Splendid news! According To The Ninth is back after a long break. And it resumes with a quiz. Mr Key is very happy.
A wholly unrelated illustration from Agence Eureka, appended here by whim.
An Excuse For Cake & Balloons
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Category Archives: Things I Have Learned
Let’s Buy Blunkett’s Brain!
Listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, I learned the thrilling news that David Blunkett is donating his brain to science. I have taken immediate steps to ensure that here at Hooting Yard we do not miss the chance to get our hands on this fantastic objet de Blunkett. So I am launching a special fundraising drive, dubbed Let’s Buy Blunkett’s Brain! Please use the donate button to give generously.
David Blunkett (brain still inside head)
To demonstrate our serious commitment to this project, I have already obtained a jar in which to keep the brain, and will be rummaging around in the pantry for chemicals and liquid pickling fluids in which to preserve it.
Blunkett’s brain as it will look when extracted from his head
Obviously there will be all sorts of exciting experiments to be done once we have the Blunkett brain snugly ensconced in the jar. I think priority should be given to one which attempts to discover why that cow attacked the heroic MP. In a designated field, the very same cow, or one similar, will be tethered to a post, and the jar containing Blunkett’s brain will be brandished in its face in a threatening manner. Will the cow be frightened in its turn, or will it strain at its rope and try to attack the jar? Or could there be another outcome entirely, such as the cow displaying no interest in the jar whatsoever and falling into cow sleep?
A cow
We will only find out if we do all in our power to get hold of that brain as soon as possible! Join the campaign today, and give as much cash as you can!
Hewson : A Pen Portrait
A splendid pen portrait of Paul “Bono” Hewson from Peter Hitchens:
Those present at both party conferences had to endure glutinous video-screen lectures from the Irish millionaire popular singer with the surgically attached sunglasses who bizarrely calls himself after a well-known dog biscuit.
In The Other House
It is reasonably well known that, while her husband was imagining “no possessions”, Yoko Ono maintained a separate apartment solely in which to keep her collection of fur coats. Perhaps she still does.
The one-time popstrel Toyah Willcox, or Mrs Fripp as we like to think of her, owns a house which is used to store her ever-growing archive of memorabilia. Every last scrap of evidence of Mrs Fripp’s existence on earth, in all media, is contained in a sort of Uber Toyah Silo, which, from the outside, looks just like an ordinary house. Strange, but true.
It has now come to light that Dobson, the twentieth century’s greatest out of print pamphleteer, also had a building other than his residence – possibly a barn, or a chalet – but we have no idea what he kept in there. Furs? Frippabilia? It’th a mythtery, sure enough.
I shall do some research.
From The Diary Of Heliogabalus
Monday. I celebrated the rite of the taurobolium, tossing my head to and fro among the castrated devotees of the Great Mother Goddess. I infibulated myself, and did all that the eunuch-priests are wont to do. Also decided to celebrate the rite of Salambo, with all the wailing and frenzy of the Syrian cult.
Tuesday. I set aside a room in the palace and there committed my indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, and shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while in a soft and melting voice I solicited the passers-by.
Wednesday. I made a public bath in the imperial palace and at the same time threw open the bath of Plautinus to the populace, that by this means I might get a supply of men with unusually large organs. I also took care to have the whole city and the wharves searched for onobeli, as those are called who seemed particularly lusty.
