CNN: Video of giant squid in ocean depths is a big breakthrough, expert says

http://cnn.com/
By Jethro Mullen, CNN
January 10, 2013 — Updated 1133 GMT (1933 HKT)

 

(CNN) — The first ever video footage of a giant squid swimming in the ocean depths is “an enormous breakthrough,” according to a prominent marine conservationist who wrote a book about the quest to find the mysterious creatures.

 “People have been searching for them for hundreds of years, literally,” said Richard Ellis, the author of “The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World’s Most Elusive Sea Creature.”

 Scientists and television broadcasters released images this week of the 10-foot-long giant squid they had filmed deep in the Pacific Ocean, far off the coast of the Japanese mainland, during hundreds of hours of underwater research.

 The discovery is significant for both science and mythology, in which giant squids have long played a notable role, Ellis said in an interview on CNN.

 “We’re going to learn how this thing moves,” he said. “How it swims, what it does with its arms when it swims.”

Softball-sized eyeball washes ashore

 

He described the squid as having eight arms and “two very, very long tentacles which it uses to grasp its prey.” Its limbs have suckers lined with sharp teeth.

 Monsters reminiscent of giant squids have been featured in fables and imagery through the ages, like the Kraken in Norse legend and the Scylla in Greek mythology.

 “For a long time, people didn’t even think they existed,” Ellis said.

 The carcasses of dead giant squid that washed ashore eventually proved that the creatures were real, but finding live ones in the wild has proved extremely challenging.

 The first still photographs of one of the huge creatures were captured in 2004, and footage was taken of one floating on the surface of the water in 2006. But researchers and cameramen had never before managed to catch a glimpse of them in the ocean abyss where they live.

 The mission that finally tracked down the creature involved 55 dives in two special submersible vehicles that spent a total of more than 285 hours far beneath the waves. Some of the dives went deeper than 3,000 feet.

 The team of scientists and filmmakers on the mission came from a variety of institutions, including the National Science Museum of Japan, the Discovery Channel and the Japanese broadcaster NHK.

They used equipment including “ultra-sensitive camera systems with light invisible to squid, bio luminescent lures and secret squid attractants,” the Discovery Channel said.
NHK and the Discovery Channel say they plan to air their programs about the squid sighting this month.

“Dramatic” New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120720-maya-temple-el-zotz-masks-faces-science-houston/

The Maya sun god as shark-man—one of his several guises on a newfound monument in Guatemala.

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published July 20, 2012

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.

 

Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico‘s Yucatán region (Maya map)—was a loose aggregation of city-states. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

“This has been a growing awareness to us since the 1990s, when it became clear that a few kingdoms were more important than others,” said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who announced the discovery of the new temple Thursday.

El Zotz, in what’s now Guatemala, was one of the smaller kingdoms, but one apparently bent on making a big impression.

By 2010 archaeologists working on a hilltop near the ancient city center had discovered 45-foot-tall (13-meter-tall) Diablo Pyramid. Atop it they found a royal palace and a tomb, believed to hold the city’s first ruler, who lived around A.D. 350 to 400.

Around the same time, Houston and a colleague spotted the first hints of the Temple of the Night Sun, behind the royal tomb on Diablo Pyramid. Only recently, though, have excavations uncovered the unprecedented artworks under centuries of overgrowth.

 

Solar Power

The sides of the temple are decorated with 5-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall) stucco masks showing the face of the sun god changing as he traverses the sky over the course of a day.

(Related: “Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 ‘Doomsday’ Myth.”)

One mask is sharklike, likely a reference to the sun rising from the Caribbean in the east, Houston said.

The noonday sun is depicted as an ancient being with crossed eyes who drank blood, and a final series of masks resemble the local jaguars, which awake from their jungle slumbers at dusk.

In Maya culture the sun is closely associated with new beginnings and the sun god with kingship, Houston explained. So the presence of solar visages on a temple next to a royal tomb may signify that the person buried inside was the founder of a dynasty—El Zotz’s first king.

It’s an example of “how the sun itself would have been grafted onto the identity of kings and the dynasties that would follow them,” he said in a press statement.

Maya archaeologist David Freidel added, “Houston’s hypothesis is likely correct that the building was dedicated to the sun as a deity closely linked to rulership. The Diablo Pyramid will certainly advance our knowledge of Early Classic Maya religion and ritual practice.”

Houston’s team also found hints that the Maya, who added new layers to the temple over generations, regarded the building as a living being. For example, the noses and mouths of the masks in older, deeper layers of the temple were systematically disfigured.

“This is actually quite common in Maya culture,” Houston told National Geographic News. “It’s very hard to find any Mayan depiction of the king that doesn’t have its eyes mutilated or its nose hacked … but ‘mutilation’ is not the appropriate term to describe it. I see it as more of a deactivation.

“It’s as if they’re turning the masks off in preparation for replicating them in subsequent layers … It’s not an act of disrespect. It’s quite the opposite.”

(Also See “End of World in 2012? Maya ‘Doomsday’ Calendar Explained.”)

“Gold Mine of Information”

Maya scholar Simon Martin said the masks on the newfound El Zotz temple are “completely unique” and valuable, because they could help verify theories about Maya portrayals of the sun god.

“We have images of the sun god at different stages … but we’ve never found anything that puts it all together,” said Martin, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, who was not involved in the project.

“We’ve had to assemble [the sequence] from bits and pieces of information and just trust that we got it right. This could be an opportunity to see the whole thing stage by stage.”

The temple is also wonderfully well preserved, Martin added, making it a “real gold mine of information.”

“We’ve seen a few places where whole buildings have been preserved,” he said. “But normally what happens is [the Maya] smashed up a building and then built on top of it, so when you dig into a building you don’t find very much of their decoration.”

