Since I signed up to join Bish Denham's Blogfest, involving posting a short ghostly experience, I reckon I better get on it.
This is a true story and the weirdest thing that ever happened to me.
Some years ago, we had orphan kittens. We were alerted to their existence by the agonized cries of the smallest, most-loudmouthed one, who was also the first to try to climb out of the box even though her eyes were glued shut by infection. We called her Intrepid. She was a dark gray tabby. She had two sisters, a dark gray tabby with white feet (Whitefoot), a black (Ford; she was an Explorer), and gray with a white chest (Pogo; he looked like a possum).
We kept them in the sunroom so our big cats wouldn't molest them and contract their fleas, fed them with an eyedropper, combed the fleas out of them, and washed their poor infected eyes regularly with saline solution. Before the recent reconfiguration of our back porch, the three rooms - laundry room, powder room, sunroom - were all connected to each other by doors, with entrance to the main part of the house from the kitchen to the laundry room and from the dining room to the sunroom. Once the kittens started moving around on their own, I would utilize the powder room as an airlock, entering through the laundry room, closing the door behind me, and then opening the door to the sunroom. But none of the doors closed very well.
One night I woke up and saw Intrepid, or possibly Whitefoot, on the foot of the bed. I sat up and she pounced into the mass of covers pushed down there - it being June and too hot to sleep with the covers up - so that I had to fish around for her. I couldn't find her. As I woke up more I realized that, even had one of the felines in the house gotten the door to the sunroom open, a kitten who could barely climb out of a box would have had to cross the dining room and kitchen, climb the steep back stairs (each riser taller than any of the kittens at full extension), cross the landing, climb the second flight of stairs, cross the hallway, and climb onto a waterbed frame with no help from a dangling bedspread. It wasn't possible. This was a hypnopompic hallucination - essentially, my body had started to wake up, but my brain had continued dreaming for a short time.
Not a big deal.
Next day (possibly my memory conflates events and it might have been several days later), the kittens were lively and I had to move back and forth between the powder room and the sun room several times in the course of tending to kittens, so to restrict the time they spent underfoot I put all of them on the bench seat in the sunroom while I went to the bathroom to get what I was after. By the time I turned around, I had kittens in my way. Intrepid in particular seemed anxious to get stepped on - while Ford and Pogo chased each other, she was directly where I needed to step. So I gently lifted her aside with my bare foot under her belly, laughing at the way her little black paws clawed the air on either side of my instep, and returned to the sunroom - where I found Intrepid, too small to jump down, standing on the edge of the bench seat meowing frantically.
None of the kittens, at this point, could climb onto the bench seat without assistance. Even Pogo, the biggest and strongest, had to use an intermediate box placed next to it to get himself up. Yet there she was. But I had felt her furry belly across my instep. And although it was easy to confuse Whitefoot - currently at the base of the bench seat - with Intrepid, I had specifically seen that the kitten I lifted had dark paws.
I have no explanation for this. I only tell you what happened.
Intrepid was the only one of the kittens who died. She never gained weight past 6.5 ounces, never got weaned. She died while I was on an out of town school visit, probably of hypothermia in the middle of June in Texas, because her body couldn't retain heat and the other kittens no longer stayed in the box insulating her.
I don't know if that is relevant.
Weird things happen, that's all.
Showing posts with label Forteana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forteana. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Essence of Summer
Once I faced up to the fact that vertigo was kicking my butt and I was neither smart nor steady enough to do anything useful, I made the most of it and spent some long June afternoons indulging in the prime luxury of summer: Reading true ghost stories on the balcony, with a cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Married to a Contactee
Although the first UFO abduction was documented in 1966 by John G. Fuller in The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours "Aboard a Flying Saucer," concerning the Betty and Barney Hill case, as long ago as the early 80s the big names in UFOology were still contactees - people who claimed direct contact with "space brothers" bringing messages of peace, love, and how we better shape up or ship out. Folks like George Adamski and Billy Meier met tall, slender aliens who resembled Tolkien elves, received messages, wrote books, took UFO pictures, and acted a lot like gurus.
