Search results

I looked up "palmistry", "palm-reading" and even "cheiromancy" to see if there was a dedicated thread on palm-reading. There isn't, which surprises me. so due diligence having been applied, I'll post this here. I was going through old stored photographs for a different reason and discovered...

I never trusted borscht as a foodstuff.... this might explain why....

Maybe it did. Look at all the folk-legends about trolls. Also, Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" sets out a nicely-argued rationale for trolls as a silicon-based lifeform: it's just that as silicon sets out its own list of limiting factors compared to carbon, there'd be less of them, they'd grow...

Thank you for all kind replies! Just had a three in the morning sandwich (chicken roll and pickle on baguette, since you ask) and a gloomy realisation I'm probably eating too much. Soon be back in bed to follow the cycle of six hours up, four hours asleep, rinse and repeat....

Rescheduled. Again. Only by ten days but still disheartening. After a year of gradual decline I really do want this to be over and done with. Thanks to all for sympathy and support! This half-life is irritating and depressing.

Eight days to my anticipated operation date. At least... very late on Friday I had a phone message from the hospital to tell me they want to discuss the date. (We'd had a rare trip out, so of course we missed the call) And of course, nobody's going to be available till Monday to explain exactly...

At least, until it reaches its First contact (and last) with the Klingons!

Never underestimate what could be, charitably, called paranoia on the part of one section of the population. With enforced stay-at-home-ness owing to lack of energy (cardiac thing awaiting attention) one thing that keeps me sane is noodling around in the Internet. Facebook remains a productive...

Interestingly, Mythconceptions in the current FT444 covers this area - it deals with the ability of water to transmit electricity and comes to a logical but surprising conclusion.

Got to admit, I have to take a long run-up and to be in the right frame of mind for cryptozoology. It's not boring per se, but an area that doesn't interest me as much as, say, conspiracy theory or religious-related forteana.

Well... there's a picture in the current FT444 that gave Herself pause for thought. Apparently it looks like me when I was a lot younger, but I can't see it myself. Some Russian bloke called Alexander Bogdanov, photographed around 1905. If my alleged body double died before I was born, does that...

Another random observation. The Conspirasphere (p26) deals with the collapse of the Key Bridge when that laden container ship crashed into a crucial bridge support pillar, and the sort of conspiracy theories growing up around it. (the sort of things that Noel Rooney memorably calls "the...

This was a repeated dream of mine - not had it for about thirty years now. I've talked about it more on threads here debating experiences suggesting past life recall, but the essence is: I was one of a party of soldiers escaping into the countryside from a doomed city, identified tentatively as...

Interesting. A great-uncle (well, relative on the same family tree) of mine was aboard that submarine and was one of the crew members who managed to get out alive. (He then capped this feat by escaping alive from a second sunken submarine in the Med in WW2. Well, he had form by then). You...

Very first impressions. To get what TV Tropes will call "administrivia" out of the way first: after a little browsing, a separate insert sheet fell out of the magazine, A5 or A6 sized, urging me to "get a one year direct debit subscription to Fortean Times" and setting out all the advantages of...

That time of the month has crept up on us again. FT444 is here... Goat glands for health and vitality! Gay vegetables from outer space! True tales of megalomaniac totalitarian science! And a fearsome creature called Fluffy! i am now going to go offline and start reading.

Background: Otava Yo grew out of a sort of collective of Russian musicians active in Leningrad/StPetersburg in the nineties. The current lineup coalesced around a couple of shaggy eccentrics called Alexei Belkin and Dimitri Shekhardin, who drew like-minded souls out to busk in Leningrad streets...

Thanks for clarification... some odd insights. In Letters, a correspondent questions why nobody ever has reincarnation memories of being a peon working on the fields in a boring mediaeval existence. That makes sense, especially as there appears to be a big wish-fulfilment theme going on -...

Here we are again.... just a perplexity. This thread discusses the content of the current or named edition of the magazine, in this case April 2024. Now I'm aware of the stickied post at the top of the page. I've read the rationale and I'm aware it's there for very good and pressing reasons...

Here's another icon of St Patrick of Russia:

I know nobody asked for this... but this is St Patrick's Day as celebrated in St Petersburg, Russia. A highlight of the gig is "I'll Tell Me Ma/Belle of Belfast City" played by Russians and sung in English.

I don't think he's being claimed as a Russian, although the thought is an amusing and engaging one. (Imagining the Irish Ambassador to Moscow clearing his throat and saying "This wee bit of business with the Orthodox Church making a claim on the Blessed Saint Paddy, so. My Government would...

He's probably too old now and apparently he's retired from performance, but a couple of decades ago there was a bloke called Rob Newman who had the cachet of being the first superstar comedian who could fill not just a theatre, but an arena. (alongside his comic partner, one David Baddiel)...

Blimey, you can eat and taste things in dreams? That happens to me once in a decade of blue moons.

More about being back at university. A growing sense of unease, a growing conviction I was there under false pretences, a feeling the university authorities were going to discover I'd done bugger all actual work and would expel me, wondering how to break it on returning home that I'd failed...

I've tried to use a light-switch in a dream but all I got was electrical static and crackling. In the same dream I tried to switch the radio on - same thing, just static and fizzing. (this was when I was at college circa 1981 - it developed into me leaving the house and walking to college, got...

