UFO Info Week-End

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats for example raised all its initial pounds 450000 capital from small investors who bought pounds 750

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, for example, raised all its initial pounds 450,000 capital from small investors who bought pounds 750 units in the show when it opened in 1981.
But opportunities to back independent cinema are far less developed. In fact, some parts of the entertainment world have always enjoyed backing from investors. The world-wide success of British films like The Full Monty – despite its relative lack of Oscars at this week’s awards in Los Angeles – and the prospect of a host of new television stations has given UK film- makers a tremendous boost Small investors too can get a slice of the action. Thousands of years ago, a static and superstitious ruling class had the bodies of their kings and priests eviscerated, their skins elaborately prepared by the application of unspeakable unguents, wrapped in bandages, shoved inside a wooden box, then a stone sarcophagus, and finally placed in a hidden tomb – all in the absurd belief that, somehow, the mummified individual would one day live again And the bugger of it is, of course, that it worked.. The principle “he that has been smitten must himself smite” may be older than we thought.My own favourite conjecture is that, in Shelley’s vast and trackless desert, an Egyptian king with a slight speech impediment had caused to be carved in stone the legend: “My name ith Othymandiath, king of kingth, gathe on my workth ye mortalth and dethpair.”There is, in all this, a wonderful irony. Imagine our pleasure when it is proved that Amenhotep III (the model, you will remember, for the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes), was three-foot tall, syphilitic, suffered from chronic hemaerrhoids and had feet covered in veruccas.And – if sex addiction could be traced – all those bad-tempered attacks on various Libyans, Nubians, Sea-Peoples, Hittites, Hattians, Philistines and Hebrews by Ramesses the Great might be explained by a need to divert attention away from various palace entanglements with the Iron Age precursors of Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones.

Was Nefertiti a natural blonde? Or perhaps Tutankhamun was a drying-out alcoholic. When was the last time, for instance, that a party leader, mid-Dimbleby, let loose a loud fart? And yet we presume that pockets of wind travel the intestines of the famous, as they do ours.This is intriguing. There is a timeless tendency for important figures to present themselves in an impossibly good light in public. There’s a charming discretion here, as though Dr David wished to reassure us that she for one, would never be party to making new holes in old bodies.Anyway, she was hoping, she continued, to be able to tell what diseases the mummies had suffered from, what they looked like (eye colour, etc.) and – with the help of DNA – which other mummies they were related to.At the moment, of course, all we have to go on is all those heroic murals and stelae, depicting vigorous Pharoahs smiting their enemies or communing with a series of improbable gods. Dr Rosalie David told the BBC Today programme that the technique was to “go in with industrial endoscopes through existing bodily holes”.

Suffice it to say that Professor Otto Appenzeller concluded that, in the near future, we would be able to discover all kinds of things about the people of the past that we do not now know.Then, just this week, came the story of how the custodians of Manchester University’s Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank have written to thousands of institutions worldwide asking for a lend of their corpses. They took nerves from the ankles of number of Egyptian mummies who kicked the earthenware sometime between 500 and 2000 BC, and a teasing little sample from just one Peruvian mummy of slightly more recent origin.These enterprising palaeo-neurobiologists sliced up the nerves, embedded them in wax, and then (but, of course, you know all this) incubated them with antibodies Their findings were both dramatic and incomprehensible. Like those weird Madagascan “relative retrieval” rituals, you hardly have time to bury your relatives these days, before some academic or arty type wants to dig them up again, and reconstruct them.Because, of course, there is so much to find out! A recent edition of the “Journal of the Autonomic Nervous System” (de rigeur in our household since the Murdoch and China business disillusioned us with the Times) – vol 67, p 105, to be exact – reported on the findings of a team looking at the neurotransmitters of the long embalmed. Poking dead bodies and interrogating their mute remains, has become something of an obsession We’re all at it. That artist bloke (the one with with the posh name accused of purloining body parts, casting them in metal and then hiding the originals inside tupperware boxes in the flats of unsuspecting girl-friends) was just the tip of the iceberg.
TV factual shows, such as Time Team, Shadows of Our Ancestors and Ice Mummies, and fictional pathologist-as-sexy-hero ones (you know: “Let’s take a look at the brain.” “Grrgghhh!” “It’s his first time, Dr Skinner”), such as Silent Witness and McCallum, testify to our fascination with the dead. Perhaps ten years ago we might not have counted on getting very much out of an Egyptian mummy (unless we were superstitious), but now we are a nation of cadaverophiles.

So, despite the fact that he’s remarkably well-preserved for a 3,000-year-old, you wouldn’t expect him to be of use to anyone now No point in asking him the way to the feluccas

Actually, that’s not true. His skin is black and desiccated, his teeth are cracked, his genitals are no more than a shrivelled flap between his stick-like thighs, and his hand has an unpleasant habit of working itself loose, and sliding over his shrunken chest, to the bottom of his box. Old Seti II is not much to look at (though his admirers are keen to point out that he’s borne up better than Senwosret IV). It is a pick’n'mix attitude to life, a way of justifying whatever we want by selecting the right study or the right book Rather than asking your mother Who after all will sometimes give you an unpalatable truth At least, that’s what 53 per cent of surveys say.. We get our prejudices confirmed, and the learned societies, theorists and authors make money.But this is all too easy.

I hate to get up on Mondays, but now I know that Science says I’m not the only one It’s a law Everyone is happy. Your mother would tell you that for nothing; but because she’s not a published author or a PhD, you’re inclined to ask Dory instead.In the same way the Church of England, with its disapproval of sex before marriage, would be happy to tell us: “Don’t rush into sex – just think how much passion will have been built up by the time you actually say yes.” But then we would rather hear that from the authors of The Rules who, after all, inform us they both have found the perfect man.But these books pale into insignificance compared to the publishing sensation of last year – The Little Book of Calm by Paul Wilson (head of an advertising agency in Australia) which contains profound aphorisms, such as: “Smile, even when you don’t feel like it.” And “Declare today a holiday!” This book had sold 600,000 copies by the end of 1997 just to give us some cod comfort.The reason why we love the BPS psychologists and the self-help books is that they confirm what we ourselves believe, making us feel more important for agreeing with the professionals. That is when I stopped buying them.Still I wish I thought of Dory Hollander PhD’s idea ,which is a book called 101 Lies Men Tell Women and Why Women Believe Them, with examples such as Lie 3: “You’re the only one”, and Lie 38: “I’m going to leave my wife.” The reason why women believe such things (and why men would too in the same situation) is our own desire to be wanted and our fear of failure and rejection. I used to buy self-help books by the shelf until a ex-boyfriend brought a Dale Carnegie book home from America for me It was called How To Stop Worrying And Start Living. I spent the afternoon in a feverish anxiety unable to stop worrying because he thought I needed this book.