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FT444

AgProv

AgProv

Doctor of Disorientation Studies, UnseenUniversity
Joined
Apr 6, 2014
Messages
1,342
Location
too North to be Midlands, too south to be North
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.
 
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 doing this.
The thing is, I opened one of these three years ago during the lockdown, and it's still going strong, or I wouldn't have had a delivery this morning.
It occurs to me that my annual sub should renew about now, so there should in theory be no need to act on this; but it's interesting I should have got this generic (unpersonalised) prompt in the month where my sub is renewed. So the question is - do I need to actually do anything, or should I just treat this as one of those interesting coincidences and ignore it? It'd be ironic, given the usual (deliberately planned?) difficulty in cancelling any sort of redundant DD, if the one direct debit I really DO want to keep ends up becoming time-expired and cancels itself!

(Also - could I trade up from the original For Tean Mug to claim a set of the ear-buds, as a loyal long term reader?)

Secondly, the book reviews.

RC McNeff's Aleister Crowley: The Hess Solution.(review on p55) Reviewer David V Barrett describes this novel as a discontinuous narrative leaping backwards and forwards across three decades and lots of geographically separate locations, noting that this makes for difficulty in keeping track of it all. It could be noted here that this is very reminiscent of another literary work in which Crowley is an occasional character - Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!. S&W use the same unstructure, so that anyone coming to Illuminatus! either gives up in despair or feels compelled to read and re-read it, so as to get a notion of how all the disparate episodes and locations fit together. I'm suspecting that there may be Homage going on here. I also predict that if I picked up this book and opened it at random, the first thing I'd see would be the number 23.

The Reverend's Review (page 57). Peter Laws reviews horror movies with a defined Christian Church setting. He notes one is kicked off by a priest hanging himself in a graveyard, an act so vile, we're told, that it opens the Gates of Hell.

Now I'm not the one who wears the clerical collar and far be it for me to lecture the Reverend Laws about the Bible.... honestly.... but it does occur to me this is a very neat way to open a horror movie, and you can even quote chapter and verse and context as to why, as well as presupposing the original Biblical context then sparked off two millennia of associated folklore, reinforced by input from other religions. (Odin hanging himself on a tree for nine days so as to gain wisdom, for instance).

Matthew 27 1:10 (also in Mark 15 and Luke 23). In which Judas, former disciple of Jesus, hangs himself, the thirty pieces of silver are reclaimed by the priests, and used to buy the field in which Judas hanged himself so as to use it as a graveyard in perpetuity....

We see one of the Twelve, men recruited by Jesus to go out and preach the Word (the first Christian priests? Definitely the start-point for the Apostolic Succession that defines priesthood), falling into despair, desolation and self loathing and killing himself in a graveyard. And in a variant of the story, Judas disembowels himself - various stomach horrors are described by the Rev Laws as the film progresses....
 
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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 fast-food delivery of blame.")

I remember reading about a subtle effect in physics, a sort of fluid mechanics thing, where any two massive bodies at sea, left to their own devices, are more rather than less likely to collide, because there's a sort of "suction effect" on the sides facing each other (like negative pressure underneath an aircraft's wing that gives it lift, or something, only operating more subtly in water). The closer they get, the stronger the drag forcing them together. So a drifting ship with a lot of mass and inertia, and a fixed support pillar, would be in the same relationship to each other, and, crunch.... it's as simple as that, perhaps.

Also, "Beyond The Nuts And Bolts" (page 28). sorry.... it's probably the way my mind works. But... Ezekiel's Chariot. I find my mind cannot get past "The Merkebah Kid is strong and tough...."


I know if you have to explain the joke it stops being funny. But... the only conspiracy theory that popped into mind here, the only suspicion of a government cover-up, was the diabolical plan in the 1970's to stop the British people from pronouncing the name of the chocolate as "Nessles", as God intended, and for us to adopt the foreign and un-British pronunciation of "Nest-Lays", simply because the EU had decreed that an é with a squiggle over the top should be pronounced as in French, as if that un-necessary squiggle made a difference.... (Background: Nestlé chocolate did something called a Milky Bar, which had an advertising jingle based on a character called The Milky Bar Kid. About that time, the adverts were wavering between the British pronunciation of Nestlés as "Nessles" with a silent "t", and the correct Swiss-French pronunciation of "Nest-Lays", as if they couldn't make their mind up either. You will note it took maybe three decades of "Milky Bar Kid" adverts for the name of the company that made them to be pronounced correctly in the TV adverts...)

