Mark Steyn summarises fifty years’ of Bond film dénouements:

For half a century, the most boring bit in 007 has always been the final 20 minutes when Bond and the girl run around the hollowed-out volcano shooting hundreds of tinfoil-suited extras in golf carts while looking for the big red “Off” button that disconnects the space laser.

Mr Key has not yet fled the country – I will be leaving at some ungodly hour tomorrow – so my hiatus announcement was a little premature. I thought I would feel bereft at neglecting important Hooting Yard business for a few days, but in fact I feel immensely relieved. A few days ago I mentioned the Quaker I knew who was cheered by having a complete absence of activity in his brainpans, and I now understand what he meant. But fear not, I will return to the fray upon my return to Blighty.

In the meantime, here is a letter that plopped into my inbox yesterday.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Liaocheng Dongying Hengtong Metal Manufacturing Co., Ltd here.

Glad to hear that you are on the market for Automatic chicken cage.

We are a professional producer of the complete sets of equipment for raising birds. At present, it is an enterprise which has the import-export license and exports a batch of comp-lete sets of automatic equipment for raising chickens.

These products gained good prestige among customers and they are not only used in great-scaled biological raising farms in domestic provinces, but also exported to Middle Asia, South and East regions, Australia, South America, Middle East areas, Africa mainland and so on in great lot.

We are willing to wholehearted with all the friends and customers to establish good relations of cooperation, realize a win-win benefits, and create a magnificent performance.

If any interest, feel free to contact me.

Best regards,

Senior Sales Manager,

Fatma

Had she not died ten years ago, yesterday would have been the 105th birthday of Louise Brooks. To celebrate, the splendid Bestiary posted a photograph of her with an owl on her head.

At least I think it’s an owl. Outa_Spaceman, to whom I am once again indebted for alerting me to the snap, thinks it is either an owl or a hawk of some kind.

You wouldn’t want to find yourself alone on a bridge with a cassowary, for example, on account of his penchant for ripping out your stomach with his big toe.

from “Pie Pellicane” by Howard Jacobson, collected in Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (2011)

Thanks to Neil Dyer for alerting me to this earth-shattering news headline.

Mr Kearney, firing from both barrels, demolishes pseudonyms like a cowboy smashing bottles in a bar-room, and woven into his staid bibliographical canvas is a host of colourful figures, shorn of their aliases: authors, publishers, illustrators, booksellers, who have had a hand in this bizarre trade almost since the invention of moveable types. Perhaps the strangest of these is Alphonse Momas, a hack-pornographer or ‘pisse-copie’. . . who wrote no fewer than forty-five books in the [Private Case] and whose output was so prolific that he had to use nine pseudonyms: Le Nismois, Tap-Tap, Cain d’Abel, L’Erotin, Fuckwell, Un journaliste du siècle dernier, Mercadette, Pan-Pan, and Trix. Mr Kearney tells us Momas was a civil servant attached to the Paris police and that he devoted himself to spiritualism in later life. I recall reading, in some attack on spiritualism, perhaps one of Fr Raupert’s spirited diatribes, of a clergyman much given to the practice of automatic writing who, to his distress, found his hand suddenly impelled by an agency capable only of the grossest indecencies. Each day on awakening from the trance into which he had thrown himself, pen in hand, in humble expectation of exploring life beyond the veil, he discovered he had been delivered of page after page of writings of the lowest and most shocking kind. Perhaps it was the spirit of Tap-Tap’, ‘coming through’.

Timothy D’Arch Smith, in a review of Patrick J. Kearney’s The Private Case : An Annotated Bibliography Of The Private Case Erotica Collection In The British [Museum] Library, collected in The Books Of The Beast (1987).

“Dear Sir, I have been thinking over your offer of helping me to the dead bodies of some of the good birds of Poultry”, wrote Charles Darwin to William Bernhardt Tegetmeier. Tegetmeier is pictured below, and you can read more about him at The Friends Of Charles Darwin.

from Ptak Science Books

I am indebted to Outa_Spaceman for drawing to my attention this paragraph of majestic sweeping prose:

Since the emergence of the twist, inventing new dances proliferated: limbo, madison, whiskey, bycicle, Hully Gully, shake and an endless etcetera. In Spain also arise about native dances like the twist or when they, however, is the Yenka will be victorious in the making. A dance based on hopping on one foot to finish jumping with both feet together. The musical part of the case is a mere excuse to cause this kind of fun gymnastic jumping in guiding their activity. The four tracks on the album are quite similar and all are composed Kurt Charley. The instrumentation is a Franciscan poverty and is chaired by an instrument, which by the way, it became fashionable: the melodic. Was a smash hit and was one of the biggest selling records in 1965 and compulsory piece around or party shindig worth his salt. It sparked a fever Yenka nationwide, because it was an innocuous family dance and athletic. Other groups and soloists were ready to record songs to the rhythm of Yenka, so Hispavox was careful to place in all partner disks labeled: “The Yenka by its creators Johnny and Charley”

Hie over here to see a snap of Johnny and Charley discussing Franciscan poverty.

Many thanks to Claire Harmer for alerting me to this doll.

Available on Amazon for just $137.77!

From his exile across the water, regular commenter Banished To A Pompous Land sends this intriguing snapshot. It was taken at a “British Pub” in the state of Virginia, and seems to suggest that, as Mr B. puts it, “the individual named at the bottom right is doing a tour of U.S. ‘British Pubs’ dispensing mellifluous vocals and deeply reactionary art criticism”.

