the 'british big cat' phenomenon isn't exactly bigfoot hoodoo! there have been quite a number of them actually captured/killed, several of them determined to be former pets by the state of their teeth and suchlike. somebody on your nice island likes to keep pumas and whatnot as pets, and then i guess ditches them if it looks like they're going to get caught? at least, the "it's illegal but some rich bastards are doing it anyway" explanation makes the most sense to me, because people are absolutely like that. which means yeah, don't go in those woods alone, even a smallish wildcat can hurt you real bad. we have bobcats here in minnesota, and even though they're only a little bigger than a domestic cat -- hell, maine coons can get that big sometimes -- they kill young deer and lambs, and have been known to attack children and pets. if someone happened to release a breeding pair of bobcats or canadian lynx back in the 80's, y'all could have hundreds of them by now. your climate is perfect.
Also, missing 411 is some of the creepiest shit Ive heard in a long time just because...wtf is it? Fairies? Big foot? Reptilians kidnapping people? Wandering into the otherworld? Clearly something fucking bizarre is happening, because a two year old is just not actualy capaple of walking twenty five miles in two days over two mountains on their own. And it happens all over the country and for at least two centuries with a 100% success rate and no clues, so itd be pretty fuckin unlikely to be people. Coast to coast is a pretty fun general resource too, though some of the callers are irritatingly batshit.
Yeah that was basically my thought as soon as I learned about ABCs (Alien Big Cats), heh! Though nobody has ever reported a sighting of one in my area I don't think (I should do more research on that) and people walk their dogs in those woods all the time... or, well, they walk their dogs in one particular relatively thin, small stretch of woods, with the bulk of the woodland fenced off. I think if a big cat of some description wanted to live in there and mostly avoid humans, it probably could. The 'Black Beast of Blackmore End' thing was a joke but the idea of feral big cats was actually brought up as a possibility at the time, though I don't remember us deciding it was The Obvious Possibility. Amusingly there is an idea of re-releasing lynxes (or some similar kind of big cat) into the wild here! Like, a genuine wildlife conservation effort that was on the news recently and has a fairly high chance of actually coming to pass.
On a similar note, Charles Fort's work is pretty cool, though I've only read The Book of the Damned. It's on Project Gutenberg, I think, and it's got a lot of 'mysterious things falling from the sky' anecdotes, which are probably my favorite type of unexplained event.
Yup, the Fortean Times is named after him and tries to work a bit on his principles. =) I really should read his stuff actually...
I found his actual writing really dense in a tolkien/lovecraft victorian sort of way, if im thinking of the right guy. But enjoyable stories.
Yeah, I've heard that about Fort and is a big reason I've not read him yet despite him being right up my alley, because I do not get on with really dense writing styles most of the time. Can't read Tolkein, for example.
So one day I was listening to music as is my wont. I was going through various songs performed by Altan because I'm very fond of them. My aimless clicking about through youtube videos led me to some tv program that they were mentioned in. Said video was entirely in Irish. I do not know Irish. I sat there and listened along happily though. It felt as automatic and natural as listening to my first language, that being English. There wasn't any of that weird disconnect I get with languages I know nothing about like with, say, Korean. There also wasn't any of the trying to struggle through bits that I did understand like with Arabic or Russian. No I just sat there until about halfway through when I realized that I had no earthly idea what was actually going on. This very weird experience has occurred a few times since and in general Irish just has a very, very natural seeming feel to it. The languages feels and flows right. It's a rat bastard to pronounce and work with and I don't know much of it still. The way it sounds though it sounds like something I do know, but just don't remember that I know. Because of that I've come to suspect that in a past life I spoke the language, or at the very least understood it.
Nothing related to this, but every time I see the title of this thread, "It's Not Unusual" gets stuck in my head. (OR MAYBE IT IS RELATED)
i really wanted to name the thread 'keep kintsugi weird', but then i remembered that scene from steven universe and i couldn't stop laughing.
