Category: goo brain

The Psychological Warfare Of The Worlds

War of the Worlds tripod Tonight, once the episode is posted, we’re heading out to view a re-creation of the classic Orson Welles radio production of The War Of The Worlds, and I’m quite excited. I also find it interesting that, due to the panic caused by the original, conspiracy theories still abound regarding the broadcast.

In the 1999 documentary, Masters of the Universe: The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, writer Daniel Hopsicker claims the Rockefeller Foundation funded the broadcast, studied the panic, and compiled a report available to a few. – wikipedia

While I’d never heard that particular angle, I do recall reading this second theory in my youth.

There has been continued speculation the panic generated by War of the Worlds inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, avoiding a similar panic. U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of UFO investigatory Project Blue Book wrote, “The [U.S. government’s] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous The War of the Worlds broadcast.” – wikipedia

Of course the Government’s “UFO” files are full of references to the broadcast: this would be something like an investigation of 1950s family structure turning up mentions of Beaver Cleaver – it doesn’t make Martians, or the Beav, any more real.

Unfortunately, not every legacy of the episode was a positive one.

In February 1949, Leonardo Paez and Eduardo Alcaraz produced a Spanish-language version of Welles’s 1938 script for Radio Quito in Quito, Ecuador. The broadcast set off panic in the city. Police and fire brigades rushed out of town to engage the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was fiction, the panic transformed into a riot and hundreds attacked Radio Quito and El Comercio, the local newspaper. In the days preceding the broadcast, El Comercio had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of unidentified objects in the skies above Ecuador. The riot resulted in six (or more) deaths, including those of Paez’s girlfriend and nephew. Paez moved to Venezuela after the incident. – wikipedia

Telling Tails

Behind the scenes of Planet Of The Apes Warning: Those with weak stomachs may find this post a bit rough.

I’m in a bit of a time crunch today, but I wanted to throw out an idea for your consideration. First, from the wikipedia:

Infrequently, a child is born with a “soft tail”, which contains no vertebrae, but only blood vessels, muscles, and nerves, although there have been several documented cases of tails containing cartilage or up to five vertebrae. […] A man named Chandre Oram, who lives in West Bengal, a state in India, is famous because of his 33-centimetre (13 in) tail. It is not believed to be a true tail, however, but rather a case of spina bifida.

While it’s not technically a ‘true’ tail, here’s a bit of Mr Oram from Japanese television.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUHYwUTVWWc]

– and, to add to your possible discomfort, here’s a clip I’ve little further information on, but which demonstrates a, uh, less-mushy ‘real’ tail.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnxzqeT466A]

I/We consider these oddities, and possibly even off-putting, but the reason I mention it is this: how long will it be – twenty years? – until bioengineering advances can activate our ancient attributes on demand, and allow those interested (I’m looking at you, Furry community) to grow custom prehensile-tails?

I’m not a huge fan of the aesthetics, but it would be handy to have an extra grip on my coffee.

Meet The Old Cult Leader, Same As The New Cult Leader

It’s perhaps unsurprising that most cult leaders come out of a background of poverty – Manson was born to an unwed 16-year-old, and Jim Jones’ family was apparently heavily hit by the Great Depression – but it seems rarer to have a sect lead by a lady, as in the case of Joanna Southcott.

From the wikipedia:

Her father was a farmer and she herself was for a considerable time a domestic servant in Exeter. She was originally of the Church of England, but about 1792, becoming persuaded that she possessed supernatural gifts, she wrote and dictated prophecies in rhyme, and then announced herself as the woman spoken of in Revelation

Not to be crass, but if I had to spend the majority of my days picking up in a house that wasn’t my own while having my bum pinched by it’s unruly owner, I too might consider digging up some prophecies and hitting the road.

Better yet, she had some luck in her new trade.

Her followers became numerous and in 1802 she settled in London and a chapel was opened for her followers. – Probert Encyclopaedia

Unfortunately, the prophet business is a lot like real estate: it doesn’t mean much unless you can close the sale and show results.

At the age of sixty four she affirmed that she was pregnant and would be delivered of the new Messiah, the Shiloh of Genesis – wikipedia

Although the baby never materialized, Joanna didn’t need to dodge the pointed questions of her followers for terribly long.

The official date of death is given as 27 December 1814; however, it is likely that she died the previous day, 26 December 1814, as her followers retained her body for some time, in the belief that she would be raised from the dead, and only agreed to its burial after it began to decay.

A whiff of decay wasn’t the only thing she’d left her people: she also imparted a trunk full of prophecies, with a suitably difficult bar to achieve before she might be proven wrong.

A final quote from the wikipedia:

She left a sealed wooden box of prophecies, usually known as Joanna Southcott’s Box, with the instruction that it be opened only at a time of national crisis, and then only in the presence of all twenty four bishops of the Church of England[…] Eventually in 1927 one reluctant prelate […] was persuaded to be present at the box’s opening, but it was found to contain only a few oddments and unimportant papers, among them a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol.

