The Cutest Sasquatch Website Ever

International mascot for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Quatchi, has his own website. This is no surprise since Olympic mascots are becoming a stronger part of the promotional arm of modern Olympics.

What is unique, is how much care and effort is made to infuse character and cuteness to Quatchi and his friends, Sumi and Miga. If you check out their site http://www.vancouver2010.com/mascots, as it begins to load Quatchi peaks around the corner, shy and blushing, and brave Miga has to convince him to step out and greet us.

Quatchi is getting great press too. Today in the MercuryNews.com compares Quatchi to Brad Pitt

The main mascot is Quatchi. He does not wear a hat, but rather a fetching set of baby-blue earmuffs. He is a young Sasquatch or Bigfoot, brown and fuzzy with that hairy unkempt look of Brad Pitt's beard.

All I know of the scruffy little guy (Quatchi, not Brad) is what I have learned on the official mascot Web site, www.vancouver2010.com/mascots. It seems he comes from the mysterious forests of Canada, and he is "shy, but loves to explore new places and meet new friends," a good thing in an international ambassador. His co-mascots are Miga, a snowboarding sea bear, and Sumi (the one with the hat), an animal spirit who lives in the mountains. Plus there's a tag-along marmot named Mukmuk, who is super cute but not an official part of the mascot team. Kind of like Cousin Oliver on "The Brady Bunch."

The Web site is adorable. When you run your cursor over the characters' cartoon images, they wave a friendly hello and say their respective names out loud. If you have access to the Internet, you simply must do this. Do it now. It's hilarious. Especially if you listen to Sumi and Miga with the cute high-pitched voices one might expect of talking stuffed animals, and then you move back to Quatchi, who has a deep, throaty, chain-smoking-sex-offender voice a la Moe Szyslak or a male Brenda Vaccaro. "Hi. I'm Quatchi. What are you wearing?" (OK, all he says is "Quatchi," but that's enough.)

Granted, it must have been tough to come up with a voice for Quatchi. I can image the Canadian mascot development committee sitting around conscientiously objecting to each other's opinions and saying things like, "Well, he's mythical, full of mystery and wonder. But also rugged and outdoorsy and a wee little hoser, eh?"

In other news it seems there are still openings for local Brittish Columbians to play the role of Quatchi at the torch relay. The job description reads.

Who Wants to be Quatchie?
Successful applicants would play the parts of Olympic mascots Quatchi, the earmuff-wearing sasquatch-like figure, and Miga, the petite black-and-white sea bear.

The ideal candidate for Quatchi would be between 5'10" and 6'2" tall, while someone posing as Miga should be between 5'1" and 5'4". Both must be 18 years or older.

Mascot performers should be reasonably fit and able to withstand the heat, weight and and other physical limitations of the costumes.

Definitely a guy in a suit.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Cutest Sasquatch Website Ever
Mercury Article "Give 'em Hill"
Who wants to be a Quatchi?
The largest Quatchi on the East Coast

Maybe, Thom Pace Tribute

Deep inside this website is a tribute page to Thom Pace's song "Maybe." It is also known as the theme song to Grizzly Adams.

Thom Pace (born Thomas M. Pace 1949 Boise, Idaho Idaho) wrote the song "Maybe", which began as a medley titled "Have the sun in the heart / Maybe" This song became the theme song of Sunn Classic Pictures and Television Film and TV series The Life and times of Grizzly Adams program'm Dan Haggerty as James Capena Adams, who had fled from false murder charges in the mountains and woods nearby The made for TV movie The Capture of Grizzly Adams, who played Haggerty and also featured "Maybe" as a theme Adams was finally able to clear his name 

Pace had originally conceived the song "Maybe" for a movie called The Snow Tigers, but in the end, the producers do not use it in this movie, it later was used as the last song of Grizzly Adams movie, and then used som theme song of television series 

Another version of the theme from an album that Pace in and was released in the 1970s was released as a single in Europe, "Maybe" went to number one in Germany and stayed there for nine weeks Pace was "Goldene Europe 'Award Europe's version of the Grammy Award for best song of 1979 he also wrote and composed often in collaboration with Maria Hegsted songs for other movies including the NBC "Movies of the Week" songs of honor and Night Of The Comet 

Read More About Thom Pace Biography...

Thom Pace's Original 1979 Performance

Thom Pace's 2008 Performance (almost 30yrs later)

Declan Galbraith a huge singer from Brittain

Okay and now we get to the amateurs that probably love this song as much as I do.

The Chronicle Respects Squatching and the BFRO

An article that is not dismissive or tongue-in-cheek. A nice refreshing look at squatching, or Bigfooting as we prefer here at BLC. The great thing about The Chronicle, a newspaper serving Lewis County Washington, is it a great introduction for those not familiar with Bigfooting, while remaining fair and balanced.

Here's an exerpt below.

ELBE — He stands 9 feet tall with stringy brown fur all over his body and glowing red eyes, and if he truly does exist, he probably lives in a forest near you.
The ape-like beast known as Sasquatch is mere legend to skeptics, but to members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, he is a legitimate scientific conundrum. The group regularly scours areas in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and other wooded parts of the state in search of “squatches” — that’s right — plural Sasquatch.
Based on sightings reported by BFRO’s Web site, Washington state is effectively Bigfoot central, more specifically the densely covered Cascade foothills of Southwest Washington. The group believes Sasquatches live in complex communities with advanced social norms and complex forms of communication, including their own language.

“These people who live here, if you could get them to talk to you, they would tell you, ‘We hear them all the time,’” said Scott Taylor, a particularly active member of BFRO who led a group of eight people on a research trip near Mount Rainier National Park last Saturday. “We try to come out to places like this to meet the witnesses and sit and talk and let them get it off their chest, because many of them have been bottling it up for years.”

The group’s claim to fame is the “Skookum Cast,” a body impression of an ape-like figure found in the Skookum Meadow, in the southern portion of the Gifford Pinchot. It was unveiled in 2000 and studied by the late Washington State University anthropologist Grover Krantz, who dedicated much of his career to studying Bigfoot, along with the Kennewick Man — skeletal remains of a prehistoric man found on the Columbia River in 1996.

The article even touches on the subject of Ray Wallace, although it may be an oversimplification.

Wallace died in 2002, but is survived by family still in the area. Bigfoot believers generally don’t buy the Wallace hoax because its announcement came after his death when family members found the foot pressings after sorting through his old junk. The Bigfoot faithful also take particular umbrage with what they say are fabricated quotes in a 2002 article by the New York Times calling Wallace’s passing “the death of Bigfoot.”

Overall we appreciate the tone of the article, it even highlights The Chronicles past coverage of Bigfoot and has a list of sightings in the Lewis County Area. to us that means theres enough information there that some reader will get the "bug" and be the one that helps us find Bigfoot.

EXTERNAL LINKS
The Chronicle Article: In Search of ’Squatch
NY Times Article at BigfootEncounters.com
Bigfoot Did Not Die by John Green