By contrast, Maya workers at El Zotz went to great pains to preserve the original temple structure, going so far as padding it with earth and small rocks before building on top of it.

(Take a Maya quiz.)

Facing Out

Archaeologist Karl Taube points out the craftsmanship of the masks. “They’re three-dimensional. The faces push out of the side of the facade. You don’t really see that very often … because if they project too much they fall off. But here they were able to pull it off.

“With the play of light on these things, the faces would have been extremely dramatic,” said Taube, of the University of California, Riverside (UCR),who also was not involved in the project.

Project leader Houston added that the masks’ color—crimson, according to paint traces—would have also helped them stand out. “With that bright red pigment, it would have had a particularly marked effect at dawn and at the setting of the sun,” Houston said.

Blazing red and perched on high, the Temple of the Night Sun was meant “to see and to be seen,” Houston said.

Importantly, it would have been noticeable from Tikal, a larger, older, and more powerful kingdom that El Zotz may or may not have been on friendly terms with.

“We tend to think of kings being completely autonomous, but for the Maya, a sacred king was often part of a hierarchy of kings,” the Penn Museum’s Martin said.

“So the people at El Zotz at times may have been heavily under the influence of Tikal, and when powers were weak at Tikal, they may have been completely independent or may have linked themselves with more powerful kings somewhere else.”

“A Lot More Discoveries” to Come?

Despite the obvious care that was taken to construct and preserve the newfound temple, it wasn’t used for long. Evidence at the site suggests the building was abandoned sometime in the fifth century, for reasons unknown.

“It’s like they just dropped their tools and left” in the middle of once again expanding the temple, Houston said. “I think what you’re looking at is the death of a dynasty.”

The answer to this mystery and others could become evident as more of the Temple of the Night Sun is uncovered.

“Only 30 percent of this facade has been exposed,” UCR’s Taube said. “I think there’re going to be a lot more discoveries and a broader understanding of what this building actually shows in the future.”

 

Scientists create artificial jellyfish from rat heart cells

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0723/Scientists-create-artificial-jellyfish-from-rat-heart-cells-video

Using rat heart muscle cells and a thin silicone film, researchers have constructed a swimming jellyfish like creature that can be used to study everything from marine biology to cardiac physiology.

Building a jelly
Jellyfish for tissue engineering

The odd jellyfish mimic, dubbed a “Medusoid” by its creators, is more than a curiosity. It’s a natural biological pump, just like the human heart. That makes it a good model to use to study cardiac physiology, said study researcher Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University.

“The idea is to look at a muscular pump other than the heart or other muscular organ and see if there are some fundamental similarities, or design principles, that are conserved across them,” Parker told LiveScience. “This study revealed that there are.”

 

Jellyfish propel themselves with a pumping action, as anyone who has ever watched them float around an aquarium tank can attest. Parker was looking for a way to tackle questions about the heart that aren’t well understood when he saw some jellyfish in a display in 2007.

 

 

“I thought, ‘I can build this,'” he said.

The ingredients were rat heart muscle cells and a thin silicone film. (“The world needs less rats and more jellyfish, so I thought it would be cool to do a one-for-one swap,” Parker joked.) Along with researchers from the California Institute of Technology, he and his team engineered the cells and silicone in a pattern that mimicked the structure of a real jellyfish. They then stuck the creature in a tank full of electrically conducting fluid and zapped it with current.

The result was a swimming, pulsating creature that acts not unlike a real jellyfish (without the eating and reproducing, of course).

These artificial jellies can solve different problems for different scientists, Parker said. A marine biologist might learn more about the architecture of a jellyfish and how it swims. A comparative biologist can compare the pumping action of the Medusoid to that of the heart. For tissue engineers, the exercise was a lesson in design and quality control. And for biological proponent experts, the system is a model that mimics how real propulsive swimmers do it.

Parker is interested in using the Medusoids for cardiovascular drug development and as a step in new designs for artificial hearts. He also has plans to go bigger.

The next step, he said, is to “pick another animal that has a more difficult anatomy and function, and build it. Give me a year or two!”

Parker and his colleagues report their results today (July 22) in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Scientists Afflict Computers With ‘Schizophrenia’ to Better Understand the Human Brain

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505124002.htm

ScienceDaily (May 6, 2011) — Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.

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The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience,” says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.”

The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what’s meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren’t real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story.

The neural network used by Grasemann and his adviser, Professor Risto Miikkulainen, is called DISCERN. Designed by Miikkulainen, DISCERN is able to learn natural language. In this study it was used to simulate what happens to language as the result of eight different types of neurological dysfunction. The results of the simulations were compared by Ralph Hoffman, professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, to what he saw when studying human schizophrenics.

In order to model the process, Grasemann and Miikkulainen began by teaching a series of simple stories to DISCERN. The stories were assimilated into DISCERN’s memory in much the way the human brain stores information-not as distinct units, but as statistical relationships of words, sentences, scripts and stories.

“With neural networks, you basically train them by showing them examples, over and over and over again,” says Grasemann. “Every time you show it an example, you say, if this is the input, then this should be your output, and if this is the input, then that should be your output. You do it again and again thousands of times, and every time it adjusts a little bit more towards doing what you want. In the end, if you do it enough, the network has learned.”

In order to model hyperlearning, Grasemann and Miikkulainen ran the system through its paces again, but with one key parameter altered. They simulated an excessive release of dopamine by increasing the system’s learning rate-essentially telling it to stop forgetting so much.

“It’s an important mechanism to be able to ignore things,” says Grasemann. “What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia.”

After being re-trained with the elevated learning rate, DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall. In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.

In another instance, DISCERN began showing evidence of “derailment”-replying to requests for a specific memory with a jumble of dissociated sentences, abrupt digressions and constant leaps from the first- to the third-person and back again.

