Paranormal Ireland – Where has all the weirdness gone?
"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." - Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity QUOTATION, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Some time ago, we grew weary of writing about the paranormal. It was a pathetic state of affairs - the bizarre became, for us, the mundane. So, we shut up, and stopped writing about it. Now, without for one minute claiming that we somehow caused a fugue in the Hibernian gestalt or a committed grievous quantum act, for some reason people in Ireland stopped sending us weird shit. We miss it, in some twisted way. Back in 1998 or 1999, a constant stream of UFO sightings kept piling into our mailbox. The papers were regularly reporting on ill-behaved poltergeists and ghostly hauntings. Not anymore. We...
Savage Controversies – Irish Lake Monsters
"The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." -- Bertrand Russell Part 1: Tempis Fugit... Some Blather readers may remember the 'Norway' fiasco, back in the summer of 1998, when I travelled to Norway, in search of lake monsters and mayhem. Those of you who don't remember, check out http://www.blather.net/archives2/issue2no16.html As expected, weird aquatic beasts were thin on the ground in Norway, and even more sparse in the water, but the chaos was abundant, the company was mixed, the craic mighty, the lunatics were depressing, and the post-expedition fall-out diabolical, with Swedish lake monster hunter Jan-Ove Sundberg annoying anyone who he seemed to think had anything to do with him *not* finding a lake monster in Lake Seljord. A concise record of the madness of those crazy seventeen days is still circulating on the Discovery Channel, on a programme called 'The...
Alfred Jarry: Absinthe, Bicycles and Merdre
'Merdre' - Pere Ubu, Ubu Roi And so Pere Ubu issued the very word that the finally threw the audience at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre into a frothing frenzy, during the 1896 staging of Alfred Jarry's (1873-1907) infamous Ubu Roi. The Parisians didn't take well to the absurd affront delivered upon them by the bold 23 year-old playwright. This broadside of "Shite!" successfully outraged the bourgeois, and shot Jarry to strange stardom aboard a wave of scandal. Jarry's influence has been considerable. While he himself owes much to Rabelais, movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism Cubism, Theatre of the Absurd - all owe debts to his works. Picasso, Flann O'Brien, The Marx Brothers, the Goons, Mad magazine, Robert Anton Wilson, Monty Python and their spawn were all influenced by Jarry, whether they knew it or not . . . The Ubu plays came as a cultural shock to the...
The Confabulous Mind – An investigator of the paranormal searches out human memory
Originally published by SIGNUM Ed: Do you own a video camera? Renee: No. Fred hates them. Fred: I like to remember things my own way. Ed: What do you mean by that? Fred: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened. -*Lost Highway* A few years ago, while having dinner with a friend in my Dublin city centre apartment, I witnessed what I perceived to be an outrageously serious crime. Hearing activity outside my second story window, I looked out to see four Garda (police) officers running towards my building, their car parked askew, doors open. They split into two pairs, a duo disappearing up a side street, while the others continued towards my window, below which stood a man, dressed in a jogging suit and cap. He did not put up any resistance as he was handcuffed and led towards the car. They were about halfway there...
‘…time is just memory mixed with desire’
De Selby, Hunter S. Thompson, Irish UFOs and more! '...time is just memory mixed with desire' - *The Part You Throw Away*, Tom Waits IRELAND AND ECHELON Irish magazine *The Phoenix*, May 5, 2000, Vol. 18 No. 9, Pgs 20-21, published an article on Ireland's connections to the global spy business: 'The abolition of Ireland's neutral status has been accelerated by a secret agreement with the American and British governments - without even a nod in the direction of the Oireachtas or the Irish public - to join a state-of-the-art, global telecommunications spying apparatus. This is revealed in a special European comission report on the Anglo-American integrated, world-wide network of electronic initelligence collection platforms (120 satellites and ground stations) code-named ECHELON. It produces military, political and economic intelligence by intercepting telecommunications and clandestinely plundering computer files.' Read the rest of the article at: Ireland joins Echelon BLEDDY UFOS One of...