The trip to Medina Lake jogged my memory of a book I considered writing way back in those days, before anal probes and therapy and little gray aliens with big eyes. I had been reading a book about Billy Meier, and how his UFO photos, contact stories, and non-profit foundation changed his lifestyle. Sorry, but that's what I chiefly remember! He attracted followers who filled his home, and his wife was placed under a lot of stress - I particularly remember one scene where she had a strong hysterical episode and was taken care of by one of the followers, with whom she had no common language. Money came in via the UFOs; but I was struck by how isolated, silent, bewildered, and marginalized this woman was in the midst of all this fuss. Did she believe her husband? The overwhelming impression I was getting is that he was faking for profit, but that he hadn't confided in her; that in fact he seldom told her anything. And when we went to visit one of my husband's co-workers on Medina Lake, I found myself looking at the setting for this novel.
It was a brilliant psychological thriller, if I say so myself - at least the shining perfect version in my head was. You'd have a standard working class Texas family living, not on the expensive waterfront, but in one of the small communities fringing the lake. Like my husband's co-worker, the family would own a small former vacation cottage, in need of a great deal of work to make it comfortable year round. If I recall correctly, this cottage had no insulation; windows opened by being pushed straight up into the wall above them; and space was at such a premium that one child essentially slept in a closet, with her clothes hanging above her. Unlike the co-worker, however, my characters would not be getting by.
The husband would be suffering from some disability and the wife would be working too hard to bring in less money than they needed to cover medical bills (no insurance!) and fix the house. They would be under tremendous financial pressure and desperate for a way out. The husband would spend more and more time out of the house; and one day would start bringing home UFO pictures and strange stories. He'd publish these and, with some canny publicity, become one of the contactee gurus, complete with book, news interviews, followers showing up on the doorstep, fame, suspicion, and fortune.
The POV character would be the wife. The husband always tells her the same stories he tells everyone else. The money is good, he's always been a good husband, and she loves him - she has to believe him. Yet, the stories are so far outside her experience she can't wrap her mind around them, and she never quite manages to see a UFO or an alien for herself - she finds believing him impossible. Strangers fill her house, making work for her and interfering with her children; strangers build a new room for her daughter, load her husband with enough money to get out of debt, tell her he's brilliant. He evades confrontation and behaves as if the most bizarre events are normal as a walk in the park. He develops relationships with female followers that seem closer than his with her; yet if he's lying, he's probably lying to them even more. Over time she will find evidence that he's faking, but he has a plausible explanation for everything and acts bewildered and hurt when she questions him. Is he crazy? Is she? What is all of this doing to her children?
One of the characters would be an investigator with whom she gets closer as the rift with her husband widens, but she was not going to cheat on her husband. The investigator would show her evidence - models perhaps - that would convince her that her husband was lying to her; but in the climax, a flood he predicted and in which he behaves heroically, alternate explanations for the evidence would arise, and the husband would disappear, permanently, leaving her more financially secure, and less certain of what was real and what wasn't than ever. The ending would make readers across America throw their books across the room in disgust, but they'd never be able to shake it.
I didn't write this for a number of reasons. At the time I conceived it, I could tell it was way too ambitious. For one thing, I wasn't even married yet (my husband and I were together five years before we did that). Though I had once been involved with a man I realized afterward was an habitual liar, who made unprovable claims every bit as weird and grandiose as the husband in this book, I knew enough to know that marriage is different, especially once you have kids, and that I would be dealing with complex, intense emotions that were way outside my experience.