“Information processing in neural networks tends to be like information processing in the human brain in many ways,” says Grasemann. “So the hope was that it would also break down in similar ways. And it did.”

The parallel between their modified neural network and human schizophrenia isn’t absolute proof the hyperlearning hypothesis is correct, says Grasemann. It is, however, support for the hypothesis, and also evidence of how useful neural networks can be in understanding the human brain.

“We have so much more control over neural networks than we could ever have over human subjects,” he says. “The hope is that this kind of modeling will help clinical research.”

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin.

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Journal Reference:

1. Ralph E. Hoffman, Uli Grasemann, Ralitza Gueorguieva, Donald Quinlan, Douglas Lane, Risto Miikkulainen. Using Computational Patients to Evaluate Illness Mechanisms in Schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 2011; DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.12.036

Tube-Nosed Bat, More Rare Species Found (10/2010)

found via : http://chrisperridas.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-bat-discovered.html

 

A Nose for Fruit

Photograph courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International

This tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009—including a katydid that “aims for the eyes” and a frog that does a mean cricket impression, Conservation International announced late Tuesday.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In all, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea’s Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges found 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects. The remote island country’s mountain ranges—which have yielded troves of new and unusual species in recent years—are accessible only by plane, boat, foot, or helicopter.
(Also see pictures of new species from Papua New Guinea’s “Lost World.”)
—Rachel Kaufman

Published October 6, 2010

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/photogalleries/101006-papua-new-guinea-species-tube-nosed-bat-science-animal-pictures/#/papua-new-guinea-new-species-bat_27185_600x450.jpg

Zoologger: Horror fly returns from the dead (10/2010)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19359-zoologger-horror-fly-returns-from-the-dead.html

found via http://grimreviews.blogspot.com/

Species: Thyreophora cynophila

Habitat: Oak forests in central western Europe – on and around dead mammals

This week: a mythical beast, not seen for more than 160 years. A nocturnal animal that feeds on the rotten flesh of large mammals. A species active only during the winter months that reportedly emits a luminous glow from its large, orange head. What new horror is this?

It’s a fly, the bone skipper Thyreophora cynophila, and it is back from the dead. Considered globally extinct until now, the first fly to be killed off by humans, the bone skipper was first described by an entomologist who found it on the carcass of a dog in 1798. Last seen in the 1840s, it has now been rediscovered by Daniel Martín-Vega and colleagues of the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. The fly turned up in baited traps in woodland around Madrid and in La Rioja province.

As might be expected of a species described as “mythical” even by entomologists and that until recently hadn’t been seen in living memory, little is known of its feeding ecology or its behaviour. But we can make some educated guesses.
Big rotters

T. cynophila is sarcosaprophagous: that is, it specialises in eating and breeding in marrow from crushed bones of large mammals such as deer. In the past such carcasses would have been relatively common in European forests after kills by bears and wolves, but these days are scarce.

The decline in large predators coincided with the ecological effects of the industrial revolution: on farms across Europe livestock were better managed and carcasses disposed of in ways that left fewer bones for bone skippers. It is one of the dangers of overspecialisation that when the thing you rely on disappears, you yourself are imperilled – lessons for us all here.

Whether the newly discovered specimens have found something else to feed on and breed in is unknown, as the larvae have not been observed.

Envy the cousins

It would be surprising, however, if they didn’t show the “leaping” behaviour characteristic of this family of flies (the Piophilidae). Bone skipper larvae curl and rapidly uncurl their bodies, thus skipping over their rotten-flesh meal and earning their common name. Larvae of a related fly, the cheese skipper, are only 8 millimetres long but can leap 15 centimetres into the air. These are the maggots, incidentally, that are intentionally added to pecorino in Sardinia, Italy, producing casa marzu rotten cheese.

Martín-Vega and colleagues were studying the colonisation of carrion as part of a forensic entomology study. The Piophilidae are valuable to police in ageing corpses and time of death, as they do not colonise bodies until three to six months after death. Martín-Vega speculates that one of the reasons T. cynophila has evaded entomologists for so long is because collections are not usually made in winter, when the flies are most active. Nor are most entomologists inclined to collect insects from highly decayed corpses.

The bright orange head and blue body of the males suggest that sexual selection is strong in the species, and that like the cheese skippers, bone skippers fight other males and court females. In the 19th century, entomologists impressed by the orange head reported that it could glow in the dark.
Journal reference: Systematic Entomology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3113.2010.00541.x

I want it. And I want it now.

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

 

I was standing chatting with some friends; Luke was trying to achieve eye contact with me. I looked at him and asked “what do you want?” He grabbed his bottle of water that hangs off my dog pouch and pulled. He had just had a drink of water; I don’t want him drinking too much at a time on a walk so I told him no more. He then grabbed his bowl which is also attached to the pouch; hmmmmm. I do not like demanding behavior; Luke wanted attention and wanted me to stop talking and keep walking. “Knock it off;” I told him making it clear that this was not acceptable behavior. He then gave me a quick look and ran off.

The other day in the park I watched as a young and very obnoxious dog attempted to control his guardian. The dog was off leash when I got there and by it’s behavior I knew I didn’t want it coming my way. I had Jessie and at 14 and grouchy she will not put up with obnoxious. The woman saw us and attempted to put the leash on; the dog was not helping. He was jumping; spinning and biting her arms and the leash. Once the leash was on he jumped and bit at the leash and her arms the entire time. She was fighting with him but he was winning; I was just glad she got the leash on.

All dogs can try your patience; some will test, some will push. The end result and lesson will result by what you do in return. Many demanding behaviors can seem cute to start with; “oh look he wants to walk himself.” So if you don’t know what is actually going on you can reinforce an obnoxious behavior. You not only allow it but you encourage it. Yikes.

