A Sunday Review

TV this week:

• Gotham: "A Legion of Horribles" - This is really winding up for a massive season finale. One question - is that Clayface or False Face? It seems like it could be either. Ok, good stuff. The return of Fish, which we were expecting. Lucius Fox being intelligent. Selina's street smarts working in her favor. Nygma's sheer joy at being bad. I also like Ethel, Hugo's assistant. The Court of Owls? Is that who the big bad is? I'm impressed by the number of cliffhangers this episode seems to have, and it will be very interesting to see what happens in the season finale next Monday.


• The Flash: "Invincible" - Poor Barry didn't get it. The Speed Force wasn't just helping him handle his past grief, it was trying to prepare him for a big loss to come. I love how the team comes together in this episode to try to help Barry tone down his feelings of superiority. I also enjoyed how Cisco is finally coming into his powers. The fact that he was able to protect himself with his abilities was interesting. But that final bit of the show, where everyone is gathered and the truth came out to at least one confused young man... that was impressive. The finale of Zoom was painful, but the Speed Force practically told Barry it was going to happen - he just wasn't listening.


• Arrow: "Lost in the Flood" - While there are some repercussions on the news about the nuke, I'm thinking there would be a heckuva lot more outrage, fear and panic. Then again, we're only seeing one angle. For all the viewers know, the rest of the world could be running around screaming. The remainder of the episode was so-so. Felicity's parents are amusing, but not my favorite parts of the show. Seeing Curtis again was good. But mostly I just want this plotline to finish.


• Legends of Tomorrow: "Legendary" - Well, that was quite a finale. I didn't actually expect them to finish off Savage. I'm more than a little confused about how they did it, and what it did to the timeline, but I gather it was all happening in a paradox anyway. So my own personal pet theory (MOPPeT) is gung gur gvzryvar jnfa'g npghnyyl nssrpgrq ol gur qrnguf bs gur cnfg Fnintrf, fvapr gurl jrer vafvqr gur cnenqbk (urapr jnvgvat sbe gur tybjvat ovgf gb tybj). Gur bayl Fnintr jub "qvrq" jnf gur "pheerag" bar, jub unq nyernql zheqrerq Evc'f snzvyl. The cliffhanger was fun enough... I like me a bit of JSA. The next season ought to be good.

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Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Apr 20th
• Aquaman #51 - After capturing Dead Water, its human form is kept in a near-waterless containment. Turns out the human form has a name and a life, and is completely unaware of what he's been doing, remembering only his last employer... The Scavenger. The art on this is fantastic, with just the right mix of scenes to drive the action home. There's much less humor in this issue, but when Aquaman is basically torturing a guy to keep him from turning into a monster and killing everyone, it kind of gets everyone down a bit, I think. Mera had a good role to play, but that stupid outfit is not winning me over. Seriously, she's her own woman. She hardly needs to dress like Aquaman to earn respect. Beyond that nitpick, I quite enjoyed this issue and I'm reallly looking forward to the next one. I'm liking the team of Abnett and Cifuentes, and hope they stick with the book for awhile.
• Titans Hunt #7 - The threat is so great that destroying the potential pawns is the only way to stop it? What about knocking them all unconscious until you can get a handle on the problem and stop it, rather than slaughtering people? Oh well, you don't expect an organization called Diablo to be friendly. The pair of Diablo agents with big letters on their chests made me think of Team Rocket from Pokemon. Silly. They weren't quite as silly in action, but terribly hokey and stilted. There wasn't really enough of Aqualad in this issue for me. While the lead trio is nice, I just want a bit more from them than walking up a staircase. Again, the issue seemed to be padded out a bit more than needed. I think this entire mini-series could have been done in half the length.
• Teen Titans Go #15 - The first story, with the scaredy-pants, was mildly amusing except for the major plot hole (he put them on over his tights, so taking them off shouldn't have "pants" him). The second tale featured a little bit of Aqualad, although I see Raven and Starfire no longer have little hearts whenever they look at him, and Raven seemed to even be ug-ing at him. Amusing issue, but only just ok.
• Astro City #34 - There must be a lot of ex-supervillains in the Astro City universe, and the big bad definitely takes advantage of that. Carl is a good person at his heart, and this issue was kind of an "aw shucks" finish to a somewhat scary tale. He helped his friends and stopped a villain, but also showed how human he was while he was at it. A great little story.
• Back to the Future #7 - Marty is sure into the adventure, but it's really not good news for Doc. Things get more and more mysterious as the issue plods along... the reveal of Doc's "car" was a little extended. The final bit, a contest between Needles and Marty, is just dumb. As I've said before, I prefer the stories set before the movie that fill in the background of the characters. This story hasn't really gripped me.
• Dirk Gently: A Spoon Too Short #3 - From the hairstyle, it's got to be Dirk as a child, right? Beyond that, I'm not sure what to say about this. It defies any logical description, and laughs at attempts to explain the plot. You almost have to read it to get it. I'm not a huge fan of this character, but this isn't a bad series so far.
• Huck #6 - I really enjoyed this book. It's a fairly simple tale of people who didn't deserve the pain they suffered. I particularly like how smart Huck and his mother actually are, and how humble they decide to be about it. Huck's desire to help people makes him a hero to look up to, and his mother's ability... well, that's something terrible and wonderful, especially when combined with Huck. The final page was nicely brutal and a good contrast to Huck's forgiving nature. A lovely series, well worth reading. Get the collection, folks, if you missed the individual issues.
• Legends of Oz Tik-Tok And Kalidah #1 - Old West Oz is a fun universe and this is an intriguing addition. I'm curious about why Tik-Tok would be hanging out with a Kalidah in the first place. The design of Tik-Tok is unique as far as I can tell, with an owlish look I wasn't expecting. The fighting style is pretty neat, and it amuses me that he suffers from the same weakness every version of Tik-Tok has... hence he must have a traveling companion of some sort. The Kalidah is obviously an equal based on certain events. Beyond the team-up itself, we have the plot, which involves a treasure. I wonder exactly how that's going to play out? A decent start. Let's see where it goes from here.
• Doctor Who 4th #2 - Ooh, now it feels like a fourth Doctor adventure, with some bumbling in and pretending to be stupid only to prove he's very smart. Fun so far, but what's on the other side of that gateway? I am very curious if it's something we've seen before, something entirely new, or something from myth (as the cyclops suggest) made real. With a decent cliffhanger, this one promises more fun before it's over. The art is a tiny bit uneven, possibly it's just the coloring. It can be hard to distinguish Carstairs before her incident with the gateway versus after... and just what happened to her. There's obvious clues, but I'm hoping the answer isn't completely obvious once we see it.
• Doctor Who 11th #2.8 - Too many characters crowding the TARDIS, and both River and the Doctor seem... out of character. I really need to know what happened to The Squire and what she really is. Absalom was a nice kick in this one, with his calm talk after beating up a bunch of fellow thugs. But the Doctor is extra manipulative and extra cruel in this. I don't know... I kind of what the story to hurry up and finish. It seems wrong, and I'd like to see a new story to replace it.

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My library book this week was The Cinder Spires: the Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher.

Well, what do you know? A Butcher book I enjoyed. Perhaps I just need to come at his series from the beginning in the future.

Anyway, this is the story of... well, it's complicated because there are four or five main characters and the book never really settles on which one is the main story, so the reader can take it from many different angles. My biggest complaint is probably that no one character was given quite enough time to develop beyond a set of stereotypes into something more, although a couple of characters nearly made the jump.

