October Walk

Wandering about London towards the end of October I found various things I hadn't noticed before...I started in Pimlico with this attempt at reflecting the "youthful" nature of an urban street. Apart from the fact that this is utter drivel - urban streets are not in any way youthful...I think it's hit rather wide of the mark and maybe it reflects a 63 year old's view of youthfulness. Wonder how long before it gets nicked for scrap.(see left)? But at least it doesn't fall foul of Danny Baker's theory about the trouser bringing about the decline of modern statuary. That is, statues look silly in trousers. I hope to be examining this in more detail as time goes on...One way round this is to stick to female and / or classical subjects.

Edgy: this 'naughty' girl is roller-skating on a bench

Trousers are definitely not an issue for the next new sculpture I found, near Vauxhall Bridge on the north bank. And here...

an empty headed couple of gender stereotypes here

Smile!

vauxhall

These flats (left), which make up the St George Wharf development, started going up around the time i first moved to Camberwell. They're going up....and they've absolutely transformed the area. No-one used to live in Vauxhall, and now fecking thousands do. The US embassy fortress will be going up near here from 2013- no doubt so they can pass orders to MI6 as befits the tinpot little poodle nation that we are...and never forget that poodles are vicious little shits! Back in 2009 Boris Johnson was upset with the plans. It appears now to be opening in 2017.

This is an artists impression I found on-line:

I caught the Frog thing or whatever amphibian animal they named it after. I didn't have my proper camera with me unfortunately, which is always the way! It's heading to the MI6 building where it rejoins the road for a run back to the depot.

Then I walked along by the Thames for a bit. Haven't done this in a couple of years! Water seemed to be unusually high.

one of my favourite views: lots of water

I passed by Parliament Square before jumping on the tube to go back to the office. Glad to see the protest continues despite Brian Hawes death earlier this year.

Stuff Round Up

Does this mean Dark matter may not exist?

And this issue - has always bugged me. Just exactly why do corporations get the same rights as human beings?



Citizens United Case that prompted this amendment

dream

i found myself being made an officer in the navy. an admiral no less!

I was given a ludicrously over-decorated jacket to wear and two
shirts. That's right, 2 shirts which I had to wear one over the other.

On the way home through the centre of Plymouth I was harrassed by
small boys on bikes, one of whom was supercool riding a bike with the
back wheel missing and only half a wheel attached to the front. I have
no idea how he did this.

Then I remembered how anyone in a suit was attacked in Plymouth. I
recalled a time when I was on a bus, in a suit and locals started
throwing bricks at the bus windows when they saw me in a suit. No
doubt this is a throw back to my time at school where my uniform was
likely to provoke violence from boys at lesser schools.

I remember very little else!

Christmas Playlist

May be I'm coming to terms with Christmas now. Its difficult for me because while I manage to get through the rest of the year keeping myself out of distressing sociable situations, Christmas forces you to make a choice. The choice is: join in 100% or be left out utterly and on your own.

Over the years I've managed carve out my own niche. Obviously it was fine when i was a kid and even round my Gran's house as a child I used to go off to be by myself for much of the evening. And this was accepted under the guise that I wanted to see the Christmas Bond film, which was a regular feature of the ITV schedules. I'd sit upstairs in my Granparents' bedroom and watch on their little t.v. and be plied with drinks and snacks throughout. It gave a me a cool (as in temperature) space with reduced stimulus in which to sit, be and think, as well as watch a Bond film (one of the good early ones I hasten to add).

I went through a difficult patch then as a teenager. Found night clubs and that difficult and used to get far too wasted far too early. Mainly because the sociable aspect of this ritual was limited for me, and quite obviously I became much more sociable with alcohol, for a short time. So ended up I getting wasted instead.

Then i met a girl and married so it became a family Xmas. Her family up in the fens. Then friends took me in after she left me, and I had what up till then had been the best  Xmas of my adult life, with the people I had campaigned and protested with during the previous few years. Then came a second marriage, a whole new family, and my own child now, kept me in Xmases for the best part of a decade! Me and S more or less felt the same about xmas so we'd go off and do out own thang more often than not. Our own thang took in Norfolk, staying in our own flat and having friends round, disappearing off to Amsterdam one year or setting up camp in a relative's house for a few days.