The Abbeylara Incident: The Killing of John Carthy
This article was formerly titled "The State of Policing". It deals with the killing of John Carthy, in April 2000, by Irish police (Gardai), in Abbeylara, Co. Longford. The incident has caused six years of controversy, culminating in the Barr Tribunal. 'Security, the friendly mask of change at which we smile, not seeing what smiles behind' - Edward A. Robinson Let me get one thing straight. I have no personal gripe with the Gardaà (Irish police), despite having being accosted, searched and questioned on several occasions for no apparent reason other than keeping strange hours or minding my own business. In fact, years ago, the Gardaà once saved me from a rather nasty situation, where I was, with some friends, under siege in our apartment. Outside were a considerable number of crazy folk, armed with knives. We had committed no sin - in fact, it was a case of mistaken...
The Event: Princess Diana’s Death
Material pertaining to the infamous Princess Diana death of August 1997 was recently recovered on a 'recovered' laptop by Blatherskites Greg Barrett and Dave (daev) Walsh... Read a Blather special on the phenomenon of bisociative coincidence. POT CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK Father Dougal: God, I've heard about those cults Ted. People dressing up in black and saying Our Lord's going to come back and save us all. Father Ted: No, Dougal, that's us. That's Catholicism. Father Dougal: Oh right. (From TV Comedy Series *Father Ted*) On March 22nd, *The Irish Times* published two articles on the antics of Mike Garde, Ireland's *Cult Watchdog*. In response, we issued a letter of criticism to the paper's letters editor, which has yet to appear in print. If there were any other critics of the cult articles, their incensed reactions are also absent from the letters page. What follows is an edited version of...
The Event – A strange investigation into the Princess Diana myth and conspiracy
by Greg Barrett 'If Christ Came Again He Would Die in a Car Crash' - J.G. Ballard The following report details a preliminary investigation into the Archaeology of bisociative coincidence. It outlines a methodology for the recovery of subconscious effects within particular contemporary scenarios. Such Events incur a generic and socially constructed formula known throughout the modern world as "accidental". "The arrangement of physical objects and temporal sequences that precede an accident must be seen to be purely coincidental: they cannot have been willed." Abiding by this definition, the accident is analogous to the psychological effect of what the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung termed the bisociative coincidence. Each thread of a bisociative coincidence can be traced back according to the linear causality of their respective autonomous paths. However, no individual element can be said to have a causal relationship to another prior to their convergence; the moment of luminosity. "The...
Out of the Marvellous – Black Masses, Lord Dunsany and Falling Fish
TEMPIS FUGIT Time does fly - yet another chasm gapes between the previous issue and this one. Its been a quiet couple of months, with very little in the way of Irish paranormal tales coming our way - but we've not been not been idle (the devil found work for us). On the Blather website can be found a fledgling, or worse still, skeleton bookstore, where we hope to start reviewing and recommending books. Tempus Fugit - The Headitorial Out of the Marvellous - Seamus Heaney, and Ancient Irish UFOs No Such Place - Lord Dunsany, falling fish, and no such Ireland Yeats and the Black Arts - Black Masses in Dublin? TPC Meta Holistic Systems - The Ongoing Saga Before we attempt to escape the subject of 'time', a small padded parcel arrived last month, and it bore a postmark of January 3rd in Smithtown, New York, USA. Inside...
Blather Doesn’t Care – An end of the pseudo-m*llennium special
As we are mere weeks away from the end of the year, Blather would like to make it know that *we don't care* about the (change of) millennium. We don't. Ok? However, we will discuss possible Irish meteorites, Wexford UFOs and other malarkey... 'Blather is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. We are as proud as bantams and as vain as peacocks. "*Blather* doesn't care." A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?' - from the original *Blather*, issue 1, published in 1934 by Brian O'Nolan a.k.a. Flann O'Brien a.k.a. Myles na gCopaleen. More on Flann...