CFZ PEOPLE: Happy Birthday, Dr Holdsworth

WEIRD WEEKEND 2014: A Query from Dan Holdsworth

Jon,

As you know, during Weird Weekends I normally stay in a B & B
to the north-west of Woolsery; Hescott Farm. Just before the main road
there is a monumental gateway on the left, with a curious inscription
on it:

http://goo.gl/maps/efro2

Omega, thou art last I'm sure
As Alpha is in the east
And thou'lt be last for ever more
Til endless ages cease.
When I am dead and gone
these verses will remain
To show who wrote thereof
By working of the brain

James Berriman
New Inn
Clovelly   Jan 10th 1902

Now, I'm willing to bet that almost nobody, not even locals such as
yourself, will have spotted this plaque. The writing is too small to
read from a car; only someone on a bike such as myself would be able to
stop and satisfy their curiosity (incidentally, a bike is the ideal
vehicle for a quiet nosey-parker round any area if you're so inclined).

So, it might make quite a nice quiz question and in any case lends itself to giving the Weird Weekend an air of, well, weirdness.

It certainly puzzles me, anyway, and there are few other mysteries on
that section of road, with the exception of the strange bright shiny
thing...

--
Dan H.

DAN HOLDSWORTH: Strange Sculptures

I seem to have a knack of finding these things...

Firstly in Woking, home of H. G. Wells:
http://goo.gl/maps/5Cqv8

and secondly in Manchester. Quite why a sculpture of a sinking ship is
here, instead outside the Manchester City ground, I really can't say:
http://goo.gl/maps/wPKxl

DAN HOLDSWORTH SENT THIS UNCATEGORISABLY PECULIAR STORY

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes

By Lucy A. Snyder

5 April 2004

Let's face it: any script kiddie with a pair of pliers can put Red Hat on a Compaq, his mom's toaster, or even the family dog. But nothing earns you geek points like installing Linux on a dead badger. So if you really want to earn your wizard hat, just read the following instructions, and soon your friends will think you're slick as caffeinated soap.

Minimum Installation Requirements:

1. one (1) pocketknife
2. one (1) screwdriver, flathead, to install Duppy card (see item 4. below)
3. computer with:
   • CD drive
   • USB, Ethernet, or a free slot for wireless networking card
   • Telnet or SSH client installed
   • cyberspiritual controller program such as FleshGolem (Mac OS X and Linux), Phranken (Windows 98, ME, 2000), or ItzaLive (Mac OS 8.1-9.x and Amiga)
4. one (1) Duppy card (available in CardBus and PCI models) or SpiritInTheSky external adapter (available in ethernet and USB models)
5. VüDü Linux (available from Twisted Faces Software)
6. minimum 3' x 3' (1m x 1m) fireproof surface, in secure, ventilated area
7. privacy
8. one (1) dead badger, good condition

Optional Installation Requirements:

• one (1) gallon of holy water (Bless! brand exorcise water is ideal) in a silver or silver-plated bucket
• one (1) pair latex gloves
• one (1) fluid ounce of flea-killing shampoo such as Ecto-Soothe or Mycodex
• running water and a large sink or washtub

The following test installation was conducted on the concrete floor of the garage of a detached single-story house, on unconsecrated ground, using a 400MHz clamshell iBook, and began shortly after local sunset.

Step 1: Find a suitable badger. Specimens from zoos are ideal, but suitable badgers can be found as roadkill along highways in many parts of North America, the British Isles, continental Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa.

• Other animals of family Mustelidae can be used in place of a badger, but an adapter may be required. See Appendix II for details.

Step 2: Once you have obtained a dead badger, check it carefully for structural damage, particularly in the spine, skull, and legs. Dead badgers do not heal, and a badger with broken legs will display limited mobility. Brain and spinal cord damage is likely to interfere with the Linux installation and render any successfully-installed system unstable, as well as voiding all explicit and implicit warranties according to the laws of any and every state, country, or alternate dimension, present or future.

• As a precaution against infection, wear latex gloves at all times when handling your dead badger. It is highly recommended that you wash the carcass with a suitable flea-killing shampoo.

Step 3: Obtain a copy of FleshGolem or other cyberspiritual controller program. This test was conducted with a copy of FleshGolem downloaded from the Apple site's utilities section. Follow all installation instructions carefully, including addenda in the readme.txt file.

Read on...

COTSWOLDS 'BIGFOOT TRACK'

Dan Holdsworth 'solved' this mystery about six months before it happened. Check this out

CORINNA DOWNES: Night scope update

On Friday we received two night-sights through the post, which had been very generously donated to the CFZ by Dan Holdsworth. We could not wait until it got dark so that we could try them out and as soon as the last flecks of daylight gave up and handed over to darkness, Graham and Jon eagerly pottered around outside and eventually came into the kitchen with them. It was like something out of Terminator, each of them having just one red eye – these seemingly floating around completely devoid of any body. Then it was my turn and the first thing I looked at was Prudence sitting on her bed by the Rayburn. Quite peculiar - especially as her eyes were just large white dots. In fact they looked like two white chocolate buttons. Freaky.

