Sound advice from Richard Carter :
having a pair of owls in your bathroom could help avoid potential embarrassment when you have guests.
As he says,
wouldn’t it be utterly awesome to keep a couple of owls in your bathroom, just to impress visitors?
Meanwhile, over at Wonders & Marvels, monkeys at war!
Who were the first monkeys to see action in war? Before the invention of gun powder fire-arms in China (ca 13th century), a 9th century Chinese chronicle (“Yu-yang-tsah-tsu” by Twan Ching-Shih) describes annual battles between soldiers of Po-mi-lan and 300,000 giant rock-throwing apes who came down from the high craggy mountains of the west to ravage crops every spring.
For last night’s performance with Lepke B. at the Resonance104.4FM tenth birthday bash, I designated an area of the room as the mosh pit, for young persons to commandeer and do whatever it is young persons do in mosh pits. This shows, I think, that I have my finger on the pulse and have due regard to my audience.
I was taking my lead from that titanic twentieth-century pamphleteer Dobson, whose own mosh pit travails were recounted last year.
The most important part of any book is the number of sheep in the index.
A great truth revealed to me last night in a dream.
In the bulging sack of letters I received in response to the piece On Pickles And Pluck And Gumption, one particular missive struck me. “A lesser man would of course plunge the syringe directly into the flesh of the subject,” wrote a reader. There is some truth in this, though only a smidgen. Some would argue that a smidgen of truth is better than no truth at all, and they may well be right, but what my correspondent overlooks is that if one did plunge the syringe filled with essence of gumption and pluck directly into the subject, thus obviating any need for the pickles in the first place, what on earth would one do with all those pickles, and indeed with the jars into which they are crammed? The obvious rejoinder to this is “Offer them for sale, unmodified, at the church bazaar or fête”. This is a superficially attractive suggestion, one that might be leapt upon by the credulous, the dimwitted, or the poor. Those of us bounden to the glorious idea of pickles-with-a-purpose will disagree.
The estimable Wartime Housewife has a rant about the latest stupidity regarding tobacco sales, so I don’t have to. Instead, in a no doubt doomed attempt to redress the balance, here is a splendid image of a smoker unburdened by modern restrictions. John White’s “The Flyer” (1587) shows an Algonquian shaman prancing around, with his tobacco in a pouch slung around his waist and, most importantly, a small black bird tied to his head. I think perhaps this is the correct attitude to adopt.
Further to my notes on the Dubbin Club, far away in New Zealand Glyn Webster provides this splendid photographic evidence of serious dubbin application.
It seems to be the done thing on various blogs to mark the end of the year by pointing readers to highlights of the twelvemonth we are about to leave behind. But quite frankly, I can’t be bothered to trawl back through the 495 postages (before this one) which I tippy-tapped out in 2011. Dutiful readers will of course spend the final hours of the year as they usually do, rereading the entire Hooting Yard archive while making notes with a pencil in a jotter. And then, at the stroke of midnight, you can put on your pointy hat and raise a glass of aerated lettucewater in celebration, for a minute or two, before returning to your reading.
I will be setting a series of tests early in 2012, to make sure you have been paying attention. Meanwhile, I wish you all a very happy new year, and thank you for your enthusiasm and support.
Today is, apparently, “the start of a two-week frenzy of online shopping”. I am told by persons who know such things that it is much easier to make purchases online than it was for Richard Bradley in the late 18th century trying to buy an island and having to negotiate with the Tobabmanser of Jancacunda and his singing man. Though in general I disapprove of shopping frenzies, I do think it would be a good idea for you all to go here and buy copies of all six Hooting Yard books, available in both paperback and ebook formats. They do, after all, make the perfect Christmas gifts for your loved ones.
It’s unmissable! For one night only, Frank Key declaims his stories to a live audience, accompanied by the legendary Outa_Spaceman singing selections from the Hooting Yard songbook and his own compositions.
Friday 18 November · 19:00 – 22:00
Woolfson & Tay. Books. Café. Gallery.
12 Bermodnsey Square
London SE1 3UN
A snip at a mere fiver! Bring your extended family, and spread the word (to avert the exquisite horror of nobody actually turning up…)
To book your place, go here: http://www.woolfsonandtay.com/lugubriousmusic-lopsidedprose.html
It’s unmissable! For one night only, Frank Key declaims his stories to a live audience, accompanied by the legendary Outa_Spaceman singing selections from the Hooting Yard songbook and his own compositions.
Friday 18 November · 19:00 – 22:00
Woolfson & Tay. Books. Café. Gallery.
12 Bermondsey Square
London SE1 3UN
A snip at a mere fiver! Bring your extended family, and spread the word (to avert the exquisite horror of nobody actually turning up…)
To book your place, go here
Thanks to Backwatersman, a “sort of Edwardian Out of Office Assistant”. In future I shall deploy this at such times as the cranial integuments get clogged up with dust and cobwebs and the Muse flees o’er hill and dale – in other words, when I am felled by vacancy-between-the-ears syndrome. If all goes well you should not see it too often.
Allah-befuddled theocratic nutters and their chums in the airhead wing of what used to be the “left” are fond of referring to the state of Israel as “the Zionist Entity”. This is of course a pejorative term, not only denying the legitimacy of the state but implying that there is something menacing and eldritch about it, like a tentacled Lovecraftian abomination.
So much for the global body politic. What about the bosky winding lanes of Interwebshire? Your favourite website, the one that makes you drool with joy unparalleled, nestles there, attracting a modicum of attention. But no one gets het up into a bothersome lather about Hooting Yard, do they? They bash on the gates, come in and read, perhaps leave a comment or buy a book or make a donation or subscribe, and then they tootle off again, heading for the Lord knows what sink of iniquity or wittering or poppycock. In nation-state terms, then, Hooting Yard is an obscure and seldom-crowed-about country, akin to Andorra, perhaps, or Kiribati, or Palau. If the nutters drove us into the sea, would anybody even notice?
In a no doubt foolhardy attempt to raise our profile, and indeed to have other websites quaking in their boots at our (albeit imaginary) menacing Lovecraftian tentacles, the time has come to rename ourselves as The Hooting Yard Entity. You have been warned.
Astonishingly, today is the fifth anniversary of the publication of Blötzmann’s historic bird psychology diagram. Ornithologists throughout the world will be celebrating this landmark in a manner only ornithologists can, that is, by gathering upon promontories peering at the sky while munching filberts.
(Click on the diagram for a larger image,)
It is hard to put into words the earth-shuddering ramifications occasioned by Blötzmann’s diagram. Certainly it has had immeasurable effects upon the way we puny humans apprehend our beakéd, wingéd, airborne pals. I for one am reduced to dribbling with joy that I no longer languish in bird-ignorance, as I sadly did until this day five long years ago.
UPDATE : Inexplicably, several errors crept into the reproduction of Blötzmann’s diagram. The corrected version appears below, and will, again, loom larger should you click upon it.
