Slippers

I admit to having a pair of slippers, in dark red leather. I wear them with my velvet smoking jacket and a fez. Slippers are the new trainers.

hox - does this make you a dark lord of the Settee? There was a lovely Grant Morrison story about Flex Mentallo (Hero of the Beach) who sent away for a Charles Atlas type kit of the type you see advertised in magazines and got superpowers - so few people ever respond to the adverts that the payoff could be sensational. I'd love to meet anyone who ever sent off to that one you always see about 'Paul the amazing memory man' who dazzled the writer of the advert at a party with his feats of memory and has a special correspondence course... Any takers? Can you imagine the sort of junk mail you'd get if you ACTUALLY BOUGHT anything from Franklin Mint? You'd be on a pigeon list for the rest of time. Like that bloke who read the Reader's Digest letter saying "Mr Hox, here's a cheque for fifty thousand dollars" and missed the small print saying "Is what we'd say to you if you won our prize draw" and flew out there to get his cheque. There might well be products that are such tat that they'd only appeal to people who are Franklin Mint regulars, that they daren't even advertise. Like, Princess Diana as a cat, armed with antique pistols and the actual sword used by Aragorn, having a duel with Elvis dressed as John Wayne ON A PLATE... What would happen if you wrote to Franklin Mint with an idea for a product and they rejected your idea?

The TV Cream link awesome - I blew so much of my pocket money on "The Unexplained" and had to keep it hidden from my parents, who would have disapproved (my mum once sat me down and explained the economics of sticker collecting to me 'now, to fill that book, you'd spend about twelve pounds on a book full of Empire Strikes Back pictures. You could buy five really nice books for that money...' - she did not get the whole concept of stickers at all). I had that flexi-disc of "Voices of the Dead" but I never dared listen to it. And to this day, The Unexplained is the only place I have seen Kirlian photography, which seemed hugely convincing at the time - "look, here's a photo of a leaf with all glowing light, then they cut a bit out of the leaf, take another photo and the bit where the leaf is gone still glows in the shape of the original leaf..." Maybe I will write a piece about this...

Have a listen to the Electronic Voice Phenomena samples here... and here... to see exactly what you missed as a kid, Andrew. This stuff still makes me poop my pants.

Yeah...what a bunch of sad..... err... Those figurines, are they to scale? what's the detail like? If you buy the first installment how much more expensive are the rest and how many are there? At what point does Gandalf arrive and is he white or grey? Is there a free binder with issue one? Franklin Mint idea rejection letters are written on paper coated with cyanide so that once you understand that the crappiest ideas in the world are better than yours you can do the decent thing.

All I remember from "The unexplained" was S.H.C. Spontaenous Human Combustion. Those grisley pics of a bedsit, burnt in the corner where an old man had sat and, there sticking out the bottom of the charred mass, was his leg. Still intact with slipper and sock. urggggggh! since then I've seen it explained so the mystery is gone but it's still strong stuff for a magazine aimed mainly at kids.

And exctoplasm.. remember the pictures of victorian women pulling yards of fluffy white cloudy stuff out of their mouths...

That should be ectoplasm of course... wonder how that "x" got in there... *glances over shoulder warily* Btw Ely, nice one on getting the thread back to slippers again. Sorry i ruined it...

The leather slipper in the famous Spontaneous Human Combustion picture, the one with big charred hole, calf, foot, slipper, walking frame, resembles the slippers that Tony got for Christmas. Hopefully tasteful indoors footware isn't the difining variable in whether you burst into flames or not... Possibly indoor footware has more a role in the paranormal than we had previously been led to believe...

I've chucked out my indoor footwear 'cause they were starting to smell. Now i have a couple of fire extinguishers strapped to my feet. Anyone want any? I got a job lot in a car boot sale.

Ely - please enlighten me! I remember vividly the old bloke's slipper and leg from calf down, there was also an uncharred walking stick and everything else melted, also that the issue quoted from "Bleak House", the description including that all over the house was a thin layer of thick yellow liquor. I'm sure I read that to melt bones you need pretty fearful temperatures (just as I found out that as most of the brain is water, cremation tends to cause a boiling of the water which can't escape quickly enough so the corpses head pops. Burial at sea for me) I've just been devouring Ricky Jay's "Jay's Journal of anomalies" which is full of this sort of stuff, the history of flea circuses, men walking on ceilings, learned dogs and best of all the man named Cavanagh who was supposedly publicly fasting for a week, only a woman caught him in a butcher's shop buying saveloy and 'ham sliced particularly fat', a lovely quote from the magistrate sending him to prison "Shall Britain suffer a Cavanagh to purchase saveloys?" Has anyone ever been fooled by Uri Gellar, even as a small child? I also remember the ESP cards , a cross, a square, a circle, some waves - sitting at the kitchen table with my sister, trying to develop my psychic powers. (Obviously mine were first class, she was just bad at sending out the right mind waves)

It's called the "wick effect". Basically, with the right conditions the body can burn within itself, the lack or air under the clothes and fats keep it burning slowly and intensley and the presence of alcohol etc helps. It's called the wick effect because the body burns like a candle wick usually lit by a cigarrette or something that will smoulder a while. The external temperatures don't get too high after a few feet but things nearby can get very hot. In the experiment I saw to prove it, where a dead pig was used in a dingy bedroom set up to recreate the general atmos in one of those pics, the TV on top of the wardrobe had actually melted but the wallpaper and other nearby objects were unburnt. The pig had been wrapped in clothes etc and, sure enough, the whole carcass was ashes but two of the trotters and even bits of the mattress were perfectly intact. I believe the yellowy goo found on the walls etc is just condensed fat like you get on the walls of chip shops. bacon butty anyone?

Given that candles used to be made with animal fat (just like soap, for all of us who have watched Fight Club) that does sound feasible, but I still don't know why the fire didn't spread, and why if this is the case it doesn't happen more often. In any event, it is officially the most macabre thing I ever read and for exposing me to such horrific photographs at the age of eleven and giving me a lifelong belief in the unusual, I give thanks to "The Unexplained magazine" Here's something else - did anyone else's dad/friends feel the need to remark EACH AND EVERY time an advert for one of these partworks came on television "Week by week, it builds up into a pile on your bedroom floor..." ? EVERY SINGLE TIME. Anyone else have parental commentary on adverts that they felt the need to repeat ad infinitum?

I suppose it is rare because the circumstances needed are quite unusual. It's like flicking a lit cigarette into an empty room and hoping it'll start a fire. It COULD but 99 times out of 100 it won't. The person has to smoulder so would almost always wake up before it got started properly. They'd have to be totally knocked out in some way (either by drink or a blow of some kind) AND there needs to be the sustainable source of heat on the appropriate surface to start the effect (ie within the clothes rather than just on the surface where it would burn differently and be a normal house fire).

Did anyone see the advert on tv that starts with people holding for PC helplines and then goes on to say "If you need help with computers, helplines can take a long time to give you the answer - but no need to worry, with PCQuick magazine... " - not really mastering the point that as it comes in twenty-four weekly parts, you might well have to wait the best part of six months to get the answer to your query and even a week is a bit slower even than Microsoft.

Yes! Yes! I WANT to unlock the potential of my PC by shelling out every week for a magazine which I do not read, which I then stick in folders, that I then stick in the back of the cupboard, whilst all the while continuing to buy the magazine each week in the hope that they may, collectively, one day, turn into the week-by-week treasure trove of knowledge that was promised to me on the telly, and also the hope that there is a finite number of them, so I can have a complete set. At the back of my cupboard.

Here's a mildly soul-destroying thought. The journos who write for part 23 of these magazines, that never get bought, never get read, (even the mugs have given up by then), just relaunched two years later - they're published... I love the idea of a cupboard of ultimate knowledge, of someone somewhere having bought all this 'week by week' magazines and now having a cupboard library to rival that of the legendary library of Alexandria, or even Borges' library of Babel - all human knowledge in ringbinder form, with easy to follow illustrations. This is just the sort of nonsense I like to write about... Neil Gaiman's lovely line 'a man who had the secret of the universe and kept it in a jam jar in Sunderland'

"The Philosphers Stone" Free Binder with part one for only £1.99* *750 subsequent parts available weekly at £10.99

for more on weekly part works

when i was a kid my mother collected ALL parts of some illustrated dictionary which ended up being about a foot across and bound in tacky purplish plastic with gold writing ... it was handy for pressing flowers as was our heaviest book ... recently she requested it and i had to root through the entire loft to find it ... why did she collect it in the first place? why did she keep it? why did she want it back? and why didnt i sling it in the skip when i had the chance?

and here...

A lovely new year to you, and everyone else, mister TC. I only wish i had some proper slippers. I'm still wearing the banana skins i threaded together with twine last summer when i was bored.

and here...

I think I may be at a turning point in my life. Slippers have become increasingly appealing over the last few months, as have towelling bath robes and sets of screwdrivers. What's happening to me? Is it all electric nose hair clippers and car vacuums for me now? Is that all I have to look forward to? I've found myself drawn to weekly and monthly part works too. I have a tiny voice inside of me that is saying "Yes, yes! I'd like to build the Red Baron's fighter plane week by week. Lord of the Rings figurines and Neapolionic soldiers? They'd look wonderful on the mantlepiece! I DO want to know how to work my PC!" The Franklin mint are my friends. If I could move to Lilliput Lane I think I would.

Don't be afraid Mark, feel the comfy side of the force....... come, join us. [%sig%]