The book itself rumbles along at a decent pace, and the world-building is excellent. I'm curious to know more about the Spires and how they were built (and why) and what the surface actually is. I enjoyed the airships and the concept, expressed by one character, of living her entire life within a confined space to the degree that merely seeing the sky gave her vertigo.

My favorite character would have to be the minor noble, Bridget, who goes to serve in the military as a duty. She probably came closest to breaking out of the stereotype set for her: large, strong girl who is a reluctant warrior at best. The way she deals with both Folly and her goofy talking cat, Rowl, made her the most interesting of the bunch.

Folly is another promising character, with a pure psychological quirk that makes her far more interesting than the rest of the cast. However, the book definitely left me wanting in regard to her and her abilities. That's not a flaw, necessarily, in an ongoing series.

The elephant in the room is the cat in the story. There will be a lot of people who really don't like Rowl and the other cats, but I thought they were handled well for the most part. There was slightly more of them that I really wanted to read, but since those bits almost always propelled the story forward, I won't complain. And, as a person owned by a cat, I can vouch for some of the behavior, although as far as I know my cat hasn't evolved enough to talk.

Overall, this was a fun romp, a good little tale. It's not going to be considered high art, and it didn't make me rethink the fantasy genre. It's certainly a good story, but I read it because it's on the Hugo finalist list. And as good as it is, I don't think it really belongs on that list.

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Fortean Times #35 (Summer 1981). The cover is... odd. Somewhat hard to discern what's happening without the "blazing bodies" headline. Yup, this issue visits the subject of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) with an article by Peter Christie that looks at a well-known case by hunting down as many primary sources as possible on the incident. In particular, there's a very early account of the death of Grace Pett that just has to be quoted: "her bone chiefly calcined and ye whole so farr reduced to ashes as to be put in ye Coffin with a Shovel". Yikes. It should be noted that this woman died in her kitchen, apparently by fire, and the wood floor and a paper screen next to her did not burn. SHC is a really really weird phenomemon, and has been documented enough times to be something real, if not understood completely. From what little I've read of the cases, however, most (if not all) of them appear to involve the consumption of liquor and open flame near the person who died. Continuing the theme is a Notes section on fires that reports on a number of SHC cases, including a couple of survivals.

Heading back to the start of the issue, the editorial apologizes again for a long delay in the issue. There's also a note that the crossword in the previous issue was missing a clue, for which the answer was "pyre". But the rest of the crossword answers are not given. Argh!

The first article in this issue is by John Michell and calls Darwinism a myth. Reading it, I can't help but wonder at the definition of Darwinism he's using. It almost seems to me that he's set up a strawman version of Darwin's theory and is whacking joyfully away at it, not paying attention to the real theory behind it. But I'm not sure. I have a sense that I'm missing something. Perhaps it is because some 35 years on we have a better grasp of the flaws of the theory while still being willing to accept the overall theme of it. I don't know. It just seems a little over-the-top and attacking the wrong target to me.

The article on the Runamo Runes is about believing something to be true so deeply that you lose all sense of perspective. In short, there is a vein of rock that wanders along a forest in Sweden and has a lot of cracks in it that resemble runes. The resemblance is enough that a whole lot of people really believed them to have been carved, and one Icelandic professor "translated" them in 1834, after working out that they were in code. Other scientists figured out what the cracks really were, although the professor defended his work until his death. They are now widely considered a natural feature, cracks in the rock, and not something someone carved. This article was republished, revised and expanded, in Fortean Times 177, the 30th Anniversary Special.

Another feature in this issue is a bunch of reports of fortean events from a correspondent in Malaysia. As often happens, the reports are eerily similar to reports from every other country, often with local twists, but equally as often with details that match UFO/strange animal/falling thing reports from around the world and across time. Strange things happen. They always have, and they always will.

I've finally found something in Fortean Times that I really don't want to read in the America Mystica column. It's nearly incomprehensible. It's like reading the worst conspiracy theorist possible trying to link things that have nothing to do with one another through a variety of silly and often contradictory ideas. I got through the first column a couple of issues ago and read one of his very poor reviews... but at this point I don't want to read any more.

Getting back to the fun stuff, On The Trail by Loren Coleman has some advice for Fortean travelers on how to find the best places to visit to find the wierd and wonderful. In the internet age, it's much easier to find the kind of information he talks about, but back in 1981 it wasn't as easy to find such specialized data. I would guess this piece was well received by the audience. I'd love to see a nice online version for my neck of the woods curated by someone like Coleman, actually.

While I'm not really warmed up to Doc Sheils yet, I loved the opening lines of this issue's "Words from the Wizard".

If Nessie happens to be an organic, flesh and blood plesiosaur, then she is no more interesting than a coelacanth: and if Bigfoot is, simply, a type of North American anthropoid ape, he is really no more interesting than a gorilla. No less interesting, certainly, but, equally certainly, no more.

He goes on to say that he finds impossible animals, like Owlman, "...a winged thing with an owl's face, a man's body and feet like a crab's claws..." to be far more interesting because it is impossible. Then he goes into a discussion of how he invokes the impossible through shamanistic rituals, and he loses me. Oh well.

Notes from the Trashkashic Records is about television. And there's something deeply odd and satisfying about reading an article that discusses television from 1981... about the time I really started getting interested in what shows were on. As an aside, I discovered quickly that I really didn't care for most shows, but I loved the theme songs to some of them and would watch them only to hear it. There were a few shows my parents wouldn't let me watch, but they'd tolerate (with rolled eyes) me watching the theme songs. The rest of the show? Bah. Anyway, back to the column, author Bob Tarte argues that television was changing the collective value of the culture by expanding what was allowed to be shown on television.

As viewers become bored with TV-reality, it enlarges slightly to accommodate more startling images. Yet these are surprising solely in the context of the medium; 'I didn't think they could show that on TV!' is the classic viewer response to something new.

Throughout the piece he namechecks a number of shows, from Ozzie and Harriet, Three's Company, I Love Lucy to Fantasy Island and Cosmos. Honestly, reading this column was a kick in the pants and a lovely walk back through time, as well.

Steve Moore has another report of strange doings from the Eastern side of the world, and there's a goofy report of a pecan tree in Alabama that was whining. There's also some updates on people who tried to solve teh energy crisis with perpetual motion machines. There's a neat page of Antiquities, which reports on a bunch of statues, some wrecked ships and some lost cities. I love these kind of reports. There's also a good set of reports in "Heavens Above" about who discovered Neptune and Jupiter and that Pluto is a double-planet. Another report looks at recent falls of strange things, including frogs and stones. There are more reports of out-of-place big cats, as well.

Phenomenomix is another two-pager in this issue, The Borders of Buffoonery Part 2, in which our bopped-on-the-head hero learns more things that man was not meant to know and gets bopped on the head more times. That's the only comic in this issue, but there is a picture of a twisted chimney under the title "Curiosa".

The letters were the usual mix, with one about winged cats and a bit on an article in the previous issue that I found incomprehensible being a spoof. Huh. The reviews make me want to visit a used bookshop with a list. All around fun issue with a lot to think about. I really enjoyed this one, despite the disturbing theme of the cover article.

Fortean Times Wishlist: FT1-FT24, FT40-FT163, FT194-FT211, FT219-FT222, FT229-FT238

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Past Sunday Reviews -- My Kindle Wishlist

A Sunday Review

TV this week:

• Gotham: "Azrael" - He's back! Death just isn't what it ought to be in the DC Universe. In this case, I wonder who else will appear who was thought dead (hint: no, I'm not actually wondering, I'm pretty sure I know). Anyway, this was a brilliant episode in one particular way: We now know how the various Gotham villains got their themes. Hugo Strange is pretty sick, but it was Ed who gave him the clue. Seeing Strange flipping through and quoting from Alice In Wonderland was a squee moment. I also liked the way the various storylines were pulled back together with the news of Azrael's identity. I have to wonder where Penguin's tale is going next. He's almost a sympathetic character, until you think of how many people he's killed. Yikes.