Leash grabbing and yanking is a very common demanding behavior. Your dog may not feel like being on leash or want to go in an opposite direction as you want. They grab the leash and start pulling; or they start jumping up at you and biting. You may try to pull the leash back and a game of tug-o-war starts. That was easy; your dog simply had to tug on the leash and you oblige with a game. The annoying jumping resulted in a game of push and shove; it may not be fun to you but your dog got the attention he was seeking.

Depending on the demanding behavior will factor in how you should react. Ignoring is the first step; it is often all that is needed. If you watch dogs interacting they too use ignoring to deter attention seeking behavior. But if it is a persistant type dog or a behavior that has previously been reinforced; ignoring will often create a “gets worse before it gets better” situation. The best reaction is to nip it in the bud so to speak; at the first sign you must react. Often it can be avoided in entirety if you are quick enough. When you see the first sign of leash grabbing or whatever the demanding behavior is you do something else. Something that creates an incompatible behavior. Doing some heeling; learning a new trick, pick up the pace of your walk, do direction training, work on your dogs catch. By creating an incompatible behavior situation you get rid of the demanding behavior. But as is typically the case you must have good timing; you want to avoid any idea that the demanding behavior caused a good reaction; meaning reinforcing of bad behavior.

A good example is; Luke is demanding attention from me. So as to not create a reinforcing situation I will ignore him; walk away and make like I am involved in some other activity. As soon as he is distracted from getting my attention I will pick up the lead and get into some serious obedience training. If he decided to bite his leash while on a walk for some attention; he would not get it. He would get a huge sigh of disgust from me and ignoring. Defusing an attention seeking behavior is very tricky; you must take the utmost of care to have your timing down and in no way reward it.

If your dog is displaying a demanding behavior; think about what their agenda is. What are they wanting? Watch, ponder and learn. Many dogs bark outside so that you will then come and let them in; works doesn’t it? Nudging at your hand while you are watching your favorite show is a great way to demand attention. Staring at the soaked tennis ball at your feet works like a charm. If they stare hard enough; you throw it right? Often these are the small things that mess up a good relationship; just who is in charge? And when you look at your relationship closely you may discover that it is not you at all that is in charge.

Controlling the beast

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

 

I’m sure everyone who walks their dog on a regular basis has crossed paths with a not so friendly dog on a leash. Typically the owner of these dogs is mortified; which they should not be, it is alot more common than not. In our world of leash laws; we have taken away our dogs ability to freely communicate. Correspondence get lost as the leash tightens. And as we humans tend to do; as the leash tightens igniting a frenzy from our dogs, we are sent into a stress induced adrenaline rush. So not only are we left with a dog that needs work; we need even more work.

Just the other day I had Luke out for a really nice walk; it was cool, we were relaxed and enjoying the fresh morning. Up ahead was a woman I’d seen before; two doxie’s (weiner dogs) that were a bit feisty but nothing had happened before. This fact could have been because I usually give feisty a good big space. But this morning was different; one of the little dogs went off on Luke and slipped his collar which enabled him to charge us. He made impact and Luke countered his tiny attack; I pulled Luke in and the woman grabbed her dog. I quickly kicked into chill mode “whoa; that was pretty weird eh Luke?” This is imperative; and we happy continued our walk unphased. And I should add that the woman did not apologize for this attack; please always apologize.

There is another dog that we see regularly at the park; this is not a small dog but it acts in the same manner. The problem is with this one is that it looks like the gentleman who walks this dog is just barely hanging on. No one wants to see a big dog going crazy on the end of the leash with someone who looks like they are loosing their grip; literally. Control is the first issue; you need to make sure that this dog is not going to slip their collar or slip out of your hands. Had the doxie that went after Luke gone after one of the other dogs at the park; things could have turned out very different for the little dog.

Along with control is space; you must give yourself enough space to calm the beast. When you start working with a dog that has leash aggression issues you need to go far enough away from what causes the problem to alleviate the problem, then start there. Often sight alone starts it all so you may need to be 40-50 feet away to start teaching the calm. But the first thing that needs to be worked on is your own calm and knowing that your dog is firmly attached by their collar or harness and that you are capable of holding the leash is a starting point. When you know your dog is securely attached and that you have good control; calm is within reach for you. Having a flustered owner on the other end of the leash only fuels a leash aggressive dog.

So take a breath; chill, hold tight and get some distance. Now go walk your dog.

Never bring your dogs to a Fireworks display

Fear and fireworks

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

 

NEVER BRING YOUR DOG TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAY

With July 4th just around the corner I thought I’d talk about this particular fear based behavior. Tilley is my fearful dog; she is terrified of fireworks. She never use to be; back when we lived in Canada it was Clyde (my male before Luke) who was petrified of storms and fireworks. It was about 6 years ago when she first showed signs of fireworks fear. Up until that point she had been fine with storms and light up the sky celebrations. So what happened? Who knows but she is now one of the many dogs fearful of fireworks.

All dogs display their fear differently; Tilley digs, she is luckily not a runner. Clyde was a climber and runner; running is the worst. If they get out of the safety of their home they can end up anywhere as they mindless attempt to run from the explosions. But luckily Tilley doesn’t run; she hides and has been found in the bathroom; perhaps she feels safe in the small room. I located her once in our closet; she had tossed the entire contents in the small area everywhere. She’d dug and dug to no avail; there she lay at the top of the heap that she’d created. Tilley is obviously trying to hide; to somehow get away from the object of her fear by digging a hole.

Since the appearance of her fireworks fear have tried our best to ignore it and go about our business as usual. We rarely go out to watch the displays; opting to be at home just to be sure that she is fine. But last year we tried something new; we have a great balcony off of our bedroom where we sit and watch. The displays are pretty far away so there is no loud booming or huge explosions right near where we sit; it is all in the distance. We got chairs out and brought the three dogs out there to watch with us. Because they are so far away; I thought it might just help her to become accustom to the sound so that she may have a lesser fear response. (NEVER BRING YOUR DOG TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAY) We sat with a glass of wine and chatted; Luke and Jessie lay on their bed and Tilley paced. She paced and sat; then paced some more. So I asked her to come and sit by me; I did not touch her.

