Comments at Hooting Yard are moderated – that is, I have to approve them before they appear. WordPress cleverly sorts out the spam and deposits it in a separate inbox. I used to keep a check on this to ensure no legitimate comments had accidentally been dispatched there, but there are currently hundreds of spam comments arriving daily. My brain is already puny and curdled enough without reading through all that bollocks just in case a witty and learned comment from one of my readers has been dumped there by mistake. I mention this in case anybody is sitting there fuming and cursing because their comment has not appeared. This will not be because I have failed to approve it, rather that it has been erroneously designated as spam and I have never even seen it. If your comment does not appear, please either resubmit it or alert me to its absence by email.

Over the past week or so, your super soaraway Hooting Yard has been inundated, inundated I tell you!, with spam comments. Usually there are three or four a day, now there are hundreds. What this means is that I cannot be bothered to skim through all the bollocks* to whittle out any genuine comments that are sometimes misdirected down the spam chute. So, if you send a comment and it fails to appear in due time, please either try again or send me an email to let me know.

ADDENDUM : * I am reminded that this useful word ought to be spelled in the Beckettian manner, i.e. ballocks.

Exciting news from the BBC. Werner Herzog has been persuaded to direct a forthcoming episode of twee bucolic period drama Lark Rise To Candleford. This follows the unprecedented global success of the scene where the peasant sprawled in the drainage ditch recites Captain Beefheart’s Old Fart At Play.

Herzog is currently working on the screenplay for his episode, which is likely to feature either a conquistador and a gang of howler monkeys laying waste to Dorcas Lane’s Candleford post office, and/or an attempt by a deranged impresario to build an opera house in the squalid village of Lark Rise.

Here is a rousing version of “O Say Can You See”, recorded yesterday at the end of Hooting Yard On The Air, on which I am accompanied by my son Ed. As you can hear, I was quite overcome with emotion and narrowly avoided having a fit of the vapours…

O Say Can You See (Duet)

Monday morning, time for a rant. Given that I persist in taking the Grauniad, I suppose I have only myself to blame that while the day is yet young I was minded to fling the paper across the room and utter execrations. What bothers me is that their highly-paid columnists – at least, paid a fat lot more than I am, i.e. nothing – betray such ignorance. It is the little details that vex me… those admittedly minor errors which, I sense, one only makes if lacking the broad sweep of what used to be called “general knowledge”.

Today’s case in point comes from fatuous television reviewer Sam Wollaston. Reviewing last night’s new Sherlock on the BBC, he notes that the modern-day setting of the series means the characters get around by black cab rather than by “the handsome carriage”. The what? He means the Hansom cab, of course. Anyone who knows that would not mistype it as “handsome”. The heavens will not fall in, the planets will continue to spin, but yet this slapdashery pains me.

A while ago, another Grauniad television reviewer, addressing himself to a new adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw, repeatedly referred to the story’s presiding evil spirit as “Peter Clint”, rather than “Quint” – this in spite of the name being clearly visible, at one point, upon a tombstone. Again, we are dealing here with what I would consider general knowledge. Henry James’ ghost story is a classic, certainly a piece with which I would have thought anybody employed in “cultural” journalism would be familiar.

Taking the cake, though, is Grauniad America editor Michael Tomasky, who sets us a history quiz. The first question is:

1. Arguably the first great work of history in the Enlightenment era was by Edward Gibbon and in six volumes described:

a. The Greco-Roman wars

b. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

c. The “Mohametan” conquest of Iberia

In the notes at the end of the quiz, he announces smugly “If you didn’t get this one, you should have stopped right then and there.” It is difficult to “get” one where none of the three alternatives is correct. Gibbon’s great work was, of course, The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. No doubt I will be accused of nit-picking, but it seems to me this is yet another example of blithe lack of attention to detail. And a narrative of rise and fall would be a very different book to one limited to decline and fall – the phrase, itself, one which the literate instantly recognise.

Incidentally, if the Grauniad and the rest of the papers still employed a sufficient number of subeditors, these embarrassments would be much less likely to occur. Bruce Willis is a man who is rarely right about anything, and he was never more wrong than when he wrote the immortal words “Proofreading is for pussies”.

I know I shouldn’t allow such twaddle to exasperate me so much. I know it is a sign of weakness, even of imminent mental collapse, when one feels compelled to post a comment at the Guardian. But alas, I couldn’t help myself. To discover the cause of my intemperance, go and read this. If you can’t bear to wade through all the comments, mine is here. (It will be distressingly familiar stuff to Hooting Yard readers, of course.)

Now I am going to apply a cold compress to my forehead, and throw pebbles at swans.