• The Flash: "Rupture" - I wonder if Cisco will ever embrace his abilities? I liked how he was shocked and overtaken by the events in this episode, even while retaining his humor and general nerdiness. Another good moment was when Eric and I realized that Wally and Jesse, two characters that have speed powers in the comic book DCU, were about to get hit by something from the speed force. We were both, yeah, this is gonna happen, isn't it? I am sure the show is going to fool us somehow, but the mere idea of both of them getting speed powers makes me impossibly happy. Caitlin also showed off her intelligence, but... ug... she kind of paid for it later. It's interesting to see the interplay between Barry's three "dads" while he's making up his mind, and almost strange that he follows the will of the one who has betrayed him. Then there's that cliffhanger. Nicely played, and nicely done.


• Arrow: "Genesis" - So Oliver has to learn how to channel his bright and happy side if he has any hope of defeating Darhk? He's doomed. Seriously, though, the show is coming down to whether or not Oliver is a good man, and that's a decent question to ask. He's a serial killer who claims to have reformed, fighting people that are only a little bit nastier than he is. This is a dark show, and Green Arrow is a dark hero for it. Moving on, Genesis... I seem to recall this being the plot of a Doctor Who episode or something. Let's kill off everyone except some survivors in an ark, who will then repopulate the world. Ug. Another plot that really is too much. And the last plot of the episode is Andy and John Diggle... I really didn't expect that resolution, if it is a resolution. But the threat remains, and the show has three more episodes in which to handle it, unless there's going to be some big cliffhanger at the end of the season.


• Legends of Tomorrow: "River of Time" - I knew from the moment Rip said they were going to take him to the Time Masters what would happen once they got there, and unsurprisingly, I was right. However, the other bits were good. Stein's choice to save Jackson, Rory and Snart deciding to bail, the Kendra/Carter/Ray love triangle. Yeah, it was all to be expected. Did anyone else think the Vanishing Point held a distinct resemblance to the Time Lord's prison in Trial of a Time Lord? The only downside of this episode was Ray being goaded into being really stupid. I mean, he's a smart guy, he should have seen right through Savage's trick. I guess he's just blinded by love. Now there's only two more episodes before the conclusion, and I'm hoping this whole Vandal Savage plotline goes away at that point. There are a lot of different things these guys could do.

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Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Apr 6th
• Justice League: Darkseid War Special #1 - Ok, I'm mildly interested in the Power Ring plotline. The rest of this is just pretty boring for me. I'm hoping this whole thing ends soon and we get back to the Justice League. Darkseid is one of the most boring villains in the DCU, and there are plenty of boring villains to choose from. The Amazons are always interesting, but an evil half-Darkseid Amazon? No thanks. I'd rather read about Superman saving a kitten from a tree than this storyline.
• Green Lantern #51 - So Hal has gone too far into the green? Who can help him? I'd completely forgotten about his allies until they reappeared, as well. I suspect this storyline will be wrapping up soon, and I'm not sad about that.
• Batman Beyond #11 - And the Justice League is back, complete with Aquagirl. If I were in Gotham when they appeared, I'm not sure what I'd be thinking. They have a heckuva lot of rebuilding to do. I wonder how much we'll see in the book and how much will be done off-camera. If the reboot... er, rebirth... starts with a clean Gotham, I'll be disappointed.
• Spider-Man 2099 #9 - Wow, Miguel is really not fooling around, but that means he's going to invite a whole lot of trouble as time goes on. As for Tempest's mother... whoa. I was ready for a number of different excuses, but that story was not something on the radar. It kind of makes sense in a superhero universe, but it stills seems like the mother ought to have told her daughter. Crazy, but it explains just about everything while making the mother less of a nasty.
• Doctor Who 10th #2.8 - Gabby still has some issues to work out, and Cindy appears to need some counseling as well. I'm curious to see where that relationship goes as this crew travels. There's a reason the Doctor doesn't usually pack a crowd into the TARDIS, I think. Relationships get complicated fast. As for the location and story... oooh, a paranormal festival at a haunted well! Nice. I am looking forward to how this problem gets solved. And I haven't forgotten the other mystery involving the sketchbook pages.
• Doctor Who 12th #2.4 - Nice solutions to the problems, although I suspect there will be plenty of clean-up for UNIT to handle. The fish was a funny addition to the team. Overall, it was ok. Fun but not fantastic. With these kind of stories, you wonder just how the government/UNIT manages to keep the populace from going nuts. I think conspiracy theorists in the Doctor Who universe must be very busy.
• Rough Riders #1 - Ah, the old "gather the team" issue, with another one coming, since I think we didn't get more than half the crew in the first one. Teddy is fun in this, but then, he was fun in real life. He hardly needs to be practically a Batman as well to make him awesome, but if anyone historically fits the role, he's a good one. This could be a really good book, or it could crash and burn, but I'm already thinking it's headed toward the really good side. Definitely one to watch.

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Fortean Times #34 (Winter 1981). A nice old-fashioned cover, which is a bit depressing in its possible racism, though I tend to read it a bit differently. The native to the area is smart enough to run while the European explorer is fascinated and soon to be eaten by the bear/ape/dinosaur/whatever... that's how I read it. The cover "story" is the official report of Dr Roy Mackal and James Powell of their trip into Impfondo, Republic of Congo, Africa, to determined whether or not stories of a fantastic beast from the area were myth or based on a real animal. Their conclusion was that there is some kind of real animal at the base of the stories, but many fantastical elements had been added in the retellings. They recommended another expedition as well as a highway between Impfondo and the village they visited, Epena, to make research easier as well as improve the lives of the locals. The highway seems to me to be something added in gratitude to the folks who helped them... a kind of "oh, by the way, these folks could use a highway" kind of thing. It makes me feel like the rest of the report is down-to-earth, but doesn't make me trust it any more than I would have. The conclusion is clear enough: like most strange animals, there's something there, but no one is really sure what. Local tradition held that talking about seeing the animal meant death, so that made it even harder to research. A good read.

The editorial states that, as of this issue, there are 907 paid subscriptions and about 100 necessary freebies. To break even, the magazine needs to sell 1200 copies... Since the previous issue, 202 subscriptions had lapsed and not been renewed, while 113 new subscriptions had started. The editorial also says the entire staff is unpaid, voluntary and spare time labor, which makes it impossible to guarantee four issues a year, despite trying to be a quarterly. I can only imagine the struggles of putting out the magazine then. It was definitely a labor of love.

Once again, letters appear early in the book, this time with an objection to one of the previous issue's incomprehensible book reviews. The author and the reviewer both get their say, and the author comes out making more sense... not that either writer covers themselves with glory in this spat. The rest of the letters are much better, including a personal tale of golf balls appearing in a strange spot, a request for readers to go out and check local newspaper archives for fun fortean stories, and two letters of support after Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World failed to credit a number of Fortean researchers, including people from the magazine, that helped with a story.

An interview early in the book is with Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, and is fairly trippy in some respects. It's about synchronicity and the connectedness of the universe. Another piece about naming aquatic lake and river monsters is actually more of an index of said monsters. Then there's the piece on disappearing hitchhikers, including some from around the time and area of Mt St Helens. I vaguely recall hearing the story of people picking up hitchhikers who told them to avoid Mt St Helens in the days leading up to the big eruption, but I can't remember if the stories were told prior to the main eruption or after. I suspect they were all told after. It was an exciting time to live so close to a volcano.

