beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

There's a reference in the new TW book to Fortean Times. The issue number they give is in the eight hundreds - 867 maybe? I noticed it because the latest FT in this universe is 234.
Either Torchwood collect FT from the future
or, in the DW 'verse, FT is a weekly.
... well they'd certainly have the material...

odd names in Britain

apparently someone actually named their child
Faithful Cock

someone elses offspring was called Offspring Gurney.

Levi Jeans was married in Padstow, Cornwall, in 1797.

and there are a whole bunch more fun ones

August 1975
A 5.25pm on 14 August, an estimated three million tons of water and hail fell on a small area of north London including Hampstead. As the Guardian put it: "Darkness fell, the heavens opened and with thunder and lightning a Divine Hand reached through the clouds and pointed squarely at HAmpstead Heath." Within three hours, 6.72in (17cm) of rain was recorded with considerable flooding and damage; one man drowned in his flat and two others were left paralysed when lightning hit them on the Heath. John Hillaby, local resident and columnist for New Scientist, said the rain fell "in misty sheets with a noise like boiling fat." The odd conjunctions... as Hampstead drowned, an African pytho was found on a windowsill in Kensington. To add more curiousity, the evening before the heavens burst Ken Rogers (now deceased), ufologist and pagan, was interviewed on Parliament Hill about his all-night UFO vigil there and pictured jabbing a finger at the clouds. Ken's skyward challenge ws published on teh 15th, as Hampstead woke up to th scale of the extraordinary localised rainstorm. FT12:7
As summarised in Fortean Times 199:80

They've been running stories from the vaults all year
and this is extra useful for me, since I chose 1975 as the year of Ripper and Ethan.
Something like that, they had to be involved somewhere. I can't decide if they called the storm, drowned the guy, were friends with the drowned guy or were the two struck by lightning, or some combination of the lot.
Of course there are actual real people behind the news item so, er, any resemblence to persons living or dead is... legally a total coincidence. Of course. Quite made up fiction stuff.

Why do they have that 'resemblance' thing at the end of stuff they've also said is 'based on a true story'?

ANYhue, FT, very cool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4178533.stm
Woman jailed for haunting castle
...
He called in the police, who captured a 42-year-old Polish woman on video,
masquerading as a ghost over a period of weeks, making mysterious noises.
...

! :)