Waking the Dead: Charles Fort’s Grave – Albany, New York
You just can't keep us out of graveyards here on blather.net. This season sees us dashing around the New World, inquiring into the whereabouts of the corpse of that irascible iconoclast, Charles Hoy Fort, father of fortean studies and teleportation. It's 11am on the 29th day of April and I'm surrounded by dead people. I can't see any of them. The year, 2007, Gregorian, 5767 Hebrew, 1428 Islamic, 1386 Persian. In the Julian calendar it's 13 days earlier... sort of. In any case, it's heading for midday, Eastern Standard Time, if you believe in that kind of thing. It's a Sunday morning, according to the ancient Egyptians. 'Sies Solis, Dimanche, Sonntag, Dé Domhnaigh, the Christian Sabbath. I'm sitting the passenger seat of a rented automobile, careening around the backroads of Albany Rural Cemetery, in upstate New York, or, if you like, the New Netherlands. The Dutch village of Beverwyck became...
MayDay!
Late at night, somewhere in Ireland, a shadowy figure will be crossing the land. He or she will be holding in their hand, a bag, or box of eggs. They might bend to dig and bury an egg in a field, or creep closer to an outhouse and lay one gently inside straw or hay. The moon is almost full, so the light is good, and the ground is dry. It is a good night to be out in the fields with malice in your heart... May Eve This night is May Eve, the night before the 1st of May, the feast of Bealtaine, also known as Mayday. This is an old Celtic feast day that marked the start of summer, the day when cattle were driven out to pasture. Bealtaine is calculated as a quarter day, between the Vernal equinox on March 21st and Midsummer Solstice on June 21st....
The 9-11 Conspiracy Theories
The 9/11 Conspiracy Theories are getting too silly, too widespread and far too pervasive. In their frantic dash to prove the complicity of the Neo-Cons, the 9/11 Truther Movement has given the Bush administration exactly what it wanted in the first place: a population mired in minutiae and utterly convinced of its own impotence. The Call to Adventure I've been avoiding this issue, if the truth be told, for months now. I started dabbling with the 9/11 conspiracy theories that have been evolving this last two or three years, a few months back, by listening to podcasts, reading articles and yes, watching the movie Loose Change - the home-made student film on 9/11 which sits at the very centre of most of the recent conspiracy theories. Whilst you have to admire the ingenuity of those responsible for the movie, you also feel forced to point out that this is,...
UFO over Archway in London
Be the holy! It's been a while since Blather found itself in the middle of a UFO flap. That is, we mean, in the actual *middle* of one, with a spate of UFO sightings in the area of Archway, near to Crouch End in north London, where this particular BlatherGoon resides. The sightings appear to have taken place on February 1st at 5.30pm with the Police recieving a brace of phone calls to report the objects... On the street Writing on the 7th of February, the Islington Gazette reports: Alix McAlister, 34, a market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway, said: "I just picked up my son from nursery in Bredgar Road. I had just come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky. "There were a group of them - 10 to 15 of them moving together. My first impression was that they...
Dave on Greenpeace Anti-Whaling Expedition to Southern Ocean
Yep, that's right. I'm back on board the Greenpeace ship Esperanza again, currently in the middle the of icefields of the Antarctic. We're here to track down and confront the Japanese whaling fleet, which, under claims of "scientific whaling" plans to kill 945 whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, then sell the meat commercially. Clever but unsavoury. So, while we're here, we're going to see a lof of beauty - and a lot of horror. You can follow the expedition here, on the Ocean Defenders expedition weblog » Related Greenpeace Sites: Defending Our Oceans » Expedition Weblog » IGO: Join our crew and start campaigning! » Whale Love Wagon » Esperanza Flickr Account » Ocean Defenders Myspace Account » Also, check out my photos here: My Flickr Account » My Abroad photoblog » Humpback whale photo © Dave Walsh UPDATE 18/02/2006: Esperanza arrives at site of stricken whaling vessel...