There's a nice piece about a puma in Powys, Wales at... I'm not making this up... Pant-y-Drain farm. It's got first-hand accounts from the witnesses, photos of the paw prints, and a great photo of the farmer with a foot on the box he covered the prints with to protect them from the rain.

On the Trail is about the giant squid. Words from the Wizard is mostly incomprehensible stories of Doc Shiels enjoying his life. A column called the Trashkashic Records is a lovely mind-bender that will give you a headache if you try to make it fit into reality, but still has plenty of oddness to offer.

In comix, Telly Kinex got an entire page instead of his usual half-page in this issue, and it's all about snow. Turns out Telly's powers work pretty well with snowballs. Facts You Might Forget is part two of the alien mentors plotline, which is mildly amusing. The second alien talks about a wardrobe of funny costumes, which the aliens put on and "go stand outside their windows"... reminds me of the figure(s) my brother and I saw outside his bedroom window when we were playing as young children once. Years later I have no real memory of it except being surprised, running out to tell someone... beyond that it's lost in the mists of time. In retrospect I wondered how we could see out the window (it was dark outside, if I recall correctly) and when I talked about it with my brother, he didn't remember the same thing I did. Ah well. The mysteries of life.

Phenomenomix is the two-page start of a multi-part story on The Borders of Buffoonery, in which the hero of the tale finds a mysterious badge on the beach, then keeps getting pounded on the head after talking to folks in a pub to try and figure out what it is and if it's worth anything. It's very much the usual kind of tale for this comic, in that you know it's going to go to some odd places, but you have no idea what will happen next.

In the Notes... Synchronicities has some fun stuff, including a stage production of Dracula forced to change rehearsal sites after learning a blood transfusion service had pre-booked the location, and a bunch of thieves in Hollywood getting away with a heist because people believed it was part of a film shoot. Out of Place has more about big cats where they ought not to be, including a lion in New York. Mystery Attacks is about mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, pigs, rooks, insects, worms, mackerel and other creatures enjoying encounters with humans. Marine Mysteries has a listing of whale beachings. Falls covers reports of ice coming from the sky, including photos of the damage some of the larger block did. There's also a section calls "Dooms" that basically reports on really dumb criminals.

There are some decent book reviews in this issue, including a couple that I put on my list to hunt second-hand shops for someday. I count at least 47 magazines in the classified exchanges, listed under the headings "Fortean", "UFO's", "PSI", "Earth Mysteries" and "Others". The News section lists a new TV series based on a Kit Pedlar book, and a few other new book and pamphlet projects. This issue also has a crossword and what I think is the first collection of crazy headlines.

I still wish I could get more issues of my favorite magazine, but I'm enjoying the reading I'm able to do so far.

Fortean Times Wishlist: FT1-FT24, FT40-FT163, FT194-FT211, FT219-FT222, FT229-FT238

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My book this week was Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon.

This is a MUST GET. If you've got a girl in your life, any age below 18, and maybe even above it, who isn't a princess-y type, get her this book. Boys will probably enjoy it too.

It's about a 12-year-old witch who takes possession of a castle that desperately needs a master in order to not be torn down and de-magicked by the Board of Magic. This isn't even a coming-of-age story, properly, but it's about learning how to handle the world on your own terms and dealing with what life throws at you. So, really, get a copy.

Ok, spoilers ahead... Zbyyl'f fgbel pbzrf bhg n ovg ng n gvzr, ohg bar bs gur svefg guvatf jr yrnea nobhg ure vf gung fur'f na rivy gjva, naq gung guvf jbeyq unf fhpu guvatf. Jr nyfb yrnea gung fur unq na byqre sevraq jub gnhtug ure n ovg nobhg zntvp, bayl gb svaq bhg gung byqre sevraq jnf hfvat ure. Gung'f bar bs gur yrffbaf fur yrneaf naq qrnyf jvgu va gur obbx, ohg gur nohfr nyzbfg unq gentvp erfhygf sbe Zbyyl. Naq ure nohfre.

Gur neg vf terng, nf hfhny. Zbyyl unf fglyr... V nterr nobhg gur obbgf. Gur inevbhf punenpgref ner snagnfgvp, rnpu bar unf n uvfgbel gung lbh ner whfg qlvat gb urne nobhg. Cvaf, va cnegvphyne. V ybir ubj Zbyyl jbexf jvgu gur erfvqragf bs gur pnfgyr gb svk guvatf. Vg'f n fubpxvat qrirybczrag jura Rhqnvzbavn fubjf hc. Gur pbagenfg orgjrra ubj fur gerngf crbcyr naq ubj Zbyyl unaqyrf bguref vf fgevxvat, nf vg bhtug gb or.

V ybirq gur fzvgvat bs Byq Zna Uneebj, naq rfcrpvnyyl ubj gur qbaxrl pnzr ubzr jvgu ure. Naq gur anzr, un! V nyfb gubhtug jbezevfr jnf terng.

In fact, there weren't any moments I didn't like, and while writing this review I started to reread and got caught up in it again. I can highly recommend this book for anyone with a quirky sense of the world, and particularly for girls who are feeling insecure in life.

---

Past Sunday Reviews -- My Kindle Wishlist

A Sunday Review

Recent television:

• Supergirl: "Myriad" - And we finally get to find out what Myriad actually is... and it's just as disappointing as I kind of expected. This episode in general had some really lame moments. Introduction of a "new" character, Kelly, just in time for her to be used as a pawn. The appearance of Superman for a brief moment, but oh so brief. Alex is extraordinarily stupid in this episode, making a choice that could only lead to heartache. And Cat's fashion choices have such a big impact? Despite all the many flaws, it was carried off by the cast, but it's still a bit pathetic.
• Supergirl: "Better Angels" - That is a totally unfair season cliffhanger. The rest was interesting enough. Ater the previous episode, it did an ok job of pulling the whole thing together and making something out of what was, at its heart, a pretty crappy storyline. The whole myriad thing was a total disappointment, as was the solution to the problem. I suspect it'll seem better in retrospect, but after just viewing the episode? Meh. I really wanted more from it. As usual, the cast is the only thing that saved the show, and the only reason I want to see more of it.


• Arrow: "Broken Hearts" - This is all about the relationship between Felicity and Oliver, moreso than any episode so far, and I seriously thought they were going to take the easy route and get them back together. The testimony of Captain Lance was impressive, but you can't help feeling there's going to be more trouble for him in the future thanks to it.
• Arrow: "Beacon of Hope" - You've got the ability to make these amazing mechanical bees and you somehow turn to crime instead of finding a way to cash in legally? And then, instead of saying, "let me join your team and go straight," you attack the one person who is most likely to be able to help you? I'm just feeling major "ug" over this one.
• Arrow: "Eleven-Fifty-Nine" - Depressing, especially that final shot. This show is often way too dark for me, this episode in particular left me cold.


• The Flash: "Versus Zoom" - A pretty good info-dump episode, filling in the back-story and making the whole Zoom thing make sense. Of course, the ending was a massive letdown, and we still don't know who the prisoner in the mask is. I'm a little curious how Zoom got back to his own world with Wally. Wouldn't he be stuck unless Cisco opened another portal? And speaking of Cisco, what a twist. He's got a whole lot of potential, but he's also remembering what happened to his other self. I would have expected him to embrace his abilities, but instead he was deliberately shying away. Nicely played by the writers.