Soon she started to relax; everything around her was calm, I got my camera out with my big zoom lens and shot fireworks and she watched us intently. This is when it is EXTREMELY important to play “chill.” You need to do your best and most relaxed display of behavior ever; sort of like “what fireworks?” She was soon relaxing; not completely but there was a marked improvement. I decided to get out her ball and see if we could even create a positive association; all is well when you are playing with a tennis ball. I tossed it around to see if there was any tiny interest; Luke snatched it up in a flash. This was good because it took Tilley’s mind off of the noise and flashes and onto Luke stealing the tennis ball. And with Luke playing ball; this had a very calming affect on Tilley.

She is not cured of her fireworks fear but she sure got through it last year with flying colors. This year I am hoping to try out a product call the Thunder shirt; I am very excited to try it out and hope that it gets here in time for the fireworks display. And on Tilley’s next visit to the vet I will give it a try as well; she comes unglued when there is a veterinarian visit required.

For all dog owners; even ones who do not have dogs that already show signs of fear during fireworks, pay extra attention to safety.

– Make sure that your dog is indoors safely confined; keep dog doors closed.
– Turn the tv or radio on to add some constant noise.
– If your dog is fearful; best to stay home with them.
– Many dogs become injured trying to get out of a house when they are in such a state of fear; often a crate is the only safe place for these guy.
– Never respond to fear behaviors with petting and hugging.
– Put on your best “chill” face; inform the entire family to do the same.

Far too many dogs end up in shelters or worse on July 4th; left in their yard they become frenzied and attempt to escape the noise. Once they are out they will just run. In this state they have no idea where they are running; they are just running. So lock up the dogs on July 4th and NEVER BRING YOUR DOGS TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAYS.

The Devil Rides Out : How Dennis Wheatley sold black magic to Britain

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2623/the_devil_rides_out.html

FT256

William Blake’s verdict on Milton was: “Of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, and much the same could be said of Dennis Wheatley. He virtually invented the popular image of Satanism in 20th-century Britain, and he made it seem strangely seductive. If the appeal of Black Magic in popular culture was ultimately erotic, then this was largely due to Wheatley’s writing, with its reliable prospect of virg ins being ritually ravished on altar tops.

By the time he died in 1977, Wheatley had shifted around 50 million books, helped by a massive surge in paperback sales during the “occult explosion” of the late Sixties and early Seventies. By then, his books seemed to be every where, in a uniform range of black paperbacks, each one featuring a naked woman who seemed to be go-go dancing behind a splurge of flame.

She was the same on each cover, but the occult props varied: on different books you’d find a skull with a black candle, a leather-bound tome, a goat’s head, a crystal ball, a tribal mask, and so on: all the décor of the arts of darkness. Inside the books, it was secret Sabbats, Satanists in mansions, astral projection, masked orgies, and the rest. The public couldn’t get enough of it.

Thanks to Wheatley, people “knew” what Black Magic and Satanism – historic ally an almost non-existent phen omenon – were like. Professor Jean La Fontaine made an astute link to Wheatley-derived imagery in her debunking of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, and Ronald Hutton, inThe Triumph of the Moon, remembers adolescents borrowing “risqué imagery” from Wheatley’s books to decorate parties: “For my generation of Essex teenagers, they represented the essential primer in diabolism.”

Their salacious promise of something impendingly kinky made Wheatley’s books particularly popular with adolescents, but they had a far wider appeal. There is a comforting air of luxury and connoisseurship about the world of Wheatley, particularly in the Duke de Richleau books such asThe Devil Rides Out, where the Duke’s flat in Curzon Street has a Tibetan Buddha on a lotus, ancient bronzes, jewelled Russian icons and “curiously carved ivories from the East”. Along with his knowledge of the mystic arts, like a prototypical Doctor Strange, the smoking-jacketed Duke also enjoys his Imperial Tokay wine and his Hoyo de Monterrey cigars.

With their attention to drink and food (“the bécasse is a bird for which I have a quite exceptional partiality”), their old-style English values, and the pukka decency of their leading characters, the Duke de Richleau books have an almost Christmassy warmth. But it is not Dickensian; it is anaristocratic warmth – or an idealised suburban fantasy of it – creating a realm where pentagrams are drawn on the floors of country house libraries, and the Prince of Darkness rubs shoulders with rare books and fine wines.

Despite the fact that the Duke and his friends battle against Satanism, Wheatley infused the whole idea of the occult with something of his own snobbery, and the association stuck. “What really happens ‘after the Ball is over’ at leading country houses?” asked the blurb of June Johns’s 1971 book Black Magic Today (published by iconic paperback imprint the New English Library, which also published Richard Allen’s Skinhead books).

Another New English Library title, Sandra Shulman’s 1970 novel The Degenerates (“exposes the evil of Satanism in Britain today”) features an evil cult in swinging London. Young ingénueJenny is taken to an extremely select party (“like one of those exclusive clubs – White’s or the Athenæum”) where she is wide-eyed at the carpets and tapestries: “[E]ven the wall of leather-bound books… suggested another unknown world. This, she understood with dismay, was real class.”

Incense drifts up from gilded burners and there is a candle burning between the horns of a gigantic goat-headed effigy. There are lobsters and caviar before the time comes for Jenny’s ritual ravishment (“[T]hey will hold you down until your initiation is accomplished”). It is a “rare sideshow of depravity”, but these people are not just any old degenerates: “Maxted and Mireille argued about the true value of a Chinese grey jade figurine which had recently been auctioned at Sotheby’s.” Jenny’s companion, David, recognises the ambience at once: “He had whiled away hours… in the company of too many Wheatley characters not to recognise the Satanic set-up.” Indeed.

