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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Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...




Friday, October 03, 2014

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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  • THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN EMULATES THE OOZELUM BIRD

    The Gonzo Daily - Friday
    We have a house guest at the moment; Jools the Cornish ghost hunter moved house recently with her partner Dougie, but the new house is so noisy that she can't get any sleep. So for a couple of nights at a time she will be kipping at Casa CFZ. All very good in theory, but when in practise we stayed up until gone five chatting about cabbages and kings, she had less sleep than one would have hoped.
    The new Marianne Faithfull album is a little odd. `Give my Love to London` opens with the title track which is ragged as hell and comes over like a stoned bunch of folkies playing 'Waiting for the Man'. On first listen, such a rag tag opener does not set the scene well for the rest of the album, but it soon tightens up and tracks like 'Late Victorian Holocaust' which was written by Nick Cave are magnificent. The whole album has a peculiarly unfinished feel to it with count ins left in and fragments of studio noise. However, when you go back to the beginning and start again the title track now does not sound out of place at all. In context with the rest of the album it makes perfect sense.
    Against a peculiar amalgam of Waterboys and Velvet Underground she sings:
    "The river's running bloody, the Tower is coming down
    I'm singing Pirate Jenny, while the black ship#s bearing down"
    and one wonders whether she has read the Alan Moore novella of a few years ago when characters from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen universe live out their own drama to the interactive soundtrack of Seeräuberjenny. We are living in strange and disturbing times, and thiws paranoid and unsettling album provides rather a good soundtrack to them.

    Ageing Hipsters, rock and roll historians, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Gong fans and all sorts of other people, had better look out! The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#97) will soon be available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/.
    It has me being totally seld indulgent with a picture of my first grand-daughter (born a few days ago) on the cover, but features an interview with the legendary Freddy Bannister, promoter of festivals at Bath and Knebworth amongst others. He talks about Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd amongst others. Doug Harr goes to see Tears for Fears, and Jon is surprisingly reassuring about the future of the music business. There are also new shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the massively talented Jaki and Tim are back with their submarine and Maisie the cow. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and Mollucan palm cockatoos (OK, no weird pink parrots, 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/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?

    ANDREW MAY: Words from the Wild Frontier

    News and stories from the remoter fringes of the CFZ blogosphere...

    From CFZ-USA:

    BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF



    "Jacobs Creature" Just A Bear?
    What he would end up capturing on his trail camera would not only surprise him but would garner the attention of the BFRO and the Bigfoot

    Latin Post

    Residents learn about sightings of Bigfoot in Ohio
    On Thursday night Doug Waller, one of the founders of the Southeastern Ohio Society for Bigfoot Investigation (SOSBI), spoke to a crowded room of ...

    fox8.com

    The Bigfoot Whisperer? Man says he has secret to tracking down creature
    A man named Farlan Huff who has been hunting the creature for years, decided to take a different approach. “I want to be non-threatening. If you want ...

    Watch this CLASSIC episode of Finding Bigfoot featuring Call of the Wildman's Turtleman!
    The investigators travel once more to the state of Kentucky to inspect some recent casts of Bigfoot tracks. After a wild night with Ernie the Turtleman

    Is This a Video of Bigfoot Caught in Oklahoma? What Has Eyes Like This?
    We've been seeing a lot of eyeshine videos lately, and this one is just as spooky as the rest. It comes from Oklahoma via the Crypto Crew. I'm not sure 

    Is This a Bigfoot Driving These Dogs Crazy?
    My Dog ran to the very end of his lease, so it must have been a Big foot. ... I remember when I was young and wanted to be the one to find Bigfoot.

    Possible Bigfoot Movement Comparison
    Crypto Tom: I went back to the area where I accendently filmed some possible movement and do a comparsion. I also run the 2 videos side by side

    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.




    NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Friday

    ON THIS DAY IN 1932 - Iraq was admitted into the League of Nations leading Britain to terminate their mandate over the nation. Britain had ruled Iraq since taking it from Turkey during World War I. 

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  • 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)