God I miss her!

Since then it's been a struggle again. Two years round my parents in Devon before that got too much for me and them! My Dad's 70 now and they are SO set in their ways my presence for more than a couple of days seems to upset them more than please them. Then from 2009 I've been back on my own again. This will be my third solo Xmas since splitting with S. Next year I'm seriously considering going elsewhere, though options are limited as is money!

What's good about being by yourself is that you can pretty much ignore the whole thing and I get some time off work to catch up with "stuff". This year I've been to a couple of works dos, my local cycling do, and I've downloaded a load of Xmassy music so I can at least have a party on my MP3 player!

This is the most engaged in Xmas I have been for at least 4 years. There was that last final disastrous Xmas with S, the 2nd or 3rd most depressing of my life! We were both incredibly depressed that year. A split was inevitable!

And so - to my Xmas playlist.....

I've tried to find stuff a little off the beaten track - the sort of stuff you hear on 6Music played by those in the know, but that never appear on the mainstream compilations, or indeed hear in the shops.

I think I've done pretty well. A lot of the stuff I was after is unfortunately only available on vinyl or CD, and often not available at all, but i found some new stuff.

First off i went to look for festive soul and funk

James Brown
This album is misnamed. While there is definitely funky tracks on there, it appears to be a compilation from across Brown's career and includes much from his pre-funky era. So it might as well have been called Soulful Christmas. But for about £3 it was worth it even if only half the tracks came up to standard.
Having said that, James Brown's soulful stuff can be pretty good too!

Santa Claus go Straight To The Ghetto

Soulful Christmas

Santa Claus Is Definitely Here To Stay

Tit For Tat (Ain't No Taking Back)

Santa Claus, Santa Claus

There's much more to be had from this album, but these are the best tracks.


Bootsy Collins
I think this might be a bit of an overlooked christmas gem:

It's all good.

Chestnuts (AKA The christmas Song)

Jingle Belz

WinterFunkyLand

Santa's Coming

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer 

Rudolph is now a funk and soul reindeer. This album is stuffed full of originals and classics radically reworked in the Bootsy Collins funk idiom. You can't go wrong at £7.49 (Amazon). Though I found many of the tracks to be available as free downloads and on You Tube. 

Motown
This is an album of mixed quality. Though enough good tracks to justify it's cost.

There's a few Jackson 5 tracks on there. I'm no Michael Jackson fan, quite the opposite in fact, however the ones on here are mostly very good.  Also on here, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, a mental version of "Joy To The World" by the Supremes. the Temptations aren't as good as you'd hope. They seem to be taking Xmas far too seriously and religiously for my taste, though "My Xmas Tree" ain't too bad, if a little sentimental. Marvin Gaye appears too with the marvellous "Christmas In The City". Kim Weston's "Wish You a Merry xmas" is cool in classic Motown diva style.


Then I looked for reggae and ska tracks - harder to find, unfortunately. At least on MP3 anyway.
http://www.mistletunes.com/reggae.html
I consider this to be a project in progress....watch this space.

finally, though i didn't initially go searching for it - jazz numbers kept coming up - so I selected a few

All of these albums have at least one good standout track on them, sometimes several. i advise you to check them out before buying.

Christmas Jazz

Ella Fitzgerald

I bought a couple of tracks of this - while I love Ella, the combination of her rich voice and Xmas schmaltz means i can only take her in small doses. Still great though. In small doses. It almost doesn't matter what you buy off this and amazon let's you sample before you buy, which is very helpful. 

Not the Verve, that wouldn't be a very happy Xmas would it? But Verve, the Jazz label. 

I didn't buy the whole album, but a few tracks are worth buying. Ella Fitzgerald's "Rudolph", Ramsey Lewis Trio's "Here Comes Santa Claus", "'Zat You Santa Claus", Louis Armstrong, "Greensleeves" John Coltrane, Shirley Horne, "Winter Wonderland", "Santa Claus Is Coming To town", Bill Evans, a jazz organ version of "Jingle Bells", Jimmy Smith, 

The Ultimate Jazz Christmas

Count Basie's Jingle Bells is sublime, and a must have for any Christmas playlist. But don't buy the album, it's just not worth it. Pick off the 3 or 4 tracks you'll like, at the most, and buy them.