BRITAIN’S OCCULT UNCLE
Along with Sex and Snobbery (two of the “three esses” that critic Cyril Connolly thought were central to successful popular fiction, the other being Sadism; he was thinking particularly of the James Bond books), people also got a certain amount of spiritual sustenance from Wheatley. Whatever the subject – and the occult was only a part of Wheatley’s output, although it’s the part he will be remembered for – Wheatley’s books were always research-heavy, and this has a special role in his occult books, where the relentless parade of factoids starts to wear down the reader’s disbelief.

The Devil Rides Out is so insistently packed with esoteric lore that readers soon learn about the astral plane, elemental spirits, the inner meaning of alchemy, familiars, grimoires, scrying, and the rest. The effect is richly atmospheric, with an immersion in specialised jargon such as “passing the Abyss”, the “dispersion of Choronzon”, “St Walburga’s Eve”, the “Clavicule of Solomon”, “Our Lady of Babalon”, and the Golden Dawn levels of Magister Templi, Neophyte, Zelator, and Ipsissimus.

Plenty of modern occultists began with Wheatley’s books, although they might not always admit it. From The Devil Rides Out alone, the main planks of an occult worldview are clear: mind rules matter; spirit is transcendent; the soul is eternal; we move through successive incarnations “towards the light”; and there are “Hidden Masters” operating above and behind the scenes.

Coming largely from the wider cult ural fall-out of Theosophy, this is an uplifting package with an undeniable popular appeal. Wheatley writes partic ularly well about astral projection or out-of-body-experi ence, which was also a powerful draw in the bestselling works of Lobsang Rampa (aka Cyril Hoskins; see FT63:24–26) and the anthropological fraud Carlos Castaneda (see FT117:42–44; 238:56–57).

Wheatley had an immense mailbag and he answered his fan letters diligently, but he noticed his occult books brought a different quality of post; a number of the writers were clearly deranged. Looking back on his life, he preferred to dwell on the letters he had received from physically sick people in hospital, who said his books had enabled them to forget their pain. His books would be doubly comforting in the circumstances, not just for their page-turning distraction but the transcendent occult message of mind over body.

By the time he published his non-fiction religious compendium The Devil And All His Works(1971), Wheatley had become Britain’s occult uncle, and his publishers cashed in on this towards the end of his life with a paperback series called “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult”. Originally planned to include hundreds of books, it ended up running to 45 – Bram Stoker, Blavatsky, Sax Rohmer, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany and many more – with undemanding introduct­ions by Wheatley. Barbara Cartland lent her name to “The Barbara Cartland Library of Love” around the same time.

Wheatley’s identification with the occult – and his famously bad prose style – meant a certain comedy value grew up round his name, albeit affectionate, and it has been there ever since. Still, it was hard work being a national figure; batt ing back letters from teen agers, lecturing to Church of England clergymen about demonic possession, and even giving his specialist opinion on crimes that might have an occult angle, such as the Charles Manson Family murders.

In fact, Wheatley was getting remarkable mileage out a rather superfcial knowledge of the occult. It was based particularly on the works of the Reverend Montague Summers, along with Grillot de Givry’s Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. 

In the 1930s, he befriended a number of occultists for his research, notably Summers and Rollo Ahmed, and he treated Aleister Crowley to a slap-up lunch at the Hungaria Restaurant on Regent Street. In later life, he was happy to give the impression of a more protracted acquaintance, but in reality he wasn’t keen to see Crowley again.

Wheatley believed in reincarnation, but he was less absorbed in the occult than his popular image suggests: he would like to have been equally remembered as a writer of thrillers and historical romances, but it was clear what his public wanted and by the end of his life he had to go along with it. His deeper interests were history and politics, and these were weirdly intertwined with his more clandestine personal mission as a writer, which we can now see hidden in full view.

SATANISTS AND SWASTIKAS 
Like many thriller writers, Wheatley was a man of frankly reactionary opinions. In his Cold War thriller Curtain of Fear, a foolish left-wing professor remembers reading a book by none other than Dennis Wheatley, a “drum-banging” writer whose characters “glorified the sort of reactionary sentiments that had been current in Disraeli’s day. They were absurd and unreal, and wickedly calculated to inspire anti-social ideas in the young…”

Wheatley often wrote himself into his books. One of his early thrillers,Such Power Is Dangerous, is set in the Hollywood film industry, where a character plans to film a novel calledThe Forbidden Territory. We are told it has “sledge scenes in the snow – aeroplanes – a gun-fight with the Reds in a ruined chateau, and a dash to the frontier in a high-powered car… plenty of love interest… great spectacle… educative value”, and “It’s by a feller named Wheatley – who he is, God knows”. In another writer, this overlap between art and life might be almost avant-garde… if it wasn’t for the asterisked footnote announcing the book was available from Hutchinson at 7/6d.

The dangerous power of the title is media power, and it shows an acutely Thirties awareness of what a critic of the time, IA Richards, called “the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker”. In the opening chapter, “A Plot to Dominate the World”, criminal dwarf Lord Gavin Fortescue explains that by means of a film monopoly he and his co-conspirators can not only achieve limitless wealth, but “…our sphere of influence would be unbounded. By the type of film which we chose to produce we could influence the mass psychology of nations.”

All his life, Wheatley had an intense consciousness of media power and propa ganda. Propaganda was a particularly well-known concept in Wheatley’s intellect ually formative years between the wars, when the press baron Lord Beaverbook described Christ as “the Divine propagand ist”, and people woke up to the fact that there was as much, if not more, power in owning newspapers as there was in reaching elected office.