There is no doubt that if anybody had walked passed the house and seen us, they would have thought us jolly odd fellows, wandering around in the dark. But on reflection I guess most in the village know us as being rather unconventional anyway. However, we enjoyed our night-time experiment and are looking forward to trying out the night-sights up at the woods one night.

Thanks, Dan, once again for your generosity. They are a gratefully received addition to our growing arsenal of specialised equipment.

DAN HOLDSWORTH MAKES A JOLLY GOOD SUGGESTION

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-13486698

DAN HOLDSWORTH WRITES: How many other big cat hoaxes have involved cuddly toys?Perhaps the Weird Weekend ought to include a tongue-in-cheek competition for the least convincing cryptid photo?

We agree. Send us your nominations for the least convincing crypto photo that is in the public domain. We shall find something jolly as a prize!

DR DAN HOLDSWORTH: One for `Taxonomy Fail` here

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349943/Green-Bay-Packers-fan-Blake-Montpetit-roasts-BEAR-Chicago.html


Nice Going, Daily Fail; you illustrated a story about a bear with a picture of a wolverine.

A CAUTIONARY TALE

I really should have a camera with me at all times.

Hoops Inn is a particularly nice pub just down the road from the CFZ. I have been going there for over thirty years. It was where I always took young ladies I was trying to impress, and it was where Corinna and I spent our wedding night.

One has to drive past it every time we go to Bideford. On Wednesday Graham and I were Asda-bound when we were held up for nearly 20 minutes trying to drive past the pub. There had been an accident; a trailer had overturned, there were police cars and various emergency vehicles scattered around. As usually happens, the quick trip to Asda turned into a much more mammoth occasion, and it was not for three hours that we were on the same road going home! Much to our surprise the obstructions were still there.

Yesterday I got this email from Dan Holdsworth asking simply "will the CFZ be reporting this?" and giving a URL:

http://swns.com/tractor-covers-country-pub-in-ten-tonnes-of-manure-011637.html

It was quite a popular story yesterday. But no one had a picture to go with it. Now, if I had only remembered my camera!

DAN HOLDSWORTH: Not really cryptozoological, not quite anyway

Jon,


here's a link to some recent research on, of all things, the Black Death plagues of medieval Europe:

http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001134

The article was linked off this one:


http://www.physorg.com/news206009200.html



which was linked into by Fortean Times.

The slight cryptozoological link was this: in the past quite a few epidemiologists have claimed (with not very much supporting evidence) that the only reservoir host for the plague bacterium Yersina pestis was the black rat, Rattus rattus, which is a mostly sub-tropical species and is somewhat beyond its northern breeding range in Britain. R. rattus in medieval times acted like it does now, as an imported pest in ports that couldn't quite cope with the climate here and only existed in ports from the population being continually topped up from shipping.

The way the disease was thought to spread was by infected rats transmitting the bacterium to their fleas. Once the rats died the now-starving fleas went looking for anything to bite, some bit people and thus passed on the disease. The problem with this model is that where rat-flea-human transmission goes on, you always see highly obvious mass deaths of rat populations before plague outbreaks; this was never commented on by medieval writers.

The logic goes that because R. rattus wasn't generally present in Britain there would be no reservoir host for Yersina pestis in Britain; therefore it couldn't be the cause of plague; therefore we would have to look for another causitive agent. The favourite for this was an entirely inferred cryptid, an unknown haemorrhagic virus. This is seriously scary because viruses are very difficult to kill; one with a symptomless incubation period of weeks is incredibly scary.

This research, then, is actually very reassuring news: we lose a seriously scary cryptid disease and replace it with a known bacterium that can be treated. We also learn something because that research shows that one strain of Y. pestis spread up to Norway, then down south again. There's no way it could have been ticking over in black rats up there, so there must be another reservoir host (domestic cats, possibly; they are easily infected and cat fleas readily bite people as well) or the disease there acted more slowly and simply spread from person to person.

This won't happen again, if only because people now have access to high quality insecticides and don't tolerate flea infestations, so the transmission chain gets broken. I'm not sure that this qualifies as cryptozoology, but it does qualify as gold-standard debunking of a scare story, replacing a scary myth with something that's still nasty but eminently treatable.

Dan Holdsworth.

SO THAT IS WHAT IT WAS..

Dan Holdsworth solves the mystery

DR DAN WITH AN INTERESTING RESOURCE

DAN HOLDSWORTH WRITES:

Jon,
Having read your story about the phantom black dog, I decided to go looking for an online map of geological faults and similar data. I found http://portal.onegeology.org/

Mooching around on this I happened to discover that Mawnan Old Church is sitting slap bang on top of a geological fault. Now, Google Earth has a layer that shows where there have been earthquakes in the past.

There was an earthquake just a little away from Mawnan in July 23, 1966 01:50:04 UTC at a depth of 33.00 km (20.51 mi). So, that fault was active then and is very likely still creeping a bit to this day, and very likely still churning out geomagnetism and the like.

Interesting, yes?

(Oh, and there are geological faults shown near Somerset, but nothing much shown near the northern bit).

ANOTHER ONE FOR DR DAN

Hannah writes: I spotted this beastie this morning in our Garden in Northamptonshire UK. It was approx. 2cm long and I did manage to get a photo.

What is it? I'm pretty sure I know, but do you?