Cthulhu Connection

If we lose contact with New Zealand - we know why.

2008-04-28T08:23:49Z

Technicians in New Zealand are set to begin defrosting a rare colossal squid, following a day's postponement.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7367774.stm

"We removed the colossal squid from the freezer and took it out of its plastic container bin," explained Te Papa's Chris Paulin on the museum's squid blog.
"We discovered that the specimen filled the entire bin, and therefore there is very little ice surrounding it. Consequently the specimen would thaw well before Wednesday."

Wow...Squid Blog...

Octopus

2008-02-28T18:55:44Z

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/reuters/2060-wicked-smart-octopus-in-new-zealand-video.htm

Mysterious Deaths of 9 Skiers Still Unresolved

2008-02-28T07:42:50Z

Mysterious Deaths of 9 Skiers Still Unresolved

By Svetlana Osadchuk
The Saint Petersburg Times
Staff Writer

Nine experienced cross-country skiers hurriedly left their tent on a Urals slope in the middle of the night, casting aside skis, food and their warm coats.

Clad in their sleepwear, the young people dashed headlong down a snowy slope toward a thick forest, where they stood no chance of surviving bitter temperatures of around minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Baffled investigators said the group died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” — and then abruptly closed the case and filed it as top secret.

The deaths, which occurred 49 years ago on Saturday, remain one of the deepest mysteries in the Urals. Records related to the incident were unsealed in the early 1990s, but friends of those who died are still searching for answers.

Dark Lovecraftian Steampunk and Neovictorian Silliness

2008-02-19T23:41:26Z

[Flagged up by fortyhumans]

Cambridge's secret library

2008-02-16T05:15:32Z

Cambridge University is supposedly posting online the contents of its secret library. They claim that, although campus legend is that the 200,000 volumes in a seventeen-floor tower library are pornography, they are actually Victorian etiquette manuals which were locked away because they were not the sort of thing serious students should be wasting their time with. Clearly Cambridge is trying to cover up some still more hideous truth by digitizing these books. They're probably covering up for the fact that the library really contains thousands of works on black magic which can be used to destroy the fabric of the universe if they enter the wrong hands. The lie that the material is really porn is no longer working to dissuade people. Someone must suspect what's really in that library, so they've been forced to pretend to come clean. It must have been very expensive to buy all these Victorian manuals to cover up for this fact.

Submarine network cables 'cut'

2008-01-31T11:42:16Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7218008.stm

Is something Altantian rising from the depths in the Mediterranean? Are the dwellers below moving north from their squalid home deep beneath Africa?

Pilot 'breakdown' diverts flight

2008-01-30T22:37:09Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7217977.stm

What was it a saw in the bleak winter sky that threw him into the depths of insanity?

The Stars Will Be Right?

2008-01-15T13:55:14Z

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is racing towards a collision with the Milky Way
"It contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun, say experts, and its leading edge is already hitting gas from our galaxy…Smith's Cloud, as it is known, may set off spectacular fireworks when it smacks into our galaxy."
Sadly it looks like we have 20-40 million years to wait.

Meanwhile,. It’s been discovered that supermassive" black holes at the centres of most galaxies could be spinning at a dizzying rate
"These celestial monsters may be rotating so fast, they are close to the maximum rates allowed by Einstein's theory of relativity."

I'm going down to Dunwich

2008-01-15T13:00:04Z

Underwater cameras are going to be used to explore the sunken town of Dunwich in England

They're even talking about bringing up artifacts. I wonder what they'll find...

Well that'll teach me...

2007-12-12T23:43:22Z

Monday night I had one of my favourite dishes, squid in chilli and tomato with rice. I've eaten squid all my life and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it's entirely possible that Cthulhu has taken umbridge to me listening to Shoggoth on the Roof, because I had an allergic reaction and spent the night in hospital on an IV and a nebuliser before being packed off to my GP with orders to get a medic alert bracelet and start carrying an adrenaline pen.

The only good thing about it was the ER doc's kept referring to me as "The Squid Lady" which I guess must be the first step towards Deep One.

Sweet! ;o)

The Arkhamist

2007-12-07T20:03:43Z

Saw this posted on Technorati - There's a guy who is moving to Arkham and keeping a blog of his life. Didn't know Craig's List did apartments in that section of Massachusetts...

http://www.arkhamist.com

LJ feed: http://www.livejournal.com/users/arkhamist

Giant Sea Scorpions!

2007-11-21T10:06:26Z

An 8ft long Sea Scorpion has been found, admittedly it was a fragment of a fossil but ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7104421.stm

Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.

The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a Germany quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.

The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.

The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.

The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.

Overall, it exceeds the record for any other sea scorpion (eurypterid) find by nearly 50cm.

The eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of modern land scorpions and possibly all arachnids (the class of animals that also includes spiders).