Wheatley had a more frivolous confirm ation of media influence when he worked as a celebrity gossip columnist in the Thirt ies. Reporting a dance, he conspired with some other society journalists to invent a fictitious beauty named Ermintrude Wraxwell. Next day, offers starting coming in from agents and film companies: “Had we named a real girl, we could have made a fortune for her.”

After being an army officer and then a Mayfair wine merchant, Wheatley started writing thrillers after his business was caught out by the Wall Street Crash. He had already written five books when he found his real subject in 1934 with The Devil Rides Out, a book with a special mess age for contemporary readers.

Hitler had come to power in 1933, and already people feared another war. It was expected to be like the last, only worse. Along with the attrition of the Western Front trenches, there would be new weapons such as “death rays”, and the poison gas bombing of cities. The technology of bombing was known to have improved, and it was widely believed London could be completely destroyed in the opening stages of a new conflagration.

There was a further reason for avoiding war in some circles, which was that Hitler was thought to be preferable to Bolshevism, and even a useful antidote to it. Wheatley was in this camp, and he sympathised with Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts. Press barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere were also opposed to war, in Rothermere’s case because he was another Fascist sympathiser, believing that “[T]he sturdy young Nazis are Europe’s guardians against the Communist danger.” Rothermere’s flagship paper, the Daily Mail, was also pro-Mosley; so much so that in January 1934 it carried a piece by Rothermere himself, with the headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”.

And so it was that on Hallowe’en 1934, the Mail began a thrilling new serial novel about a struggle to avoid a new war with Germany. It wasThe Devil Rides Out, by “master of sensation” Dennis Wheatley. The Thirties subtext, lost in the celebrated 1968 Hammer film and now largely forgotten, is that the Satanists are trying to start a new war, and the Duke de Richleau and his chums have to stop them. Rescuing his Jewish friend Simon Aron from the Satanists with a sock on the jaw, the Duke places a supernatural charm around his neck to keep him safe; in one of the weirder moments in Thirties fiction, it is a golden swastika, which the Duke explains is “the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world…”

The swastika was not so associated with Nazism as it has been since the War: as an Eastern charm, it appeared on the covers of Kipling books (and, perhaps less innocently, it was given away as a lucky watch fob by Coca-Cola, which later sponsored the Berlin Olympics). The Duke’s comments are not pro-Nazi, and it may even be that Wheatley was trying to weaken the strong ‘brand identity’ of Nazism, prising the swastika loose from it.

At the same time, Germany is specific ally exonerated from having caused World War I. “I thought the Germans got a bit above themselves,” says the Duke’s friend Rex van Ryn, to which the Duke says “You fool! Germany did not make the War. It came out of Russia.” It was caused by Rasputin, supposedly a black magician. This exemption from blame is part of the book’s inner message, which is (to borrow a line from Noel Coward) “Let’s not be beastly to the Hun.”

Given the strong overlap between the esoteric and far-right sensibilities – noticed by Orwell, among others, who mentions in his essay on WB Yeats that the French Fascist paper Gringoirewas crammed with adverts for astrologers – it is extremely fitt ing that the greatest popular occult novel of the 20th century should have a subtext of peace with Nazi Germany.

WHEATLEY’S WAR
Wheatley changed his mind about Mosley and Hitler, and he had an extraordinary war. He began by writing papers for the King and the Joint Planning Staff on subjects such as Resistance to Invasion, where he advocated a last-ditch civilian struggle of the kind never yet seen in Britain, with every village doing its bit to delay the German advance by digging in to die as an isolated unit.

His masterpiece of the period, however, was Total War, which had some quite sophisticated ideas about the war in general: Wheatley argued that while WWI had been a tribal war, WWII was better understood as a civil war (an idea which must have made particular sense after being a fellow-traveller of the other side only a few years earlier).

Further, “Total War” was idea war: “…the decisive sphere of Total War is the Mental Sphere,” and “The primary Power Instrument of Total War is not Armed Force, but propaganda.” Armed force came third in Wheatley’s estimation, below propaganda and military intelligence; in fact, “Armed force must be considered as the backing for propaganda power.” As for propaganda itself, “the science of influencing ideas”, it “loses its value if it is recognised as propaganda”.

Wheatley moved from writing these papers to working in deception-planning, with extraordinary characters such as Dudley Clarke and Johnny Bevan. Lieutenant-Colonel Clarke was the founding genius of British deception in WWII and he became a legendary figure to his coll­eagues, although his sanity was questioned after he caused a diplomatic incident in neutral Spain, where he was arrested while dressed as a woman.

When the Allies were ready to invade Sicily, Johnny Bevan had to convince the Germans that an invasion of France was imminent instead. He had banknotes printed saying “British Army of Occupation in Northern France”, and Wheatley and others would accidentally hand these over in restaurants and shops, snatching them back when they had been seen. Later, even as the D-Day landings were happening in Normandy, Bevan and his colleagues had led the Germans to believe they were only a feint, so they continued to keep the bulk of their armoured divisions uselessly in the Pas de Calais where they expected the real attack.

British deception was one of the great success stories of the war, and by the strat egic legerdemain of arriving in decisive numbers where they were not expected, the Allies saved thousands of lives on both sides (See “Bodyguard of Lies”, FT185:38–45). It was also one of the great successes of Wheatley’s life, bringing him a new circle of friends and an enduring conn ection with the military and intelligence establishments.

Wheatley continued to write fiction during the early stages of the war, particularly thrillers about British secret agent Gregory Sallust, but in 1941 he published his second occult novel, Strange Conflict. This had the Nazis in league with a Haitian practitioner of voodoo, and its central supernatural feature is astral projection, used for spying purposes (it might sound like the sort of nonsense that belongs only in the world of Wheatley, but the American government later poured an estimated million into military clairvoyance experiments under the concept of “remote viewing”, notably in the CIA’s notorious Stargate Programme.

