The Gonzo Daily - Thursday
A couple of weeks ago Corinna bought me the lastest
issue of Mojo which is ordered each month for me at the village shop. Someone (I
suspect mother) put it somewhere peculiar and I forgot all about it. I
discovered it last night, and sat down belatedly to read it. It included their
review of the year;'s albums, and - as I had just finished writing my own for
Gonzo Weekly - I sat down to read it with interest. Peculiarly there were only
four (or it might have been five) albums that were on both lists. Certainly the
shape of the year's music as seen by the two magazines were wildly different.
And, remember, both magazines appeal to a broadly similar demographic. This has
got to be a good thing, and basically refutes any claims that the world of
popular music is in decline. The music business is changing, but that is an
entirely different matter.
As far as cryptozoology is concerned, the big news
is that a team including Dr Ross Barnett who isolated leopard DNA from hair
samples found in North Devon and sent to him by the CFZ back in 2010 reanalysed
the hair samples which Bryan Sykes et al identified as being from an ancestral
polar bear. In the Proceedings B of the Royal Society, Sykes et al write:
"We appreciate notification of the error in Sykes
et al. [...] where we matched mitochondrial 12S RNA sequence recovered from two
‘yeti’ hair samples found in Ladakh, India (no. 25025, >40 years old) and
Bhutan (no. 25191 >10 years old) with GenBank accessions recovered from the
jawbone of a Pleistocene polar bear Ursus maritimus described in Lindqvist et
al. [...] The matches were instead to a modern specimen of U. maritimus from the
Diomede Islands in the Bering Sea reported in the same paper. The error was
caused by an incomplete GenBank search linking the sample to the paper rather
than to the individual isolate. Although the error is certainly unfortunate, it
does not change the conclusion that the sequences recovered from the ‘yeti’
hairs connect to U. maritimus nor does it invalidate any of the possible
explanations discussed in the paper. Importantly, for the thrust of the paper as
a whole, the conclusion that these Himalayan ‘yeti’ samples were certainly not
from a hitherto unknown primate is unaffected."
This actually confounds things even more. How has
modern polar bear DNA turned up in the Himalayas? As football commentators say,
there is still everything to play for.
What confuses things, however, is that the BBC
report of this gets it completely wrong and claims that the DNA was actually
from a subspecies of brown bear; an assertion which has been copied across the
internet. Many thanks to Loren Coleman for bringing this to my
attention.
Merrell Fankhauser, Lee Pomeroy, Unidentified
Flying Wassnames, René van Commenée, Jon Anderson, Yes, Hawkwind, and Daevid
Allen fans had better look out!
The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#108) is
available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/. It
has Merrell Fankhauser on the cover talking about his latest project that
involves setting music to some apparently alien transmissions from off the coast
of Malibu. Doug Harr interviews the legendary Lee Pomeroy, René van Commenée
expounds at length on his Desert Island Discs, and also builds a huge musical
art machine in the middle of Antwerp, Xtul declare war on humanity and give away
their new single as a Christmas gift, and there are also new shows from the
multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night
Progressive, and the titular submarine dwellers are back with another episode of
Sub Reality Sandwich (except its not). There is also a collection of more news,
reviews, views, interviews and anteaters wishing to snooze (OK, nothing to do
with dozy edentates, 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!
* 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/…/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit…
* 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 55 who - together with an infantile orange cat 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 infantile orange cat?
The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper-column inches than any other cryptozoological subject. 
