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...

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Wednesday, December 13, 2017

FORTEAN BIRD NEWS FROM THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES


What has Corinna's column of Fortean bird news got to do with cryptozoology? 

Well, everything, actually! 

In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that whereas the study of out-of-place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot or lake monsters, it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean zoologist to be interested in.





THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN IS STEADFAST

The Gonzo Daily: Wednesday
 
Yesterday my shocking lifestyle caught up with me. The practise nurse at my GP's surgery in Bideford, called me out over my ongoing history of substance abuse. The substance in question being cake! Apparently since I quit smoking my blood pressure is the best it has ever been, but my blood sugar is through the bleeding roof! I had hoped that the massive amounts of diabetic medicine that I am on each day would negate the effects of a teensy bit of light hearted comfort eating...But apparently not. Pancreases huh?
 
Forgive me for always banging on about our webTV show, but it matters a lot to me, and I would be grateful for as many people as possible to see it, and spread the tidings of it far and wide:
 
 
And if you fancy supporting us on Patreon:
 
But for now, here is the news:
 
THE GONZO TRACK OF THE DAY: Bob Calvert - The Righ...
THOM THE WORLD POET: The Daily Poem
RICK WAKEMAN ON THE BBC
YES NEWS
FRANK ZAPPA NEWS
 
Gonzo Weekly #264
THE INNER MOUNTING ISSUE
 
As we approach Christmas, guitar legend John McLaughlin does something truly special, Mr Dearling goes to Parliament and sees an art exhibition in a railway station, Jon muses on Judge Smith's new film, we send Robert Schneck to a desert island, Jeremy reviews Larry Wallis and John listens to Quicksilver Messenger Service!
 
Hail Eris!
 
And there are radio shows from Mack Maloney AND Strange Fruit, AND Friday Night Progressive AND (because it was a full moon last week) Canterbury Sans Frontieres. We also have columns from all sorts of folk including Neil Nixon, Roy Weard, C J Stone, Mr Biffo and the irrepressible Corinna. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and southern dibblers who have blown a fuse (OK, nothing to do with small marsupials who are not good at household electrics, but I got carried away with things that rhymed with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
 
This issue features:
 
Judge Smith, Adam Horovitz, Israel Horovitz, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Downes Braid Association, Yoko Ono, Jarvis Cocker, Neil Young, The Beatles, Yes, Cruise to the Edge, Strange Fruit, Friday Night Progressive, Mack Maloney's Mystery Hour, Jean-Philippe Leo Smet (Johnny Hallyday, Christine Margaret Keeler, Carles Santos, Norihiko Hashida, James Mundell Lowe, Robert "Bilbo" Walker Jr., Magin Diaz Garcia, Michael I, Barbara Dickson, Jessica Lee Morgan, Rick Wakeman, Billion Dollar Babies, Tangerine Dream, John McLaughlin, Alan Dearling, Waterloo Station, All Party Parliamentary Writers' Group (APWG), Wojciech Grajkowski, Agnes Monod-Gayraud, Cressida Cowell, David Freiberg's Quicksilver Messenger Service, John Brodie-Good, Jeremy Smith, Larry Wallis, Kev Rowland, Monster Magnet, Quiet Riot, Ric Sanders, Rafael Senra, Quantum Fantay, Carol Albert, Catherine Howe, Hawkwind, Jimmy Durante, Katy Perry, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beyonce, Neil Nixon
 
And the last few issues are:
 
Issue 263 (The magic Band)
Issue 262 (DikMik)
Issue 261 (Leonard Cohen)
Issue 260 (Amsterdam Squat Festie)
Issue 259 (Out come thee Freaks)
Issue 258 (The Devil's Jukebox)
Issue 257 (Judge Smith)
Issue 255/6 (John Lennon)
Issue 254 (Mr Biffo)
Issue 253 (Dana Gillespie)
Issue 252 (Cropredy)
Issue 251 (Scott Walker)
Issue 250 (Jamms)
Issue 249 (Bill Bruford)
Issue 248 (The Selecter)
Issue 247 (Don Airey)
Issue 246 (Steve Hackett)
Issue 244-5 (Summer Special)
 
 
All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power chaps, we have to share it!
 
