MAKANYAN

ARAB SPRING

2012-07-11T11:01:00.000+03:00

"Arab Springs" are not as spontaneous as the Western mainstream media would have us believe.

Their behind-the-scenes instigators always get "a little help from their Global Power Elite mega-planning friends..."

Isn't it rather odd that after long decades of slumber, starting in early 2011 millions upon millions of Arabs throughout North Africa and the Middle East suddenly woke up, took to the streets, violently clashed with police and security forces, overthrew their governments and in one instance - Libya - managed to deliver their country to a perverse alliance of foreign terrorists, local thugs, CIA operatives and NATO bombers, eventually murdering their own exceptional leader, Muammar Gaddafi, live on global TV? Question: just how spontaneous are these major social convulsions that lead to revolution, chaos, battles on streets and squares, thousands dead and injured, and the violent overthrow of entire governments? To a certain degree they are, no doubt, spontaneous: people are growing weary of their national governments' growing inability to resolve vital collective problems.

In fact, a survey of public opinion in any country in the world will show that, on average, half the population rejects their on-going governments, and even their entire political classes. The more lucid and aware see them all as mere puppets subordinated to Money Power elites in one form or another: whether banking cartels, oil and mining companies, media moguls, domestic and foreign lobbies, or a wide array of war-mongers. Because it's not just the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus or Benghazi that are in turmoil, but also the streets of New York, London, Oakland, Madrid, Athens and Rome. Uncannily, the standard image of social violence is the same everywhere: disgruntled, exasperated, impoverished protesters clashing with police and security forces: sad scenes of the poor fighting the poor... whilst one can imagine mega-bankers looking down from their 50th floor boardrooms, sipping their whisky and laughing at the scene down there...

What is different, then, about today's optimistic sounding "Arab Spring"? Basically, that ready-to-happen civil commotions and popular uprisings are purposely and maliciously being triggered by well-trained, well-financed, well-supported foreign and domestic agitators and agents, who have vested interests in destabilizing countries in that region to promote their own agendas, totally unrelated to the National Interest of the locals. They have a very different axe to grind, aligned to the interests of specific foreign powers - notably the US, UK, Israel, France, EU countries and their regional pawns in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait - where the Global Power Elite is embedded.

In fact, this is a whole new form of waging war based on PsyWar (psychological warfare), where the mainstream global media become veritable weapons of mass mental destruction of people's ability to see and understand what is really being done to them. As with all wars, its objective is conquest and control of entire countries and regions.

Modern war is waged by powerful nations on five different overlapping, holistic levels of aggression against weaker, appetizing countries, ranging from stark naked aggression to subtle subversion:

1. Military Invasion - Allows direct control by fully overthrowing and overpowering the target nation. It has one major drawback: it looks really bad on the evening news. Today, this applies to Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine; Libya is a moving target...

2. Military Coup - Identifies and supports domestic military/civilian allies and traitors willing to support a foreign power against their own people. Latin America saw US-backed coups in the 60's and 70's in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina... Now we seem to be seeing this in Egypt.

3. Financial Coup - Banking cartels corner any government they please to do "the Global Power Elite's bidding or else..!" Examples: Argentina's 2001/2 collapse, preceded by Mexico (1997), Russia (1998), Brazil (1999). Today: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland... Instead of tanks, they use the IMF, World Bank, US Treasury, ECB...

4. Political Coup - Flexibly uses combinations of "crises" to impose unelected governments such as Trilateralists Mario Monti in Italy, and Lucas Papademos in Greece...

5. Social Coup - Today's PsyWar. First you map out internal social grievances and woes, strife and ancestral hatreds, then you pin the fault on a suitable scapegoat/patsy, then you support and arm domestic and foreign agitators and "freedom fighters", ensuring that the Western Media clearly tell the world who are the "good guys" and who the "bad guys". Today, the "Arab Spring". Tomorrow, maybe we'll see "Latin American Springs" or "South East Asian Springs..." or "Former Soviet Republics Springs..." Many countries today fit one of these categories and/or a combination of several of them, escalating to/descending from one to another. Egypt began as a "Category 5" and escalated to a "Category 2". Libya also began as a "Category 5" and was bombed into a veritable "Category 1".

