9 Waterspouts in China

http://shanghaiist.com/2014/10/22/waterspouts-qinghai-photos.php

I dreamt about this film a few weeks ago...

I couldn't figure out how I knew the year of the film (1973) in the dream, I just remember dreaming about a double-decker bus being driven by the current Bond actor, and the wheel coming off.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2783507/James-Bond-villain-Geoffrey-Holder-dies-aged-84-pneumonia-complications.html

I particularly remember this part of the film when I watched as a child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX3wGWHRlXQ

Baron Samedi is a Mercurial figure in Haitian Vodou, a psychopomp and is associated with crossroads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Samedi

Omen

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/07/lighning-kills-11-colombia

The Third Angel

http://shanghaiist.com/2014/07/25/wenzhou-river-turns-blood-red-overnight.php

http://biblehub.com/revelation/16-4.htm

龙卷风 (Dragon Wind) moves along Taiwanese river

A water spout tornado travelled 6km up the Gaoping River in Taiwan on Saturday 20th July 2014 about 2:40pm. Apart from destroying screen houses it did little damage.


http://shanghaiist.com/2014/07/23/50-metre_tall_water_tornado_appears.php

Something I missed earlier...

 Sunday 26th January 2014, this was the day after the mini-tornado me and artist Daniella Valz-Gen encountered after seeing the Madge Gill exhibition. The pope, and some children, release white doves symbolizing peace, from the Vatican window. The doves are attacked by sea gulls and hooded crows. This gesture of peace was made in reference to the then spiraling situation in Kiev.

As of now the Ukraine situation just escalated dramatically with the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17. 

Vatican

1550s, from Latin mons Vaticanus, Roman hill on which Papal palace stands. Said to be an Etruscan loan-word, not related to vates "sooth-sayer." 

 

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=vatican&searchmode=none 

can (v.1)

Old English 1st & 3rd person singular present indicative of cunnan "know, have power to, be able," (also "to have carnal knowledge"), from Proto-Germanic *kunnan "to be mentally able, to have learned" (cognates: Old Norse kenna "to know, make known," Old Frisian kanna "to recognize, admit," German kennen "to know," Gothic kannjan "to make known"), from PIE root *gno- (see know).

Absorbing the third sense of "to know," that of "to know how to do something" (in addition to "to know as a fact" and "to be acquainted with" something or someone). An Old English preterite-present verb, its original past participle, couth, survived only in its negation (see uncouth), but see also could. The present participle has spun off as cunning.   

 

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=can&searchmode=none

I heard recently that 'can' relates to snake i.e. knowledge from the serpent (think of the symbol for medicine) -- I can't find a reference for this as of now...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/pope-releases-peace-doves-which-are-promptly-attacked-by-meaner-birds/

A hooded crow attacks one of the peace doves.

Hooded crows:
'In Celtic folklore, the bird appears on the shoulder of the dying Cú Chulainn,^[19] and could also be a manifestation of the Morrígan, the wife of Tethra, or the Cailleach.^[20] This idea has persisted, and the hooded crow is associated with fairies in the Scottish highlands and Ireland; in the 18th century, Scottish shepherds would make offerings to them to keep them from attacking sheep. '

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooded_crow#Cultural_significance

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546218/Birds-released-Vatican-gesture-peace-immediately-attacked-vicious-seagull-crow.html

Jupiter Begins to Close its Eye

Jupiter's eye is shrinking. The Red storm on Jupiters surface has shrunk to its smallest recorded size.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/30/a-cosmic-tadpole-jupiters-shrinking-spot-and-nasas-flying-saucer-in-pictures

Chinese Dragon Photographed in Tornado

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/2486982471

Twins

 Twin tornadoes kill 1 as they pass through Nebraska, U.S. on Monday 16th June 2014.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jun/17/deadly-twin-tornadoes-town-pilger-nebraska-video

11th June 2014 Solar Flares (x3)

 11th June 2014 three solar flares erupt on the surface of the Sun in quick succession.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10891856/Huge-solar-flares-captured-by-Nasa.html

'Mother, do you remember when I was little, I had a friend, he was make-believe? '

Monday 9th June 2014 Rik Mayall is found dead at home. He died suddenly, and as of yet, mysteriously. Culturally this was a big event across the U.K. The many articles about him in the paper this week reminded me of his one Hollywood film Drop Dead Fred, not because of the title as such (although it doesn't escape your attention) but because it was on at the cinemas in the U.K. when I was working part-time at the Odeon cinema in Richmond. We used to get a long lunch (back when you still got an hour...) and I once went exploring in the basement under screen one. It was dark, I think I might have had one of those torches the ushers use. The building was old, completed in 1930, and the basement led to another, deeper and darker basement. On the second basement I started to become nervous, no one had been down here for a while I guessed, what it was originally used for I am not sure. Richmond is on a hill and you can see the rise of that hill from the front of the cinema. On the second basement I discovered stairs leading down to a third basement and there is where I left it, fear rising in me. I went back up.

