The Earth’s Anomalous Lightforms
This site is a collection of articles and other material regarding anomalous luminous phenomena. It covers a range of natural but mysterious lights which for various reasons are seldom investigated as mainstream science.
In general, this site mainly covers earth lights (i.e. spooklights, ghost lights, nocturnal lights, amber gamblers, geophysical meteors), and the Will-o’-the-wisp (i.e. the ignus fatuus, the foolish fire). Earthquake lights are also covered, along with some other rare phenomena such as foxfire, St. Elmo’s Fire, and so on, but these are really sidelines to the main theme.
Enjoy.
Peter’s Friends – Tobacco Factory, Bristol
The deeply lovely legend Peter Clifford, who many of you will remember from The Heist (pretend scientist for the Milgram Experiment) or The Devil’s Picturebook, is hosting four nights of magic at The Tobacco Factory in Bristol. Some of you will know that this is where I performed my first full stage show. This studio theatre is famous for maintaining a superb standard of production, and aside from Peter’s nights, the annual Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory stagings are some of the best you’ll see in the country, often starring Peter himself. Last year they invited Jonathan Miller to direct Hamlet, which, with the faultless Jamie Ballard in the title role (Jamie, a good friend, will also be in Black Death with Andy Nyman) was every bit as good as any of the more highly publicised productions.
So, Peter’s Friends will bring together the best of Britain’s magicians for four Sunday nights: the details of each programme yet to be confirmed but he promises ‘mentalism, gambling cons, street magic and bamboozling outright trickery’. The dates are:
Sunday 28th June
Sunday 26th July
Sunday 27th September
Sunday 25th October
At The Tobacco Factory, Raleigh Rd, Bristol: box office 0117 902 0344.
It’s really worth making sure you secure tickets for these.
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4 inch aliens attack Pakistan
Want to know what is really is? head over to Forgetomori
Possessed: Poisonous Gas or Psychiatric Disorder?
Mysterious circumstances enveloped the case that took place in the SM Denim factory, and staff at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital (ASH) were baffled when affected workers of the factory were brought to the hospital’s emergency ward on Saturday.
Rumours were rife in the emergency ward, among families of the affected that the victims had been “possessed by an evil being,” as one woman put it.
“My cousin, Sadia, went into hysterics and suddenly started tossing herself across the walls of the factory, and hitting herself with her hands violently, just like the devil had taken possession of her,” said the middle-aged woman who was holding down one of Sadia’s hands. The girl’s fiancÈ held down her other hand.
Sadia, a frail girl with pallid skin, was lying on the bed with her eyes rolling up in her head. She kept trying to bite her fiance’s wrist as he held her down. She kept wriggling as if to break free, but seemed too weak to be able to actually do so.
Friday Fun: Great trick with cigarette and match
Word is – Coops can do this!
Worlds largest horns
No this is NOT photoshopped. It’s real.
This is Lurch, the proud bearer of the world’s largest horns. Lurch is a Watusi bull living in an Animal shelter, whose horns measure 92.25 cm and weigh more than 100 pounds each. He’s quite the attraction in his home state and he’s favorite pass-time is acting as bodyguard for a crippled horse that’s being harassed by fellow horses.
14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite
A schoolboy has survived a direct hit by a meteorite after it fell to earth at 30,000mph.
Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky. A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.
Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky. A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.
Telegraph (Thanks Houdinia)
Derren Brown Interview – Telegraph
Derren Brown is a mind-reading, bullet-dodging, cabbie-confounding magician, but he’s not the devil – he’s just a very tired boy…
Derren Brown is about to astound me. Britain’s most famous mind reader, magician, master of misdirection and a man whose book, Tricks of the Mind, tells you how to memorise whole reams of unrelated information, is in the kitchen of his north London flat, making himself a fresh coffee and me more tea.
Suddenly, he frowns and contemplates the two mugs, one red and one yellow. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I can’t remember if you were the red one or the yellow one. Can you?’ To be fair, Brown, 38, is exhausted. He toils, he tells me, 51 weeks a year, putting together the television shows that have made him famous and doing the flabbergasting stage shows audiences so enjoy.
Today, he’s in the last stages of rehearsal for his new tour, and he’s run down – when we meet, he’s clutching a bottle of linctus and coughing. Although a book of his sharply observed caricatures was recently published, he hasn’t painted since before Christmas, nor even had the time for music – ‘It’s one of the first things that goes, isn’t it?’ he says in his fast, light, classless voice. ‘Sitting and listening to music.’ (He loves Rufus Wainwright and has drawers, presumably full of CDs, neatly labelled ‘Bach’, ‘Opera’, and ‘Chamber’.) And that workload is also why, when we talk about confidence tricks and his love of them and I ask him how he thinks Bernie Madoff pulled off his $50 billion scam, he says, ‘Who’s Bernie Madoff?’ He hasn’t read a newspaper in months.
(more…)
Derren Brown on Radio 4 Show
Derren Brown on Radio 4: Front Row with Mark Lawson.
Click here to download.
How to treat sleepwalking
Sleepwalking has been in the headlines recently thanks to a string of bizarre cases — and around one in 40 of us do it.
Sleepwalking has had more than its fair share of headlines recently thanks to a string of bizarre cases, the most recent of which was the acquittal last week of a woman who had been charged with attempting to smother her mother. Donna Sheppard-Saunders, 33, held a pillow over her sleeping mother’s face for 30 seconds before she woke up and realised what she was doing. The court accepted her defence that she was sleepwalking and unaware of her actions.
It is not the first time that a sleepwalking defence has proved successful. In the late Eighties, a 23-year old Canadian, Kenneth Parks, was acquitted after claiming that he was sleepwalking when he drove 15 miles to his in-laws’ house and stabbed his mother-in-law to death. Sleepwalking is a poorly understood phenomenon that typically occurs during the first third of the night. It is much more common in young children, who often grow out of it as they get older, but for a significant minority it persists into adulthood and it is estimated that one in 40 British adults sleepwalks regularly.
Brain electroencephalography (EEG) wave patterns show that sleepwalkers are in a state of incomplete awakening, where parts of the brain are functioning normally while others remain “asleep”. There is a genetic component — it often runs in families — and possible triggers include stress, lack of sleep and alcohol. There is also growing interest in the role of heavy snoring and other sleep-related breathing difficulties, treatment of which seems to result in a dramatic reduction in sleepwalking.
