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FT397

Tempest63

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Dec 19, 2009
Messages
2,972
The silver man mystery
This sporting afterlife
Amityville revisited

Don’t know what the silver man mystery is all about but I’m about to find out
 
I can't be first, can I? Arrived today, and has a feature on one of my favourite UFO/alien cases from my childhood in it, worth the price of admission alone. Also some Amityville business.
 
I can't be first, can I? Arrived today, and has a feature on one of my favourite UFO/alien cases from my childhood in it, worth the price of admission alone. Also some Amityville business.
Snap!
 
The cloud of old woman IHTM was particularly good.
 
Reading the book reviews and getting a Mandela moment on The Curious History of Sex. (page 62)

No, not the content.

Right at the end of the review, saw something odd and had to blink and look twice. It was the way the review spelt a word: anæesthetic.

It wasn't even American English, which leaves out the "æ" ligature and simplifies the word to anesthetic. So there is at least one variant spelling out there.

That extra letter "e" in there just after the "æ". Once I realised what was odd about the spelling of a word I've always written as "anæsthetic" without the extra "e", I wondered. Has it always been spelt like that and I just haven't noticed? Or has somebody changed the spelling lately, and I wasn't copied into the memo, and missed it? is this a Mandela thing?
 
Not the content.

My copy of 397 came through on time as far as I known. I'd been away for a few days, and two copies were nestling among the junk mail on the mat. I opened my copy and put the spare on my desk. Eventually got round to moving it and found it was addressed to a WB about 12 doors down from me in Huntingdon.
So if you're on the board and someone pushed a copy though your door at about 13:15 today (10 September), that's where it's been hiding, not detained by be Men in Black.
 
Yup got mine just now so lawn half cut rest of jobs abandoned mug of tea and in me shed :hapdan:
 
When an old cricketer leaves the crease.... well, this is where they go?

Reading the article on cricketing ghosts - was surprised at first that one haunting was in Madeira, which at first glance is not a place where you'd expect cricket to have taken root. But then, in the 1800's, wasn't this part of the British Empire? like Corfu, where the local Greeks took to it so enthusiastically that they still play today...


 
Reading the book reviews and getting a Mandela moment on The Curious History of Sex. (page 62)

No, not the content.

Right at the end of the review, saw something odd and had to blink and look twice. It was the way the review spelt a word: anæesthetic.

It wasn't even American English, which leaves out the "æ" ligature and simplifies the word to anesthetic. So there is at least one variant spelling out there.

That extra letter "e" in there just after the "æ". Once I realised what was odd about the spelling of a word I've always written as "anæsthetic" without the extra "e", I wondered. Has it always been spelt like that and I just haven't noticed? Or has somebody changed the spelling lately, and I wasn't copied into the memo, and missed it? is this a Mandela thing?
I think that is just a misspelling.
 
I think that is just a misspelling.
Thinking about it, the reviewer is quoting the author who is directly quoting William Kellogg, who was active at the turn of the 19th - 20th century. Could this be an archaic Victorian-era spelling? Or Kellogg's own idiosyncracy? Explaining why it's been allowed to stand by Ft's sub-editor even though the word is incorrectly spelt by modern standards.

Also... the letter to the editor about the Townsend-Withers sighting (FT388 and 393) - somebody had the same idea as me (it's on the relevant FT magazine talk thread EDIT - my ideas are in FT390's discussion) , so damn, wish I'd written in about it! He does seem to have gone into it in more detail, though. Interesting somebody, totally independently, was thinking along the same lines as me - re letter from Steve Sinton on astrodomes
 
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Right at the end of the review, saw something odd and had to blink and look twice. It was the way the review spelt a word: anæesthetic.
It wasn't even American English, which leaves out the "æ" ligature and simplifies the word to anesthetic. So there is at least one variant spelling out there.
That extra letter "e" in there just after the "æ". Once I realised what was odd about the spelling of a word I've always written as "anæsthetic" without the extra "e", I wondered. Has it always been spelt like that and I just haven't noticed? Or has somebody changed the spelling lately, and I wasn't copied into the memo, and missed it? is this a Mandela thing?

This odd spelling occurs in a number of older medical texts (or at least the modern day versions of those texts). It's rife in 19th century texts, and it is cited in titles and quotes at least as late as 1942.

Some, but not all, these occurrences have been changed since the texts were originally published. For example ...

