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FT281

Mal_Adjusted

Mal_Adjusted

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Aug 6, 2003
Messages
2,246
Any month, another FT

haven't read it yet, so going by headlines / pix,
a partial listing of topics covered this month (apart from the usual stuff):

New feral child
crazy animal pix
magnetic child
great pestilence
Irish SHC
flat earth
underground earthworks
polts
anders behring brevik and the "knights templar"
brave dogs
landesman, haast, roszak obits
evans, hopkins obits
barnstaple SHC
art of John Martin (not guitar player)
Malayan pyro-polts
Sri Lankan "mass hysteria"
LSD mass poisonings
Fortean Tintin
Jen Ogilvie's Peruvian Adventure
Plumstead ghost
(Jen's own web-page here: http://www.jenogi.com/ )
 
Good issue; shame about the goat on the motorbike pic though; it's quite clearly got it's feet tied together with rope :roll:
 
the Breivik article seems to have suffered a layout mishap; and there's a strange reticence about naming Paul Ray as "Lionheart" mentioned by Breivik viz:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ju ... heart-blog

Paul Ray, who writes a blog under the name Lionheart, says he belongs to an anti Muslim group called The Ancient Order of the Templar Knights but denies ever meeting Breivik and says he was horrified by the mass killings in Norway on Friday. In a telephone interview with Associated Press, Ray said he was not at the 2002 London meeting that Breivik described in his manifesto.
Click to expand...

that Breivik is a fantasist and delusional seems pretty certain, but he obviously knew about a group calling itself the Knights Templar (or Templar Knights), which (despite having nothing to do with the historical KT or any other modern group using the same name) clearly had some form of existence.
 
Fluttermoth said:
Good issue; shame about the goat on the motorbike pic though; it's quite clearly got it's feet tied together with rope :roll:
Click to expand...

I came here to say that too.
The fore and hind legs on the left and right have clearly be tied together and then the man has 'put' the animal on rather like rucksack.

It might just seem like a little oversight, but to me it has cast doubt on the integrity of FT. If they are going to publish a picture saying 'there is no rope being used' when there clearly is, do they bother to research anything anymore?
 
Actually, we can - what we thought was part of the background looks like the goat's rear leg and a bit of rope.

And Owen has just pointed out that the motorbike isn't moving either!

Well, apologies for that - our eyesight obviously isn't what it was, and we were obviously overexcited by a motorcycling goat. And it's all Paul's fault.
 
Dr_David_Sutton said:
Actually, we can - what we thought was part of the background looks like the goat's rear leg and a bit of rope.

And Owen has just pointed out that the motorbike isn't moving either!

Well, apologies for that - our eyesight obviously isn't what it was, and we were obviously overexcited by a motorcycling goat. And it's all Paul's fault.
Click to expand...

Ah, you were only kidding us.
 
Gosh, you guys sure are good at makin' up jokes on the hoof.
 
Tying a goat to yourself to go motorcycling is still pretty strange.

Anyway, I finally got a chance to read some of the mag, and the John Martin article was very interesting, I'd never heard of him before but he certainly tapped into an area of entertainment which endures to this day. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it down to see the exhibition, but never mind.

Liked the remote controlled pram IHTM, nice bit of high strangeness that even if there was an explanation, it must have been ludicrous.
 
Tying a goat to yourself to go motorcycling is still pretty strange.
Click to expand...

Branson does it all the time.

Theodore Roszak has departed the mortal coil (obits). Flicker was a really great Fortean novel.
 
gncxx said:
Tying a goat to yourself to go motorcycling is still pretty strange.
Click to expand...

Not really, they just can't afford airbags in Cuba.

Shiiiiiiit. Bang!! Baaaaaaaaaaaaa! Ooooof!...Well that was a bit of luck, Ernesto. Goat curry again tonight, my friend: the sound of a Cuban road traffic accident.

I absolutely loved the pram story in this months It Happened to Me. Up there with those truly Fortean experiences: bizarre and unclassifiable and somehow emphasised by the mundanity of the setting and props. It's stuff like that that keeps me interested.
 
goat riding motorcycle

OMG are you just trying to get my goat?


lol

What a baaaaad joke

another, omg i kill myself,
 
rats and the plague

Regarding the 1300s rat problem has there been any research regarding whether there is any signicant information regarding whether sailors in particular was effected more deaths or more rapidly than the general populace.