Waking the Dead: Burke and Hare
178 years ago today, an Irishman named William Burke was executed in Edinburgh, Scotland. You may never have heard of him, but at the time of his death he was infamous: 'This day, Wednesday 28th Jan, 1829, William Burke underwent the last sentence of the law, for the murder of Mrs Docherty, one of the victims of the West Port Tragedies. At an early hour, the spacious street where the scaffold was erected, was crowded to excess ; and all the windows which could command a view, were previously bespoken, and high prices given for them.' So begins the Broadside which was posted on the streets of Edinburgh in 1829, informing those who could read it that William Burke, one half of the infamous Burke and Hare, had been sent to the gallows and hung until dead. A Broadside, in case you were curious, was the popular means of mass...
Blast from the past: Cannonballs from the sky
In October 1997, a mystery cannonball tore through the walls of a Missouri mobile home. Nobody knew where it came from, or who fired. We wrote some crazy stuff about it, here on blather.net. Now it's come back to haunt us... The owner of the mobile home, Kathy J. Mickelson, emailed blather.net, telling her side of the story. The "cannonball" was no such thing - in fact, it was a massive spudgun. "There never was an explanation which didn't itself need to be explained" - Charles Fort Nearly nine years ago, on October 23rd, 1997, I wrote an article for blather.net called "The Smoking Cannon": A rather amusing, classically fortean story crashed onto the Blather newsdesk this week, in the shape of a cannonball. The 'civil war-type' missile tore through a window and two walls of Leonard and Kathy Mickelson's mobile home, in House Springs, Missouri, on Thursday night 16th...
Angry Dreams
Occasionally I have dreams during which I get extremely angry with people whom I feel no anger to in 'real life' - and wake up somewhat disturbed and embarrassed. It happened again last night (I was in a theatre in Venice pelting the collective Blather readership with Monster Munch, while shouting and laughing hysterically) . I decided to use the web to investigate the phenomenon of angry dreams. A search for "angry dreams" first turned up a commercial website called Absolute Comfort, selling beds and mattresses etc. Their anger page revealed something that seemed to me very sensible indeed: "...what about angry dreams? It's obvious that we go to bed tired at night. We wake up refreshed, rested and energized the next morning. The body using its built-in intelligence knows how to relieve itself of fatigue and accumulated stress and strain from the day's activities." Yes, I was completely exhausted...
The War at Home: the story of Zachary Bowen and Addie Hall
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to meet Greg Palast, who I interviewed for a piece on Blather. The reason the piece never appeared is quite simple and enormously embarrasing: I lost the tapes. Despite the amateur-hour antics, one thing has stayed with me from that day: Palast's description of how the horrors that Timothy McVeigh had witnessed as a soldier during the first Iraq war had followed him home to the U.S. and led him to commit a horror of his own: the Oklahoma City bombing. I mention this because the recent story of how decorated soldier Zachary Bowen murdered, dismembered and cooked his girlfriend Addie Hall, may also have its origins in what Bowen was exposed to when on service. To paraphrase what Palast said to me that day, isn't it foolish of us to expect that the warzone will not follow a soldier home?...
Diggin’ in the Dirt: NIall (sausage the fourth)
Blather's grave-robber in residence 'Ender' returns to deliver the latest in his epic series of articles on the legendary Irish warlord and shagger of many women, Niall of the Nine Hostages. So, strap on yer fedora and grab hold of yer trowel as this time we explore the controversial genetic evidence which, it was recently suggested, points to the fact that one in five Irish people are directly descended from Niall... In our last sausage we had seen how, just like that, out of nowhere, came the ‘history’ of the Uà Néill legacy. In the words of Kelleher ‘like a school of cuttle fish from an ink-cloud of their own making’ Booty The success and rise of the Uà Néill dynasty is inexorably linked with the changing political order, landscape and belief systems within fifth and sixth century Ireland and on the wider European stage with the decline of the...