Anyway. Nigel Watson doesn't mention that "Merkevah", as in "battle chariot", is also the Hebrew word for a fifty-odd ton main battle tank currently in Israeli army service - Ezekiel's biblical juggernaut may have been part of the naming rationale here?
 
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I was surprised when I got the May issue yesterday.
I admit that I've got used to getting my copy in the post about a week before the end of the month, but over two weeks in advance? Confuses the heck out of me.
 
Stormkhan said:
I was surprised when I got the May issue yesterday.
I admit that I've got used to getting my copy in the post about a week before the end of the month, but over two weeks in advance? Confuses the heck out of me.
Click to expand...

There are 13 issues a year so they come out every four weeks and we receive each issue two or three days earlier than in the preceding calendar month. By the November issue we should be fully four weeks 'early'. In fact, last year we actually got the November issue on 30 September, and December's on 28 October! Then at the end of November we get the intercalated Christmas issue, and everything resets to delivery a week or so before the beginning of the month.

we need a 'leap week' at some point to adjust for there being 365 1/4 days in an average year

oxo
 
I've often thought that regular subscribers should have a chance to purchase the 'free gifts' that new subscribers get. Even if we paid a reasonable sum, I'd happily buy a mug or other ephemera, since I don't know where else I could get them from.

I remember suggesting some years ago that all current subscribers should be sent a mug as a 'thank you'. There were no free gifts when I took out my subscription, and I feel as though I am missing out!
 
catseye said:
I've often thought that regular subscribers should have a chance to purchase the 'free gifts' that new subscribers get. Even if we paid a reasonable sum, I'd happily buy a mug or other ephemera, since I don't know where else I could get them from.

I remember suggesting some years ago that all current subscribers should be sent a mug as a 'thank you'. There were no free gifts when I took out my subscription, and I feel as though I am missing out!
Click to expand...
Nowt for digital subscribers either, although I have a mug (in daily use!) and a little notebook somewhere that came with old paper subscriptions.
 
catseye said:
I've often thought that regular subscribers should have a chance to purchase the 'free gifts' that new subscribers get. Even if we paid a reasonable sum, I'd happily buy a mug or other ephemera, since I don't know where else I could get them from.

I remember suggesting some years ago that all current subscribers should be sent a mug as a 'thank you'. There were no free gifts when I took out my subscription, and I feel as though I am missing out!
Click to expand...
I agree.
This objection is the same as bank customers losing out for 'brand loyalty' to the benefit of new customers.
All this action does is to encourage switching and actually reduce customer loyalty.
Though this isn't possible with the FT of course. ;)
 
Stormkhan said:
I agree.
This objection is the same as bank customers losing out for 'brand loyalty' to the benefit of new customers.
All this action does is to encourage switching and actually reduce customer loyalty.
Though this isn't possible with the FT of course. ;)
Click to expand...
It's not just banks - lots of places have 'encouragements' for new customers to sign up. But in the case of FT, where the free gifty things are advertisements for the product, why not have them available for established readers too? At a small cost, obviously, to cover the cost of production or whatever, but we could ADVERTISE the product, and pay good money for the privilege of doing so.
 
AgProv said:
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 doing this.
The thing is, I opened one of these three years ago during the lockdown, and it's still going strong, or I wouldn't have had a delivery this morning.
It occurs to me that my annual sub should renew about now, so there should in theory be no need to act on this; but it's interesting I should have got this generic (unpersonalised) prompt in the month where my sub is renewed. So the question is - do I need to actually do anything, or should I just treat this as one of those interesting coincidences and ignore it? It'd be ironic, given the usual (deliberately planned?) difficulty in cancelling any sort of redundant DD, if the one direct debit I really DO want to keep ends up becoming time-expired and cancels itself!
Click to expand...
Just a coincidence I guess. I got one last month and in the current issue too.
 
I set the ball rolling by asking a local newsagent to start stocking FT magazine over 10 years ago. Ownership has changed hands since then but the new owners still to this day get 3 copies on their shelf which is good for me except I've felt a bit guilty because I can't always afford to buy the latest issue. I can and have this month though. Before that and in the 'I can't afford this' moments', they let me loiter and read it at the shelf and they turn a blind eye.

I've got the latest issue on my bed ready.
 
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