My apologies for the recent lack of potsages [sic] here at the Yard of Hooting. This has been occasioned my my inability to cope – either mentally or physically – with the damnable weather. Whatever happened to “overcast, with drizzle”? Instrad, I am battered and blinded by the sun – or, as the Moody Blues liked to call it, Brave Helios! Well, Brave Helios is an accur’d orb I would happily see blotted out, or wholly extinguished. I shall pray for rain, or, better, a howling blizzard,, and resume tippy-tapping when I am able.

Er … as you may have noticed, we’re not quite there yet with the Rebirth of Hooting Yard. (Basically, none of the Innards is working, so anything you try to click on is apparently “Not Found”.) Fear not! Optimum blogtasticness will resume shortly …

Meanwhile – news of Killer Swans!

The current Hooting Yard hiatus has been caused by hackery. It is hoped to resolve this as soon as possible. Meanwhile, do not click on any links, as you may be misdirected to vile evils.

I am attempting to do a spot of Hooting Yard housekeeping, delving into the terrifying innards of WordPress to tweak this website here & there. Frankly, I find my brain befuddled, but progress is being made, albeit slowly.

Thus far, I have managed to make a couple of updates to the sidebar. A while ago, ResonanceFM discontinued its podcasts and, as far as I know, erased them from history. I haven’t worked out how to remove the podcasty links over to your right, but I have inserted a link to the Hooting Yard audio archive on Mixcloud. Shows are available there almost as soon as they have been broadcast.

I recently trod in the puddle of Instagram, and have added a sidebar link so you lot can go and look at pictures posted by out_of_print_pamphleteer.

I shall keep you informed of further refinements if my brain doers not overheat in the meantime.

UPDATE : I’ve also inserted a sidebar Archives section, where you can browse through the morass of potsages [sic] month by month.

FURTHER UPDATE : Those podcast links have now been excised. See the Comments, however, for Old Resonance Hooting Yard Podcasts News, and watch this space …

I have not bothered to look this up in any reference books, so please forgive me if the answer is blindingly obvious.

What, I would like to know, is the quality inherent in the excrement expelled by bats that is related to human madness? I am thinking of the phrase batshit crazy. We do not commonly say, for example, catshit crazy or giraffeshit crazy or puff-addershit crazy, or at least I have not heard these phrases used at the sort of swish sophisticated cocktail parties I try to barge my way into. But reference to the droppings of bats is made frequently.

Answers in the Comments please, unless you are batshit crazy yourself, in which case you would be more appropriately occupied reading something by Will Self.

May the mewling and gurgling of the Christmas Baby-God warm the cockles of all Hooting Yard readers on this day and throughout the coming twelvemonth.

Mr Key’s computer is on the blink. It is to be hoped normal service will be resumed as soon as possible,

I am off to Belgium for a bit. Upon my return, I will strive – well, if not every sinew, then at least some of the more sinewy ones, to revive Hooting Yard so that it is once again a busy and bustling thoroughfare o’ prose.

The world’s leading exponent of avant garde oriental shadow puppetry celebrates her birthday today. Let’s all send her some money!

Peter Blegvad, from “The Unborn Byron”:

Spread the word, tomorrow morn
A future poet shall be born.
From my mother I shall fall
Into the womb that holds us all.
My life shall be a meteor
Which generations shall adore.
For my unbuttoned liberty
The unborn will remember me.

Mr Key, from “The Tiny Newborn Mr Key”:

1959, this very morn
The tiny Mr Key was born
He was a full month premature
When he knocked his fist upon the door
Of the world beyond his mother’s womb
A tiny bright spark in the gloom
And soon the words poured out of him
They pour out still, with ceaseless vim.

I can see my father now
With his spade
Digging up potatoes
In a field
As rain pours down
Then trudging back
His boots in the muck
To the filthy cottage
Where my mother clutches her rosary beads
And prays to the Blessed Virgin
For more rain
And more potatoes
To feed the visiting priest

I am sniffy about science fiction. The genre does not appeal to me. Over the years I have read several sci-fi books – or SF, or speculative fiction, or whatever the preferred term is these days – and though I have enjoyed some of them, mildly, I feel no great urge to read more widely in the field. Similarly with the cinema – there are a few sci-fi films I like, but in general I will actively avoid them. I have never, for example, seen Star Wars, nor any of its seemingly inordinate sequels and prequels. Despite not having seen it, I tend to agree with the critic who suggested that its success destroyed American cinema. The vast majority of films churned out by Hollywood are pap, and pap of a certain kind, for which George Lucas is to be held personally responsible.

In addition to being sniffy about sci-fi, I am also diabetic. Until recently, these two parts of my life could coexist without hoo-hah. I have to jab myself with insulin daily, as a direct result of the debaucheries of my Wilderness Years. I do not find this particularly onerous, and if anything it acts as a useful reminder not to revisit those chaotic stupidities.

But a few weeks ago, after seeing a consultant whose resemblance to Brian Eno is so eerily close that I would swear Brain One is moonlighting as an NHS doctor, my regimen was changed. Instead of injecting one type of insulin (Novomix), Brian recommended my diabetes would be better managed by using two different preparations. It is the names of these that make me feel, daily, like a collaborator in some awful sci-fi adventure.

I do not know who is responsible for the nomenclature of insulin solutions. Whomsoever it is clearly gave no thought to the psychic damage wrought upon my tattered nerves by forcing me to inject Humalog and the even more sci-fi-sounding Lantus Solostar.

In hindsight, Novomix itself sounds like the name of a distant star in a galaxy far far away. One imagines it as the setting where dashing space hero Lantus Solostar does battle with the bumbling robots known as Humalogs.

God give me strength.

Lantus Solostar

This potsage [sic] has been removed because:

(a) The Dobson estate slapped me with a cease-and-desist order

(b) There are far too many out of print Dobson pamphlets to choose from

(c) I haven’t got the faintest idea how to replicate the format of those immensely irritating quizzes that have spread across Het Internet like an ague

(d) All of the above

(e) None of the above