Monday, November 9, 2009

That Damned Dr. Klutschiev

Over the past weekend I was just meandering around Washington Square in Manhattan with my wife as we tend to some days. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Big Apple, Washington Sq. is basically an epicenter on the weekends for street vendors and people that sell stuff... And crap, they sell a lot of crap. You can certainly find a whole lot of great stuff out there if you look hard enough. Personally, I always happen to migrate towards the books and literature, just to see if there's anything that they are selling for practically nothing.

This day was nothing less than unexpected. I approached one street vendor with a big table full of books. Everything from "new" books, to worn-out paperbacks that had seen better days. After thumbing around for a bit through the stacks, my wife brought one to my attention. It was a leather-bound personal looking book. It had the words "Dr. Klutschiev - 1897" embroidered on the spine. Intrigued, I bought the book, for a whole $1.50. As i found my way to a nice chunk of concrete near the fountain at Washington Square, I flipped through the old journal and one entry really screamed out at me... It even had a newspaper clipping glued in it. The clipping read; "Giant Mechanical Bear attacks the Flatiron Building!". It was dated for August 30th, 1926...

Now, I'm no history major, but I sure as hell don't remember hearing about that, ever. The clipping was pretty official, seeing as it must have been almost 80 years old and very faded, but still legible. It detailed how no one was sure where this bear had come from, or what it wanted. There were accusations, sure, most of which were directed at Tesla, but we all know he was crazy, not mad. Then it hit me, I had stumbled upon the journal of a real life mad scientist... I said to myself "That damned Dr. Klutschiev!"
It looks like he even got a picture of the monster

That lead me to really get interested in this guy, turns out he used to run his operations out of a now abandoned warehouse in the hell's kitchen area, complete with a workshop and underground lab. So I read more and more, and I couldn't get enough. It seems he basically wrote a manual for his nephew (age 5 at that time). Maybe his nephew never got the journal, or just wrote it off as nonsense stories his crazy uncle Klutschiev wrote, he must have sold it. Whatever the case is, here I am, reading what I have come to call "The Chronicle of that Damned Dr. Klutschiev".

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