 Finally, more traditional type music:

Plenty of old school xmas classics on here. The album is way cheaper to by than individual tracks so go easy. If you start feeling you want to buy more than 6 or 7 tracks of this album then you may as well buy the whole thing and listen at your leisure. Some of the tracks on here are seldom heard such as Louis Armstrong's "Cool Yule" and Earnest Tubb's "Blue Christmas".


I already have the perennial favourite - the Phil Spector Christmas album. It's a shame I only get to play it three weeks of the year

And this is my rather modest Christmas groceries stash:

The duck is in the freezer!

Happy Xmas!

The Moon

I wondered if I could get a decent snap of our Moon with my camera. I'm quite pleased with it.

"I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean how dare they go on strike when they've got these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?" Millionaire & ex public schoolboy, Jeremy Clarkson

aging, flabby millionaire tosspot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Colombia

Between 1986 and 2010 over 2800 were killed according to one source, and over 4000 according to others. Most assassinations were carried out by paramilitaries or the Colombian military; some were carried out by the guerillas. In 2009 only around 4% of workers in Colombia were unionised. Wikipedia

Clarkson probably thinks this is a good thing, least ways, he hasn't apologised for his crass and offensive remarks. His non-apology reads thus:

"I didn't for a moment intend these remarks to be taken seriously – as I believe is clear if they're seen in context. If the BBC and I have caused any offence, I'm quite happy to apologise for it alongside them."

Here are some examples from the "Justice For colombia" website - there are many many more examples if you click on the link, and they continue right up to the present. 

http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/campaigns/union-rights/

1st of October 2009 at 8.30 p.m., hired assassins seriously injured Mario Montes de Oca Anaya and killed Alberto Luis Pastrana Soto, who was with him at the time, as they approached the main entrance of Hospital San Jerónimo in the city of Montería, Córdoba. 
Montes de Oca Anaya, head of the local branch of the Córdoba teachers’ association, ADEMACOR, and a legal advisor on the matter of displaced persons, received three bullet wounds and is currently in hospital in the city of Montería. As in many other such cases, the death threats against the teacher were reported, but the authorities took no action. Mario is the brother of Boris Montes de Oca, a member of the CUT executive and head of the Labour Relations and Collective Bargaining Department.

8 December 2009: The ITUC has denounced and strongly condemned the murders of art teacher Zorayda Cortés López, who worked at the Higher Technical Institute of Pereira, the capital of Risaralda, and Leny Yanube Rengifo Gómez, a teacher and active member of the Cauca education workers’ union, Asociación de Institutores y Trabajadores de la Educación del Cauca – ASOINCA.

It is unacceptable and a cause for grave concern in the trade union movement that 195 teachers have been assassinated in Colombia, without a single arrest being made, and that 35 trade unionists have been killed this year alone.http://www.ituc-csi.org/colombia-195-teachers-killed-no.html

Teacher Trade Unionist killed every two weeks in colombia

http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-17808-f0.pdf

It's not just the killings, and it's not just Colombia, there are imprisonments and intimidation worldwide, Turkey, Iraq, Somalia, Thailand, all over central and south America, Africa and the Middle East. Have no doubt that if the west continues down its current road of oppression and injustice we may well see this happening in Europe too. Remember that it was happening in Europe as recently as 35 years ago. That's not even to begin on some of the suppressed stories from the 1980s miners' strike in the UK. Don't be complacent!

http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?page=morenews&id_mot=43

This makes Jeremy Clarkson very very happy: a murdered Trade Unionist

Altered States

This entry was originally written before Ken Russell died, however, upon his death i decided to embellish it somewhat to make it into a sort of personal take / tribute on Ken Russell. STILL NOT FINISHED

Here's a film which explores a few Fortean concepts: religion, creation, the nature of humanity and so forth. Funny old film really. It'll take me a while to work out what I think..

