HIKER’S ‘WOLF HORN’ WORKS, SURVIVING FRIEND SAYS

Yosemite National Park, WY – 26/5/08 In what ecologists are hailing as a breakthrough for wildlife conservation, the late Patrick Weils has left behind a homemade horn that perfectly imitates the hunting call of the endangered Rocky Mountain Snow Wolf. Environmentalists say Weil’s device will make tracking the remaining wolves easier, especially in the winter months when food is scarce. There are an estimated 300 snow wolves left in the Rockies, down from about 10 million just 3 decades ago.

The recently deceased Weils, a computer programmer and avid backpacker from Billings, Montana, spent many weekends experimenting with homemade wolf calling devices until perfecting this one, said friend Cal Rizzo from his hospital bed in Casper, WY, where doctors say he’s making a steady but slow recovery from multiple wolf bites to his legs and scalp.

“Patrick and I used to go for long weekends up into the back country,” Rizzo said, his voice slurred from heavy doses of pain medication. “He was fascinated by wolves, their habits and ways. He’d always whip out one of his little home made horns. Some of them didn’t sound like wolves at all, others were okay. But we never saw a single wolf. Until last weekend. Then we saw lots.”

Rizzo managed to snap this photo of the wolves as they charged his late friend Weils

The wolves weren’t the only ones to respond to Weils’ call. Yosemite biologist and wolf expert Chad Whitting heard Weil’s latest and final horn blows while hiking on a nearby ridge. He says he rushed to the two men’s campsite.

“That whistle had me fooled too,” he said at his wolf watch station, a small wooden cabin on Mount Peabody. “I said to myself, my babies got lucky today. They’ve found something to hunt. I figured they were after a rabbit.”

Listen to an early model of Weils' 'wolf horn.' Though this one didn't work Weils would later achieve success.

The wolves ran off at Whitting’s approach but he says he counted at least seven different tracks in the snow. Also, he was able to recover Weils’ hand and part of his shoulder by following a trail of blood towards the tree line.

“His hand was still clutching the horn,” Whitting said. “I’ll be damned if it this little wooden tooter doesn’t sound exactly like the noise the snow wolf makes to challenge another’s territory. Or when its stolen a challenger’s mate.” Whitting says it occurred to him as he dressed the multiple puncture wounds of Weils unconscious friend that the whistle could be used to draw the wolves out, either to count or cull their numbers.

“It was like an epiphany,” he said. “I was looking at that mess of a campsite, with Weils’s decimated, ice-cold corpse all crumpled in his shredded tent, and it just hit me. This device is going to revolutionize wolf protection programs everywhere.”

Weil, who was also an advanced scuba diver, was also working on a high frequency underwater gadget to attract great white sharks.

YOUTUBE VIDEO STILL UNPOPULAR, LAMENTS AREA MAN

West Hollywood, CA - 5/17/08 Three years ago, on the day aspiring filmmaker Caleb Collins bought his first video camera, he asked himself, How much drama can you squeeze into one minute? “I was intrigued by the idea of working within such strict parameters,” Collins said in a recent interview in a West Hollywood café. “Plus, the cheap camera I bought only allowed for 60 second video clips.”

Collins says it took him two years to perfect a short-film concept. But in a fortuitous turn he managed to film the movie in just one take. Then he posted it on Youtube where it has been a total failure.

“Its discouraging,” conceded Collins one year on. “I put my heart into this project and I’m not getting any hits. My parents and my sister watched it (the film) once each. I’ve seen it a zillion times and it keeps getting better for me. But I don’t think anyone else has clicked on it. Not even my friends.”

Collins’ film, entitled ‘Milkbone Underwear,’ opens with a close up of someone slicing vegetables on a cutting board. The action culminates in an erotic scene in which a hand, apparently imitating a dog, rubs itself against a carrot. In the process a voice, presumably the cook’s, is heard making unappealing noises.

Collins' film, which he says contains all the dramatic elements of a hit, could yet land some visits on Youtube

Internet films abound on-line and only a handful of them ever gain notoriety. But the chances of Collins’ film attracting attention are even slimmer, says media analyst Brett Hunkenbauer of Disney’s Medialand Entertainment magazine.

“The competition out there is fierce, and there’s still no real way for small players to do marketing, except via word of mouth,” said Hunkenbauer. “Also, I’ve watched Collins’ short film and its horrible from every conceivable point of view. When it ends you’re left with no desire whatsoever to know who this Collins is, or what his next project might be.”

Several other film critics contacted for this story refused to watch the film in its entirety, or to comment on it.

But Collins said he’s not discouraged. “Online films are a tough one,” he said. “But I’ve got some more ideas, using more or less the same cast and concept. I didn’t come to Hollywood to fail.” Collins said he also entered ‘Milkbone Underwear’ in a handful of short-film festivals. And although a year has passed he says he’s hoping an acceptance letter may have been lost in the mail.

Collins initially told a reporter that he had received one positive comment on his Youtube post – ‘Milkbone Underwear is the must-see film of the summer!’ - allegedly from famed critic Roger Eebert. But an investigation uncovered Collins himself as the comment’s author. It has since disappeared from his post.

FRENCH POLICE RAID ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT HANG-OUTS

Hundreds Arrested in Paris Sweep, Deported Overnight

Detainees Mostly North Africans, Asians and Deadbeat Americans posing as Writers

French police arrest an undocumented American 'writer' in Paris. In his pocket authorities found a poorly-written poem entitled "The Stain of the Yak."

Paris – 5/17/08 On Tuesday morning 23 year old American college drop-out Lyle Ginsberg was sitting outside Paris’ renowned Café Flor, in the Latin Quarter, drinking an espresso and pretending to write with a number 2 pencil on a yellow block of notebook paper. By Tuesday night the dishevelled, beret-wearing youth was back at his parents’ house outside of Lancaster, PA.

“I don’t know how it all happened,” said the allegedly aspiring writer, reached by telephone just hours after his deportation and whose parents could be heard in the background reprimanding him to get a job. “I was writing something grand, something true, and it was raining and the rain was pounding the leaves and that was the most real thing about that day in Paris, that grey city of men all with their swell arguments and the women who always came along to wreck it all. And I was drinking to start the day and thinking about going to watch the horses with Pierre who also loved a drink if you were inviting when the police came and dragged me away.”

Ginsberg, who says he has an original prose voice and lots of ideas for novels, is one of over a hundred American ‘writers’ who the French police say they’d been monitoring for months as part of a larger operation against illegal immigrants and posers.

Yesterday French Interior Minister Michele Alliot Marie told reporters such raids would continue until “the obnoxious blight is eradicated."

"The French people do not feel safe,” she said in comments to French radio EuropeOne. “Paris has become a city where just for walking home alone at night you can be mugged, harassed or exposed to exaggerated purple prose from impromptu ‘literary’ events.”

Listen to live reading of "The Stain of the Yak"



The Americans were deported under a new immigration law that prohibits foreigners from, among other things, dressing like Gertrude Stein or loitering near the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The law also bans the suspicious practice of ‘accidentally’ leaving behind signed poems in bars and cafes or pretending not to be American when lost tourists ask for directions. Some crimes - for example ostentatious or extended displays of ennui - could also come with a 3 month prison sentence prior to deportation.

When asked about the hundreds of Algerians and Chinese also deported in the immigration crackdown, Interior Minister Alliot Marie said, “Oh yes, they were caught up in the sweep as well.”