Written by Jonathan Wojcik

  To share something convoluted, silly and only tenuously connected to Halloween, (as usual?) let me talk for a moment about the genus Cymothoa, or tongue-eating parasitic isopods. I was one of the first to ever write about these little cuties for the internet, way back in 2002, before their strangeness started making news headlines (erronously reporting on them as "new" discoveries) from which their popularity deservedly exploded. If you're not up to speed, I most recently described them here, along with other, arguably far stranger parasitic crustaceans!

   Perhaps inevitably, these fascinating real-world monsters have finally inspired their own horror movie, The Bay, which is basically Paranormal Activity with parasitic isopods. It's even by some of the same people! From the trailer, it looks like some jolly ridiculous B-monster fun, but whether or not it proves watchable is irrelevant, because I'm moderately, slightly excited about it for an entirely different, entirely idiotic reason.

   If you run any search for these parasites on Google images, my goofy cartoon drawing of one (which you can buy on stuff!) is bound to come up, and this is exactly what somebody allegedly does in The Bay. I don't know where, when or how visible it is, but a computer screen displaying authentic google results appears somewhere, at some point, in the finished film. How do I know this?

   Because they paid me $200 for it! They asked me to sign the agreement many months ago, and I forgot all about it until the check came in the mail just recently. For a tiny thumbnail cropping up among dozens of other thumbnails on a search engine, I was paid more money than any paycheck I ever earned from my last three jobs. What? You earn more than that just flipping burgers? I'm sorry, your highness. That'd be a whole month's worth of meals for me, if I didn't already cover that with food stamps! Can you believe it was apparently easier to throw money at me than just replace some thumbnails with something else? I guess they must have paid a lot of people just to maintain an authentic enough google screenshot. We could form a club!

   So, squint hard, and look for my completely accidental "contribution" to the authenticity of THE BAY, provided whatever footage it appears in even made the final cut.