The motivation to believe unbelievable things said by certain people is powerful, whether that person is spouse, parent, lover, or mentor. That was the idea that interested me most - the faith we invest in other human beings, and how far that can be tested before we break. It would be 20 years before I could approach this matter as more than an intellectual exercise; and in the meantime, I discovered that this isn't my sort of book. It would have to be dense, psychological, dark, and intense. Worst, it would be an adult book. All the concerns in it are adult concerns. The necessary style and approach to character would be suitable for adults, not children or teen-agers. I don't even read these books anymore. I sure wouldn't know how to peddle it. I could easily spend two years of my life writing this and never circulate it because the idea of breaking into the adult novel market didn't appeal to me.
I suppose I could rework the story from the POV of one of the children, but I find I can't get into it. The thing is, the wife's story is the specific one that attracted me. The children would be under tremendous strain for similar reasons; but ultimately they aren't responsible for their father or the financial well-being of the family. Their mother is. And whereas the kids have no choice about being the children of their parents, their mother gets up every morning and chooses anew whether to remain her husband's spouse.
We all have our limitations. I believe I know mine.
The trip to Medina Lake jogged my memory of a book I considered writing way back in those days, before anal probes and therapy and little gray aliens with big eyes. I had been reading a book about Billy Meier, and how his UFO photos, contact stories, and non-profit foundation changed his lifestyle. Sorry, but that's what I chiefly remember! He attracted followers who filled his home, and his wife was placed under a lot of stress - I particularly remember one scene where she had a strong hysterical episode and was taken care of by one of the followers, with whom she had no common language. Money came in via the UFOs; but I was struck by how isolated, silent, bewildered, and marginalized this woman was in the midst of all this fuss. Did she believe her husband? The overwhelming impression I was getting is that he was faking for profit, but that he hadn't confided in her; that in fact he seldom told her anything. And when we went to visit one of my husband's co-workers on Medina Lake, I found myself looking at the setting for this novel.
It was a brilliant psychological thriller, if I say so myself - at least the shining perfect version in my head was. You'd have a standard working class Texas family living, not on the expensive waterfront, but in one of the small communities fringing the lake. Like my husband's co-worker, the family would own a small former vacation cottage, in need of a great deal of work to make it comfortable year round. If I recall correctly, this cottage had no insulation; windows opened by being pushed straight up into the wall above them; and space was at such a premium that one child essentially slept in a closet, with her clothes hanging above her. Unlike the co-worker, however, my characters would not be getting by.
The husband would be suffering from some disability and the wife would be working too hard to bring in less money than they needed to cover medical bills (no insurance!) and fix the house. They would be under tremendous financial pressure and desperate for a way out. The husband would spend more and more time out of the house; and one day would start bringing home UFO pictures and strange stories. He'd publish these and, with some canny publicity, become one of the contactee gurus, complete with book, news interviews, followers showing up on the doorstep, fame, suspicion, and fortune.
The POV character would be the wife. The husband always tells her the same stories he tells everyone else. The money is good, he's always been a good husband, and she loves him - she has to believe him. Yet, the stories are so far outside her experience she can't wrap her mind around them, and she never quite manages to see a UFO or an alien for herself - she finds believing him impossible. Strangers fill her house, making work for her and interfering with her children; strangers build a new room for her daughter, load her husband with enough money to get out of debt, tell her he's brilliant. He evades confrontation and behaves as if the most bizarre events are normal as a walk in the park. He develops relationships with female followers that seem closer than his with her; yet if he's lying, he's probably lying to them even more. Over time she will find evidence that he's faking, but he has a plausible explanation for everything and acts bewildered and hurt when she questions him. Is he crazy? Is she? What is all of this doing to her children?
One of the characters would be an investigator with whom she gets closer as the rift with her husband widens, but she was not going to cheat on her husband. The investigator would show her evidence - models perhaps - that would convince her that her husband was lying to her; but in the climax, a flood he predicted and in which he behaves heroically, alternate explanations for the evidence would arise, and the husband would disappear, permanently, leaving her more financially secure, and less certain of what was real and what wasn't than ever. The ending would make readers across America throw their books across the room in disgust, but they'd never be able to shake it.