Oxford Academic lists the title of a July 1942 article in the British Journal of Anaesthesia as:

ANÆESTHETIC RECORDING AS PRACTISED AT MADISON
https://academic.oup.com/bja/article/18/2/69/232838

However, the PDF file of the complete article shows the title as:


ANAESTHETIC RECORDING AS PRACTISED AT MADISON
https://watermark.silverchair.com/1...-h2uEACqAlyYCa5k8q_7Tmb4KGQbolWhmRvWCi-E3cm9g


Here's a second example ... The odd spelling appears in the (modern) text of the webpage presenting an 1847 article, but the image of that article's first page (on the same webpage) doesn't reflect the oddity.

https://www.bmj.com/content/s1-11/24/656


A third example ... In the Delphi Complete Works of William James (Illustrated) both the British and the odd spellings occur in a single paragraph.

https://books.google.com/books?id=r...wHHoECCEQAQ#v=onepage&q="anæesthetic"&f=false

This suggests that the odd spelling may be the result of some sort of glitch or oversight in post hoc modern transcription of old texts. In other words, nobody actually used the oddball spelling until it appeared as an accident in the late 20th / early 21st centuries.

I'm not sure this is the case, because what appear to be optical / image transcriptions of two articles in the 1906
Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of North Carolina exhibit the oddball spelling.

https://books.google.com/books?id=S...wDXoECBwQAQ#v=onepage&q="anæesthetic"&f=false
 
Not the content.

My copy of 397 came through on time as far as I known. I'd been away for a few days, and two copies were nestling among the junk mail on the mat. I opened my copy and put the spare on my desk. Eventually got round to moving it and found it was addressed to a WB about 12 doors down from me in Huntingdon.
So if you're on the board and someone pushed a copy though your door at about 13:15 today (10 September), that's where it's been hiding, not detained by be Men in Black.

"WB"?

Two FT readers on one street? It's an anomaly! Is there much poltergeist and UFO activity locally?
 
Morning ogdred you must have seen some one on your street wearing a tin foil hat and thought hmm mebbe a FT reader.Or is your street weird anyway :dunno:
 
The Risley Silver Man "explanation" is a pretty good example of "explaining away" too. Not saying it's not plausible (or even probable), but Mr Anonymous, interviewed 40 years later, says it was all down to Mr Also Anonymous playing a prank on (untraceable?) students. No sources given, not even for the police report that described the witness as "pissed as a newt" (can one access police reports so casually?). To judge by the maps in the article, the author has a strange grasp of distance too.
 
The Risley Silver Man "explanation" is a pretty good example of "explaining away" too. Not saying it's not plausible (or even probable), but Mr Anonymous, interviewed 40 years later, says it was all down to Mr Also Anonymous playing a prank on (untraceable?) students. No sources given, not even for the police report that described the witness as "pissed as a newt" (can one access police reports so casually?). To judge by the maps in the article, the author has a strange grasp of distance too.

Yeah, it was a nice try at explaining it, but the explanation was even less convincing than the Silver Man being a space alien. I eagerly await the letters on this one.
 
Brilliant review of the new Blu-Ray release of Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece Walkabout.
Hard to believe it's 51 years since the movie first enthralled and mystified viewers.
Nice touch that the package contains a copy of the book, which I haven't read since doing English Lit O Level.
May have to treat myself to this.
 
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Brilliant review of the new Blu-Ray release of Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece Walkabout.
Hard to believe it's 51 years since the movie first enthralled and mystified viewers.

That's because it's 49 years since the movie first enthralled and mystified viewers.
 
That's because it's 49 years since the movie first enthralled and mystified viewers.

Is that another boob destined for next month's errata column then?

walk.JPG
 
Yeah, I was just being a smartarse, but the first the public saw of it was 1971, just like Performance was made in 1969 too, but was held back to the following year for... reasons.
 
My copy arrived today.
 
Again reading back copies at random. thinking I must find out more about Maya Deren (p52). Hunt Emerson's artwork of this Santeria practitioner (I've been watching re-runs of Cheers in the morning) - I've just realised she looks like scary acid-drop bar waitress Carla Tortelli. Already pugnacious with a hair-trigger temper, this adds voudou to Carla's approach to life (to run up at it and punch it).
 
1649258409400.png

Maya Deren
1649258833921.png

Maya Deren by Hunt Emerson



1649258489119.png

Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman)
 
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