Drop Dead Fred is about an unhappy girl's imaginary friend who appears from a jack-in-the-box to cheer her up. When she visits a world renown psychologist who specializes in children with imaginary friends, Fred gets to meet up with all the other imaginary friends who he, we presume, all know each other from the imaginary friend dimension.

Writing for Mystical Move Guide, Carl J. Schroeder states:
"The imaginary friend is cavortingly rude for a reason; he served to push the girlchild to do mischief for attention and as a cry for help. Now grown up, the woman has forgotten and is about to lose her soul, so events call for some kind of literal return of her demon to force the exposure of her pain. This psychic crisis is poignantly realistic... The creature who is visible only to the woman is like a poltergeist energy of her repressed self, a problematic ego container into which her powers of assertion and creativity were poured and stored. The movie's resolution is startlingly beautiful..."

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_Dead_Fred

Nothing's there...

Saturday 31 May 2014 maybe 6pm. I'm at Queen Road Overground Station with the artist Daniella Valz-Gen. I notice two objects in the sky above what looks like New Cross. One is larger and drifting to the right, the other smaller, is just hanging there. Daniella Valz-Gen sees them too. There's maybe a flash. But I'm not sure. Daniella says there is a flash. Then the train comes.
I take a picture. I remember that the larger object is above one of the blocks of white flats.

There's nothing in the picture.

"This is like an apocalyptic Hollywood movie,"

"I've never seen anything like this. I was afraid it was an omen of things to come."

Freak sandstorm hits Tehran, kills 4.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/02/tehran-sandstorm-kills-injures-dozens-iran

Lightning Hits World Trade Center Fri 23 May 2014

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/lightning-hits-world-trade-center-in-striking-video-and-photos-002745767.html

Shard Hit By Lightning

http://www.businessinsider.com/an-iconic-london-skyscraper-was-just-hit-by-lightning-2014-5

Latest Bee News Just In...

20 million bees escape from truck crash in Delaware.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/bees-swarm-after-truck-overturns-in-delaware/2014/05/20/21044800-e07c-11e3-9442-54189bf1a809_story.html

Wax

'Millions' of wasps swarm in Essex. Western Road near Chandlers Way.

Western i.e. the west

Chandler - person in medieval house responsible for wax, candles and soap.

Wax as in bee's wax? Wax used to make homes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler

http://www.london24.com/news/quirky-london/swarm_of_wasps_sends_people_fleeing_in_east_london_1_3604198

Seasonal Offers

Shoppers in Victoria Top Shop  attacked by bees. Is the hive-mind trying to make a point on the post-capitalist world? They seemed to be particularly attracted to the 30% green heart. Is it a message?
[originally posted on London Fortean Society facebook page]
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/shoppers-attacked-by-huge-swarm-of-bees-in-victoria-topshop-store-9383009.html

Tornadogenesis

Lauren Coleman's excellent blog The Copy Cat Effect states that a recent paper on Tornado Climatology has shown that tornadoes have a tendency to touch down in the areas between the city and countryside, the marginal areas where in the US, trailer parks tend to be. These are liminal areas, where the wilderness gives way to the settled world of the city. The suburbs have always had a mysteriousness, where the animal and vegetable world are kept at bay temporarily, leave those pavements unmaintained by council workmen with their weedkiller sprays and in a year or two the place looks like one of those ancient temples in the jungle. Nature clings on to every crevice. These areas have always been associated with Witches, who out of necessity needed to be near nature so as to collect the ingredients for their potions but also needed to be near a populace of customers.
That Tornadoes manifest in liminal areas is of no surprise. They are Daemons.

http://copycateffect.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/trailers.html

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2013EI000548.1

Jeffrey

The actor Bob Hoskins died recently.  While working of the mainly animated feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he described a spell of hallucinations caused by him having to visualize the animated characters he was acting with in order to aline the sight-line of his eyes to the animations.

"I think I went a bit mad while working on that. Lost my mind. The voice of the rabbit was there just behind the camera all the time," he recalled. "The trouble was, I had learnt how to hallucinate. My daughter had an invisible friend called Jeffrey and I played with her and this invisible friend until one day I actually saw the friend."