I didn't write this for a number of reasons. At the time I conceived it, I could tell it was way too ambitious. For one thing, I wasn't even married yet (my husband and I were together five years before we did that). Though I had once been involved with a man I realized afterward was an habitual liar, who made unprovable claims every bit as weird and grandiose as the husband in this book, I knew enough to know that marriage is different, especially once you have kids, and that I would be dealing with complex, intense emotions that were way outside my experience.
The motivation to believe unbelievable things said by certain people is powerful, whether that person is spouse, parent, lover, or mentor. That was the idea that interested me most - the faith we invest in other human beings, and how far that can be tested before we break. It would be 20 years before I could approach this matter as more than an intellectual exercise; and in the meantime, I discovered that this isn't my sort of book. It would have to be dense, psychological, dark, and intense. Worst, it would be an adult book. All the concerns in it are adult concerns. The necessary style and approach to character would be suitable for adults, not children or teen-agers. I don't even read these books anymore. I sure wouldn't know how to peddle it. I could easily spend two years of my life writing this and never circulate it because the idea of breaking into the adult novel market didn't appeal to me.
I suppose I could rework the story from the POV of one of the children, but I find I can't get into it. The thing is, the wife's story is the specific one that attracted me. The children would be under tremendous strain for similar reasons; but ultimately they aren't responsible for their father or the financial well-being of the family. Their mother is. And whereas the kids have no choice about being the children of their parents, their mother gets up every morning and chooses anew whether to remain her husband's spouse.
We all have our limitations. I believe I know mine.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
News! Parking Teens Picked Up by UFO!
All I can say about this one is, great googly moogly.
UFO picks up Laconia, NH car with teens and drops 180 feet away. Physical evidence includes $5,000 worth of damage to the bottom of the car, divots from the pavement, and disappearing blood!
Less stunning, but still interesting: Did you know elephants are afraid of bees?
Elephants make alarm calls to warn of approaching bees
UFO picks up Laconia, NH car with teens and drops 180 feet away. Physical evidence includes $5,000 worth of damage to the bottom of the car, divots from the pavement, and disappearing blood!
Less stunning, but still interesting: Did you know elephants are afraid of bees?
Elephants make alarm calls to warn of approaching bees
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Miscellaneous News
The Clovis Comet theory has been disproved - no it hasn't - is reasonable - no it isn't - explains a lot - doesn't make any sense. There's only one thing to do with a theory like that: get more data in order to revise it some more! An astronomer suggests that, while a single cometary impact is unlikely, the one that broke up to create the Taurid system could have showered us with lots of little bits of comet, which answers some objections, but not others. Such is science.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
It Came in the Mail
So yesterday was being kind of a bust - the (cough cough) inches I added to the seat of the sweatpants pattern vanished in the sewing and I'm confused; the car died in the driveway (better than dying in the library parking lot after 5); the refrigerator leaked copiously and the repairman couldn't come until today; and my inner gyroscope went out. But then the mail came, and I had a Fortean Times! So I spent a lot of the day wrapped in an afghan reading about weird stuff.
The term "Fortean" is derived from Charles Fort, who spent much of his adult life collecting clippings of strange stories from newspapers and journals and evolving theories of reality out of them. His four books - Book of the Damned, Lo, New Lands, and Wild Talents - are difficult to read due to both his literary style and his thought process, in which facts and ideas blend into eachother and nobody really knows, or can know, anything. Always serious except when he's joking, he builds theories he doesn't believe out of stories of mysterious disappearances, mysterious appearances, miraculous events, and the sometimes even more miraculous pseudoexplanations that people come up with so they don't have to think about them anymore. FT, a UK publication, gives space to ghosts, UFOs, crop circles, cryptozoology, witch panics, miracles, science from fringe physics to mainstream archeology, folklore and fakelore, fairies, frauds, medical anamolies - if it's weird, it's there. The magazine's editorial policy is criticized as credulous and as skeptical to the point of debunking, by different people on different subjects, and that strikes me as a strong indication that it's pretty evenhanded on the whole.