I've been having a Ken Russell season lately. sometime ago i searched for Russell's filmography on Lovefilm and put most, if not all, his films onto my rental list. 

so far I've mainly revisited films I'd already seen. it's both astonishing and outrageous that many of Russell's films are still not available on DVD. 

The film story is based on this

Altered States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20078923,00.html

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1075

Another right on its way out,. After this the tabloids can say anything they like about you, unless you're rich. Who do I blame? The Liberal Democrats of course! Cowardly, despicable, scumbags who continue to ensure that our extremist government remains in power.

Billy Goat Gruff

Until I went onto Twitter I felt like a lone voice of sanity, on the internet, shouting in the wilderness.

Why is that?

I think internet bulletin boards were the key problem.
Urban75 was abusive -while some good people post on there, the vast majority are middle class or higher, snotty little twats who presumably are now snotty middle aged twats - best part of a deacde since i was there - talking about gardening and how very edgy Brixton is. Fucking yeah - sure it's edgy! I lived there in 1988 and can categorically state that Brixton has been thoroughly gentrified. If you want to see edgy have a poke around Camberwell!
So I fell between the nit-picking pedantic pseudo intellectuals, quite often mummy's boy with shed loads of cash but no perceivable life, who used to give me shit for not being politically active while I was trying to keep a family together in hostile circumstances, and struggling with autism.
These were the sort of tosspots who would squat a property and then let their own house out for high rents. Pretend anarchists. I will name no names!
Pretend working class as well - again - no names. The times that my working class origins got challenged by precious little middle class children was untrue! to them if you work, can speak words of two sylables, undersatnd basic philospohical concepts, have a degree, don't have a "cockney" / northern accent, then you're middle class. Apparently. That'd be news to all the bosh bosh, "loads of money" builders who live in south east London, and thousands of cabbies, teachers, solicitors, bankers, journalists, etc. who pulled themselves up by bootstraps and did genuinely make a success from nothing, with or without support from their parents, but chiefly, only becasue the state made those opportunities available to a wider part of society than just public schoolboys.
I'm digressing big-time here.
Later:
Bikeradar was peculiar. Lots of mummy's boys who worked in media / law / technology who were decidedly middle class, or upper middle class,
I got called commie, hippy, all the names under the sun for expressing a pro-scientific understanding of the environment and human society.
"It's worse in Africa" v- bleak house
Cif - a little better, but sometimes i was completely on my own.
"shameful" for wanting to understand reasons behind rioting - clearly economically/ politically driven and unless we understand that worse will happen in the future. Or we could live in an oppresive police state. I suggest anyone who thinks that has a little read about south and central america - even "nice" middle class people were murdered by the state.
Twitter - feel like there's a huge netwrok of like minded - anarchists and socialists i can talk to. The ideas I thought were out there - like maybe we can discuss ideas instead of picking each other up on our spelling - though that does still happen, and thankfully there's a block button. Very handy
Trolls - not just an internet phenomena. They are real people expressing genuine views or prejudices.

They need to be challenged - probably not on the internet, but in the streets, we're not quite living int he Matrix yet - we can all still interact in the real world. Even the opressive Met police haven't stopped that yet - though they are well on their way to doing so.

Pointless Overtaking

I'm not on the bike at the moment, but it doesn't stop me from posting up other cyclists' experiences. Here's an excellent video entitled "world's most pointless overtake". I have to say - this sort of thing happened to me all the time while i was on my bike. It drove me round the bed. I even tried to comment on it once, lightheartedly, to a driver who'd overtaken me seconds before we both came to a red light. My attempt at a light hearted reprimand ended up with him calling me a cunt, going completely red in the face, and finally threatening to kill me.



Thanks to rogerhotuk

Fortean Times Unconvention - Sunday

Roberts & Clarke

 Christopher Josiffe: Gef the Talking Mongoose

The link takes you to the Fortean times article which appeared back in January. a lovely and entertaining article, nice bit of research by Josiffe, who I met once at a South East London Folklore Society meeting.
I missed all but the Q&A session for this.

