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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Friday, January 09, 2015

CFZ IN THE NEWS




Rob Campbell: My list before the end of the world
August's event is surely a trip to the Weird Weekend in North Devon, which is the annual gathering of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, dedicated to the ...
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BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF:



A Southwest Virginia man says he has seen Bigfoot five times!
... Roaring Creature in the Woods of Virginia · Does Big Foot live in Bexar County? Take a Listen: Bigfoot Witness Near Shenandoah National Forest ...


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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.
  • NEWSLINK: CMR mountain lion study reveals more am...
  • US SIGHTINGS: Hiker comes face-to-face with big c...
  • UK SIGHTINGS: Wild beast spotted near supermarket

  • NEWSLINK: Rare ‘clumsy’ cat captured on camera fo...
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    RAINES EXPLAINS: Paris 2015

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    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.

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    THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN IS UNACCOUNTABLY AHEAD OF THE GAME? OR IS THIS JUST HIS OVERACTIVE IMAGINATION AT WORK? WHO KNOWS?

    The Gonzo Daily - 9th January
     
    Strange Days indeed. The political situation across the world gets more and more frightening, the weather is grey and blustery, and the front gate keeps blowing open in the wind with a terrible CLANGGG!!! which then sets the two dogs running about the place barking like the hounds of Hell. I have rheumatism in my neck which prescribed muscle relaxants (note, I said prescribed, boys and girls) and heat cushions are only doing a little to alleviate, and all sorts of other crap with which I shall not bore you. But I am in a strangely good mood. Dear Andrew May has done another e-book, as - believe it or not - have I and we now have no less than five e-books up for sale, two of which have actually started selling. I have completed proofs for a couple of Gonzo autobiographies, and the final work on Volume 2 of George Eberhart's 'Mysterious Creatures' is pretty well done and dusted. And - the BIG AND - for the first time in nearly eighteen months I have started a new issue of Animals & Men, so am feeling remarkably chipper.
     
     
    The Gonzo Weekly #111
    www.gonzoweekly.com
     
    Mice on Stilts, Kate Bush, Three Friends, PFM, Yusuf, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, King Crimson, Elbow, The National, Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, Yes, Hawkwind, and Daevid Allen fans had better look out!
     
    The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#111) is available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/. It has Mice on Stilts on the front cover, and an interview with the band, Doug's totally subjective top ten gigs of last year, we send Lee Pomeroy, prog bass player to the stars to a desert island, and there are shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the titular submarine dwellers are lost at sea, whilst Xtul are still causing havoc in the forest. 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!
     
    You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
    http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/
     

    * 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?
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    eBOOKS


    For some years we have been wrestling with the problem of e-books. Some people have been demanding them quite vociferously, and insinuating that we "can't be bothered" to produce them. This is just not true. The sad fact is that the format is just not suitable for most of our publications. Andrew May is currently working on transferring the books in our back catalogue that are mainly text, or which have very few illustrations, into e-books, and he is cracking on with them at a rate of knots.

    Many of our books, however, have complex typesetting with footnotes, endnotes and references, as well as having a large number of illustrations. The technology to make e-books has moved on greatly over the past few years, and I am happy to say that by utilising Kindle software aimed at producing comic books and kid's books we can now produce static versions of our more complex titles.

    However, let me warn you in advance. They do NOT have clickable links, or searchable text, but we hope to offset this by offering the books at a significantly lower price than the printed version. The font face and size are also not changeable except by expanding the page as a whole. When the technology moves on we shall move on with it. And in the meantime I still consider the hard copy titles to be the definitive editions.

    At the moment we are issuing our e-books purely via Amazon's Kindle platform, because - as we understand it - there are free apps which one can download in order to read Kindle e-books on all other formats. However, we would welcome your feedback on the subject. If you buy our e-books please give us feedback. It helps us to improve what we do...

    Jon Downes,
    January 2015

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    FORTEAN ART TERRORISM: The latest from Xtul

    My father was a strange man; quick to condemn, and very much shut inside a world of his own making. But as I get older, I realise that the same could be said of us all. My teens were spent listening to rock music, drinking beer and smoking cannabis,whereas his were spent drinking gin and being torpedoed by German U Boats. Such things do - I imagine - tend to fuck up one's outlook on life.

    But my father was remarkably judgemental. I remember him claiming that a clip from The Muppet Show of Miss Piggy singing a duet with Kris Kristofferson on 'Help me make it through the night' was promoting bestiality, how Alvin Stardust was a communist (I never did get that one), and how Mott the Hoople's 'Roll Away the Stone' was somehow mocking the resurrection of Our Lord, when the stone was rolled away from his tomb on the first Easter Sunday. Stuff like that sounds ridiculous to modem ears, but I am sure that some of the things that I say in front of my young relatives sound just as irritatingly archaic to their ears.

    Read on...
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    NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Friday

    ON THIS DAY IN 1799 - British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax, at two shillings (10p) in the pound, to raise funds for the Napoleonic Wars. 

  • Two children, six and 10, survive stings by Irukan...
  • What would you do with 6 tons of crushed ivory?
  • Deadly brown snake emerges from surf, causing alar...
  • Driver dies in crash with wild boar on M4
  • Study rules out spiders as common cause of bacteri...
  • Snail named for cement company that could make it ...
  • Dwarf elephant beats up big rival

  • Black widow spider venom unveiled: The fast evolut...

    • 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)
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