i didn't have to be taught to ride a horse. the very first time i was allowed to interact with a horse, i just mounted up and started riding around. it was at a school weekend camp thing, and we were required to do a one-hour How To Horse class if we hadn't taken lessons elsewhere, so i lied and said i'd taken lessons, because i just couldn't see how you could not know how to horse. some guys who had actually taken riding lessons were like "ok awesome let's go do the hard trail" and i felt like i couldn't get out of it without admitting i was full of shit (and getting stuck in the class with the kids who were afraid of big animals) so i just went "sure what the hell" and went with them. and. it was. easy? like at one point the horse gave me some attitude about a branch that had fallen across the trail, and i had no trouble handling that. when it wanted to snack instead of keeping up with the others, i was able to handle that just fine. and at the end we found a big open field and we all went galloping as fast as the horses would do, and i knew a lot of people fall off or get their butts bruised or something the first time they gallop, but it was just fun. i am not altogether sure whether i believe in reincarnation or in genetic memory. maybe i just happened to guess right every time i interacted with the critter. but my dad's ancestors sure did horse real good. they horsed all over europe and asia. they burned stuff and took stuff and then horsed home again. they horsed from cradle to grave. i am kind of not surprised that half a dozen generations or whatever has not taken the horse out of the bloodline. #yes i just verbed horse #you're welcome
@jacktrash Now I'm jealous, hah. My mother adores horses and I have been around them since I was a baby and sitting on them since I was a baby and yet riding has been something I've had to work on quite hard (because I fail to have decent co-ordination, I think, mostly) and I am not nearly as confident with horses generally as you might expect. To be honest, they are no passion of mine, though I do greatly enjoy riding and being around them; I don't think I'll ever have my own. But I'm into them enough to wish I was better at horsing. xP
here's my contribution! I posted it a while back but hey maybe some people didn't see it so: weird noises in BC! Spoiler: my take, so you aren't unduly influenced it sounds like weirdly-amplified metal screech to me.
Cover stories on this month's Fortean Times: 'Rest in Pieces: The curious fate of famous corpses' 'Second Run: Four-year-old boy's past life in 1930s Hollywood' 'Challenger Conspiracy: Shuttle crew's suspicious survival' 'Establishment Assassins: Who killed Lawrence of Arabia?' 'Norway's Rain of Worms' 'Thai dragon corpse' 'Samurai ghost' 'UFO vortex' 'Phantom Hitchhikers: Real-life meetings with Britain's road ghosts' 'Mushroom Clouds on Mars and other anomalies from the red planet' 'Mugabe's Magic Rock: Witches and weirdness in Zimbabwean politics' Willing to read & report if anyone's interested in any. xP
Oooh. Please tell me how, exactly, witches and weirdness are involved in Zimbabwean politics. Witches + politics sounds like a fun fantasy novel plot so I'm now extremely interested in how that works in real life.
I have to go out and help with horses right this second but once i get back in i'll get that article a read for you. =P I think it's one of the long ones so I'll probably try and summarise.
Right okay brief summary of article, minus all the rather vicious sarcasm/mockery directed at Mugabe's regime, on which I cannot comment for lack of knowledge of international politics. Basically there has been a considerable rise in people in Zimbabwe going to witch doctors and doing things like claiming, when caught having sex with a donkey, that it was a human prostitute who magically turned herself into a donkey... and there was a guy who claimed to be divine and was almost mobbed violently when a crowd demanded he make money rain from the sky to prove it and then he failed to do so. Also witch-hunts and similar. This is probably something to do with the absolutely crippled economy, since it leads to more tension generally and people being frightened and frustrated and so turning to more esoteric methods of fixing problems and suchlike. But it probably is also influenced by the fact that Mugabe's government also blatantly believes in magic and was at one point in 2007 was completely taken in by a spirit-medium woman who claimed to have been led to a rock that spewed pure diesel by thw spirits of the ancestors. Like, ministers went and had photos taken with her and reported to Mugabe that it was all legit. And then it turned out to be a hoax. But even then the police were too afraid of the woman's powers to arrest her, and the Electorical Registrar General had sheltered her and helped keep the hoax going. And more generally, one minister believes he's haunted by a ghost of someone who might have been politically murdered, and set out a dinner place for it, allegedly, and the water Resources Minister has said reservoir construction has been halted by mermaids. So basically Zimbabwe has a strong culture of believing in magic and witchcraft and the government appears to buy into it.
Uh wow. See i was more or less with you (or i guess the articles author) for most of this because im not there, its not my tradition what do i know, but then you got to "halted by mermaids" and i just. No. What? No.
Probably more with me, since the article's general tone was 'mugabe's regime is horrible and also ridiculous, look how ridiculous they are all being', and I found it a bit needlessly full of mockery tbh. I mean I have no doubt that Mugabe is probably not a nice person or good for the country, but I also don't appreciate such incredibly obvious bias in my reporting. xP The 'halted by mermaids' thing is p ridiculous though. Let me go make sure that's got a citation.