 Dave Clarke and Andy Roberts: Cursed Stones

Dave Clarke, again, sharing the stage with "long-time sidekick" Andy Roberts for a talk on cursed stones. This examined "cases where people have linked hauntings and other supernatural experiences with cult stone artefacts such as Celtic stone heads and other stone objects, such as the Hexham Heads and the Tigh nam Bodach shrine in Scotland."

 http://www.philipcoppens.com/glenlyon.html

Andy Roberts started off by saying that though the pair wrote the UFO section in the Fortean Times, this wasn't their main field of interest, that they only wrote the UFO stuff to piss off the readers (big laugh). In fact their main field of interest seems to be, er, fields. And things you might find in fields, stone circles, ley lines, that sort of thing, and indeed, the subject of this talk, "cursed" stones.

The talk started in Scotland. The claim was made that spiritual beliefs and practices have survived from pre-Christian times in various parts of the UK. Examples were forthcoming. 

Tigh nam Bodach

The talk also took in an area of Derbyshire where sacred stones are secretly revered.

This particular "cursed" stone head (below) after apparently causing havoc, was eventually taken to Lockerbie by its fearless and sceptical new owner in December 1988. Subsequent events led to said sceptical owner suddenly not being sceptical any more.

David Clarke

The story of the Hexham Heads was recounted, and I do remember reading the article in the FT quite a long time ago now. These stone heads were dug up and strange things a happened. We learn also that a man, (truck driver?) eventually popped up on Nationwide to claim he had made the Hexham Heads and indeed made some more that were nearly identical. Regardless of their authenticity, they are currently missing, wherabouts unknown.
At the end of a lecture a woman stood up to say that a report exists in her museum (didn't catch all the details here) of an analysis of the Hexham Heads, and they were indeed made of concrete, not stone.

the stage with Hexham Heads slide

Little Mannie: an amusing aside

a "real" stone head (speakers' own)

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince: The Forbidden Universe

I wasn't sure about this talk. It started well enough with the claim that science wasn't quite the rational exercise that scientists tell us - or that is written in the text books. At least not in the early days anyway. Which I accept perfectly happily, an looked forward to finding out more.

But, it began to dawn on me 15 / 20 minutes into the talk that these people weren't dispassionate, neutral Forteans weighing up the pros and cons of something that appears strange, but were in fact believers in this thing they were talking about, which at that point still hadn't been made clear. I saw that quite a few people were now walking out. I don't know if they were walking out in protest, they may have just seen it as a good chance to go and get a coffee, use the toilet, smoke a fag, etc. But if that was the case, not many came back.

A lot was said about Isaac Newton and his unorthodox religious views, which are decidedly non-scientific, I accept, but then Newton wasn't a scientist, and science as we know it didn't really exist. He was more like an alchemist.

So we got onto Hermeticism and the Hermetic revival around the time of the Renaissance. Copernicus and his sun centric cosmos in 1543, long lost Egyptian documents written by Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great Hermes) , the fact that all the early scientists owed their discoveries to the ancient philosophy.

Pickett gave us the true story of Galileo and dispute with the orthodox church, as she saw it. His support for Heliocentricism was seen as a threat to the church. From their website:

The Hermeticists taught that a wide acceptance of the heliocentric theory would be the trigger for a religious and political revolution. If and when people were allowed to believe that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way round as they taught, then - to them - all hell would break loose. They could not let this happen, so they threatened Galileo with the usual agonising death of heretics.

Then Prince came on and spoke, and I'll let his argument be described in his own words:

"Part Two of The Forbidden Universe takes the story to the present day, contending that the view of the universe emerging from the latest scientific discoveries, particularly of quantum physics and cosmology, can be seen to vindicate the ancient Hermetic belief in an evolving, living, conscious universe. Far from being merely a historical footnote, Hermeticism hold the key to humanity's future.

There is something else, some great irony and even a cover-up on the part of today's scientific orthodoxy. The fact is that, although staggering to many, science itself has proven beyond doubt that the dazzling array of fine-tunings of the laws of physics and biochemistry that has enabled life to be arise in the universe cannot be ascribed to chance. Therefore, science itself implies the existence of a designer…

However, it must be stressed that while this shows that life has been created and is meaningful, it neither proves the existence of the biblical God nor the truth of the account of creation in Genesis.

