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Davey Jones' Locker

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Posts posted by Davey Jones' Locker

  2. Posted

    On 21/02/2019 at 16:04, Bibliogryphon said:

    @En Passant I did try and think about the relative levels of fame. At the top you have Prince Philip which I don't think anyone would dispute and I put Kirk Douglas below him because he was a global superstar actor.

     

    World leaders scored high and film stars but I tried to rank them in their levels of iconography.

     

    Whilst we spend more time discussing Olivia de Havilland I think Doris Day would be more recognisable in the public.

     

    Struggled with people like Tina Turner and Vera Lynne trying to think outside the paraochial UK centric box. How famous is Vera outside of the UK?

     

    The US stars that have no traction over here I tried to place higher than the equivalent UK TV stars because of your point about global populations but someone like Honor Blackman was Pussy Galore.

     

    I did tend to penalise people that I have only heard about because of the Deathlist.

     

    Please send me your own version by DM (to avoid clogging the thread with endless lists) and I will try and create and averaged out one.

    Some more random musings on relative fame and coverage of death:

     

    1. Yesterday, Luke Perry, the star of a half-forgotten soap opera from 20 years ago, received a lot more coverage in the Australian mainstream media than that satanic-looking tosser from Prodigy (so Hollywood promotional power counts). Neither came near the levels of fawning over the homegrown icon that was Mike Willesee though.

     

    2.In terms of fame relative to audience age, Carrie Fisher is best known to my generation as Princess Leia and was a huge star in her own right, irrespective of any actual acting skills she may have possessed. To my mum's generation though, she is really just Debbie Reynold's daughter. Carrie's death received a lot more coverage than Debbie's though in the "double event" death. Debbie was basically portrayed in the media as just Carrie's mother and the star of some old forgotten films(!) Kirk Douglas is of course a superstar but I am wondering how many younger people today would know Michael better and think of him more in terms of being Michael's dad without having seen his films. 

     

    3. Likewise, Robin Williams received a lot more coverage than Lauren Bacall  the following day who ended up just being a footnote on the news. So even Hollywood stardom fades with the decades. Does make me wonder what would happen if, say, Olivia's death happens at the same time as that of a younger, bigger star.

     

    4. I ranked Prunella Scales higher on the list higher than Ed Asner or Valerie Harper because the ABC repeats her old shows frequently  whereas, to my knowledge, Mary Tyler Moore has never been repeated. They were probably bigger stars at the time, so, yes, UK stars can be more famous than American ones in certain circumstances. Basically, in Australia, commercial television stations buy Yank shows and the ABC buys Pommie shows so we have a dose of each (SBS buys foreign language shows which is good for my knowledge on the Foreign Stars thread.)

     

    5. To answer your question, yes, Vera Lynn is super-famous outside the UK. She is seen as the epitome of Englishness, for better or worse.

     

    6. Not sure about Olivia versus Doris in the fame stakes either. I put Olivia slightly higher because she was in more classics, including the iconic Robin Hood with "our" Errol but it was a tough one.

     

    7. Emperor Akihito is moderately well known as the head of state of a major trading partner but with so many Japanese-Australian citizens now perhaps I have shown Anglo bias ranking him so low.

     

    8. Moss versus Walker was also tough. Moss was a superstar in his day bit you never hear of him in Australia now. I wouldn't have a vlue what he has done post-racing whereas Walker is the media face of the sport as the chief comentator so possibly more well known to young people.

     

    9. Since soccer isn't as popular as AFL or Rugby League in terms of media coverage in Australia (though things are gradually changing) Banks and Greaves suffer badly. Anywhere else in the world, they'd probably be ranked a lot higher but they are not known here at all by the general public.

    • Like 2

  3. Posted

    On 21/02/2019 at 07:28, Bibliogryphon said:

    Following the discussion in the QEII thread about the relative fame of Deathlist picks I thought I would begin to look at this in a bit more depth. As I said the criteria that contributes to a persons inclusion is dependent on three things
     

    Age  - this is a fact (unless you are Doris Day) and it is easy to rank them on this

     

    Fame - There is a fame threshold below which someone would not be considered Deathlist worthy but that is pretty low if you have;

     

    Illness/Lifestyle - This is the most important but it is also the most difficult because there are the Clive James approach. "Look guys I am dying,.........still dying.........honestly I could go any day now.........publishes book........wow I am still here........I'll be gone soon......" or there is the Lewis Collins approach. Nothing and then turns up dead one day or the halfway house ala Val Kilmer "there is nothing wrong with me" but appears in public looking awful and there is much speculation

     

    However I have tried to address the level of fame and ranked this years picks in fame order. 

     

    I appreciate this is highly subjective but I have tried to consider worldwide fame and the media reaction to any of these deaths.

     

    1                     Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh

    2                     Kirk Douglas

    3                     Jimmy Carter

    4                     Tina Turner

    5                     Mikhail Gorbachev

    6                      Robert Mugabe

    7                     Doris Day

    8                     Olivia De Havilland

    9                     Sidney Poitier

    10                  Vera Lynn

    11                 Harry Belafonte

    12                  Dick van Dyke

    13                  Desmond Tutu

    14                 Emperor Akihito

    15                  Little Richard

    16                 Jacques Chirac

    17                  Hosni Mubarak

    18                  Pierre Cardin

    19                 Betty White

    20                 Ed Asner

    21                 Stirling Moss

    22                 Larry King

    23                 Nobby Stiles

    24                  Gordon Banks

    25                 Murray Walker

    26                 Clive James

    27                  Jimmy Greaves

    28                 Bob Hawke

    29                 Valery Giscard d'Estaing

    30                 Herman Wouk

    31                 Henry Kissinger        

    32                 Bob Dole

    33                 Alan Greenspan

    34                 Javier Perez de Cuellar

    35                 Honor Blackman

    36                 Vanessa Redgrave

    37                 Prunella Scales

    38                  Ginger Baker

    39                  Loretta Lynn

    40                  Valerie Harper

    41                  June Brown

    42                 Shane MacGowan

    43                  Bob Barker

    44                 Barbara Walters

    45                 Cleo Laine

    46                  Jerry Stiller

    47                 Tony Britton

    48                 John McCririck

    49                  Leah Bracknell

    50                  Johnny Clegg

    If you want to disagree just DM  me your fame rankings and I will combine them into a DL overall fame ranking and then I might try to plot age and fame against position on list to determine if there is a correlation.

    Attempt at Aussie fame rankings (it really depends on age though - older people will know Vera Lynn better than they know Tina Turner, for instance. Clive James would probably have been ranked higher in the past when he was on television more often, Stirling Moss when he was racing, Chirac when he was in office, etc):

     

    1. Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh
    2. Bob Hawke
    3. Jimmy Carter
    4. Mikhail Gorbachev
    5. Kirk Douglas
    6. Olivia De Havilland
    7. Dick van Dyke

    8. Doris Day
    9. Robert Mugabe
    10. Henry Kissinger 

    11. Desmond Tutu
    12. Clive James

    13. Alan Greenspan
    14. Hosni Mubarak
    15. Jacques Chirac

    16. Harry Belafonte

    17. Vera Lynn

    18. Tina Turner

    19. Cleo Laine

    20. Vanessa Redgrave
    21. Honor Blackman

    22. Little Richard

    23. Stirling Moss
    24. Murray Walker

    25. Sidney Poitier
    26. Prunella Scales

    27. Javier Perez de Cuellar
    28. Betty White
    29. Pierre Cardin

    30. Emperor Akihito
    31. Barbara Walters
    32. Larry King
    33. Bob Dole

    34. Loretta Lynn
    35. Ginger Baker
    36. Valery Giscard d'Estaing
    37. Ed Asner
    38. Valerie Harper
    39. June Brown        
    40. Bob Barker 
    41. Nobby Stiles

    42. Herman Wouk
    43. Jerry Stiller

    44. Gordon Banks
    45. Jimmy Greaves            
    46. Tony Britton
    47. John McCririck
    48. Leah Bracknell
    49. Johnny Clegg
    50. Shane MacGowan

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    There is a discussion of all the major Australian UFO stories here. Included is another contemporary news report video on the Knowles case:

     

    https://mashable.com/2016/10/27/australian-ufo-sightings-top-5/#h1PWal3AXSq6

     

    UPDATE: More contemporary reports on the case:

     

    https://www.apnews.com/9bd96fcf56695d960ae48975f4c793c8

     

    https://www.apnews.com/c32556c9bfaee668f5194a5a9d6ea047

     

    Hmmm.... Police were convinced it was not a hoax, there was the physical evidence of the tar and the fishermen were witnesses too. 

     

    UPDATE 2:

     

    Patrick Knowles provides an account (not sure when this is dated):

     

     

    Quote

     

    03.20

    Australia [man]

    My name is Patrick Knowles. My family and I have been the victim of a media frenzy since first telling our story. Now I very much regret making it public. We have experienced unrelenting ridicule, being described as crazy, or accused of making up a hoax just for money, and so on. But we only wanted people to know what happened to us, we weren't after anything!

    It happened on January 20, 1988. My mother, two brothers and I were driving from Perth to Melbourne. We were going to drive straight through in shifts, and we planned to cross the desert at night when the heat wasn't so bad. By 2.30 am we were in the Nullarbor Plain. We stopped for petrol and switched drivers. Sean was driving and I was in the front seat next to him. The road was empty. Suddenly we saw a bright yellow light up ahead and Sean slowed down. As we got closer, the yellow light seemed to be emanating from an egg-shaped object hovering just above ground level. We thought we might be seeing things but then a caravan passed going the other way, and it swerved sharply to avoid the luminous egg. The closer we got to it, the more we realised it wasn't a normal vehicle or a road signal or anything like that. Sean swerved to avoid it and we continued on, leaving it behind.

    Suddenly, the object started towards us. It appeared to accelerate with tremendous speed. We drove on and it literally chased us. The faster we went to get away from it, the faster this object went after us. I reckon we reached a speed of 125 miles per hour but it caught up in a matter of seconds. Then Sean made a sudden u-turn and headed back West in the direction of the petrol station. The UFO also turned around. I don't know how the hell it was flying, because it didn't have any wings or anything like wings. It just kept coming after us. Sean made another fast u-turn heading back toward Melbourne again but the UFO turned as well and kept pace with the car. In the backseat, everyone was scared. The dogs started barking and whining.

    Then suddenly, we were hit. It shot a beam of light out and punctured our back tyre. The back tyre was on fire. We started sliding across the road. I realised if we braked we would have to confront the UFO, but Sean didn't have any choice. Then it landed on the roof of the car and picked the car up. It lit up the car like a microwave. The heat was intense. Our hair was standing straight up and we felt really funny - like we were being dehydrated. It was awful, frightening, like our brains were being sucked out. My fear was that I would be pulled out of my body. I put my hand out of the window and touched something spongy that burned my hand. I thought we were going to die.
    You could actually feel the car rising in the air. The car began to fill with a thick black fog. It was so hot, and all this soot, this junk, started covering us. Our voices started changing - you know how a tape deck sounds when the batteries start to go flat? That's what it was like. Then I passed out.

    I came to when I heard a tremendous noise, like a bang, and our car suddenly dropped back to earth. Dawn was coming up. The thing just flew away, that was the last we saw of it. I had to change the tyre, and we tried to clean out the black soot. There were marks on the roof of the car. As soon as we could, we drove fast to the nearest roadhouse. We were too shocked to talk for a while. Then we realised we had lost a couple of hours time during the incident. We called the police. The funny thing was they were already looking for us. Someone, maybe the people in the caravan we passed, had phoned the police anonymously. Their report states that they witnessed our car being picked up off the road and shaken violently. They noticed the car was covered in black ash. The police inspected our car and noted the ash, the bad smell, and the dents on the roof. They was convinced something had occurred. They took us to the hospital where we were treated for burns and shock. But then the media got hold of the incident. I don't think a single reporter or journalist asked sensible questions or tried to console us for our fear, they just wanted to humiliate us. When our car was examined by forensic scientists, they found unexplained high concentrations of chlorine, an element not usually present in cars, animals, or the desert environment. My family does not need proof of this sort because we all know what we witnessed and what we went through that night.

     

    Source:  https://www.artangel.org.uk/witness/ufo-sightings-from-around-world/#australia-and-oceania

     

    :sherlock:

  5. Posted

    Actually, it turns out the guy espousing that theory has been promoting it on this forum too:

     

    https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/246829-australian-family-encounters-glowing-object/

     

    He still provides no evidence. Interestingly he draws in the weird, weird story of conman John Friedrich, who was building up just such an organisation under the guise of a "Safety Council" right under the noses of the authorities. One popular theory at the time was that John Friedrich was actually an assumed identity of a re-emerged Frederick Valentich, so this guy is actually, knowingly or unknowingly, linking together three great Australian mysteries!

     

    Anyway, as smart phones and dashcams become more and more prevalent, it will be interesting to see if incidents like the Knowles story occur in the future. If they are concocted by publicity seekers or mass hallucinations, people will have to come up with more inventive tales. (In a way it will be sad if there are no more mysteries in the world.) If, on the other hand, they are real, it will be fascinating to see what the footage shows.

  6. Posted

    40 minutes ago, maryportfuncity said:

     

     

    So, an interesting point about this case is that it is indeed one of the hardest to explain away (most are unexplained but many fall so obviously into particular explanations - meteorites, mistaken observations of Venus etc. - that they soon form a pattern and the more sceptical investigators find it easy to show the pattern). I'm fairly open-minded by comparison to the harder sceptics to the possibility that one or two cases are truly strange. Oddly, the main thing that's "wrong" in this regard with the Knowles family case is how much the initial encounter then goes on to fit the kind of abduction narrative that was fairly prevalent at the time. Given that many of those abductions are discredited now the Knowles' story - sort of - suffers by comparison. Which is why you could take a sceptical view that natural phenomena + hysteria just about explains it. 

    Yes, makes sense. I have heard of cases of people really wanting to see either extinct thylacines or the urban myth of escaped big cats and then convincing themselves they have seen them when they go out in the bush whereas other people in the same area see nothing. I could readily believe someone seeing something unexpected, like a meteor, and the  mind then filling in the blanks and constructing a story around it.

     

    I guess the most interesting thing in the Knowles case is the inclusion of the "hard evidence" of the dust on the car which was supposedly an unexplained substance at the time. 

     

    The paramilitary explanation sounds as bizarre and paranoid as any explanation involving extraterrestrials: what evidence is there for the claim? Who was the real target? Why on earth would some real high profile target be traveling across the wasteland of the Nullarbor Plain?! Why not just shoot them or blow them up if they were travelling unescorted across the desert and leave the wreckage there instead of trying to use an electro-magnet to abduct their car and drop it in the ocean(!) At the end, he seems to contradict himself by saying high profile events like the Bicentennial at Sydney would be attractive, whereas we are talking about a car out in the middle of nowhere with no media and few witnesses around.

     

    At least he tries to explain the dust on the car.

  7. Posted

    10 hours ago, maryportfuncity said:

     

     

    One of the strangest UFO cases ever - though there are a few truly strange but non-paranormal explanations doing the rounds including them being unwitting victims of a paramilitary attack: https://steemit.com/ufo/@williambuckley/knowles-family-ufo-mystery-solved

     

    A scientific explanation grounded in some observable phenomena suggests potentially the local "min min" light; which would mean a lot of the other things observed were down to some mass hysteria in the car: http://users.adam.com.au/bstett/PaMinMinSolved97.htm

    Cool, thanks! I remember all the media circus around the Knowles case when I was a kid and it really intrigued me at the time.

     

    I have always wanted to see the Min Min phenomena - might have to drive out into one of the areas where it is spotted one of these days. BTW, my father observed ball lightning a few times when he was young.

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

    On 01/03/2019 at 14:46, WhoamI said:

    Must admit Mike Willesee did surprise me. He was doing well at last report I read. Billy J. Smith, the Queensland sports announcers died the same day as Kerri-Anne  Kennerley's husband John, 28 Feb 2019.

    Eric Abetz's wife died March 1 as well.

  13. Posted

    On 27/02/2019 at 15:17, Sir Creep said:

    Australian rockstar John Farnham has been rushed to hospital, forcing him to postpone his upcoming New Zealand shows.

    The 69-year-old was scheduled to open for the Eagles in Dunedin on Saturday, before performing his own shows in Wellington and Auckland next week.

    But it has now been revealed the legendary singer has been hospitalised with a severe infection after having minor surgery two weeks ago.
    SC

    One link in a chain reaction?

     

     

     

     

    I'll get me coat.

  14. Posted

    On 01/03/2019 at 13:19, YoungWillz said:

    Mike Willesee QO: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6759077/Veteran-journalist-Mike-Willesee-dies-aged-76-losing-battle-throat-cancer.html

    Let's not forget the classic "Willesee versus Skyhooks" interview (which is the Australian equivalent of "Grundy versus Sex Pistols"):

     

     

    Part 1 (introduction and song):

     

    Part 2 (the interview - even today it is painful to watch the two most famous people in the country at the time go head to head :D):

     

  16. Posted

    4 hours ago, Paul Bearer said:

    @John Robinson, check out her own thread. Might be a hoax, might not. 

    Vera Lynn's health seems to be tied to Britain's political fortunes. Flourishes on the back of the Second World War, goes on for ages afterwards, albeit slowly declining, and now might be doomed, might not.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    "I used to go to New York University a long time ago, which is in Greenwich Village, that's where I started, and I was, ah, in love in my freshman year, but I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic, y'know. We didn't know which religion not to bring the children up in. And I bummed around for a long time, and I met my wife, and we got married against my parents' wishes, we were married in Long Island, in New York, we were married by a reformed rabbi in Long Island... a very reformed rabbi... a Nazi." - Woody Allen

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    If Savile and Rolf have their own threads, Pell deserves one, too.

     

    George Pell is 77 years old, has heart trouble (though that may have been a sham to avoid flying home to face trial) and is due to have knee reconstruction work. Yet to be sentenced though judging by the judge's comments, he's had it:

     

    Quote

     

    Defence barrister Robert Richter QC argued on Wednesday that Pell's offending was at the low end of the scale and had no aggravating features.

     

    "It must be clear by now I am struggling with that," Judge Kidd replied, hitting back.

     

    The judge later struck down another controversial argument from Mr Richter with a simple "don't say it".

     

    Judge Kidd said Pell engaged in shocking conduct that allowed no innocent explanation.

     

    "At the moment I see this as callous, brazen offending. Blatant," he said.

     

     

    10 years is the standard sentence for this kind of crime, putting him at 87 when he is released.

    • Like 1

  20. Posted

    Virgin Galactic hopes to launch tourist flights by the end of this year.

     

    "[There has been]  criticism from the likes of Australian astronaut Andy Thomas, who said the program is dangerous, dead-end, glorified aeroplane travel.

     

    One Time magazine editor called Virgin Galactic "amateur hour" and Mr Branson "a man driven by too much hubris, too much hucksterism and too little knowledge of the head-crackingly complex business of engineering".

     

    Another writer said the company was without a real business plan beyond "the vague talk of space tourism, and the spacecraft it built was hardly able to accomplish even that"."

     

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-25/virgin-galactic-hopes-to-launch-tourist-space-flights-in-2019/10829902

  22. Posted

    Know of any celebs (or forum members) who have been to the Grand Canyon museum's collections building in the last eighteen years? The collections included paint buckets(!) full of uranium.

     

    "One of the buckets was so full that its lid would not close.

     

    Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute."

     

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2019/02/18/grand-canyon-tourists-exposed-radiation-safety-manager-says/2876435002/

     

     

  25. Posted

    Queen to be evacuated in the case of Brexit unrest:

     

    "LONDON (Reuters) - British officials have revived Cold War emergency plans to relocate the royal family should there be riots in London if Britain suffers a disruptive departure from the European Union next month, two Sunday newspapers reported.

     

    “These emergency evacuation plans have been in existence since the Cold War, but have now been repurposed in the event of civil disorder following a no-deal Brexit,” the Sunday Times said, quoting an unnamed source from the government’s Cabinet Office, which handles sensitive administrative issues.

     

    The Mail on Sunday also said it had learnt of plans to move the royal family, including The Queen, to safe locations away from London."

     

    https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-royals/the-queen-to-be-evacuated-in-case-of-brexit-unrest-media-idUSKCN1PS005

     

    • Like 2
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