Macro-management by the Global Power Elite is governed by their specific goals and interests in each country, because they still need a strong US, a nuclear Israel and a stable Germany, but they definitely do not want a strong Russia and China, a nuclear Iran and a stable Latin America... Like Hurricane Watches in the Caribbean, maybe we should start mapping out Political Regime Change Watches on a regional, even global, basis. It would certainly help in tracking the dark clouds of war, death and destruction that are gathering.

RED MERCURY AN ELABORATE HOAX

2012-07-11T09:19:00.001+03:00

What is red mercury?

The only thing we can be sure of is that it's a ripping yarn. Rumours that Soviet nuclear experts had produced a mysterious explosive material with unimaginable destructive power first circulated in the 1970s, and despite several official investigations and subsequent denials the story refuses to die. The near-mythical compound cropped up again on Sunday, when the News of the World claimed it had foiled a terrorist plot to buy red mercury as material for a dirty bomb.

Depending on who you believe, red mercury is either an elaborate hoax, a codename for nuclear material smuggled through the former iron curtain, or a terrifying new trigger for a handheld hydrogen bomb. What it isn't, according to the speculation and hearsay that makes up the scientific literature on the subject, is any use for a dirty bomb (one that scatters radioactive material).

"Nobody would dream of getting that stuff for a dirty bomb," says Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist who worked at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in the 1950s. "For a terrorist it would offer no significant advantages over an ordinary high explosive or, if they wanted a dirty bomb, a radioactive source. To go to the trouble of spending huge amounts of money on red mercury makes no sense at all."

Particularly so if all you get for the News of the World's reported price of £300,000 a kilo is mercury dyed red with nail varnish, which, according to a 1994 investigation by the Russian prosecutor-general's office, is what was in the "red mercury" sold by Russian conmen throughout Europe and the Middle East after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Others, including Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, disagree, and Barnaby says there is evidence that the Soviets churned out vast quantities of mercury antimony oxide, the intermediate - and equally elusive - compound from which red mercury is supposedly produced by placing it inside a nuclear reactor. "There's no doubt that they made a large amount of that stuff. I've talked to chemists who have analysed it in East Germany," he says. "But what they did with it is a mystery."

Some say the intermediate compound can multiply the yield of explosions and that it was used inside conventional Soviet nuclear weapons or as a rocket fuel additive. Others say the compound was irradiated in the core of nuclear reactors to produce pure red mercury, capable of exploding with enough heat and pressure to act as a trigger inside a briefcase-sized fusion bomb.

The International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna takes a different view. "Red mercury doesn't exist," a spokesman says. "The whole thing is a bunch of malarkey."

The Truth About LIBYA

2011-09-16T11:30:00.001+03:00

Libya's Blood For Oil - The Vampire War
By Susan Lindauer
Former US Intel Asset Who Covered Libya At The UN 1995-2003
3-28-11

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don't care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what's really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened

Last October, US oil giants- Chevron and Occidental Petroleum- made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi's government. As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya's U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy!

About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya's innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)

Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he'd done it. He'd bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He's a crafty bastard, extremely intelligent and canny. That's exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn't playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age-the Oil Industry-roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they'd suffered under U.N. sanctions.

Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi's request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer-in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.

The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.

According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who'd been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that "Operation Corea" allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages' whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the "Godfather of Terror," Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.

Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee's team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.

On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.

The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That's right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.

Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight-making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays.

It was a monstrous act! But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA's role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony-- $4 million a pop- and Megrahi's life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.

It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well-The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya's demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well-particularly France and Italy-who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.

I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a b-tch on both sides. You don't lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You've got to admit that Gadhaffi's attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.

Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don't strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.

And that's exactly what's happening today.

Don't kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: "Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa" and "Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?"

There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.

For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world-a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.

As Chossudovsky writes, "Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern breakaway province" on February 23 and 24- seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi's domestic rebellion. "The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk." (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels." Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.

We're supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days- from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!

That's strategically impossible.

Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi's fate wasn't decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi's nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.

The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.

Don't kid yourself. Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don't bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.

Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They're scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.

The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don't think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They've got their stakes out, and they're starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.

And woe to the wicked when they do!

A poisonous spider

2010-06-24T08:22:00.000+03:00

Brown Recluse

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 9

Day 10

Its raining Cats and Dogs

2010-06-24T08:20:00.002+03:00

Next time you're washing your hands and the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children -- last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs -- thick straw -- piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof -- hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor."