Do I believe any of it? What difference does it make? Whether an account of UFO abduction is interesting or not does not depend on whether I can make up my mind that it's a hoax, an accurate account of what happened, a psychotic episode, or whatever; or on whether the abductors come from the subconscious, the future, the Zeta Reticuli system, or Fairyland. I want the story. I can believe anything for the duration of the story, and in truth few truly Fortean events can be pinned down well enough for me to choose one interpretation over another. Unless given a reason to think someone a liar independent of the strangeness of his story, I accept that people recount their experiences as accurately and truthfully as they know how. That in no way obliges me to accept any given explanation of the experience.
I always get FT a month late due to the reality of distribution across the Atlantic, so I've already seen some of the items mentioned on the website or somewhere else, but whereas the website and forum sometimes annoy me into going away from them for weeks at a time (the internet is full of technical glitches and crabby people), I am always happy to see the magazine. The cover story is lurid - issue 257, February 2010, celebrates Dracula - but I like the little bits most. Breaking News, not so breaking anymore, and the Peruvian Fat Killers story has already been dialed back, but the fact that policemen were telling reporters that they'd uncovered a ring of thieves murdering people to sell their fat on the world cosmetic market (in fact the people they caught killed one person, for different reasons - the world cosmetic market gets its human fats from liposuction) is even weirder once you realize how unfounded the statement is. If I wrote adult thrillers I'd be looking into that!
"FT's Favourite Headlines From Around the World" is a box presenting, without explanation, odd headlines, most of which probabably made sense in context. Devil told: Don't go out at night (Metro, July 16, 2009); Intruder who took an axe to hospital 'for his own protection' (Irish Daily Mail, same date); Newsreader Natasha makes baby sacrifice (Aberdeen Press and Journal, June 25, 2009, oh dear!).
Small news stories: Apparently in August a cop in St. Paul broke into a gorilla enclosure to feed Pop Tarts to the inmates - I sense a Disney comedy behind that one, the old-fashioned kind, with a hapless Dean Jones as the cop. A stockbroker from Florida arrested for pretending to drown and hurling jellyfish at rescuers. Hair supposedly shorn from Elvis in the army sold for $18,300, raising the question "Why did the barber save it?" A physicist quoted as saying that God hates the Higgs bosun particle and that's why the Large Hadron Collider is having so many problems. A man named Shaun Byrne lost his wallet; four months later and five hundred miles away it was found by a dog named Byrne. A seven-year-old blind boy taught to use echolocation, pictured shooting hoops. A man with bad eyesight has a stroke, and after the clot is removed has 20/20 vision.
And on and on and on, articles on myths about Darwin (who did not repent evolution on his deathbed and who did not hesitate to publish out of fear, but because he was putting in the work to support it), a beluga who saved a diver, a Siamese twin starfish, looking for the chupacabras in Nicaragua where it's never been reported, report on the Texas Bigfoot Conference last October, and some freaky stuff in the lettercol. Ick, somebody found a packet with a picture of tooth fairies and the words "Put this under your pillow and see what the fairies bring" printed on it, on the balcony of his top-floor flat in Manchester. It contained 10 bloody human teeth - roots and all (picture included). Nasty story, there, and he can't figure out how it was delivered.
In a world this weird, how does anybody get bored?
Now if I could just figure out where those missing inches of fabric went...
