WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

DALE DRINNON: Cryptozoology etc



Dale Drinnon's been doing a fair bit of web-surfing lately, and has these links to share with us:

New at the Frontiers of Zoology:

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspotcom/2013/01/more-plesiosaur-comparisons-with-loch.html
http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2013/01/neanderthal-skull-from-florida.html


New at Benny's blog,the Ominous Octopus Omnibus:

MANY THANKS TO MY DEAR NEPHEW ROSS FOR THIS PICTURE


Man’s 40-year search for extinct Japanese wolf sees no finish lineHiroshi Yagi was 19 when he first heard a strange howling in a beech wood forest on Mount Naeba. He knew then that it was no ordinary dog. With heightened curiosity, he later began a what-would-be 40-year search for an animal that has not been seen in Japan since 1905. Since then, Yagi has transferred from one job to another, assembled sophisticated monitoring equipment and climbed and trekked mountains in hopes of finding this creature called the Japanese wolf.


According to the Japanese Red List of the Environment Ministry, the Japanese wolf is an extinct species. Its most prominent physical features are its sharp face and its curled tail tip. In Yagi’s earlier searches in the Okuchichibu mountains, he saw plenty of shrines honoring the wolves and learned of eyewitness accounts from climbers. He was hopeful of the place, so he visited it at least once a month. In October 1996, he came across an animal that had uncanny resemblance to the wolf. The photos he took made headlines when a zootaxy expert said that it “is possibly a surviving descendent of the Japanese wolf.”

Read on...

CRYPTOLINK: Bigfoot: A Figment of the Imagination or a Mythical Creature? You Decide

A word about cryptolinks: We are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting, usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me.  


Over the last forty or so years we have heard many stories that make us as curious as a cat pawing at the goldfish tank. I remember as a kid hearing about many sightings of flying saucers or some other out of the ordinary events that you really never knew what to believe or if those sightings were really what people claimed they were to be.
One mythical creature that has had a lot of people wondering if it is real or not is of course, the one and only, Big Foot. I have seen various stories about this hairy creature that supposedly dwells and combs the unexplored woods of the Great Northwest and Northern California where the only life around is the thickly, untouched-by-man woods that are thicker than a milkshake with more ice cream in it than milk and where the Eagles fly and fly high above the tree tops as they soar like our feathered friends on a mission to explore the wilderness.

FORTEAN BIRD NEWS FROM THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES (CFZ)

In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that - whereas the study of out of place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot, or lake monsters - it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean Zoologist to be interested in. So, after about six months of regular postings on the main bloggo, Corinna has taken the plunge and started a 'Watcher of the Skies' blog of her own as part of the CFZ Bloggo Network.


I'M YER GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN




Graham here again, and the replacement modem seems to be behaving itself at present. Also, the weather's fairly OK - it's not raining, at present! So I'm only a little bit late with today's notifications:

Guest reviewer Derek Wilson drove to and from the Hawkwind gig in Bedford the other night, and so can remember it all. Here, he provides a detailed track-by-track review...
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/hawkwind-bedford.html

THOM THE WORLD POET's Daily Poem for Wednesday:
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/thom-world-poet-daily-poem_30.html

Candidates for the Rock & Roll graveyard?
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/not-dead-yet.html

Jon's editorial looks at the wonderful and sometimes sane world of the music press...
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/in-which-jon-lays-out-his-stall.html

Gonzo 'track of the day' is from the lively bunch kbown as the Dazz Band:
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-gonzo-track-of-day-dazz-band.html

LINK: Eric Burdon puts his Joshua Tree home up for sale...
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/link-eric-burdon-lists-joshua-tree-home.html


*  The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at  jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...

*  The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html

* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!

*  Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 53 who - together with his orange cat puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish and batrachians. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the orange cat?

JUST A NOTE ON FORTEAN FICTION


Although I did not come to live in England until 1971, my earliest memories of this green and pleasant land date back as far as the autumn/winter of 1963.  I have been in love with the English countryside ever since, and it is a love affair which is consummated every time that I leave my little house deep in the heart of rural North Devon.   It is a love affair which is completely requited, and which has given me immense happiness over the past half-century.

The late Malcolm Saville, a children’s author whose reputation is nowhere as near as high as I believe that it ought to be in these degenerate times, once said that – and I paraphrase – the reason why he set so many of the his novels for children and young people in wild and beautiful parts of the British Isles, was to encourage his readers to visit places that he loved.  In a funny sort of way, I am now in a position of being able to do the same thing (well sort of).

Many of the novels in our Fortean Fiction range, most notably those by Tabitca Cope and Di Francis, are set in spectacularly beautiful parts of our islands, and it is with great pleasure that they have taken a figurative leaf out of Malcolm Saville’s books. These novels are illustrated with general landscape views of the areas described in the book, and I hope that the mixture of the author’s skill and the photography of Dave Curtis (Dark Wear), my lovely wife Corinna (Death on Dartmoor) and yours truly (Dark Ness), will encourage the more adventurous reader to seek out and enjoy these beautiful landscapes for themselves.

This is a practice with which I intend to carry on for as long as possible. As a society we are becoming more and more divorced from the reality of the natural world and it is one of the most important parts of the CFZ Publishing Group to try, in our own little way, to help redress this balance. 

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

Yesterday’s News Today


On this day in 1661, Oliver Cromwell was disinterred and “executed” two years after his death, for having the king executed and generally making a bit of a hash of turning Britain into a republic.

And now the news:




All the relevant facts about Oliver Cromwell courtesy of Monty Python: