EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
THE WICKEDEST MAN IN FT
It’s been a long-running joke amiong FT readers that not an issue goes by without mention of a certain Mr Crowley. It’s a joke that our resident cartoonist, the one and only Hunt Emerson, has sometimes cheekily acknowledged in his equally long-running Phenomenomix strip, where the Great Beast has been known to pop up with some regularity. While all efforts to banish the Beast from these pages have failed, it would seem that things have taken a distinct turn for the worse: as well as turning in the final, epic-length instalment in the Lives of the Great Occcultists series on which he and Kevin Jackson have been collaborating, Hunt also sent us the disturbing selfportrait you see on this page. Perhaps 40-odd years of fortean cartooning have taken their toll; perhaps the restless spirit of the Wickedest Man in the World, not content with continuing to influence pop culture at a considerable distance, has possessed the once affable Mr Emerson. What is all too clear is that the Beast walks among us once more!
AVIAN DEVILS OF THE SILLY SEASON
We’ve noted before that certain animal behaviours, when brought to human attention through our increasingly close proximity to one another in urban environments, tend to prompt mediadriven social panics. The latest issue of the British Trust for Ornothology’s BTO
News magazine (Issue 323, Summer 2017) examines just this process, looking at the way the mainstream media have fed the concept of the ‘gull menace’ in its coverage of these sea birds as dangerous, violent and even evil pests. Lisa Carr, of Cardiff University, has tracked such coverage, demonstrating the way that the intersection of “news values… [including] negativity, proximity, continuity, uniqueness and simplicity” with the parliamentary recess of the British summer months (the “silly season”) can lead to a spike in stories demonising animals: in 2012 it was foxes, for example; in 2015, it was gulls (see
FT331:2, 18-19). Headlines like “Killer Seagulls”, “Gull War Syndrome” and “Seagull pecks dog to death in garden” have a lasting impact: anti-gull vigilantes have been reported in Berwick-upon-Tweed, shootings and poisonings in Sussex and Dorset, and a video showing a young man breaking a gull’s neck (because the birds kept him awake) was posted to social media last year. As Ms Carr suggests, the only way this situation, inflamed by illinformed media stories, will be improved is by looking at solutions based on sound scientific evidence and not by creating folk devils in the press.
ERRATA
FT352:60: John O Beard of Lancing, West Sussex, writes: “In your review of SD Tucker’s Forgotten Science you refer to Tucker criticising Tesla for believing that lighting can cause downpours. Surely he criticised him for believing that it was lightning that caused downpours? ”
FT354:10: Proudly pedantic Martin Stubbs of London spotted a scientific blunder, writing: “The newly named element Nihonium has the atomic number of 113, not 13 as printed in Sidelines. Element No 13 is Aluminium, first isolated in 1827.”