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/30/showbiz/obit-bob-hoskins/index.html

Kao tao

 A man in Chengdu (Sichuan Province) pulled over his car to urinate and in doing so accidentally unearthed a Song Dynasty (960-1279) funerary statue. Usually found in male/female pairs by tombs, they are depicted kowtowing (from the Cantonese kao tao, a bow showing deep respect) to ward of evil spirits.


http://shanghaiist.com/2014/04/28/mans-roadside-pee-unearths-ancient-chinese-artifact.php

If There Was Ever an Omen...

Man crushed to death by falling crucifix dedicated to recently canonized John Paul II

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/new-saints/pope-john-paul-ii-crucifix-falls-crushes-man-death-n89546
Kind of reminds me of the lightning striking the Vatican after the abdication of the Pope last year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21630874http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21630874

Ghost Jet

Second Sedna

Deeper than the orbit of demoted ex planet Pluto. 
Deeper than Eris, dwarf planet of chaos, strife and discord, dark daughter of Night and the son of Time.
But not as deep as Sedna. Iniut daughter thrown into the sea by her father. She held vainly to the side of the kayak but her father cuts off her fingers with an axe and down she goes, into the deep. 
She becomes the Sea Goddess. Ruler of the monsters of the deep.
2012 VP113 isnt as deep as that.
But its still deep.
2012 VP113 is anounced as a new dwarf planet on the 26th March 2014.

2nd April 2014 sand from sand storms in the Sahara fall on Southern England. I can taste sand when I breathe. I thought it was all the building sites. My back aches. My knees ache.
There's been a big earthquake in Chile.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/03261345-a-second-sedna-what-does-it-mean.html

Fire Tornado 14 March 2014

 Is there something there? In the smoke? Can you see it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcUnE0tHcaI

Wormwood

It was in the first half of 2012 that I had been working an extremely early shift in a low paid job in Wormwood Street. The streets name had aroused my curiosity, being familiar as I was with the Book of Revelations, and this combined with the apocalyptic count down that seemed to be playing out on the calendar made the above find even more prophetic. A faded chalk spiral on the wall of 'All Hallows on the Wall'. This church was built on the old London Wall and had replaced a previous church that resided on the Roman city wall. It survived the apocalyptic fire of 1666 and was renown for it's many hermits.

Wormwood Street is called as such not after the biblical prophesy but after the Wormwood plant that used to grow on the London Wall. Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) is one of the ingredients that is used to make Absinth and contains thujone which is psychoactive and can cause convulsions and hallucinations (as well as kidney failure) if taken in large enough amounts.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616 –  1654), a kind of proto New Age anti-establishment astrologer/healer, insisted that Wormwood was the ingredient that was vital in understanding his work The English Physitian, a guide to herbs as medicine. His entry on this plant was described as reading like a stream of consciousness, suggesting that he had taken it when writing. Culpeper set up a phamacy in a halfway house (liminal?) in Spitalfields, just down the road from Wormwood Street and outside of the wall that marked the extent of the City of London's authority. He treated patient for free, gathering herbs from the nearby countryside.

Culpeper  appears as the major protagonist of 'Doctor of Medicine', one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill'. (Puck being the king of the faeries, as featured in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_absinthium

Wormwood, αψίνθιον (apsinthion) or άψινθος (apsinthos) in Greek, is a star or angel.

"The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter." (Rev 8:10–11)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28Bible%29

Wormwood also links with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

The city name is the same as a local Ukrainian name for Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort or common wormwood), which is also чорнобиль "chornobyl"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_%28city%29#Name_origin

Wand, Wend, Wind

A 9000 year old 'magic wand' found in Tell Qarassa, Southern Syria (2007-2009). The site is from the Neolithic period and may have been some of the earliest farmers. Along with the 'wand', carved with human faces, were 30 headless skeletons.