You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
 
SPECIAL NOTICE: If you, too, want to unleash the power of your inner rock journalist, and want to join a rapidly growing band of likewise minded weirdos please email me at jon@eclipse.co.uk The more the merrier really.
 
* The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...
 
* The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk
 
* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!
 
* Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 58 who - together with a Jack Russell called Archie, an infantile orange cat named after a song by Frank Zappa, and two half grown kittens, one totally coincidentally named after one of the Manson Family, purely because she squeaks, puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention Archie and the Cats?

CRYPTOLINK: We think its a turtle.

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me. 

 


The Daily Star says:

Mystery giant 'HUMAN-LIKE creature' spotted poking head out of river

FOOTAGE has emerged of an unknown human-like creature floating in a river popular among fishermen.
We say:

It's a Turtle

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/666484/Mystery-sea-creature-human-like-animal-spotted-in-Australian-river-video

THYLACINES IN THE NEWS



In other words, the last ice age may have doomed the Tasmanian tiger long before "European settlers deemed the thylacine a threat to the Tasmanian sheep industry and the government aggressively targeted it for eradication by offering a £1.00 bounty for each animal killed," the Nature study notes.
Dr Mark Eldridge, a marsupial expert with the Australian Museum Research Institute who was not involved in the study, suggests that when Tasmanian tigers evolved, there was no apex predator in Australia. The tiger essentially evolved to fill a gap in the market. "What the thylacine has done is fill that ...

An international team of researchers led by associate professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne used DNA from the 106-year-old preserved remains of a juvenile thylacine or Tasmanian tiger to sequence the animal's genome, making it one of the most complete genetic blueprints for an ...
The Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, was unique. It was the largest marsupial predator that survived into recent times. Sadly it was hunted to extinction in the wild, and the last known Tasmanian tiger died in captivity in 1936. In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution today, my ...

BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF




An intriguing new documentary is coming to Netflix UK in the middle of December: Discovering Bigfoot, which chronicles a three-day expedition into the heart of Sasquatch Country. The film uses scientific and systematic methods in a bid to confirm the existence of the American folklore icon, Bigfoot.


Mattsquatch Presents: Bigfoot Scat
Mattsquatch Presents writes "Lets talk about Bigfoot Scat and identification. Surprisingly, I've gotten a lot of requests to cover this subject. So here's a.


Bigfoot encounter on Christmas
A family is spending Christmas together when they notice a large creature stalking the edge of the property by the tree line. Here is Bigfoot Tony's Breakdown.


But instead of a deer, a Bigfoot walked across no more than 50 feet in front of me. He was every bit of 7 feet tall, if not a little more, so he had a long enough stride to go from shoulder to shoulder in three or four steps at the most, with a distinct arm swing that almost looked exaggerated. He was intent on ...

NESSIENEWS (Caveat Lector)



Years of the Inverness Courier and the Loch Ness Monster - Loch Ness Mystery
THE ANOMALIST Glasgow Boy takes us back to the earliest mention of our favorite cryptid in this newspaper, from 1833, which shows that the story predates by a century the better-known reports that began today's Nessie fever. Turning to other folklore, Dr. Beach stretches a point to tell us of The Rise of ...

The star of the show is undoubtably the Loch Ness Monster and fiction or not, she's big business for the Scottish tourist board. The very thrill of ... At the nasty end of the scale there's a creature that devours lovable, furry otters in huge quantities then gallops effortlessly across the surface of Scottish lochs.

NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Wednesday

ON THIS DAY IN - 1577 - Five ships under the command of Sir Francis Drake left Plymouth, England, to embark on Drake's circumnavigation of the globe. The journey took almost three years. 
And now some more recent news from the CFZ Newsdesk

  • A horse is a horse, of course, of course -- except...
  • There's a deeper fish in the sea
  • Why predators have such crazy faces
  • Invasive frogs give invasive birds a boost in Hawa...


  • AND TO WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK... (Music that may have some relevance to items also on this page, or may just reflect my mood on the day).