On the eve of 21 December [1937], Crowley rounded up representatives of the white, black, brown, red, and yellow races – according to William Hickey’s column in the Daily Express the next day the black representative was a dancing-girl, the Indian a non-English speaking Bengali Muslim ‘who seemed rather puzzled by the whole business’ – and at the foot of Cleopatra’s needle at precisely 6.22 a.m. on 22 December as the sun moved into Capricorn, presented each with a copy of [The Book of the Law]. Acceptance was briefly delayed while Crowley made a short speech:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. I Ankh-f-n-khonsu, the Priest of the Princes, present you, ______, as representative of your race, with the Book of the Law. It is the charter of Universal Freedom, for every man and woman in the world. Love is the law. Love under will.

Fra. N. , also present together with the Express journalist, named Freedland, recalls the occasion’s less spiritual aspects:

We dined together and proceeded to pub and café crawl until the Jew, Indian, Negro and Malayan had been collected. It was very hard keeping the party going until 6 a.m. . . It was one of the craziest evenings I have ever spent, and none of the people picked up knew each other.

Crowley’s diary is also light on religious significance:

Freedland – and even N.! – acted nobly. We collected the people of the 5 races, took them to the rooms of one Erskine, a terribly dull party, brightening when we got rid of most of them & started whisky. At Cleopatra’s Needle [Mercury, i.e. Wednesday] 6.22 a.m. I presented the 5 copies and made my magical utterance. And so to bed.

22 Dec. 37. Hangover v. bad.

from The Books Of The Beast by Timothy D’Arch Smith (1987)

The Antarctic continent in mythology and literature has abounded in creatures and phenomena that appear wonderful, terrible and ridiculous by turns : polar spirits, demon ships, vampires, routes to Mars, routes to Jupiter, routes to the interior of the earth, enormous polar whirlpools, alien monsters buried in ice, the lost city of Atlantis, dinosaurs, giant lobsters, giant insects and giant albino kangaroos.

Elizabeth Leane, Antarctica In Fiction : Imaginative Narratives Of The Far South (2012)

Another Englishman who drew public attention to the Alps . . . was Albert Smith. He was a prototype of the young hiker, camper and mountaineer of to-day who, with limited means, spends a short but infinitely precious holiday in the hills. Thus far mountaineering had been, and was to be for many years, the almost exclusive preserve of the eclectics, of Government officials, University dons and professional men generally who with ample time and money at their disposal could afford long holidays in the Alps and the expense of guides. In 1838, Smith, then twenty-two years old, arrived at Chamonix with twelve pounds in his pocket. Instantly he fell under the spell of the mountains and was so anxious to make the ascent of Mont Blanc that he offered to go as a porter for anyone who would take him. He failed in his ambition, but returned to the attack in 1851 with some Oxford undergraduates who were delighted to climb with him when they learned that he was “Mr. Smith of London, the well-known comic author”. This time he succeeded, but the ascent provoked much undesirable publicity. In the course of an article, the Daily News wrote, “De Saussure’s observations and reflections on Mont Blanc live in his poetical philosophy; those of Mr. Albert Smith will be most appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns and stale fast witticisms, with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc . . . will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English tourists in Switzerland for a mindless and rather vulgar redundance of animal spirits”.

But Albert Smith remained unabashed. He was by nature a born showman, and such are impervious to criticism and abuse. He wrote an interesting and amusing book about Mont Blanc and, constructing a model of the mountain, set out to describe it and his experiences to all and sundry. His Mont Blanc in a Box show was a popular success and, however much it may have been scorned by the eclectics, undoubtedly did much to bring the beauty and interest of the Alps to the public attention.

from British Mountaineers by F. S. Smythe (1942)

After the French Revolution, a law was passed that bells should be removed from churches and melted down to make cannons. “These monuments to the luxury of our cities and to the vanity of their inhabitants” explained one public prosecutor in 1793, “can be more usefully employed in bringing terror and death” to the enemies of the republic. Not all towns and villages co-operated.

In November 1793, the mayor [of Saint Cornier-des-Landes], a republican, decided to follow the letter of the law and take down the bells. The operation dragged on, however, as the patriots staying at the local inn shirked the task. The former “custos” of the church, a post that had been handed down within the same family for almost two hundred years, managed to persuade them to drink perry . . . which delayed the operation, since by then night had fallen. Pierre Duchesnay, the servant of the mayor’s aunt, was delighted to discover that the vehicle he had brought to move the bells was now quite useless.

In the following days the people of Saint Cornier prided themselves on having succeeded where neighbouring communes had failed so lamentably. A few weeks later, a commissioner from the revolutionary committee of Domfront, escorted by a “juring” priest and a wagoner, came to seize the bells in question. He seemed to be in somewhat of a hurry and remarked to the mayor that he should have razed the bell tower because it was an affront to the principal of equality. It was then that a former bailiff residing in the commune decided to “play a trick” on the authorities by installing in the bell tower one Gabriel Duchesnay, a journeyman woodcutter who was armed with an axe and instructed to feign madness. After a drink or two, the commissioner set out to capture the bells, whereupon he heard the woodcutter order him to go back down. “If you climb up and lay a finger on the bells, I’ll cut you right down!” cried the madman. The mayor, who had gotten wise to the trick, confirmed that it was indeed a genuine madman and the commissioner had to withdraw.

from Village Bells : Sound And Meaning In The Nineteenth-Century French Countryside by Alain Corbin (1998)