• Legends of Tomorrow: "Left Behind" - The relationship between Ray and Kendra is deeply interesting, if only because of all the interference it is getting from both sides. Then there is Sara. She's really not thinking straight. But it was nice to see Ra's al Ghul again. And Talia? Wow. But the biggest shock was the identity of Chronos and how Snart freed himself. Yikes. This was an intense episode from start to finish, packed with stuff.
• Legends of Tomorrow: "Progeny" - Per Degaton... yup. Heading into DC legends to find the biggest and baddest of the baddies for us to gasp about. This one also lets our heroes break loose again, with a nifty battle sequence. Overall, a pretty good episode, even if everything Rip does to the timeline seems to make things worse.
• Legends of Tomorrow: "The Magnificent Eight" - I really enjoyed this one, although it was a bit too much in places. I liked seeing Kendra meet with a former self, as well. Tragedy or heartbreak? We have to hope it's heartbreak. Rory's turnaround seems a bit abrupt, until his comment that he was only ever on his own side. I loved Snart's sharpshooting and Rip's reason for not getting involved. And I figured the kid was somebody famous, just didn't guess who.
• Legends of Tomorrow: "Last Refuge" - So time is something that is malleable, but then it sets, like cement. It wants to happen, but there are points at which things can be massively altered. It seems to me that altering the timeline in the way the assassin proposed to do it would cause much more disruption than what Rip and his buddies were up to. So, we've got a show that really is riddled with plot holes, some of them even intentional. But there's a decent cast and some fun moments, so I'll forgive most of it.


• Gotham: "Into the Woods" - I fear this one might stay with me longer than I like. In short, this was intensely horrible on the Penguin side, and terrifying on the Nygma side.
• Gotham: "Pinewood" - And the whole mystery is solved, more or less. I wonder what will happen now that the truth is out there? I knew the new character was doomed as soon as we met her, but I didn't expect what happened. It was nice to see 'The Lady' again, even if she's not as nuts as Missy. Overall, a decent episode, with a properly disturbing end.

---

Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Mar 16th
• Sinestro #21 - Hey, Aquaman is on the cover! He's not inside, that I could see, but that's ok. For once I sort of liked the issue. Soranik is still my favorite of the new DCU characters. She's going to have some tough times ahead, but that's what makes her interesting. I almost see Sinestro putting her in charge simply because she is more interesting than him, just to make sure his book keeps going. Huh. Am I falling for a super-villain gambit?
• Titans Hunt #6 - This issue was just a lot more filler. All of this could have been told quicker without losing much at all. Combine this issue and the previous two, and you'd have a nice, tight story. But this? It's the same thing padded out into a cliffhanger that's not a cliffhanger. All we have that's new is an info-dump, which could have been done in a couple of pages. I'm sorry, I want to like this book, it has Garth in it, but stop stretching stories.
• Astro City #33 - Steeljack isn't stupid, but I'm not entirely sure that this move was the smartest he could have taken to get to the source of the problem. Then again, maybe it worked? But the question of motive, why people would be killed, has not been sorted out. I have a guess, which I'll hide with rot-13: Vs gur ivyynvaf ner va gur arjf naq ovt anzrf, gura gur erfgnhenag jvyy qb orggre, znlor?
• Huck #5 - He acts like he isn't smart, but he's just very very cautious. And when he gets to situations where he no longer needs caution, well... all bets are off. I do like the sheer goodness between Huck and his mother. The sheer badness of their captors makes it easier to root for Huck, as well. I have very much enjoyed this book and I'm looking forward to the next issue.
• Usagi Yojimbo #153 - Ah, cucumbers. This came directly after the previous story. I'm not sure how long this story takes, but I assume there was a period of recovery for Usagi after his injury, regardless of the healing. The kappa was interesting. I'm sure we've seen them before, but it was strange to learn of a truce between the villagers and the kappa based on the favorite food. And then to learn the flooding caused problems for more than just the humans.
• Doctor Who 8th #5 - And there's another story that comes to its conclusion. This was a pretty good little run, with an interesting companion introduced with a little mystery that was nicely solved. There's a bit of that "Gangers" vibe in this one, with the notion that scientifically created life can be as real as life that apparently springs up out of evolution/whatever. I don't know if we'll be getting any more of the adventures of Josie and the Doctor, but I'd like to see more of this pair. She's pretty good as a companion.

---

Fortean Times #33 (Autumn 1980). Honestly, I'm not fond of the cover to this one. It doesn't mean anything to me, and it's vaguely anxiety-inducing. I'm guessing there's some massive symbolism I'm missing, but I just don't like it.

That said, the contents are another story, of course. It's somewhat humbling to read the editorial, which is about the cash-flow problems of the magazine. The subscriptions are hovering at the 1000 mark... not bad for a little mag like this. The editorial says they want to double that, to 2000, so they can reach an even keel. Again, humbling for a person reading this nearly 36 years later with a deep love of the modern version of the magazine!

This issue jumps right into the letter column, and starts with a term I've never heard of for Urban Legends: "Whale Tumour" stories. The second letter references Oshspe: The Kosmon Bible, which I seriously thought for a minute was a joke. Hoax maybe, but the letter writer took it seriously. There's several more letters, including a suggestion to sell the cover art for cash, which wasn't possible because the cover art was returned to the artist, along with the copyright. Another letter rips into the Manna Machine book amusingly, while another talks about Mt St Helens, sort of.

The first feature article is about the Enfield Poltergeist by one of the witnesses, Guy Lyon Playfair. He has some theories about polts and what might cause them, but it's pretty clear from his article that he firmly believes there's something going on there beyond mere hoaxing, and he makes a pretty good case for it. I'm sure this is one of those situations that I can't really "believe" in until I've experienced it, and from what he's written, I absolutely do not want to experience it. So I'll accept that he believed it to be real and move on to the next topic...

Which is an article about the similarities between reports by UFO abductees/witnesses. There's some interesting speculation about the true nature of such reports, but I'm slightly disappointed that more than 30 years later we're still discussing exactly the same things.

The final installment of "Gateways To Mystery" appears in this issue, with a co-writer on the article who, it seems to me, makes it a bit harder to read. Honestly, I think it kind of lost the thread of the first two parts and wandered off into unknown territory without enough of a link to make its case. There's certainly information there, but not really much sense. Deep thinking, but not very clear.

The final "feature" pieces is more stories from what was then an upcoming book, Man Bites Man that collects a lot of strange newsclippings from George Ives. Some are neat, some are just freaky.

We get another selection from Aristotle's Book of Problems from 1749, this one not quite as offensive at the ones in the previous issue. There are some clues to how people thought, such as the idea that a person who has been murdered will bleed if his murderer looks at him and that it's not a good idea to sleep on your back. Interesting for the insights.

Comix has Telly Kinex getting into trouble with his landlord for making so much noise thanks to his experiments in telekinesis, which result in him dropping things fairly often. Needless to say, Telly gets the better of the landlord. I'm becoming slightly fond of this comic. Phenomenomix is about fire in its various forms, particularly the more fortean types. Facts You Might Forget is about aliens coming to earth to educate humans, and manages to be slightly offensive while slightly amusing. I'm not warming up to this one at all.

There is a lot to look at in the Notes section, starting with coverage of Mass Hysteria cases from the era. It's easy to see the interest in the way Rickard writes about the subject: this is something he's really intrigued by. Strange Encounters had some fun reports out of Russia, while there were some cool images reproduced in the simulacra section. All kinds of different topics were covered in the Trends section, while the Unidentified section introduced readers to a new lake monster hunter.

Loren Coleman looks at giant snake sightings in the United States, and finds some fun ones. Steve Moore has a round-up of tales from China and the Philippines. Enigma Variations, about UFOs, looks at reports from school children.

