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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Saturday, June 07, 2014

CRYPTOLINK: Slide Show: Wild and Wonderful Concept Art from Long Lost L.A. Theme Park

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. 



Theme park designer Christopher Merritt and historian Domenic Priore dove deep to find never-before seen photos and incredible 1950s concept art for their new book Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles’s Space Age Nautical Pleasure Pier.

That wild-eyed sea serpent coaster! Those grinning Technicolor trees! A dark ride with exploding lava pods! The ideas are so far out that it’s almost impossible to believe that this wonderland was actually built in Santa Monica in 1958. It’s even harder to believe, certainly harder to accept, that it all came to an unceremonious end less than a decade later.
Read on...

UNBELIEVABLE: eTalks - The Secrets of Food Marketing

GOLLY IT'S THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN

The Gonzo Daily - Saturday
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have no doubt noticed that today's notifications are going out about twelve hours earlier than usual. There is a simple reason for this. Corinna has a cold and would like to take as much of the weekend off as possible, whereas I have music to record, books to read, dogs to play with and a hedgehog hutch to supervise the construction of. So we are trying to clear our collective desks as quickly as possible so that we can take as much of the weekend for ourselves as we possibly can!

The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly is very nearly here, and will soon be available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com. It has the lovely Pam Windo on the front cover and features an interview with her by yours truly. We also have news of Galahad's new bass player (who is actually their old bass player), Corky Laing gets an award, and a lot of people panic about Yes' lead singer's throat.  There are also new shows from the peculiar multiverse of Sub Reality Sandwich, from Friday Night Progressive, and from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and high-heeled shoes (OK, no specialist footwear, 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!!!

Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:

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!

To make sure that you don't miss your copy of future issues make an old hippy a happy chappy and subscribe
http://eepurl.com/r-VTD

*  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.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html

* 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 54 who - together with an orange kitten named after a song by Frank Zappa - puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon, which he shares with various fish and sometimes a small Indian frog. 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 the orange kitten?

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. 





BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF



BigFoot Sighting in Shelbyville,Tennessee
Heavyrebel071′s channel: I was trying to film some deer for youtube and I heard something making noises and then i heard the crows and decided ...

In Search of the Kushtaka, Alaska's Other Bigfoot
In Search of the Kushtaka, Alaska's Other Bigfoot. Some call it a myth, some call it a hoax. But for those unfortunate souls who have come face to face

TODAY'S BIG CAT NEWS

The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper-column inches than any other cryptozoological subject. 

There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived by us in some way, so we are publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in. 

The worldwide mystery cat phenomenon (or group of phenomena, if we are to be more accurate) is not JUST about cryptozoology. At its most basic level it is about the relationship between our species and various species of larger cat. That is why sometimes you will read stories here that appear to have nothing to do with cryptozoology but have everything to do with human/big cat interaction. As committed Forteans, we believe that until we understand the nature of these interactions, we have no hope of understanding the truth that we are seeking. 

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  • OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

    Yesterday’s News Today

    On this day in 1965 the artist Damian Hirst was born. In the 90s Hirst sparked off controversy by displaying various animals that had been dissected and preserved in formaldehyde as art, the resulting pieces having sold for several thousands of pounds.
    And now the news:

  • Aberaeron pool repairs on hold over bat colony
  • Gene study shows how sheep first separated from go...
  • Marine animal thought extinct for 4 million years,...
  • Catfish 'See' Their Next Meal with Acid-Sensing Wh...
  • Caged civet coffee is to be refused certification
  • Newly discovered insect 'Supersonus' hits animal k...
  • Blind cavefish are able to 'count'
  • US, not just Mexico, revealed as responsible for d...
  • Hirst also directed the video for Blur's “Country House” which went on to define the look for most other 'brit pop' videos that were to follow: