A Long, Long Way From Home



A Spotted Cuscus, occasionally found in Northern Queensland but most common in Papua New Guinea, has turned up at a zoo in Eastern China, sparking a Daily Mail 'Mystery Creature No-One Can Identify!' story, claiming zookeepers are absolutely mystified as to what kind of freakish rodent it is.

It took only a few minutes for DM readers to identify the "Mystery Creature!" in comments. It would have taken even less to get an ID on Twitter. But that's not a story, or a clickbait headline.

Someone needs to send this cuscus back to a PNG jungle.

Great photo here of a Spotted Cuscus ripping into a star fruit.

How Murdoch's news.com.au defined Abbott's People in 2009 :

Global Warming conspiracy theory

This theory claims the science behind current environmental changes - as popularised by Al Gore in the film An Inconvenient Truth - was created for financial gain.

Some believe that governments are using the global warming "myth" to raise taxes and restrict competitive US businesses in Europe - or that it is a United Nations ploy to create a one-world government.

It's like reading the How To opinion manual for The Australian

To the slightly vague memories of 1995 :

Numerous Australians have shared their 9/11 Stories with ABC News Online, but Penny's stood out, for its vivid detail and images of the unimaginable horrors witnessed by so many survivors that day, from all over the world. One of Penny's photos, taken from her hotel room, close to the World Trade Centre complex on the morning of September 11, 2001, shows the aftermath of a man who jumped from the burning skyscrapers :

"There is a dead man about the middle of (this shot of the courtyard below my hotel).

"He's wearing a pink shirt and white pants. I've often wondered if I could somehow track down his family, who would likely know what their husband/father was wearing and whether it would give them any comfort to know exactly what happened to him and that he didn't die alone because I watched and prayed and cried as he died."

The reflections falling across the WTC plaza, in Penny's photo, are from the windows of the World Trade Centre 1 and 2 towers. Within 40 minutes of the photo being taken, both towers will have collapsed, consuming, swallowing up the remains of this unknown man and some 200 more people believed to have leapt or fallen to their deaths.

The fall from the upper floors of the WTC towers would have lasted 9 to 10 seconds.

Department Of Defence Only Public Statement On UFOs, 1977 : 10% Of Australian Sightings Can't Be Explained

The 1977 documentary UFOs Are Here screened on Channel 9, in prime time from memory, and had a monumental impact amongst Australian kids who'd been fed a steady diet of UFOmania by popular culture for most of their childhoods. The doco wasn't only discussed amongst kids in the playground the next day, teachers were bombarded with questions from students about it, t00.

As a doco, looking back at it now, UFOs Are Here! is a strange, scattershot 'They're Lying To Us! treatise, with some curious claims that the American Pine Gap base near Alice Springs isn't just a surveillance station but an advanced flight technology workshop, and the existence of a scientific 'Cosmic Conspiracy'.

However, the doco also covered some interesting Australian history, and has a bunch of great interviews with computer geeks, eccentrics, director Steven Spielberg, flogging the film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and everyday people who saw something strange in the sky and can't find explanations for what they witnessed.



A rare public statement on UFOs by the Australian Department of Defence :



The most likely explanation for nearly all "officially unexplained" UFO sightings, at least in Australia, was and still is test flights by classified military aircraft, which makes the official statement, above, by the DoD a wry invitation for witnesses to keep speculating about extraterrestrial, instead of local war industry, origins for the strange things they'd seen in the skies.

I never thought I'd be posting a clip from X-Factor here, but what a voice, and what an attitude to life after being born and abandoned in the chemical weapons soaked aftermath of the 199o-91 War On Iraq :