WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

Search This Blog

WATCH OUR WEEKLY WEBtv SHOW

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON
Click on this logo to find out more about helping CFZtv and getting some smashing rewards...

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER



Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...




Friday, September 04, 2009

BRING ME A LETTER, THE SOONER THE BETTER

My postbag continues to amuse and instruct. There are three spectacularly groovy things in the latest batch: The first being a copy of an interesting paper by Richard Corlett about the feasiblity and morality of reintroducing Hong Kong's lost vertebrate fauna. As he wrote in another seminal article:

In Hong Kong’s climate, forest is the natural vegetation everywhere. It can be suppressed by regular cutting or burning, but the harvesting of biomass for fuel ended decades ago and fires, although still common, are less often started and more rapidly controlled near urban areas than next to rural villages. An increase in the area of forest is therefore an inevitable, if paradoxical, consequence of the increasing urbanisation of the New Territories. Hong Kong Island, where the last grassland is disappearing under a tidal wave of shrubs and trees, illustrates the future for the whole territory. Within fifty years, forest will cover most of Hong Kong.

Good news for native biodiversity, surely? Well…yes… partly. It is true that many of our most diverse inland sites are in forest, but these are areas that have had continuous tree cover for centuries, as a result of inaccessibility or the protection of feng shui. The much larger areas of young secondary forest are a lot less diverse. Even at the best sites, the diversity is in the plants and invertebrates – organisms that can persist in the tiniest of forest patches. Vertebrates do not survive in such situations so Hong Kong has lost most species that require forest. The new forests are therefore empty in comparison with the larger, older forest areas in Guangdong, and even more so if compared with what must have been here a thousand years ago. There are no reliable records for Hong Kong from before the nineteenth century, when the vertebrate fauna was already impoverished. To get an idea of what has been lost, we must therefore extrapolate from recent and historical records for the South China region. These records suggest the local extinction, by the nineteenth century, of at least the following families of forest vertebrates: monkeys, gibbons, elephants, rhinoceroses, squirrels, flying squirrels, bamboo rats, pheasants, woodpeckers and trogons (Corlett, 2002). A species list would be much longer, since several major vertebrate groups, such as the babblers, cats, mustelids and rodents, are represented by just a few survivors of the original diversity.

The 2002 paper ,which was sent to me by Richard Muirhead this morning, gives much food for thought. Thanks mate.

The other major bit from my postbag was a set of DVDs from Dr Karl Shuker. Was it a scientific symposium of some kind, or possibly some cerebral exploration of scientific minutiae, sent by one leading cryptozoologist to another? Nope. It was the complete series of The Double Deckers. "What the heck is that?" I hear anyone born after 1961 ask. Well, according to Wikipedia:

Here Come the Double Deckers was a seventeen-part British children's TV series from 1970/1971 revolving around the adventures of seven children whose den was an old red double-decker London bus in an unused works (junk) yard. A co-production between British independent film company Century Films and American TV company 20th Century Fox, it was a comedy adventure sitcom similar in look and feel to other late 1960s / early 1970s sitcoms such as The Monkees, The Partridge Family and the Banana Splits. The shows (without ads) were about 21 minutes long.

The programme made its debut on September 12, 1970 at 10:30 am ET in the US on ABC, and at 4:55 pm on January 1, 1971 in Britain on BBC One. In the US, the series was rerun on Sunday mornings during the 1971-1972 TV season on ABC from September 12, 1971 to September 3, 1972, in the same time slot. Each week saw the gang in a separate adventure including episodes based around a runaway home-made hovercraft, a chocolate factory and invading 'Martians' with guns that shot out chocolate candy, a disastrous camping holiday, collecting tin foil for a guide dog/seeing-eye dog, becoming pop moguls with their protege 'The Cool Cavalier' and a haunted stately home.

The cast were unknowns apart from Melvyn Hayes who appeared as Albert the Street Cleaner. Of the younger stars, Peter Firth has gone on to a prominent acting career, appearing in Equus, The Hunt for Red October, Tess, Pearl Harbor and Spooks. Co-star Brinsley Forde later became the lead singer in Aswad. The series was original scheduled for 26 episodes, followed by a further series, but production ceased after the 17th due to financial difficulties and alleged irregularities.

Cheers, Karl. I am very grateful.

Now all I need is someone to find me the two-part play School for Clowns featuring (and I believe scripted by) Ken Campbell, which was shown on (I think) Dramarama on ITV in 1981, and I will be very happy.

Oh, BTW, I have had a stream of emails (well, two actually) asking what the headlines in my ongoing postbag series mean. I hope this video (after you plough through the Fab Four being rude to the worryingly unfunny Mike and Bernie Winters in 1963, explains it all.


1 comment:

Dr Karl Shuker said...

No probs, Jon, but when you were checking out The Double Deckers on Wikipedia, you should have checked out the entry for Douglas Simmonds, the actor who played Doughnut. It reads:

"Douglas Simmonds (born 18 February 1958 in England), is a British child actor who played the part of Doughnut in the UK television show Here Come the Double Deckers.

Douglas left acting to work in science and medicine, training as a medical student before becoming a theoretical physicist and researcher. Whilst working on string theory, he later expanded this theory to include toroidal hyperspaces. After working for several years for the Department of Health as an expert in Medical Computing he retired and is now a researcher in ancient glyptic art."

Yes, the sound that you just heard was indeed my jaw hitting the floor! Who would have guessed? Way to go, Doughnut!