It’s pig time, at last, in the Hooting Yard Advent Calendar. Here is a picture of pigs doing what pigs do best. And let us not forget that if you gaze at these pigs for an hour or so, any mental or emotional turmoil buffeting your brain will be becalmed, for as we know, the contemplation of pigs in a pig sty is greatly soothing to the frantic.
The snap is from the Animal Photos! website. I like the breezy gusto of that exclamation mark. Perhaps I should rename this site Hooting Yard!
Yesterday’s advent calendar picture was so terrifying that you have probably had a fit of the vapours and taken to your bed, whimpering and neurasthenic. In such circumstances, you will be subsisting on a diet of invalid food, so voila! today’s picture shows a lovely bowl of pap ‘n’ slops. Yum!
from Toast
Your Hooting Yard advent calendar picture today comes with a parental guidance warning, as it may frighten the tinies, not to mention the weak-minded and those of puny brainpans. It is a terrifying still taken from Quatermass And The Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967), showing the Hobbs End tube station demon.
Today’s advent calendar picture is an old trading card for celery compound. Personally, I always thought a celery compound was a fenced-off area where you grew celery, much as the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts is a sort of fenced-off area for the keeping of Kennedys. But apparently not. You live and learn – especially with Hooting Yard as your guide!
Dear Frank, writes Tim Thurn, I find it somewhat befuddling that we are almost a week in to your excellent Hooting Yard advent calendar initiative and have not yet been given a picture of a bird to print and cut out and paste with glue to our sheet of cardboard. Given that you are one of the world’s foremost ornithologists, sort of, things have come to a pretty pass, and I know a pretty pass when I see one. (My forthcoming book Pretty Passes I Have Known is the proof of that.) So please get your finger out and give us a picture of a bird to print and cut out and paste with glue to our sheet of cardboard! Yours until the cows come home, Tim Thurn.
I pay due attention to my readers, so for today I have chosen not just a picture of a bird, but a picture of several birds, or rather several painted wooden birds, in the form of these excellent bufflehead decoys from M.A.D. Decoys of Birdsboro, PA.
The whole point of this advent calendar hoo-ha is that we are counting towards the celebration of the birth of sweet baby Jesus. Later, grown to mangodhood, Jesus asserted that “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”, so it may be considered inappropriate to include a picture of a rival god in our calendar. But that’s just what we’re going to do here at Hooting Yard, inspired by the spirit of diverse vibrancy, or vibrant diversity, or whatever it is they inculcate into tinies in their community education hubs these days.
Here, courtesy of Bushwick Policy, is a Mayan bat-god, eerily similar to the hideous bat-god Fatso.
Today’s advent calendar picture shows a bog, or more precisely a blanket bog. (A blanket bog ought not be confused with a Blunkett bog, which is the type of bog the blind philandering erstwhile Labour Home Secretary may stumble into when attacked by cows.) This particular bog is on Dartmoor, but I suspect it is similar to an Isle of Wight bog through which Margo Williams may be dragged by her ghostly spirit guides.
Today’s advent calendar picture may upset those of a nervous disposition and those subject to fits of the vapours when confronted by images of lightning-struck cows. The picture – of cattle struck by lightning – is a print from 1872.
Instructions for making your advent calendar can be found here. What I forgot to mention is that, having glued the picture to your sheet of cardboard, you should use a thick black marker pen to write the appropriate number above, below, or to the side of the picture. Deploy Roman numerals, please.
For instructions on making your advent calendar, see here. Today’s picture shows Old Halob and fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol (played by an actor) on a winter sports enthusiasts’ holiday, date unknown.
Thanks to vintagewinter
I think it is about time I treated you lot to a Hooting Yard Advent Calendar. Each day between now and Christmas Day I will post a picture. The idea is that you get a big sheet of cardboard and hang it up on an inner wall of your hovel. Then, each day, you can print the picture posted here onto a sheet of paper, cut it out, and glue it to the sheet of cardboard. Watch in delight as the pictures multiply!
We start today with a colour photograph of a drainage ditch, courtesy of Five Islands Orchard.