"Earlier traditions of figurative art had avoided the detailed and naturalistic representation of the human face."

http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.580267


wand (n.) c.1200, from Old Norse vondr "rod, switch," (cf. Gothic wandus "rod," Middle Swedish vander), from Proto-Germanic *wend- "to turn," see wind (v.)). The notion is of a bending, flexible stick. Cf. cognate Old Norse veggr, Old English wag "wall," Old Saxon, Dutch wand, Old High German want, German Wand "wall," originally "wickerwork for making walls," or "wall made of wattle-work" (an insight into early Germanic domestic architecture). Magic wand is attested from c.1400 and shows the etymological sense of "suppleness" already had been lost.


http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=wand&searchmode=none



Wand - Wind (as in 'to wind a watch', a spinning motion) - Wind (as in a winding wind, a tornado?)



switch (n.) 
1590s, "slender riding whip," probably from a Flemish or Low German word akin to Middle Dutch swijch "bough, twig," or swutsche, variant of Low German zwukse "long thin stick, switch," from Germanic base *swih- (cf. Old High German zwec "wooden peg," German Zweck "aim, design," originally "peg as a target," Zwick "wooden peg"), perhaps connected with PIE root *swei- (2) "to swing, bend, to turn." 



http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=switch&allowed_in_frame=0

Wand - Switch (as in to switch 'on' or 'off'')


A stick that switches 'on' and 'off' the wind?


Gingerbread Cyclops

I saw these Gingerbread Cyclopean Women at the university library coffee shop, which doubles as my studio. They are both missing a left eye.

Stan Gooch describes the left/right characteristics as follows:

Left                                                        Right
Feminine                                               Masculine
Matriarchy                                            Patriarchy  
Goddess                                                God
Moon                                                     Sun
Night                                                     Day
Art                                                         Science
Magic                                                    Reason
Subconscious                                        Conscious
Cerebellum (Back Brain)                      Cerebrum (Front Brain)
Neanderthal                                          Cro-Magnon
Democrat (Left Wing)                           Republican (Right Wing)

 http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/5176/the_doubly_divided_self.html

Always The Artist

A Scene from the third series of Game of Thrones where a gruesome design of dismembered horses has been left  by the mysterious White Walkers. The 'galaxy' spiral design caught my attention and I wondered what was the intention of this dark art. Who was the sign intended to be viewed by? Was it religious in nature? Why do the White Walkers feel a need to produce this kind of art? 

And a question familiar to most art students...why this choice of materials?

Tracks left by Dust Devils on the surface of Mars

 http://www.outerspaceuniverse.org/dust-devils-planet-mars.html

A Dust Devil caught in action on Mars.

http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/marsasart/

Loren Coleman's deeply disturbing blog was the influence for me writing the one you are currently reading. I had noticed some of the events that Coleman had written about as they had come up in the news as well as others he had missed and I wanted to write of my own observations, from an especially personal perspective. His post on the Peter Pan suicides had caught my attention before (2010) and caught it again when he posted recently (Feb 2014).

A child found (2014) in an apparent suicide, surname Rider, in an area called Baton Rouge (red stick - a symbol to mark the boundaries of rival tribal areas).

(Rider- one who rides horses- this being the year of the horse)

Coleman links this, via what he refers to as the 'Name Game' a series of interlinking names and their meanings, to several 'suicides' from 1998-2010. There were two that happened on the same day in 2009, in both India and the US. Many were found hung from door hooks and Coleman suggests this may have a connection to Captain Hook, the villainous pirate in the Peter Pan stories.

It was the date that caught my attention.
20th Feb.
A date that had personal resonances with me.

I had noticed the name game myself many years before. Sometimes it is clear that names have been used to specifically hint at references as in the use of the date September the 11th (911 - in the American dating system) to indicate the 'emergency' of the American Emergency Services telephone number.  
But sometimes, names have been referenced in a way that could not have been caused by human agency and one can only speculate that a more supernatural design is at work. 

I hesitated to write about these connection because of the negative energy it implies. My superstitiousness is what attracts me to these details but it also warns me away.

http://copycateffect.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/new-hook.html

Horse-ripping, the mutilation of horses - suspected to be religious in nature, has been an ongoing phenomena I have taken note of. This is sometimes liked with mysterious horse-braiding, where braids are tied into the mane's or tail's of horses. 

(horses - symbolic of the Goddess Epona)  

(braiding, a form of weaving, is associated with daemonic activity)

'Pixies are drawn to horses, riding them for pleasure and making tangled ringlets in the manes of those horses they ride.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixie 

 

Venus of Willendorf c. 28,000 – 25,000 B.C.E. (with braided hair?)

 

Venus of Brassempouy 25,000 B.C.E. (with braided hair?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-ripping

http://www.academia.edu/3819433/The_urban_folklore_of_Otherworldly_horse_mane_braiding_and_the_
persistence_of_superstition_regarding_witch_knots_in_horses_manes_from_Shakespeare_to_Spiritual_Warfare

The White Horse at Uffington is suspected to be Celtic in origin and a reference to Goddess worship. It has been vandalized twice, both times with the addition of a rider. The symbolism here can be seen as a domination of the feminine Goddess element.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse