THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE

When he was brought in during the late spring he was seriously underweight and couldn't fly. During a routine examination last week he turned out to be about 30% smaller than he should have been.

He was probably the runt of the litter and would never have had a chance in the wild so although we were sad, we were not overly surprised when Richard found him dead in his aviary yesterday morning.

Rest in Peace Ichabod Meldrew.

During his brief time with us he did exhibit some very fortean habits, as the link below shows.

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/05/twa-corbies.html

YOU'RE GONNA WRITE ME A LETTER, THE SOONER THE BETTER

My postbag continues to delight and amuse. So far this morning I have another blue dog picture from Naomi, a pile of research material from Richard Muirhead (who really is a marvel) covering Irish lake monsters and historical sightings of wildmen in Poland, and a parcel from blogdude Bigfoot73 (aka John Coates). He has very kindly sent me a 1tb RAM card, and the Command & Conquer game that I rather cheekily asked for (not thinking for a moment that anyone would send it to me).

Thank you, my dear.

The CFZ has been funded by private subscription, and donations for seventeen years now, but it is a two-way process. Next week, everything being OK, we will be donating a working (though slightly ancient) computer, to Tony "Doc" Shiels who is a working (though slightly ancient) wizard, and today the CFZ fighting fund paid for a new USB keyboard for Dizzy Miss Lizzy, who managed to knacker hers by pouring coke all over it.

Before anyone repeats Max's idiotic slur, it was the sort of coke that comes in a bottle and is rather good mixed with rum, rather than the other sort, although the idea of Ms C. doing a line of Bolivian Marching Powder off her laptop is admittedly amusing.

So if you have any computer equipment up for grabs let me know. I will find it a good home, and who else would mix Ecclesiastes 11:1 with a string of poor drug jokes?

SMASHING NEW BOOK ON ATLANTIS

COMPANION TO ATLANTIS AND OTHER MYSTERY LANDS,

by Ronan Coghlan

XIPHOS BOOKS 2009, ISBN 978-0-9544936-9-1

There have been more books on Atlantis than you can shake a stick at. So what’s different about this one? Well, aside from being written by noted scholar, Fortean and antiquarian Ronan Coghlan; it is an A to Z of not just all things Atlantean but of all lost geography: lost cities, lost islands, lost continents. It’s all here: Hyperborea, lemuria, Mu, Shambhala and many others. Some of the most interesting are not the huge continents but small islands or island chains that seem to have vanished. The Aurora Islands in the South Atlantic, for example, were last observed in 1856; the Nimrod Islands near the tip of South America were last seen in 1828; and Pepys Island, which vanished in 1684. Pheng-Lai was supposedly a mysterious island of Chinese legend visited over 2000 years ago that may have been Hawaii.

As for Atlantis itself people have thought that it was just about anywhere from Ireland to Africa. Some say it was a city on an island in a lake rather than a continent in the ocean. One such spot is the wonderfully named Poopoo Lake in Bolivia.

People who have written about, hunted for or studied Atlantis and other lost locations are listed from Madam Blavatsky to Otto Muck. There are also lists of the animals and plants that supposedly flourished on Atlantis.

Ronan supports a very feasible idea that most of the lost continents can be traced back to the scientifically well attested sinking of ancient Sundaland (no, not the place were Geordie Dave lives; the land mass that once linked the Indonesian Islands together. It was quite swiftly broken into island chains in three successive inundations 14 000, 11 000 and 8 500 years ago. DNA evidence shows that the inhabitants spread out widely, ranging from Turkey to the Eastern Pacific. They may have even been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Linguistic evidence also points to the idea that the Sundaland people were ancestral to the Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic peoples. All in all it sounds like a plausible root to the worldwide legends of ‘lost continents’. RF

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Companion-Atlantis-Other-Mystery-Lands/dp/0954493699/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252400844&sr=1-1

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday’s News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

I was contacted today by a very upset young lady who had been searching high and low for 3D glasses to look at Sunday’s 3D photo only to find out it wasn’t there. I didn’t notice this because it had been bumped off the front page by the exciting news about the blue dogs, so I’m sorry I didn’t upload it somewhere and post a link to it in yesterday’s YNT. To make up for it, here it is:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v386/shearluck/trilo.jpg

It takes a long time and a lot of skill to make these 3D photos (you can’t just point a 3D cam at something and snap it; you have to do a lot of calibration to get the desired effects) and I’m getting better at them all the time; this work is among my best yet. If you want to see the whole lot of 3D photos so far, and ones that haven’t been on the bloggo, there is an album on my facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=601569127#/album.php?aid=123546&id=601569127

Anyway, now it’s time for the news:

Arctic researcher flees after wolves gorge on bacon

Australian man finds python living in his toilet

More albino hedgehogs

Mt Bosavi team find giant rats and grunting fish

‘Rat’s amazing!