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway, hence, a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite awhile. Hence the rhyme, "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale bread which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth."

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer.

THE MAYAN CALENDAR DOES NOT END IN 2012

2008-12-12T15:40:00.002+03:00

The astronomer Philip Plait has stated very clearly that the Mayan calendar does not end in 2012 at all, that it is like the odometer on your car, as each section of the odometer reaches 9 and then clicks over to 0, the next number to it starts a new cycle, so that when all the numbers again reach 0 all the way across the odometer - the last number will change from 1 to 2 and the new cycle starts all over again.

The Mayan Tzolkin

The Tzolkin is a 260-day calendar based around the period of human gestation. It is composed of 20 day-signs, each of which has 13 variations, and was (and still is) used to determine character traits and time harmonics, in a similar way to Western astrology. The Maya also used a 365-day calendar called the Haab, and a Venus calendar, plus others. They measured long time periods by means of a Long Count, in which one 360-day year (a "Tun"), consists of 18 x 20-day "months" ("Uinals"). Twenty of these Tuns is a Katun; 20 Katuns is a Baktun (nearly 400 years); and 13 Baktuns adds up to a "Great Cycle" of 1,872,000 days, ( 5200 Tuns, or about 5125 years).

Mayan scholars have been attempting to correlate the Long Count with our Western Gregorian calendar, since the beginning of this century. There has been massive variation in the suggested correlations, but as early as 1905, Goodman suggested a correlation only 3 days from the most popular one today. Known as the GMT correlation, or "correlation # 584283", this was finalized in 1950, and puts the start of the Great Cycle ( day 0.0.0.0.0) on 11th August 3114 BC, and the end-date (known as 13.0.0.0.0.) as 21st December 2012.

Jose Arguelles has pointed out that the Tzolkin is a harmonic of the Great Cycle, and can be used to map history, as if it is measuring not individual gestation but species gestation, since 5 Great Cycles add to exactly 26,000 Tuns; the "Grand Year" or precession of the equinoxes - a higher harmonic of 260.

2012

2008-12-12T15:17:00.002+03:00

There is a lot of speculation about what will happen in the year 2012.

There is zero scientific evidence that anything will happen, but there are many things that threaten the very existence of mankind. The probable threats are an asteroid strike, geomagnetic revearsal, flu pandemic or even a nuclear war just to mention afew.

All these assumptions stem from the fact that the long count calendar of the Ancient Mayans ends on the 21st of December 2012.

The doomsday theory has caused so much anxiety and excitement that some chap in England has put up a huge bunker for sale.

GEF the talking mongoose

2008-06-02T12:11:00.000+03:00

Would you ever have imagined that a mongoose would learn to communicate with human beings.

Well stranger than fiction this little creature is claimed to have once remarked "If you knew what I know, you'd know a hell of a lot,"

Well the story of Gef goes like this

The Story of Gef

The strange saga of Gef the talking mongoose began in Autumn 1931 in an isolated farmstead on the Isle of Man known as Doarlish Carshen. The farm was home to 60-yr-old Jim Irving, his wife Margaret, and their 13-yr old daughter Voirrey.
Jim had been a commercial traveller before taking up farming in his retirement. The farm was not a success. Productivity was dropping, and the family struggled to make ends meet. They had no electricity, no phone and no radio. Their nearest neighbours lived over a mile away.

The Thing in the Walls
One dull September evening, the family heard inexplicable scratching and spitting sounds coming from behind the wooden panels lining the walls of the farmhouse. Jim thought a rat was to blame, and tried in vain to drive it from its lair.
The strange noises persisted over the following days. Jim set traps and laid down poison, but to no avail. In desperation, he even tried to flush the intruder out by growling like a dog. To his surprise, it growled right back at him!
The elusive creature proved to be a talented mimic. It ingratiated itself with Jim by dutifully repeating his imitations of various animals and birds. Soon, he had only to name an animal and it would promptly respond with the appropriate imitation. At other times it made a gurgling sound rather like a baby attempting to form words. Then it began to talk...

