a couple of Facebook postings from the Reno area, where woman have captured photos of ‘foreign speaking’ men approaching them or congregated in parking lots. One incident happened in the parking structure of the Cal-Neva in downtown, another at the Walmart on Damonte Ranch Parkway, and a third attack where a woman was apparently yanked from her vehicle, though little has been reported on the attack.

Add to this the strange incident of a woman allegedly speaking with a ‘heavy accent,’ stealing the purse of an injured woman involved in a car crash near Virginia and Plumb, in Reno. She may have been working in concert with three other individuals at the time of the theft, since they were spotted together at Shoppers Square during the time of the incident.

In the Damonte Ranch incident, the woman reported that she was confronted by a man, who upon approaching her said, “Hello dear, how’s your day going, you are extremely beautiful.” She was polite in her response to him, but continued walking.

Once inside the store, she turned to see him walking around her car and looking in it. She reported the man’s activities to the store’s security and eventually had them walk her out to her car so she could safely leave the area.

But before this happened, she observed him not only meet up with another man and listened as the two spoke in a foreign language to each other, they both returned to her car. Finally, a white van with five more men in it pulled up behind her vehicle and the two men looking at her car, got in it.

She said the group of seven drove around the parking lot slowly, passing by her car each time. Next they parked four rows away and appeared to be waiting for her to return to her car and that once security threatened to call the police, they drove off.

This is the same thing that has been happening throughout Europe, though very little has been openly reported on the way these incidents are set-up or unfold. In the end though, the majority of these attacks end in a brutal rape and even the death of the female victim.

To be straight, no one is certain of the number of refugees the state of Nevada has taken in, or from what part of the globe they’ve come from. What’s known is that terrorism takes many forms, and it has one aim — to strike fear into others. So go ahead, call me what you will, but the time is now to be vigilant. They are among us and they’re a danger to our safety and our society.

My feet tangle.

Glancing down, I see Batman’s bat-a-rang on a line, zipping around my ankles, pulling tight. With no ability to place one foot ahead of the other, I topple, a full-body slam to the floor. Before I know it, a blur of red and blue rolls me over, so quickly, so many times, I nearly puke.

As Superman rotates, Spiderman flings his webbing, immobilizing me neck to foot. I put up a fight to free myself from the wet, sticky goo, but can’t move more than my right hand, which is in my pocket. Confused, I cry out, “Why? What have I done to you?”

The voice is unmistakable as Batman growls, “You didn’t share.”

“What?” I ask.

“You failed to share the Pez candies you brought home yesterday,” he explains.

With a furrowed-brow, I question, “How in the hell…”

“You can’t fool Yogi or Boo-Boo’s noses,” Aquaman interrupts.

“They knew the instant you opened your front door,” Santa continues.

“And to think I fought my best friend defending you,” I call out, adding “You fat bastard, Kris!”

Toy Story Woody mosies over as Luke Skywalker demands, “So, where did you hide them, Luke Two?”

“Huh?” I respond, “Hide what?! What the eff are you talking about?!

“The Pez candies, you S-O-B!” Fozzie Bear snarls, spraying slobber in my face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I pled.

“Do your thing, Wonder Woman!” Tweetie Bird instructs.

In an instant I feel the Lasso of Hestia drop over my forehead. The pressure so intense I can’t resist answering truthfully as Batman (Ben Affleck, not Christian Bale) steps forward, gargling, “Where’s the Pez candies?”

The harder I try not answering, the greater the Lasso tightens at my temples, until I blurt out, “Drawer on left, closest to dishwasher!!!” As the pain subsides, I hear the clacking of my collection of Pez dispensers in the kitchen. A drawer opens, a plastic bag rustles, a drawer closes. The disorganized clacking starts up, moving down the hallway.

“Wait!” I scream, “What about me? You can’t jus’ leave me like this?”

“Oh, yes we can,” replies Return of the Jedi’s Princess Leia Organa, “Besides we want to hear how you explain this to your wife.” She disappears with the other dispensers into the back room and the leather satchel they live in.

My right hand is touching my lock-blade knife. Slipping it from my pocket, I flick it open, stabbing into the now-dry and ever hardening web. I must hurry – my wife’s due home in less than half-an-hour.