Yet totally in denial, scientists have rushed to embrace the totally speculative multiverse theory - which by its very nature can never be proven - rather than admit that they themselves have demonstrated that the universe has been designed. This is not science. This is desperation."

There was mention of theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler who speculated about their being a "Participatory Anthropic Principle" in the Universe.

So where do I stand on all this? Buggered if I know, really. It's be tempting to adopt this belief system, especially as it seems to piss Christians off quite so much. Yes, it's a nice idea that agency pressed a button around the time of the Big Bang and started all this going to exact specifications; and impossible to entirely rule out too as we know that given enough time, we too will be designing and creating out own multiple universes. If we can do it, then how can we deny that we may be part of someone else's handy work. Maybe we're aprt of a computer programme?
But then I think, where does it all get us. Isn't it just better to do as the more honest scientists do and admit we just don't know, and maybe we never will.

Ted Harrison: Apocalypse When?

From the Program:
The world should have ended on 21 May this year, according to American radio preacher Harold Camping; or has the Apocalypse been postponed to 2012 as the Mayan Calendar is supposed to suggest? Over history, hundreds of dates have been set for Doomsday and, so far, every prediction has fallen flat on its face. So why do prophets keep prophesying? Why do their followers believe them? And how do failed prophets and disillusioned followers cope with the inevitable ‘disappointment’ of waking up on Judgement Day to find everything as normal? And how is the world supposed to end when it does? Will a wrathful God take to the skies with his angels? Will we be hit by a meteorite or rogue planet? Will the human-race score an own-goal and cause irreversible climate change or blow itself up with nuclear weapons? Ted Harrison explores the history, mythology and psychology of End-time rumours.

I really enjoyed this talk. Made me laugh quite a bit, thought the speaker was excellent. I'm not sure everyone thought it was as amusing as I did - though he was throwing in quite a few jokes, quite dry jokes. My kind of humour I guess.

Guardian on the end of the world

John Martin: Apocalypse

Mayan Prophesy Joke

And that's where it ends for me - as I took to the pub to talk to a friend I rarely see.

I missed:

Gail-Nina Anderson: A Popular History of the Mummy

Nina Conti: Her Master’s Voice 

Fortean Times Uncon - Saturday

Fairly awful journey in but worth it. The problems began the day before when above the sound of my MP3 player I heard an ominous announcement. The gist of it was that the DLR would be closed the whole weekend for "planned" maintenance. The reason I put planned in quotes is, if it was planned, as they said, why am I hearing about it for the first time the evening before?! I am on the email and text lists for DLR travel info, I use it every day, I work for flipping TfL, and have seen no signs, have heard nothing, not even internally. WTF!!! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the DLR is fucking unprofessional!! Amateurs! But I digress.
The next problem occurred to me later - too late to do anything in fact. The problem being on this day with no DLR there is also a little matter of the Lord Mayor's show which attracts thousands, maybe tens of thousands. sure enough, even in the morning, the trains were infeasibly packed with parents and young kids.
The other problems were all of my own making - the fact that I didn't make my sandwiches on Friday, the fact that I stayed up till 2 am drinking and Tweeting, and finally the fact that when I woke up at 7 am on Saturday morning I could barely move.

So I missed high profile guest Jon Ronson, which disapointed me a little. But this guy saw it:

http://paulstott.typepad.com/911cultwatch/2011/11/jon-ronson-at-uncon-2011.html

I also missed:
Science and Sasquatch: the life of Grover Krantz - Brian Regal
Physical anthropologist Grover Krantz (1931-2002) was the most well known scientist to publicly champion the existence of the North American cryptid called Sasquatch—also known as Bigfoot. While he did not originate it, he actively promoted the idea that this creature was an evolutionary descendent of Gigantopithecus. For his efforts, he was dismissed or ignored by academics who viewed the Sasquatch as at best a relic of folklore and at worst a hoax, and also received a negative reaction from amateur Bigfoot researchers, some of whom threatened and abused him. 

