weird but true

Years ago, when I was just a kid (okay, not all that many years ago), I came across this rather tatty book at a street market. It was really cheap, and I bought it on a whim, I don't know why. Maybe it was the rain of frogs reference on the cover -- I remember being quite intrigued by that (hey, I was only a kid).

The book was by a Charles Fort and it was called "The Book of the Damned" -- which sounds a lot more spooky than it is. Actually, it was fun. Fort was this guy around the turn of the century (the previous one; ie he was born in the 19th century), and he took exception to how dogmatic scientists could be about things, and so he gathered together all these weird events that couldn't be explained by the science of his day (I don't think the scientists of our day could do any better, either!).

So we've got reports of rains of frogs and cases of spontaneous combustions and stuff like that. He's actually been called the father of modern skepticism and noone's ever denied he was smart, and a lot of the book is pretty funny.

Anyway, I mention all this because, I haven't thought of this book for years, no idea what happened to it, but something reminded me of it the other day and whimsically I Googled him, and lo and behold! his work lives on. I mean I knew he became a sort of cult figure, but there you go, there's actually a thriving (?) magazine based on his stuff, called the Fortean Times, and it's got a website with articles and breaking news. I mean this is definitely head and shoulders above tabloid stuff, where they just make stuff up, the weirder the better. Like, they reference an article in a British paper about marathon swimmers who are going to swim in Loch Ness being insured against bites from the Loch Ness monster. And on this particular day, in 1975, a family was watching the movie of the Titanic (an earlier one, duh) and just as the ship crashed into the iceberg, a giant block of ice fell through their roof!

Anyway, its kind fun, if you're bored.