The term "Fortean" is derived from Charles Fort, who spent much of his adult life collecting clippings of strange stories from newspapers and journals and evolving theories of reality out of them. His four books - Book of the Damned, Lo, New Lands, and Wild Talents - are difficult to read due to both his literary style and his thought process, in which facts and ideas blend into eachother and nobody really knows, or can know, anything. Always serious except when he's joking, he builds theories he doesn't believe out of stories of mysterious disappearances, mysterious appearances, miraculous events, and the sometimes even more miraculous pseudoexplanations that people come up with so they don't have to think about them anymore. FT, a UK publication, gives space to ghosts, UFOs, crop circles, cryptozoology, witch panics, miracles, science from fringe physics to mainstream archeology, folklore and fakelore, fairies, frauds, medical anamolies - if it's weird, it's there. The magazine's editorial policy is criticized as credulous and as skeptical to the point of debunking, by different people on different subjects, and that strikes me as a strong indication that it's pretty evenhanded on the whole.
Do I believe any of it? What difference does it make? Whether an account of UFO abduction is interesting or not does not depend on whether I can make up my mind that it's a hoax, an accurate account of what happened, a psychotic episode, or whatever; or on whether the abductors come from the subconscious, the future, the Zeta Reticuli system, or Fairyland. I want the story. I can believe anything for the duration of the story, and in truth few truly Fortean events can be pinned down well enough for me to choose one interpretation over another. Unless given a reason to think someone a liar independent of the strangeness of his story, I accept that people recount their experiences as accurately and truthfully as they know how. That in no way obliges me to accept any given explanation of the experience.
I always get FT a month late due to the reality of distribution across the Atlantic, so I've already seen some of the items mentioned on the website or somewhere else, but whereas the website and forum sometimes annoy me into going away from them for weeks at a time (the internet is full of technical glitches and crabby people), I am always happy to see the magazine. The cover story is lurid - issue 257, February 2010, celebrates Dracula - but I like the little bits most. Breaking News, not so breaking anymore, and the Peruvian Fat Killers story has already been dialed back, but the fact that policemen were telling reporters that they'd uncovered a ring of thieves murdering people to sell their fat on the world cosmetic market (in fact the people they caught killed one person, for different reasons - the world cosmetic market gets its human fats from liposuction) is even weirder once you realize how unfounded the statement is. If I wrote adult thrillers I'd be looking into that!
"FT's Favourite Headlines From Around the World" is a box presenting, without explanation, odd headlines, most of which probabably made sense in context. Devil told: Don't go out at night (Metro, July 16, 2009); Intruder who took an axe to hospital 'for his own protection' (Irish Daily Mail, same date); Newsreader Natasha makes baby sacrifice (Aberdeen Press and Journal, June 25, 2009, oh dear!).
Small news stories: Apparently in August a cop in St. Paul broke into a gorilla enclosure to feed Pop Tarts to the inmates - I sense a Disney comedy behind that one, the old-fashioned kind, with a hapless Dean Jones as the cop. A stockbroker from Florida arrested for pretending to drown and hurling jellyfish at rescuers. Hair supposedly shorn from Elvis in the army sold for $18,300, raising the question "Why did the barber save it?" A physicist quoted as saying that God hates the Higgs bosun particle and that's why the Large Hadron Collider is having so many problems. A man named Shaun Byrne lost his wallet; four months later and five hundred miles away it was found by a dog named Byrne. A seven-year-old blind boy taught to use echolocation, pictured shooting hoops. A man with bad eyesight has a stroke, and after the clot is removed has 20/20 vision.
And on and on and on, articles on myths about Darwin (who did not repent evolution on his deathbed and who did not hesitate to publish out of fear, but because he was putting in the work to support it), a beluga who saved a diver, a Siamese twin starfish, looking for the chupacabras in Nicaragua where it's never been reported, report on the Texas Bigfoot Conference last October, and some freaky stuff in the lettercol. Ick, somebody found a packet with a picture of tooth fairies and the words "Put this under your pillow and see what the fairies bring" printed on it, on the balcony of his top-floor flat in Manchester. It contained 10 bloody human teeth - roots and all (picture included). Nasty story, there, and he can't figure out how it was delivered.
In a world this weird, how does anybody get bored?
Now if I could just figure out where those missing inches of fabric went...
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