At the Camden Centre I only paused to buy myself a coffee before heading into the main hall to see:

Dr Dave Clarke

1855 is best known to Forteans as the year in which the mysterious Devil’s Footprints appeared overnight during a heavy snowfall in Devon. But were supernatural forces also at work in Yorkshire – with fatal consequences? This talk tells the story of a Sheffield woman who died “from fright” following an encounter with a ghost, and the bizarre story that unfolded in the wake of the inquest – a story involving spiritualists, messages from a murder victim, buried treasure and a mysterious young woman with wild talents. Taking a story that would have perplexed the Victorian detective Inspector Jack Whicher, David Clarke follows the clues and asks: was this truly a case of death by supernatural causes?


I walked in while this guy was in full flow - talking about a series of events in Sheffield in 1855 which involved Mormons, seances and a woman who could apparently see the dead. She went into a fit and died - the death certificate recorded she died from fright. I had to work out the story in a backwards sort of way, having missed the beginning. but it was an interesting little insight into Victoriana. These people were clearly obsessed with being able to contact the dead, and with their high mortality rate, its not surprising really. It wasn't the last time we'd be touching upon the morbid fascination of the dead amongst British Victorians.

Dr Clarke linked these events with other events reported that year - such as the Devil's footprints in Devon - which had me quivering under the duvet as a child. How much could the idea of one influenced the other? Would people have read about the footprints in the paper and been in some way made more susceptible to believing in spirits and ghouls?

http://www.phoenixism.net/?p=8113

From Dave's Blog http://drdavidclarke.co.uk/

Scared to Death on Campo Lane…The background:There are certain irrefutable facts about the death of Sheffield Mormon Hannah Rallison in Campo Lane, in 1855. She collapsed in front of several people after entering a cellar said to be haunted. She claimed, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she had seen a ghost. And experts at an inquest could not find a rational explanation for the healthy 48-year-old’s sudden demise.

“This is one of the most fascinating mysteries I’ve come across,” says David Clarke, former Star journalist, author and all-round expert in the unexplained. “What’s intriguing is that, unlike many of these stories, it is all document in newspaper reports and the inquest – but still no one really knows what happened.”

What we do know is that the Campo Lane cellar – below the home of fellow Mormon John Favell – was said to be haunted after John himself claimed he spotted an old woman there. As neighbours gathered to investigate on February 24, Hannah temporarily entered the cellar alone. There, in front of several witnesses, she was seized by terror, shrieked she had seen a ghost and collapsed. She died in her South Street home the next day.

“This was all recorded as fact,” says David, who has researched the incident for an up coming book on Victorian mysteries. “It fascinated so many people it actually ended up being reported in several national newspapers at the time.”

Research by David shows that within a couple of weeks The Sheffield Independent claimed to have found an explanation. “We have been informed,” it said, “that some of the alleged appearances resulted from the operations of a magic lantern by the occupiers of adjacent premises, who knew that Favell and his family were Mormonites, and determined to have a lark at their expense.”

David asks anyone with possible information about Hannah Rallison or the Favells to email furnival.news@googlemail.co.uk

Richard Freeman

Cryptozoologist - I've seen him talk 4 times now and he's always entertaining, if somewhat idiosyncratic and  somehwat grouchy. This time he's got two expeditions to talk about. Apparently there's a BBC4 feature length documentary in the pipeline. 


All Ape-men Great and Small - Richard Freeman
The search for unknown hominids continues – from the 10-foot-tall Yeti to the rather les imposing Orang Pendek. In November 2010, the Centre for Fortean Zoology took an expidition into the Garo Hills of Northern India in search of the yeti, or mande burung as it is know locally. They uncovered not only eyewitness reports and tracks but also stories of a monster snake unknown to science. In September of 2011, the CFZ mounted their fourth expedition to Sumatra in search of the Orang Pendek, building on the 2009 trip, where the creature was sighted and hair found. Richard Freeman will be giving full accounts of the results of these latest expeditions.


This is a short clip of Richard explaining what crytpozoology is.