Thinking about 442, this might be one of those editions. It's all good, it's all readable, it's all grist in the Fortean mill: but it's just that there's nothing much about the actual articles that's inspiring any further comments or reflections or digressions in this thread. I've just realised...

And in one of the articles, forget which one, the word "segue" is used in its correct context to denote a seamless elision between two states, a managed change in which the transition is managed so smoothly and subtly you might not even be aware it's happening. The thing with this is...

The archaeological discovery that there is a 5,600 year old history, continuous and unbroken, of porridge-making in Scotland. I'm just betting the dried-up stuff from three millenia BC, as found in that Pictish settlement, would if reconstituted taste as good now as it did then!

Ran out of energy and crashed to bed for a few hours this evening. The dream was a long, intricate and internally consistent one that covered things like alien activity, abductions and government cover-ups (as dreams do). I want to get it on record before it fades - already the details are...

Self-detonating kamikaze khazis. Ouch. I always suspected those clever Japanese contraptions were far more sophisticated than the humble toilet needs to be... as any engineer will tell you, the more sophistication you build into a system, the more the potential for breakdown. Too many moving...

There's a Billy Connolly sketch about this; Connolly begins with random observations about travelling by air, and then embellishes a story allegedly told to him by a hospital nurse about the mystery guy found at the bottom of a shallow crater in an upmarket suburb of Edinburgh, where people are...

That word "jock" has an interesting derivation: apparently it referred to very basic and cheaply made protection for a fighting soldier, where metal plates were either stitched into the layers of a leather jerkin, or else fastened to the outside, like a poor man's chainmail. Up on the Scottish...

3:55am and insomniac - binge-reading an entire thread which is new to me. Half my family comes from Staffordshire and has accents to match: places like Cannock and Stoke. It's interesting they had a sort of "thing" which the Lancashire/North Wales Borders half of my ancestry doesn't. Aunts...

Interesting one from the landing page for my internet browser. The nine "most visited" icons are in a completely straight horizontal line and always have been. But against the wallpaper picture of the boat where its sides curve up to the prow.... the first visual impression is that the icons...

Last night - had a dream about ending up with thousands of pounds of gambling debts and that I was being pursued for the money by three large and serious-looking large Asian gentlemen who actually came round to the house to discuss the matter. Intimidating and perplexing as my involvement with...

Ah, so maybe I was a little bit too far over on the west. What's the date of your photos? Mine, according to Google Street View, were January 2020. Thanks for that! (Still lots of mature tree growth here, though).

A late-arriving reflection: if there are now a couple of large mature trees where there were buildings, this in itself is evidence the demolition and site clearance of Hunt Street occured quite a few decades ago, maybe even in the late 1960s!

I think I've located where Hunt Street was. It's pretty rare for an entire street to be obliterated from the map: usually only the buildings go, while the paved road and infrastructure remain. But I recall Stockport had some really serious urban redevelopment in the seventies and eighties where...

Isn't Rule One that you always assume the cameras are rolling and the mike's live?

A lion in the passenger seat.... that might work until you spotted, say, a deer or a gazelle. Next thing you know, the lion's taken over the driving seat and it's lining up some roadkill, with the hunting instinct having taken over, and it's telling you "after I hit it, right, you get it in the...

I think I posted here some years ago about dreams that felt like I'd slipped down my own personal timeline and revisited the streets I grew up in, aged about ten and eleven. This was then capped by dreaming about Manchester as it would have been seen by my father, before I was born, and...

A long and weird one last night... in the dream I was in New York, staying at a friend's, and missing all the social cues and hints that I'd over-stayed my welcome and had been there for too long. She was perfectly "nice" about it, but I remember the sense of bright red shame when I finally...

woke up with what I remembered as a school playground ditty in my head with nonsense words like I don't care if it rains or freezes As long as I got my plastic Jesus Sittin' on the dashboard of my car And could I shift it... I was trying, really trying, to recall where else I'd heard the...

I was looking to be clever and to retrieve artwork from one of the more excitable American religious sides, about how your PC and the Internet are a gateway to Hell and how unwholesome things manifest via your screen and Godless intentions. (This has to be a Fortean thing in itself?) I found...

I read "Fort-Ian" as if it were the name of a computer language. (Limitation of the font: a capital "i" is indistinguishable from small-case "L" and it's only the context that distinguishes them). So it made sense in my head as "FORTLAN". now I'm wondering what a computer program or language...

no, no no no, he's outside, looking in! He'll fly his astral plane....

That thing about Stanley cups is weird. A few years ago, I found one lost or abandoned on a bus seat in Canterbury. I rescued it and took it home, as you do, noticed it had the Stanley logo on it and wondered vaguely if this was one of those label-more-valuable-than-the-item things. I also noted...

Just back from a thrilling morning in hospital, having had another ride on the CTI merry-go-round... and. What - Already? FT441 (Feb 2024) is on the mat, having slipped through a time-warp from a presumed date of arrival for next week. We have to look forward to (or I will, as I intend to...

Last night: just a "glimpse" of myself, in which I had the physical vitality and the easy freeness of movement I had in my twenties and thirties. I've noticed how sensory input in dreams follows, pretty much, the order of importance of our five senses: dreams are always visual, and almost...