Joanna Southcott's Box

March 29, 2011
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goo brain, history, junk thought, Uncategorised

Name Calling

I started this as a tweet, but the idea didn’t have the required room:

One day terms like lame, gay, retarded, etc., will be replaced with a new set of society’s perceived weaknesses and wickedness – eventually someone may be laggy, or a banker, just as they were once a beslubbering, fat-kidneyed, flax-wench.

Disappearing Act

Mercado de Sonora (Sonora Market) is a mercado público, or city-established traditional market, located just southeast of the historic center of Mexico City in the Colonia Merced Balbuena neighborhood. – wikipedia

There are situations, like children and the script to last night’s episode, which eventually leave your control to take on a life of their own, a life that can bring anxiety and heartbreak.

If only we lived in a world like Will Coffin’s, in which we could turn to magic for a solution – well, supposedly, the people who frequent Mercado de Sonora have just such an advantage.

The two types of products, herbal medicines and magical/occult items, are not completely separate[…] The variety of medicinal plants sold is vast and include avocado leaves for inflammations, chiranthodendron for the heart, jacaranda flowers for the stomach and more. There is also dried rattlesnake, which is considered a medicine against cancer, dried skunk to “strengthen the blood,” and starfish. Plant items more strongly associated with magic and religion include crosses of ocote wood for good luck, chains of garlic to ward off evil and deer eyes to protect against the “evil eye.” – wikipedia

The herbs provide an interesting selection, and I’d be interested to see if there was any science behind some their usages, but none listed are quite what I’m shopping for.

The market sells occult items related to magic (white and black), pre-Hispanic religious and magical traditions, Santería, the cult of Santa Muerte, shamanism, and various others […] [i]tems for sale include amulets, horseshoes, candles in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and colors, with many of the colors have very specific functions, gold dust, black salt, powders of unknown ingredients, “water of Saint Ignatius” to ward off unwanted attention, aromatic lotions and soaps, many of which are related to love spells and more – wikipedia

No, still nothing to correct a nappy narrator; I suppose I’ll just have to stick to invoking the ancient rites of my people:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjd7L6txGLk]

Welcome to Monday

Feeling a knot of tension in your stomach, brought on by the knowledge that you’re still standing on the welcome-mat of a long week ahead?

Worried about that outstanding item on your schedule? Annoyed by the chipper attitudes of your workmates?

Might I suggest the soothing visage of a chimp in a tux?

From the wikipedia article on the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens:

In 1893 a chimpanzee was purchased from another of Wombwell’s Travelling Menageries in London. The four-year old chimpanzee, Consul, was dressed in a smoking jacket and cap and puffed on a cob pipe; he frequently accompanied [zoo owner] James Jennison to business meetings.

I’m sure Consul must have been a master negotiator in the boardroom, but, as often happens, his heir had a more artistic bent – from the same article:

Consul proved to be exceptionally popular, and after his death on 24 November 1894, the Jennisons immediately obtained a replacement, Consul II, who played a violin while riding a tricycle around the gardens, later graduating to a bicycle.

Consul II

Hindenburg

I don’t believe I’ve posted this image before, from a New York Times gallery, but I’ve been deriving a lot of inspiration from it in the last while.

I can’t recall where I originally came across it, but there’s a high chance it was somehow via Jim of Relic Radio.

Enter The Night Parrot

The Kakapo (Māori: kākāpō, meaning night parrot) […] also called owl parrot, is a species of large, flightless nocturnal parrot endemic to New Zealand. – wikipedia

I think these amazing birds have been in the news quite a bit lately, so I won’t spend too long running down their fascinating habits – what I did want to mention, however, was the interesting (to me, at least) fact that their most invasive predators are feral house cats, introduced by settling Europeans.

Kakapo found at http://blog.elliottfox.com/?p=95

Pulp Rescue

Iron Man Armour Who wouldn’t love to be able to send a besuited, and belligerent, Robert Downey Jr. into the heart of Japan’s crippled reactors to manhandle the unruly portions, and provide the flow of water necessary to reverse the current tragic trajectory?

We’re not there yet, but we may not be that far from it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8VhW9JIwUk]

The next generation of this type of product won’t have hand-repulsors, or the ability to fly, but I’m sure the strength to carry another hundred pounds of shielding would, and will, be most welcome.

The Long View

Screenshot from http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geiger-counter-tokyo
Speaking of the situation in Japan, I wanted to bring up an item I thought might be of interest to Collective Detective fans.

With official estimations of the threat from radiation across Japan changing rapidly and sometimes inconsistent, a number of real-time amateur radiation monitors have popped up online. A live geiger counter at altTokyo.com updates a graph with data every 60 seconds, and a uStream channel broadcasting the digital display of another Tokyo geiger counter was drawing more than 14,000 viewers earlier today. – CNET

– and by “and sometimes inconsistent”, they mean “and sometimes possibly a lie”.

At the time this post is going up, I found the altTokyo page unreachable, but the uStream was available and displaying a cpm of 14.14 – from what I’ve read, a rating of 160 is something to panic over.

I find it fascinating, and disturbing, that average citizens have had to take this level of science into their own hands, for their own safety. Whatever the outcome in these next few days and weeks, the Japanese corporate and social structure is in for a long, intense, debate. Are the stoic calm of the people, and the possibly tragic results of trying to save political-face, two sides of the same coin?