Here we are in a new year! Let’s hope it’s a good one.
Coming soon is a new post about what I did on vacation. I was looking for interesting natural phenomena and off-beat spooky things on an island in the middle of the sea. But during my extended holiday time off, I managed to write up two “year’s end” wrapups. These are available through my Substack platform (free to view and subscribe). Please check them out.
Favorite Weird News of 2022
I’m always going to be drawn to news of the odd and unusual, particularly regarding nature and belief in society. I put out a newsletter each week detailing the most interesting of these stories. Almost always, what is presented in the media is not the whole story and, it’s often mistaken or woefully incomplete. While it’s getting easier to find these kinds of stories, in some ways it is getting harder to figure them out. We are in a world of pseudo-events, where a Twitter post of an old item becomes new “news”. It takes effort to track down what really happened and pertinent details that help understand it. If the place of origin is non-English speaking, I may be sunk trying to figure things out. But I have gotten lucky. Crowdsourcing does have advantages. Here is my Top 10 list of most fascinating weird news stories of last year.
Mystery booms and Skyquakes of 2022
In 2021, I began keeping track of mystery booms reported in the media. Mystery booms are unsettling because they signal some sort of danger from below ground, on the surface, or in the sky. Often, we just can’t tell because sound is hard to trace. And then it’s gone. Better technology allows us to gather additional evidence for these sounds and, it turns out, many have definite or probable causes. While some dramatic commentators still insist the sounds herald the coming apocalypse, that’s not true. Instead, they are obvious mundane sources, suspected secret sources, or indicators of events to which we should certainly pay attention.
Join me on Mastodon
In other news, I’m officially off of Twitter. Please consider joining up on Mastodon. It’s been a excellent experience full of interesting, smart, and considerate people. No trolls, no ads, no insane and moronic billionaire whining babies. Here’s me: https://mstdn.social/@idoubtit
If you don’t want to sign up but use an RSS reader (like Feedly), you can follow any Mastodon feed there by adding .rss to the location for subscription. https://mstdn.social/@idoubtit.rss
You can probably tell that I switched back to the free version of WordPress hosting for this blog. I’m not very active (because I’m on Substack) and need to switch web hosts. Since I only have one site that needs a robust host (Spooky Geology), I’ll probably be keeping this one here on the free platform to avoid the hassles of web hosting of which there are many. My plan is to work on reconfiguring and writing more on Spooky Geo in the new year.
If you want to drop me a line the new old-fashioned way, I’m at lithospherica(at)gmail.com
Thanks for following my stuff! Best wishes to you in the coming trip round the sun.