Lots of good reviews in this issue, and a couple of incomprehensible ones. I'm impressed by the number of publications listed in the Classified Exchanges... these are other magazines that send copies to FT in order to get a copy of FT. There's 38 of them, if I'm counting right. Today, these are the people with websites that are kept up-to-date. It's another good issue from the past of my favorite magazine, and it only makes me more determined to get my hands on more back issues. It may be 36 years old, but the reading is still fun.

Fortean Times Wishlist: FT1-FT24, FT40-FT163, FT194-FT211, FT219-FT222, FT229-FT238

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Past Sunday Reviews -- My Kindle Wishlist

A Sunday Review

Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Mar 2nd
• Green Lantern #50 - Ah, the jumble that is the DC Universe now... allowing us to have multiple Hal Jordans, as if one wasn't too much!
• Batman Beyond #10 - Yay the Justice League is back! Including Aquagirl. Boo, they aren't themselves.
• Batman '66 Meets the Man From UNCLE #4 - Fun little story, with all the Bat-villains out having fun in another country. And, of course, Batman has a great disguise.
• Scooby-Doo Team-Up #15 - The Flash this time... and a visit to Gorilla City. I like the "talking gorilla"\"talking dog" moment. Very cute.
• DC Comics Bombshells #10 - No Mera, but lots of battling. This is a darn good book, and it just keeps getting more fun with all the twists and turns.
• Doctor Who 11th #2.6 - Well, if you are going to go there, you clearly need River Song to do the driving... This is getting kind of exciting.
• Steam League #2 - Still extremely disjointed, and the rivalry between Dorothy and Alice is amusing but I'm not sure it was quite set up right. I'll stick with it, but it's a bit of a confusing book.
• Legend of Oz: The Wicked West #6 - Not much to say about this one. More of the same, really. I suppose I'd write more if I hadn't already read it the first time it was published, but I'm just rereading.

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Fortean Times #32 (Summer 1980). Seesawing between old and new, once again I'll head back to the 1980s and to what was, to me, a memorable summer. Mt St Helens had just erupted, and I was obsessed. It wasn't the first time I became obsessed with something, but it was one that had a lasting impact on me. I learned a lot about geology and how odd the Pacific coast is, and tons about volcanoes and what makes them. I also vividly remember the photographs of the devastation... I had a book about the eruption that showed the remains of a truck with a body in it. I didn't quite go so far as to memorize the names of the dead, but I was close to it.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the next issue of Fortean Times came out with almost no mention of Mt St Helens, and the one mention I see, on page 26, got the date wrong. The eruption happened on Sunday, 18 May, not the 20th... although the phrasing is unclear enough it could be just sloppy writing.

I love the cover to this issue. The artist is Gilbert Shelton, a well-known underground comix artist. As a person might guess from the cover, much of the issue focuses on cats. Mostly big cats showing up where they aren't expected. There's an article on The Panthers of Southern Australia, and Loren Coleman's "On the Trail" column is about African lions, complete with manes, showing up in the United States. Out of Place is also about... well, out of place big cats. Even Phenomenomix gets into the act, with the main character turning into a cat trying to get into a phantom tin of cat food. Naturally, there's a lot of fun bits in these pages. People seem to like spotting giant cats, and for some reason they are kind of fun to read about, too.

The first main article is actually about the "Mississauga Blob", a strange plasticky thing that hit someone's picnic table in their backyard about the time Skylab was falling. There's some information about the incident and what happened when the witnesses attempted to report it. All told, a strange story, and nearly impossible to figure out what really might have happened.

The second part of the Gateways to Mystery article is in this issue, and features a collection of events by date in one relatively small area of Michigan, just to illustrate what a gateway area might look like. Some of the sightings are fun reads and some are just odd. There's no conclusion reached, just a general theory with some ideas on how to possibly record features of the area near the events to maybe get an idea of what's really happening. Fun, but I'm not sure where it's all headed yet.

Paul Sieveking presents the readers with a horrible selection from a 1749 book called Aristotle's Book of Problems that has absolutely rubbish advice for a variety of problems and total BS answers to somewhat childish questions. I'm just going to say if I had a time travel device, I'd be tempted to go back and smack whoever wrote the thing upside the head just for the Basilisk answer alone.

The letters start out with a really good "It Happened to Me" type of story, about being approached by someone at a cemetery who saw his own name on a gravestone, only to go back later and fail to find the gravestone. It reads just like an urban legend, though the writer claims it was a personal experience. There's also letters about tulpas, booms, films committing suicide and a giant kangaroo in Lancashire.

Comix starts with a very silly Telly Kinex, in which Telly hears about a mind-improving fish spread and tests its power by purchasing and consuming 15 family-size pots of the stuff, with predictable results. Ug. I've already mentioned Phenomenomix, but Facts You Might Forget is about ... um ... knitting patterns received via a knitting needle through the head? I don't want to think about it too hard.

This issue has some photos of winged cats... the poor critters have fur-covered growths on their backs, usually just in front of their hindquarters. There have been lots of reports of them, so the wings apparently don't hurt them much, since they survive to be found and photographed. The photos are part of a selection of clippings by George Ives that were being collected into a book.

A new column in this issue is by the problematic writer, but it's fine because I read it and it makes almost no sense anyway. It reads like a stereotype of a conspiracy theorist, with each paragraph almost making some sort of sense, but as a whole it really doesn't come together at all unless you cross your eyes and hit yourself over the head with a frying pan a few times. Again, everything from that writer gets a bucket of salt to go with it.

The reviews are fun, although I can't see much I'd want to track down. There's a book called "Guardians of the Universe" by Ronald Story that apparently addresses the Ancient Astronaut theories of von Daniken, a book I was exposed to early on because there was a copy in my parents' house and I read anything I could get my hands on. Even then I thought it was pretty silly, so this book sounds like a fun takedown of it. There's also a review of the print copy of the House of Lords UFO Debate, which happened in January 1979 and apparently caused a stir in Fortean circles. Another one it would be fun to look at some time. I was also amused to see a book called "The Manna Machine", which is apparently the genesis of the article of the same name by Ted Harrison in FT326. Connections...

Some of the other features have collections of strange tales, stories about sorcerers in China, swarms of varieties of critters, a round-up of odd news from India, reports of human sacrifice, talking elephants and monster hunts. Lots of neat bits and pieces, densely packed into a fairly small magazine. Definitely something I enjoy reading, the magazine that makes me laugh and think.

Fortean Times Wishlist: FT1-FT24, FT40-FT163, FT194-FT211, FT219-FT222, FT229-FT238

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Past Sunday Reviews -- My Kindle Wishlist

A Sunday Review

TV this week:

• Supergirl: "Falling" - And after a flash of red, all that Supergirl has worked to build falls down around her. The best moments of the episode were when Supergirl threatens Cat (very effectively) and when she apologizes. Both intense moments that say a lot about the women involved.
• Supergirl: "Manhunter" - And finally we learn about the death of a major character that happened well before the series started. It's told nicely through flashbacks, which also explain why superheroes lie about themselves. It's a nice reminder of the major problem with alter-egos... they are lies.


• The Flash: "Trajectory" - This episode is a bit disjointed, like it's trying to link various pieces but isn't sure how to do it properly. The result is a bit of a mish-mash... not bad, but it really needed another edit or two before it was filmed.


• Gotham: "This Ball of Mud and Meanness" - Bruce confronts his parents' killer... this is definitely it's own universe. Nygma gets paranoid while Cobblepot goes sane. All very disturbing.
• Gotham: "Mad Grey Dawn" - That was not what I was expecting from this show at all. Yeah, Gordon is no longer the man he once was, but I wasn't expecting ... well, this! As for Cobblepot... I detect danger in the air for the Penguin. And why do I think Nygma is headed for a major fall? Then there's "sleeping beauty"... this show is crazy.