The idea of flying around on the astral plane was also calculated to lessen the fear of death – the Duke discusses exactly this aspect, as he encounters the spirits of the departed rising from blitzed buildings – and to prepare a wartime readership to endure widespread bereavement.

Like a one-man Ministry of Information, Wheatley thought this would be good for public morale, and there was a further mess age broadcast inStrange Conflict concerning the Blitz. Not only had the Blitz fallen heaviest on working class industrial areas, but many middle class people were able to leave London for the country, a freedom resented by those trapped in the capital. The King and Queen were booed in the East End, and the Blitz was proving socially divisive, as the Germans hoped it would. It is with this in mind that the Duke de Richleau makes a positive point of staying in London: “I loathe discomfort and boredom,” he says, “but no amount of either would induce me to leave London when there are such thousands of poor people who cannot afford to do so.”

RED DEVILS 
With the War over and the Cold War gett ing underway, Wheatley published The Haunting of Toby Jugg in 1948. Featuring a Satanic school, this was inspired by Wheatley’s inside knowledge of MI5’s investigation of Dartington Hall, a liberal arts-based school in Devon. It was in Jugg that Wheatley broached his great Cold War theme, suggesting that Communism was actually a cover for Satanism, and vice versa.

As a Satanist explains, Satan “mocks those who no longer believe in his existence by having them demonstrate in favour of rule by the Proletariat on the first of May. Have you never realised that it is his anniversary, and that it is born of May-day Eve – Walpurgis Nacht – on which we celebrate his festival?” Walpurgis Night or St.Walburga’s Eve should be familiar to Wheatley readers fromThe Devil Rides Out, while May Day, the old pagan festival and more recently international workers’ day, was the occasion of a massive military parade of troops, tanks and missiles through Moscow, once a familiar annual sight on British television.

The anti-Communist line continues almost routinely through Wheatley’s next occult thriller, To The Devil – A Daughter (one of Wheatley’s best books, featuring a girl with a split personality and a vill ain – Canon Copely-Syle – derived from Montague Summers) but there was a more specific message to come in 1956 with The Ka of Gifford Hillary. This features a man who comes back from the dead – in his Ka, a kind of astral self derived from Egyptian religion – after being killed, and manages to re-animate his body, only to find himself on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Along with a generous quota of thrills and spills, the novel contained a new and distinct message about nuclear armaments, making it very topical: CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was founded in 1957, a year after the book was published. The crux is that Britain must reduce her conventional weapons in order to afford nuclear weapons, and the public, despite their sentimental attachment to the old-style Army and Navy, must be brought onside. As a well-placed friend tells Sir Giff ord, the heaviest burden in a democracy is “persuading the mainly ignorant masses to accept a programme that sound evidence has shown to be best for them”.

The friend asks Sir Gifford if he will raise public awareness of the issues by rejecting a Ministry of Defence order for conventional warships, despite the knock to his firm’s profits, and writing a letter to The Timesto explain why he has done so. The Ka of Gifford Hillary was a remarkably well-informed book, slightly ahead of the 1957 White Paper on Defence. In publishing a million-seller with these pro-nuclear arguments, Wheatley achieved exactly the same publicity mission that Sir Gifford is asked to undertake within the narrative.

Having revealed in Toby Jugg that Commun ism in general was the new vehicle for Satanism, inThe Satanist (1960) Wheatley turned his attention to the Trade Union movement in particular. Again, it makes the book very much a document of its time, published a year after the Boulting Brothers comedy I’m All Right, Jack, with Peter Sellers as the Stalinist shop steward Fred Kite.

Communist influence was widespread in some unions, furthered by rigged elect ions, and The Satanist opens in the office of Colonel “Conky Bill” Verney, a character loosely based on Maxwell Knight, a friend of Wheatley’s in MI5. One of his agents has been crucified upside down with his throat cut, and his discussion of this horrible event slides smoothly into ballot-rigging and the spectre of Satanic Trade Unionism.

Society seemed to be falling to pieces in the late Sixties and early Seventies, with industrial unrest, student rebellion and terrorism. Britain was also coming to terms with multi-culturalism, Enoch Powell was talking about “rivers of blood”, and the Black Power movement was prominent in America. In the last of his major occult novels,Gateway to Hell (1970), Wheatley’s new worry was Black Power, and he tried to defuse the pro spect of worldwide race war.

Wheatley’s anxieties about everything going to the dogs were equally visible in his non-fiction magnum opus The Devil And All His Works(1971). Wheatley was far from alone in this – as the Seventies crisis continued there was talk of “private armies” and plans in Britain for counter-revolution – but the particular spin he gave it was distinctly his own. “Is it possible that riots, wildcat strikes, anti-apartheid demonstrations and the appalling increase in crime have any connection with magic and Satanism?” he asked his readers.

Wheatley’s whole career is remarkable for its calculated propaganda angle. His books were a mixture of potboiling and public service – at least according to his own values – written to manipulate the national consciousness. It’s fascinating that this should be particularly true of his occult books.

There are several reasons for this, the simplest being that they tend to be contemporary (and obviously better suited to play with current fears than his Napol eonic-era Roger Brook series, for example). They hold up a kind of magic mirror to their times. But over and above that, it is peculiarly appropriate to the overlap between propaganda and magic as means of influencing consciousness within an idea-led, thought-driven view of the world, tampering with reality by means of words and images. It was in this context that Capt ain JFC Fuller – occultist, historian, tank expert, and associate of both Crowley and Hitler – told readers of the Occult Review that magic remained a “formidable weapon under the name of ‘propaganda’”. Talking of Germany’s chief PR man and “minister of public enlightenment”, he added: “Is not Dr Goebbels a magician?”