"The biggest scorpion today is nearly 30cm so that shows you how big this creature was," said Dr Simon Braddy from the University of Bristol, UK.

It was one of Dr Braddy's co-authors, Markus Poschmann, who made the discovery in the quarry near Prum in south-west Germany.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realised there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab," he recalled.

"After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw. Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out.

"The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilise it."

Super-sized meals

The species existed during a period in Earth history when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher than today.

And it was those elevated levels, some palaeo-scientists believe, that may have helped drive the super-sized bodies of many of the invertebrates that existed at that time - monster millipedes, huge cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies.

But Dr Braddy thinks the large scales may have had a lot to do with the absence early on of vertebrate predators. As they came on the scene, these animals would have eaten all the biggest prey specimens.

"The fact that you are big means you are more likely to be seen and to be taken for a tastier morsel," he told BBC News. "Evolution will not select for large size; you want to be small so you can hide away."

The scorpions are thought to have made their first scuttles on to land about 450 million years ago.

While some would have taken up a fully terrestrial existence, others like Jaekelopterus rhenaniae would have maintained an aquatic or semi-aquatic lifestyle.

Cheaper Sanity Insurance

2007-11-07T19:01:50Z

Today's Bunny is excellent

Comet 17P/Holmes

2007-11-01T22:02:52Z

”And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us...”

17P/Holmes

Holmes is currently moving away from the Sun, and is almost midway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter

But over the last few days it's brightened incredibly - over a million times its usual level in a few hours! - and is now visible to the naked eye. Astronomers are baffled and are calling it one of the cometary events of the century. It seems to have either exploded, shed its outer crust or broken up after an impact. The dust cloud around it is a vast and expanding sphere. All very unusual and worth following.

Today the reputable space site SpaceWeather says that in fact Comet Holmes's physical diameter (including its diffuse coma) is seven times larger than the planet Jupiter!

------------
From www.spaceweather.com:
Comet 17P/Holmes has been relentlessly expanding since its explosion on Oct 23rd and now it spans an angle in the sky almost half as wide as the full Moon. Using a picture of the comet he took on Oct. 30th, Helmut Groell of Moers, Germany, created this animation for comparison
Actually, the comet is even bigger than it looks. While the Moon is a mere 240 thousand miles away, Comet Holmes is 150 million miles from Earth. The comet's physical diameter is thus seven times wider than the planet Jupiter--and it is still expanding.
------------
See here for the sequence

Image from news.com
Image on imageshack
this page shows the sequence of expansion and some 'mystery fragments'

As initially directed to by fractalgeek and from an email by Nick L (sans-LJ)

A great resource for anyone running 'Call of Cthulhu' in Egypt.

2007-10-29T09:53:41Z

http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/

Somebody has a sense of humour

2007-10-07T21:41:08Z

This weekend, I bought myself a food flask to take hot lunches to work. It is made by Aladdin. It is a shiny metal canister, short and squat.

On the side is marked miGO.

*insert muffled hysterics here*

giggle

2007-10-04T20:51:33Z

Where the Great Old Ones Are

Lolthulhu

2007-09-20T18:16:54Z

Lolcats meet Cthulhu

http://lolthulhu.com/

Giant "Lobster"

2007-09-19T13:18:25Z

Poseidon is a Pink Spiny Lobster recently caught 200 miles south west of Cornwall, strictly speaking he's a member of the Crayfish family not a true Lobster.

He's two feet long (at least double that when he flips his antenna forward) and weighs over 9 pounds.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=482488

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/09_03/BigSmallLobAPX_800x411.jpg

Ok, so he's a crustacean not a cephalopod but something must have caused his immense growth ...

Scores ill in Peru 'meteor crash'

2007-09-19T08:27:04Z

"Hundreds of people in Peru have needed treatment after an object from space - said to be a meteorite - plummeted to Earth in a remote area, officials say.

They say the object left a deep crater after crashing down over the weekend near the town of Carancas in the Andes.

People who have visited scene have been complaining of headaches, vomiting and nausea after inhaling gases.

A team of scientists is on its way to the site to collect samples and verify whether it was indeed a meteorite."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7001897.stm

Hmm ...

Alright, I might have too much time on my hands right now

2007-09-14T23:57:22Z

Oh My Gods

2007-07-25T18:55:56Z

For those who may not have already seen it, Oh My Gods Cthulhu running gag

Cthulhu Elder Wear...

2007-07-23T13:43:35Z

Am amused.

I want to buy some for stock but not entirely sure if there's a market for them through the shop. Might be something for one of the side projects though :p

So anyone interested if I buy some?

MI5 Badger or Iraqi Ghouls?

2007-07-13T14:47:35Z

One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept. "My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6295138.stm

Giant Penguins

2007-06-26T08:14:52Z

It's true, they exist!

I'm sure the colouring is only a guess. I bet they were really albino.