Richard always seems on the edge of some great discovery, but unfortunately so far it seems the evidence collected has come to nothing. Even so, the stories are great. 

Most of the stuff he talked about is in these articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/sep/09/orang-pendek-quest-sumatra

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/sep/08/orang-pendek-sumatra-mystery-ape

http://cfzsumatra09.blogspot.com/

another clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXx42eAETNM

Jan Bondeson

This speaker was a Swedish born doctor (and prolific author) who began his career in london, but now works in Cardiff. He looked to me like Michael Palin's mild mannered accountant character, but had a tremendous sense of humour and knows how to tell a story.  He spoke about "clever" dogs and horses; there's a good FT article about this which i'll dig out at some point for a few extra details. This delusion carried on right up to and including the Nazi era.

The press got quite excited about his research a while back, with articles appearing in the mainstream press, however they mostly missed the point of his research and even made stuff up, such as claiming that Hitler was creating a troop of super-intelligent terrorist dogs!!

Jan Bondeson reveals how an early-20th century German obsession with the supposedly superior intelligence of horses and dogs gave birth to a ‘new animal psychology’ and created a host of doggie celebrities noted for their philosophical thought, ardent patriotism and ability to communicate with humans. These canine luminaries included Rolf, the philosophical Airedale Terrier, who kept up a lively correspondence with scientists and thinkers, and Don, the incredible talking Pointer, who enjoyed a spectacular career and spawned a host of imitators around the world.

piano playing dog

performing dogs

it was a period of madness in pseudo science - the claim was that the animals were intelligent but owners were giving their pets unconscious cues for when to stop tapping, barking, etc, when answering questions or "talking". The case reminds me of the more recent fashion for teaching sign language to apes, with simlarly over-blown claims, and ultimately, simlarly discredited. 

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100010350

Daily Mail take on it

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390340/Dr-Jan-Bondeson-Nazis-tried-teach-dogs-talk-read.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-13568270
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=1

Sarah Angliss

Engineer, scientist, musician, Fortean. This talk was a bit of a mish-mash. Interetsing, entertaining, but ultimately nothing to really get your teeth into. not even sure the content was particularly Fortean to be honest, besides the oft repeated "voices form the dead" reference she made. She demonstrated a genuine wax cylinder set up, both playing and recording.
The programme describes her spot thus:
In December 1877, a journalist writing in Scientific American noted there was now “a startling possibility of recording voices of the dead”. He had just witnessed Edison recording sound on his new invention: the phonograph. In this live demonstration, I’ll explore some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of audio recording, as I immortalise a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph. Delving into the archives, I’ll also examine a little-known curiosity from the 18th century, one which may have been used to record short segments of sound 150 years before the phonograph. This event will include some short, musical interludes incorporating a few of my own inventions. As I use the theremin to conjure up ‘music from the aether’, I’ll reveal how the first ‘electric servants’ were also seen as tools for paranormal investigation.

The "voice of the dead" we heard was from Florence Nightingale, very much alive when she recorded it - and surprisngly good quality too.

Sarah talked about an old practice of removing birds from wild, isolating them, starving them, and then training them to sing particular tunes. There was even an industry in selling tunes designed specifically for teaching to the birds. It was a pre wax-cylinder era music centre for the home. The practice lasted about 150 years. But cruel apparently.

Sarah recorded a member of the audience, rather bizarrely saying (shouting - you had to shout as amplification was still a thing of the future) "I love you sausage man" and then played it back. Despite the claim of Jan Bondeson in the previous talk, this earliest of all recording technologies sounded remarkably good to these modern ears.

Stookie Bill

Finally she played a tune on her theramin - with robotic vent dummy as vocalist - a replica of John Logie Baird's "Stooky Bill" who appeared on the first ever television transmission.


You won't be surprised to hear that the music Sarah performs sounds rather creepy, and atmospheric. How else would you expect a theramin to sound?

This clip is just a taster for Sarah's music, which she performs with her band Spacedog:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/play/uncanny-orchestra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To7t_26TVoM

http://www.myspace.com/spacedoguk

http://youtu.be/7LQsLOpKjac