Month: March 1998
Orbiting Fur Balls
A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU IN THE OFF-WORLD COLONIES On Saturday 14th March, this Blatherskite was conversing with the Church of Subgenius's Rev. Nickie Deathchick whilst attending an open-house reception in the Fringeware Store (Austin, Texas). Suddenly, a representative of a company calling themselves 'Celestis' was thrust upon us. In case you don't know, Houston based Celistis were responsible for last year launching into space the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, and philosopher and scientist Timothy Leary. This Celestis representative (who I shall refrain from naming) filled us in on the basic idea of their latest project - but asked us to keep mum until he contacted us with further details, as this information was not yet public knowledge. We agreed (wondering why he had told us at all). . . but on the following Tuesday, March 17th, the Daily Telegraph ran a story concerning this 'secret' information....
Animalous Phenomena
MONKEY BUSINESS The Sunday Nation, via The Electronic Telegraph, reported on the 9th of February 1998 the invasion by some 100 baboons of a hospital in Marsbit, Kenya. The unexpected visitors (was it during visiting hours?) were accused of plucking dextrose drips from patients. Three weeks later, Reuters (via Yahoo) told of a troop of monkeys (species unspecified) staging a pitch invasion at a schoolboy soccer match in Hargeisa, Somalia. Several players were injured while making for shelter, and the police eventually had to open fire to disperse the monkeys, killing an apparent 'ringleader'. A consolidated effort, or a mere coincidence? WHEN YER DEAD, YER DEAD On a more macabre note, one of Ireland's oldest cemeteries, the Yew Tree graveyard in Monasterevan, Co. Kildare, has an exhumation of human bones on a nightly basis, according to the Irish Times of February 12th . The graveyard is on the site of...
It’s the end of the Millennium as we know it
Blather has been idly comparing the news of these past few days to our hypothetical dramatisation (adapted for the 'net) of the Book of Revelations. On March 8th, traffic on 200 mile stretch of North Californian highway slowed to a near halt as it was illuminated by flaming objects falling from the sky, convincing many that an aircraft had crashed. According to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, it was a large meteor shower (The Associated Press, Via Nando News, and the San Francisco Examiner on March 10th). This was preceded by a disclosure concerning a 32-year-old Chinese farmer who had just been divested of two of his three tongues (Agence France-Presse March 9th, Reuters March 8th), and a Canadian cow which gave birth to four calves, a rather rare and momentous occurrence (The Associated Press, via Nando March 8th). MIRACLE ALERT We nearly didn't get round to mentioning this little...
Frog Fall
MARCH SPAWNED A FROG FROG FALL Suzanne Charlton the BBC Weather Centre had a rather intriguing weather report to make on the 5th of March. A 'distraught' woman in Croydon (The Times say Croydon, while several people reckon that the BBC said Crawley), in the southern U.K., phoned the Meteorological Office to inform them of a deluge of of frogs which were proceeding to cover her garden and much of the surrounding neighbourhood. Neil Lofthouse, the U.K.'s national forecaster, was quoted as saying that : "You do get reports of things getting sucked up by water spouts, which are rotating columns of water, or tornadoes. They would have to go over a lake or something with a lot of frogs on it." Unfortunately Mr. Lofthouse is fumbling in the dark with this fairly weak, if typical explanation. For more on anomalous falls, see The Anomalist's 'Super-Sargasso Surfin' and Blather's 'Raining...