Year: 2006
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...
UFOs in Newbury, UK
Starting this September just gone, residents in Newbury, Berkshire, England have been reporting anomalous lights in the local sky. According to Newbury News 'triangular lights' were seen by the the local Greenham Common by a spate of people. And now a new set of sightings, this week just gone, over the M4 road have left locals puzzled and generated a rash of calls to the media. Apparently, the Met office and the Police can't explain it. But, if the truth be told, the UFO sightings are only the beginning of the story for an area rich in Fortean history: a quick perusal of the archives reveals an area abundant in spectres, ghosts and unexplained phenomena. Robert Rowlands of the Newbury News reports: 'In late September, Newbury residents claimed to have witnessed triangular formations of lights hovering over Greenham Common and other parts of the district. So far, the MOD and...
To Hell or Howth: The Hostel of the Red God
Halloween Special: This is an expanded version of an article I had published recently, as part of the programme for Conor McPherson's play The Seafarer, currently being staged at the National Theatre in London. I was asked to write a piece dealing with the mythology of Howth and places in the Dublin landscape. I soon discovered a sinister relationship between some of these places... It's a dark winter's night in the Dublin Mountains. The wind and rain howl around a skull-faced building overlooking the city. In the womb-like warmth inside, members of the Hellfire Club play cards, betting recklessly money, horses, land, and women. They are all prominent members of the ruling class - MPs, Lords and even the City Sheriff. A knock comes on the door - a well dressed, but saturated traveller is ushered in, bade to warm himself by the turf fire. He joins the card game,...
UFO YouTube
In addition to whacky music videos, horse porn, mind-bendingly dull video blogs, Chuck Norris fight-scenes and flesh-crawlingly cute kittens on record turntables, YouTube is also a portal for all class of UFO shenanigans, allowing as it does, for the easy sharing of 'UFO movies' from around the world. Theoretically, this should be a goldmine of Forteana: the very cream of what the UFOlogical community has to offer. However, YouTube's strength is also it's weakness: the ease with which you can upload a file means that many people don't bother to explain the provenance of the footage. The result is a mixed bag. No matter, it's been far too long since we had any hot UFO action around these parts, so I decided to strap-on my bullshit detector and wade in to the thick of it. Frankfurt The following is a vieo clip filmed over Frankfurt, which at first glance seems...
Robert Anton Wilson Needs Your Help (updated 6th October 2006)
If I was to name two writers who have inspired me to keep blather.net running over the last nine and a half years, it's been Flann O'Brien, and Robert Anton Wilson. For the last decade or so that I've been reading them, Wilson's books have awed and inspired me. They've also made me guffaw with a deep belly laugh that few other writers have drawn from me. now, Bob, or as he's also known, RAW, needs our help. They say (who the fuck are they?) that you should never meet your heroes, as you'll only be disappointed. I've met the man called Robert Anton Wilson twice, and had a whale of a time. He's one of the funniest and most gentle people I've ever had the chance to encounter. Mind you, Bob seems to have been reading blather.net for a long time, before I knew that he knew that I...
Waking the Dead: Necrophiliacs arrested in Mississippi
Reading like the plot of a low-budget horror movie, the press was awash with the ghoulish story of the twins Nicholas and Alexander Grunke today, who were arrested after illegally excavating the corpse of Laura Tennesen: for the express purpose of sexually violating her remains. Waking the Dead has been running for about a year now and in that time we've covered some pretty horrible stuff: body-snatching, death in all its gruesome facets, murder and the dark history of surgical science. But all of this pales into insignificance in the face of an almost unbelievable story which made the press today. From the London Metro: 'Twin brothers and an accomplice have been arrested Wisconsin, America after they tried to dig up a girl's corpse and have sex with it. Police received an anonymous tip-off that the three men were on their way to the cemetary to dig up a grave...
Waking the Dead: Bitton Train Graveyard
Bitton Train Graveyard can be found just outside Bristol city. The rusted remains found there are a fragmentary glimpse of another age, a lost time, when the singular vision of a man called Isambard Kingdom Brunel re-shaped the very landscape and cities of England. For a chap who smoked up to 40 cigars a day, Brunel was an energetic man. He built ships, roads, bridges and, of course, he built railways. From Wikipedia: 'Though Brunel's projects were not always successful, they often contained innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. During his short career, Brunel achieved many engineering 'firsts', including assisting in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river and development of the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, which was at the time also the largest ship ever built.' The Bitton railway museum is part of the Avon Valley Railway line which ran from Bristol to Bath, which...