Gef Introduces Himself
By way of experiment, Voirrey asked the creature to repeat some nursery rhymes. It obliged in a clear, if very squeaky, voice. Soon it was speaking freely. It introduced itself as Gef and claimed to be "an extra clever mongoose" from Delhi, India. (A neighbouring farmer had imported Mongeese to the island 20 years earlier to curb the local rabbit population.)
Gef was soon holding regular conversations with both Voirrey and her father. (He seemed rather less friendly towards Voirrey's mother, Margaret.) He began nesting in a boxed partition in Voirrey's room, which the family dubbed "Gef's sanctum".
Although Jim and Margaret both caught brief glimpses of Gef, only Voirrey was allowed to look at him directly. She described him as being the size of a small rat, with yellowish fur and a long bushy tail.

Gef's Habits
Gef soon became part of the family. During the day he would roam the island, riding on the back axles of buses and cars. In the evening he would return home and share the news and gossip he had picked up on his travels. Sometimes he would also read out items from the local newspapers.
"It announces its presence by calling either myself or my wife by our Christian names," Jim Irving wrote. "It's hearing powers are phenomenal. It is no use whispering. It detects the whisper 15-20 feet away, tells you that you are whispering, and repeats exactly what one has said."
Gef would often bring rabbits home for Margaret to cook. In return, he was given titbits such as biscuits, sweets and chocolate. He was also fond of bacon and sausages. The food would be left out for him on the crossbeams near the ceiling, and he would sneak out and snatch it when no-one was looking.

Singalong with Gef
Gef enjoyed singing as much as talking. His favourite tune was Baba Black Sheep, which he would sing along to the gramophone. (Sometimes, he would bounce a rubber ball up and down in time to the music instead.)
On one occasion, he rather offended Voirrey's mother by singing a lewd parody of Home on the Range he had picked up from some bus drivers. "You know Gef, you are no animal!" scolded Margaret. "Of course I am not," retorted Gef. "I am the Holy Ghost!"

Gef's Temper
Like many a poltergeist (or adolescent girl) Gef had a rather short fuse. For example, he once flew into a rage when Jim was taking his time in opening the morning post. "Read it out, you fat-headed gnome!" he squeaked furiously.
He also seemed to enjoy deliberately provoking Voirrey's parents. One night, he made a nuisance of himself by sighing and groaning for 30 minutes without pause, before confessing, "I did it for devilment!"
On another occasion, Margaret found herself being pelted with stones as she walked home. "Is that you, Gef?" she called out. "Yes, Maggie the witch woman, the Zulu Woman, the Honolulu woman!" taunted the impertinent mongoose.

Gef's Fame
The Manx papers ran a series of gently mocking articles about the 'Dalby Spook' (as they dubbed Gef) which led to Voirrey being teased mercilessly at school. Gef's fame spread to the mainland after Jim Irving persuaded the psychic researcher (and inveterate self-publicist) Harry Price to take an interest in the case.
Even as Gef's notoriety grew, his visits to the Irvings became fewer and farther between. When Price eventually showed up to investigate in person, the marvellous mongoose was conspicuous only by his absence.
In 1936, Price published the results of his investigation in a book co-authored with journalist Richard Lambert called The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern "Miracle" Investigated. (Lambert's role in the case indirectly precipitated a well-publicised libel action involving the BBC.) Although Price did not explicitly accuse the Irvings of perpetrating a hoax, neither did he validate their claims.

Farewell to Gef
Soon after Price's book was published, the Irvings left Cashen's Gap for the mainland. Gef did not follow them, nor did he make himself known to the new owner, a Mr Graham.
In 1947, Graham trapped and killed a strange looking animal that seemed to be neither ferret, stoat nor weasel. "It answers to all descriptions," the puzzled farmer told the local press. Eventually Graham too left Cashen's Gap, and the farmhouse was demolished.
In 1970, a reporter from FATE magazine tracked down Voirrey and attempted to interview her. She proved reluctant to discuss her former life with Gef. "Yes, there was a little animal who talked and did all those other things," she admitted. "He said he was a mongoose and we should call him Gef... But I do wish he had let us alone."

2008-06-02T11:06:00.000+03:00

A Dugong is a mammal that lives in the sea. This animal inspired sailors to tell tales about mermaids. Lonely sailors have been known to have gotten intimate with the dugong.

Dugongs grow up to 3m in length and weigh up to 400kg - as much as a cow!

Dugong are hunted for food.

So there you have it. Thats your mermaid.

Mermaids

2008-05-31T13:31:00.001+03:00

Do mermaids really exist? Are mermaids supernatural in nature?In this blog you'll find all you need to know about mermaids