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Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Feb 17th
• Sinestro #20 - The king is dead, long live the king? I'm really not sure what to think of this one, since I'm relatively sure we didn't see what really happened. Since Soranik is my favorite, I'll just try to enjoy it.
• Titans Hunt #5 - And the plot thickens even more, as a variety of characters are showing up and remembering that everyone has forgotten the Teen Titans... which actually explains a lot about this universe being so messed up. I loved the moment Dick calls Garth 'Aqualad'. Ha.
• Teen Titans Go #14 - Beast Boy's quote: "If this game doesn't get better in another twenty levels, I'm out." is so much the gamer philosophy I nearly laughed milk out of my nose when I read it. Both stories were cute in this issue. I particularly liked the various Starfires that appeared in the opening tale. Fun stuff without a lot of substance.
• Twilight Zone 1959 - A nice little anthology with three stories, the first one just odd, the second one almost successfully creepy, and the last one an ode to comic book fans of the 1950s. None of them rise to sheer excellence, but they are all very good and the book is a fun read.
• Astro City #32 - Into a trap he goes. Obviously, from the first pages, that's what's going to happen. But who and why is a good question. Totally intrigued, as usual. Great set-up.
• Huck #4 - And I wondered that Huck's brother didn't seem to have any abilities. Still a very good book, and I'm now extremely curious to see what happens next.
• Usagi Yojimbo #152 - Usagi is awesome... but I do wonder what happened to him and the other person who vanished during the flood. Perhaps that question will be answered in the next issue? I also see that Usagi has learned of an injustice from the bandits, so I wonder if that little problem will be dealt with as well. I enjoyed this issue a lot. Simple plot, but lots to think about.
• Doctor Who 8th #4 - A nice little done-in-one that's part of the ongoing plotline. I would think the Doctor might figure out a way to get solve the problem a bit better. Still, at least it's solved.
• Steam League #1 - A bit of a mess of a book, with characters from lots of different stories jumbled together into ... well, I'm still not sure what they are jumbled into. What I know is that Oz characters show up, so we got it. It's got some decent artwork and a strange plot, but it's promising enough.

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Fortean Times #31 (Spring 1980). Going back to the old issues, this one was released about the time I was finally becoming aware that history was still happening. That said, I was certainly not aware of this magazine, but I would have loved that cover. Right now, I'm still delighted by the cover. The giant ape has such a great expression, something between "should I smash them?" and "ooh, they stink!" The cover article is pretty good, written by two Chinese students about their own hunt for China's version of Bigfoot. The themes are familiar to anyone who has studied Bigfoot - lots of stories, lots of indirect evidence, but no proof. I loved one paragraph that lists all the data the group gathered then laments that all the evidence found of the wild man itself was hair, footprints, excrement samples and taped interviews with eye witnesses. Same song, different country. It's a nice reminder that people are the same all the world over, despite our differences.

This issue is a bit slimmer than the previous one, and the editorial explained that the magazine had cash-flow problems while it tried to appeal to a larger market with the previous two issues. As a result, this issue is slimmer and has less color on the cover, but it's still up to the same standards readers were used to. From the opening article, I'd say that is accurate.

The second feature is about "Gateways to Mystery," or window areas - places on earth where odd things happen repeatedly. Author David Fideler makes the case that these areas tend to be clustered around fault lines. While the article itself isn't too bad, it's got a bunch of supporting artwork, some of which isn't actually mentioned in the article and thus goes unexplained. At least there's a good set of footnotes.

The third and final feature is an absolutely hoot of a look at the Delayed Death Touch, referred to in the article as the DDT. This apparently mythical martial arts move kills a person with a touch, but the death occurs some days/weeks/years after the touch. The article itself digresses frequently, but is consistently entertaining and manages to cover a lot of ground on its subject. A fun little piece.

Enigma Variations, the column about UFOs, focuses on hostile alien encounters. On the Trail talks about maned big cats in North America, including a sighting in Tacoma I'd never heard of... although, since I was only four at the time of the sightings, I doubt I'd remember it from local news. The Steve Moore column has two follow-ups, including an update on the condition of the hairy boy from the previous issue. The other follow-up appears to be about the terracotta army, which was reported on in issue #29.

Comix include "Telly Kinex", who is harassed this time by a joker who glues a rock to his hand and bets Telly £25 he can't roll the rock across the joker's shoulders to his other hand. Bad things happen. The next comic, "Facts You Might Forget" is about a guy who sneezes icons. Phenomenomix is a two-pager that concerns a rash of oddness and its final result.

Moving into the "Notes" section, we start with some strange encounters... UFO-themed, of course. Interesting little stories, but not much beyond that. Heavens Above has cutting-edge space news, some of which I knew about and some I didn't. Antiquities looks at ancient footprints, Atlantis discovered again, and a variety of neat little bits and pieces. The cartoon in this section shows two guys in robes walking past Stonehenge saying, "It's a disgrace. It should have been let ages ago." Ha. Standing stones as nuisance properties.

Ghosts has some fairly standard haunted house tales, and synchronicities is about people with intensely suitable names. Ball lightning is the subject of the next section, and there's some decent little tales there. Finally, in Trends, there is a piece on small people both real and not, and another piece on fakery, doubles, and sadly similar events. There's also a photo with a couple standing on a beach at La Jolla, and a child in the background playing. There's an implication that something is unusual about the photo, as there's a close-up of the child. But it looks like a trick of perspective to me.

The reviews are pretty good. I'm terribly amused by a comment on computers in the first one, but it was early days yet for computers in regular life, so I'm not surprised. One of the reviews is written by a problematic writer who I looked up after seeing a review of his work in the previous issue... I'll just say everything I read by that person will get an extra bucket of salt, so I'm not really sure what to make of his review. One book gets two reviews, and is panned completely in one and dismissed lightly in the other. The sole review of a paperback book warns readers to not eat while reading it, as it's about incorruptible corpses of saints. Um. Good advice.

The letters were fun, with the opening one being a response to a review in the previous issue. There's also a story about mysterious ball lightning, a report of a book being a known hoax in response to something printed in issue #29, and some thoughts on the fish fall article in issue #30 with a kind response from the article's writer. All told, it's another excellent issue of my favorite magazine, and makes me wish I could get my hands on all the earlier issues even more. *sigh*

Fortean Times Wishlist: FT1-FT24, FT40-FT163, FT194-FT211, FT219-FT222, FT229-FT238

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Past Sunday Reviews -- My Kindle Wishlist

A Sunday Review

Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:

• Feb 3rd
• Green Lantern #49 - I'm really not entirely sure what's going on in this book, but as a stand-alone, it works ok. Green Lantern comes to the rescue with some quick thinking, the day is saved, and there's some touching family scenes.
• Batman Beyond #9 - I really don't know what to think about this book, and those last couple of pages just confuse me more. If they are alive, then how did all that happen? If they aren't, then what are those? Huh.
• Doctor Strange #5 - So, that's the price paid for his recoveries. Wong is right that Strange would put an end to it if he knew. As for the rest... well, let's see what happens next.
• Legend of Oz: The Wicked West #5 - And we reach the Emerald City and meet the Wizard. It all seems more abrupt than I remember from the first time I read this through. I'm liking the backup feature with the four witches, but I feel like the story needed another draft to make it right.

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Fortean Times #30 (Autumn 1979). So, I got some very old issues of Fortean Times on eBay as part of my effort to update my cover gallery and index, and of course I jumped in to read the issues as well. Naturally, I'm looking at these in a completely different way than the original readers, but I'm still getting a lot out of them.

