BEST OF 030 Quickly, what is the number one problem facing Americans today? That’s right, stubborn stains. Being an American is a messy job and we’ve got the stains to prove it! Grape soda, tobacco juice, ink from signing all those Declarations of Independence. Coffee, gunpowder and sooooooo much blood! We’ve tried to fight the stains. Tried to hide them under a nice blazer. We’ve even tried to banish them using household alchemy; powerful decoctions of lemon juice, baking soda and fine vinegars. And yet they continue to mock us, ruining our nice vest just seconds before the group picture, or appearing in a marinara spattered sundress in Pensacola, Florida in the very likeness of our human god! Well, I say no more! It’s time we strike back before the stains develop an unkillable super-stain like they’ve been threatening to do for so many years. It’s time to — Wait, what? They already did that? Well, crud. If you think American stains are tough you should check out what’s going on in Venezuela. For more than 30 years, the good people of Caracas, Venezuela (Caracons? Caracites?) have been battling with a mysterious substance known only as “La Mancha Negra” or “The Black Stain.” I know. Awesome. It sounds like the name of a Mexican wrestler or a vampire’s motorcycle. But it is neither of those things. What it is is a strange black stain that was first noticed by road workers patching a stretch of highway near the Caracas airport in 1986. At first the workers were like, “Oh cool, a 30 meter patch of tar-like substance seems like a good enough reason to take a break,” but then it started to grow. Soon, meters became miles, and before long, La Mancha Negra was firmly in control of almost all the roads surrounding the Caracas airport. And to make matters worse, the blob, like any good blob, seemed to be somewhat bloodthirsty. La Mancha Negra has been described as having the consistency of sticky oil or “chewed bubble gum,” with a noticeable propensity to shrink and expand in correlation to cold and hot weather respectively. You would think that roads covered in bubble gum would make for awesome traction and some Hot Wheels style loop-de-loop racing, but nuh uh. This stuff has been described as “slick as ice” to drive on and, in the time since its discovery, has been responsible for an estimated 1,800 deaths due to traffic accidents! So, if you’re anything like the hundreds of terrified Caracoolios, you No. 138 probably have a couple of questions by now. Namely, what is it? And how do we fight it? Well, the answer from Venezuela’s top politicians seems to be a stalwart and resounding, “We don’t know!” The Venezuelan government has poured millions of dollars into studying and cleaning up La Mancha Negra and the stain has even become a major political hot button, with candidates adopting a staunchly anti-blob policy during election years (the disastrous 2006 campaign of Ferdinand “Give the blob what it wants” Castillo notwithstanding). And yet, the solution evades them. So far, cleanup methods that haven’t worked at all include power washing, smothering the blob with tons of pulverized limestone, and even completely scraping clean and resurfacing the road. It has even been suggested that some of the more heroic politicians used a portion of that money to purchase new and exotic automobiles to test on the sludgeseized roadways to no tactical advantage. And even though you can have the entire history of your bloodline mapped for less than a $100, all those millions in research dollars have still yet to yield any conclusive test results as to what this stuff might be. So the Venezuelan blob-science community has become a veritable Wild West of frantic postulation, with scientists claiming everything from a neverbefore-encountered non-Newtonian blend of dust and motor oil, to sludge runoff from a nearby slum draining down into the asphalt and creating some kind of mutant slime right out of a mid 90s Spider-Man story arc. I have even heard it suggested that, in order to cut costs, the Venezuelan government used cement made from the pulverized bones of serial killers to pave those roads and that La Mancha Negra is the manifestation of their unquenchable bloodlust, returned to spread death and destruction from beyond the graaaaaaaaaaave. Sure it was me who suggested it, but why not?! If they are just making shit up then why doesn’t Werewolf Radar get to take a stab? From the sound of things, we are just about as qualified to throw out ideas as anyone else studying this mystery to date. What’s that? Do we have any solutions? Sure we do. Try a little club soda. That usually works. HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PARANORMAL? SEND THEM TO: WEREWOLFRADARPOD@GMAIL.COM. IT’S A BIG, WEIRD WORLD. DON’T BE SCARED. BE PREPARED.
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