I don't remember reading anywhere that there was a shortage of sailors due to the plague, black death or even scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) in particular, has anyone got more information.
 
Superb issue! big gz to all those involved! Only minor quibble is the v1 exploding in 1947, typo, unexploded bomb or bast Nazis not known they are beaten?
 
Re: rats and the plague

thealien2000uk said:
...I don't remember reading anywhere that there was a shortage of sailors due to the plague, black death or even scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) in particular, has anyone got more information.
Click to expand...

The pandemic resulted in a shortage of trades/professions/skills right across the board and I suspect that the sheer number of fatalities involved would obscure any effective statistical analysis of particular sections of society, especially when that group represents a relatively tiny proportion of that society as a whole.

If you're suggesting that an analysis of sailors deaths compared to other sections of society might indicate how the pandemic spread - which is a valid and interesting point - then I think it would be very difficult to tell, even with effective data. A sailor on dry land would be exposed to the disease the same as any of the many millions who died, and even an analysis of onboard deaths would not be able to take into account where the victim was exposed to the sickness.
 
I asked my Sri Lankan friend about the Grease Yakas article, and he said the whole controversy has been fuelled by the Tamil Tigers, who are the only ones speaking up for the Tamil people. This isn't so great when they spread rumours that the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, himself no saint, is a Satanist who is planning to sacrifice Tamil women and children to make himself immortal. Especially when so many believe the rumours thanks to decades of atrocities the authorities refuse to do anything about. So the ordinary folk are caught between a rock and a hard place, these false stories simply making things worse. Not a good situation at all.
 
I wish my copy would hurry up and arrive! I want to see the goat on the bike! (I need a good laugh!)
 
Having seen the goat on a bike, it's not as funny as I thought it would be...
 
Regarding the Nazi Christianity offering in the letters section:

When the writer says that, 'According to its constitution, the Nazi Party was, "Christian, but not favouring any one particular denomination"', I think the document that he's actually referring to is the manifesto of the German Workers Party, the predecessor of the NSDAP; the Nazis weren't much interested in constitutions, although, IIRC, they never actually repealed the Weimar Constitution - after they squeezed what they wanted out of it they just smothered it to death with the Enabling Act.

Also, I think the speech being referred to in which Hitler prohibited secular schools was one made during negotiations towards the Reichskonkordat (the Nazi-Vatican Concordat) - so possibly he was playing to his audience. And it might also be worth pointing out that his attack on Atheism went hand in hand with an attack on 'Freethinkers'.
 
I always thought hitler was a atheist, so after reading that letter i done some research (ooo ok i looked on wikki for 5 mins) and hitler seemed to tell different groups what they wanted to hear, he was catholic but not practicing, he said Christianity was good , but there appeared to be a plan to destroy it after the war, on the whole i would say he wasn't a christian.
 
titch said:
I always thought hitler was a atheist, so after reading that letter i done some research (ooo ok i looked on wikki for 5 mins) and hitler seemed to tell different groups what they wanted to hear, he was catholic but not practicing, he said Christianity was good , but there appeared to be a plan to destroy it after the war, on the whole i would say he wasn't a christian.
Click to expand...

Hitler used religion when it suited him, in latter years his own religion, (or lack of it) seems to me to have been largely irrelevant to him, and any discussion of Hitler's personal attitude to religion, and the Nazi’s official stance in this regard, is bit of a minefield because it’s often based on statements made with a particular audience in mind. The suggestion that Hitler and the Nazis and their crimes were a consequence of atheism and secularism is often levelled at the latter interests by religious apologists (IIRC, at least one example exists on the FTMB's Atheism thread). Similarly anti-religious elements claim religion was a factor in Hitler and the Nazis and their crimes because it is actually very easy to find examples of Hitler playing the religion card.

The Nazis used everything in their power to achieve, extend and hold on to their influence - that's not hidden knowledge, we already know that. I think there's possibly a far more interesting discussion to be had in the reverse side of that coin: how religion accomodated the Nazis.
 
Have you seen what's "coming next month"?


BYCICLING FROGS!


...unless some hidden wires or ropes are discovered...
 
Hitlers religion

I read somewhere that Hitler was Catholic as his father but his mother was a converted Jew and that his catholic upbringing is why he got the vatican to align themselves with the Nazi party
 
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