The first issue I'm looking at is #30, which was published when I was about seven years old. At that point in time I was fascinated by the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, but really didn't have much comprehension that there was a whole universe of things that science ignored or laughed at - that nevertheless contained information on human nature and possibly better understanding of the real world as well. In fact, at that point in time I also had no sense of history. The first time I truly understood that "history" was still happening was when Mt St Helens erupted, and that was a few months after this issue was published. Anyway, enough about me... into the book itself.

I love the painted cover. At first I looked at it and thought it was just a nice nature scene. It's not until you look a bit that you start to see all the faces. These are illustrating the cover article on simulacra by John Michell. The article is about the tendency to see faces, in particular, in all kinds of natural phenomena, but it also looks at a few other types of simulacra. I'm unsteady as to how Michell felt about it... the implication of the article is that observation changes something, and the mere fact that we are seeing a person/face/hand has meaning, but that meaning is not made clear. This is Fortean at its purest. He presents the facts, with some opinions, then leaves it to the reader to make their own judgement. Of particular interest to me in this piece is a throwaway comment on photography: "What is it that distinguishes a good photographer from a bad one when both have steady hands and the same equipment?" The implication is that the photographer involuntarily projects something into the photo. As a person who has to take photos every day, I wish this were true, because then all my photos would be fantastic. *sigh*

A second feature article is about Clemente Dominguez, who I'd never heard about, no surprise. It's quite the story, and much better told in the article by Bob Rickard than on Wikipedia. In short, while the shenanigans are of slight interest to Forteans, it's the apparent stigmata that put this tale into the basket of needing a closer look. Good stuff.

The third feature is on the Fish Fall of 1859. Instead of trying to draw any conclusions, the piece gathers up the known facts from as many sources as possible to try to determine what facts are correct, or most likely to be correct. No attempt is made to explain it, which is good, because it doesn't really seem to have a good explanation. Not the best piece, but interesting, especially to a small-town reporter who can see how the facts might have so easily gotten confused.

The last feature is about the Son of Sam, and argues that the man who was captured and jailed did not do it alone, and names another suspect. I'm mostly unfamiliar with the case, knowing the name and the fearsome reputation, but little else, so I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim in the feature. The writing style is bizarre and uncomfortable, so I'm not impressed with this one overall.

There are several columns, and the first one in this issue was "Enigma Variations" by Nigel Watson, which was a nice round-up of UFO beliefs. I liked his conclusion to the column, which asked what is driving the beliefs. I cringed at the name of Steve Moore's column, "Tales from the Yellow Emporium", but the column itself isn't bad. This particular column is about a mao hai, a hairy child who was born covered in hair, and other such people. It seems to me to harken forward to FT274, which has two such individuals on the cover.

Loren Coleman contributed a column called "On the Trail" in which he details cryptozoological events. This one is about a road trip in the US. Coleman makes the observation that people who live in trailers tend to live on the fringe/frontier of American society, because as towns are established, they tend to zone out trailer parks. So the stories he tells concentrate on people who live in trailers. He starts with panthers then moves on to thunderbirds, with a revisit to Marlon Lowe, who suffered endless taunts after his story about being picked up by a giant bird went public. From Coleman's report, the poor kid suffered immensely, and his family had dead birds left on their front porch by nasty neighbors apparently upset at the publicity. Makes me want to go smack some sense into them, but that's 37 years ago.

The last column is "Under the Eye" by Steve Burgess and concerns itself with the rock group Klaatu, which was apparently still a mystery at the time.

Unlike the modern Strangedays, this issue has section headings (with art by Hunt Emerson) that introduce specific topics. The first one is "Out of Place" and mainly talks about big cats, which are not native to the British Isles, being seen in the British Isles. There's a bit of snark at an "expert opinion" that determined cast paw prints were from a dog, not a cat, and plenty of witness descriptions. There were also two cartoons, thought I'm not sure who drew them. One features a "Young Turk" at the Natural History Museum studying a live chicken instead of various stuffed animals. This is a callback to the article, in which the experts were from the Natural History Museum. The second cartoon is at the end of the article and shows two bigfoot hunters finding a very small bigfoot with enormous feet.

The next section is "Strange Deaths", which I usually read in the modern version but generally do not comment on. I'm going to observe the same standard with this issue.

Next up is "Plants", and it starts with the question of whether or not plants are conscious... I hear the screams of the vegetables? The section starts out with glowing plants, including potatoes later used to make "super chips" and referred to by locals as Identified Frying Objects. Then we learn about plants that spent time in space and seeds preserved in time and later grown. Giant mushrooms are next on the menu, but the finish of the article is an "ugly sort of rubber plant gone wrong" that was growing next to a television set and reportedly grew away from the light and, when watered, uttered moans. Yikes? Of slight interest, one of the cases mentioned is about Harry Potter, a keen gardener who discovered a wooden clothes peg he was using to mark a row of seeds took root.

Poltergeists is the next section, although it's just about ghosts in general. Well, ghosts with dishonorable intentions, in this case. Sexy spectres and randy wraiths are covered, with just a pinch of snarky commentary to keep it all PG-rated. Following that is a section on synchronicity, and in particular, twins. Loads of good stories in this one, including a bunch on twins separated at birth. More twins are in the "Freaks" section, which starts with sad stories of cojoined twins and other odd mysteries of birth, and finishes with some miracle babies before getting sad again with a story of an 83-year-old woman with a calcified foetus from when she was a young woman. Both sections have photos, including two very hard to see photos of two-faced kittens.

The next section, "Wild Talents", is about psi abilities and such. This one is about people able to see without their eyes. Moving on to "Lightnings", we get stories about lightning strikes, both fatal and not, and a listing of such strikes. The final section is "Trends" and starts with the story of Skylab. I vaguely remember it... I was thrilled with anything to do with space exploration, so I would have read anything I could have gotten my hands on about it. I remember it falling, and I remember the reports... this has a little more than I remember. There are other pieces, some fun, some depressing. There's a bit on Loch Ness, including an ill-advised attempt to search for the monster with trained dolphins (!). Another whole piece is about priests being attacked, including Pope John Paul nearly being hit by a large iron cross in Pompeii, Italy.

There are comics in this issue, called "Comix" in the table of contents. The first one is called "Telly Kinex" and has a skeptical reporter bothering a guy, presumably from the title, who happens to be using his telekinetic powers. As might be expected, the interruption of concentration has bad results for the reporter. This issue also has an installment of "Phenomenomix", which is still running in the modern version. I can't really say much about this, except it's about the progression of what happens when you mess with psychic powers, maybe? The final listed comic is "Facts You Might Forget" and seems to be about something called remote photography.

The reviews... oh, the reviews. Eight dense pages of pure reviews, with some truly amazing and scary stuff up for inspection. The reviews were as strong as they've always been, but lacking the numerical ratings. It still isn't hard to tell if something impressed the reviewer. There aren't many I'd actually be interested in getting, but some are truly funny and/or bizarre. With the advantage of time, I can look back at some of the works and see what history has said about the authors (sometimes not good at all), which put a slight damper on my amusement in at least one case. Still, it's a reminder to take everything with a grain/spoonful/cup/barrel of salt.

A size comparison shows that old Fortean Times were a bit smaller than the current issues.

The letters are pretty good, with probably the one that most quickly sparked my interest being a letter about creating a Fortean Classification System - how does one categorize the uncategorizable? Overall, this is an incredible little package. Much smaller than current Fortean Times issues, but much more densely packed with information. I'm certainly glad to have gotten my hands on it, and hope I can get more of the older issues in time.

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