Thursday. Had a banquet. I used silver urns and casseroles, and vessels of chased silver, one hundred pounds in weight, some of them decorated with the lewdest designs. I concocted wine seasoned with mastich and with pennyroyal and I had rose-wine made more fragrant by adding pulverized pine-cone. I made force-meat of fish, and of oysters of various kinds or similar shell-fish, and of lobsters, crayfish and squills. I strewed roses and all manner of flowers, such as lilies, violets, hyacinths, and narcissus, over my banqueting-rooms, couches and porticoes, and then strolled about in them. I refused to swim in a pool that was not perfumed with saffron or some other well-known essence. And I could not rest easily on cushions that were not stuffed with rabbit-fur or feathers from under the wings of partridges, and I changed the pillows frequently. In imitation of Apicius I ate camels-heels and also cocks-combs taken from the living birds, and the tongues of peacocks and nightingales, because I was told that one who ate them was immune from the plague. I served to the palace-attendants huge platters heaped up with the viscera of mullets, and flamingo-brains, partridge-eggs, thrush-brains, and the heads of parrots, pheasants, and peacocks. And the beards of the mullets that I ordered to be served were so large that they were brought on, in place of cress or parsley or pickled beans or fenugreek, in well-filled bowls and disk-shaped platters – a particularly amazing performance, I thought.
Friday. I finished building the reversible ceiling-panels. Once I have packed sufficient violets and rose-petals into the space above, I will invite my rivals and parasites to another banquet, and then have a factotum pull a lever to release the panels, and thus will I smother to death my guests under the cascade of violets and rose-petals.
Saturday. I drove a chariot drawn by four elephants on the Vatican Hill, destroying the tombs which obstructed the way, and I harnessed four camels to a chariot at a private spectacle in the Circus. Then I collected serpents with the aid of priests of the Marsic nation and suddenly let them loose before dawn, when the populace assembled for the more frequented games, and many people were injured by their fangs.
Sunday. I shut up a vast number of flies in a jar and called them tamed bees.
Monday. I am confident my name will be branded in history above all others, because of my unspeakably disgusting life.
The Roses Of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888)
Onions, Vulgarity, And Crime
“There is, one must admit, a certain association of vulgarity with the onion. It is a valuable food, and an indispensable accessory to the culinary artist; but as used by many people it is not suggestive of refinement. And yet the bulb has not only an honourable character – it has a sort of sacred history.
“Both Pliny and Juvenal, among old writers, and many Egyptologists of our own time and country, have recorded that the ancient Egyptians worshipped the onion. It is true that Wilkinson, who wrote on the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, doubts the evidence of this; but he adds that the onion was admitted as a common offering on every altar, and that the priests were forbidden to eat it. In Ellis’s History of Madagascar it is noted that the Malagasy of our time regard the onion as unclean, and forbidden by the idols.”
But the onion can be a weapon in the fight against crime!
“Ovid… says that both onions and sulphur were given to criminals to purify them from their crimes, upon the old theory of purgation by fumigation.”
Extracts from Storyology : Essays In Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, And Plant-Lore by Benjamin Taylor (1900)
Finlandia
Elberry’s Ghost comes to the rescue of the tongue-tied:
One student said, rather taken aback by the sudden torrent of runology: “How do you know this?” i thought about this for a bit then said, “i’m just interested in runes and things like that. i know people in Finland.”
It occurs to me that “i know people in Finland” is an excellent catch-all response to just about any question.
Victorian Aether Ships, Etc
Mr Key has recruited a hare-brained academic with wild hair and smudged spectacles to carry out an analysis of search terms which fetch people up at Hooting Yard. You will recall that some poor soul came here having sought information on “character flaw of mediaeval peasant”. Among recent phrases of interest are:
Iron wolf implements
Victorian aether ships
John Le Mesurier dentures
Mormon goat
How to make a crow
How to cook a cormorant
I am hoping my befuddled academic discovers that the person seeking culinary tips for cormorants was Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music famed for his swan-eating activities. We shall wait and see.
Smeared With Mayan Mud
Christians have their seminaries, and Muslims their madrassas – but where is the school for the aspirant Aztec fundamentalist? I speak of myself, of course. Home study is all very well, and I have tried to be diligent, but in the absence of a collegiate setting, I am falling prey to the lure of rival, and surely heretical, faiths.
This little complaint was occasioned by my stumbling upon an account of a Mayan rebirthing ceremony. True Aztec believers, even the most wishy-washy, should guard against falling into the Mayan embrace. And yet… is there not something irresistible in this Times report of 2001?
The ceremony took place at dusk. Mr Blair and his wife, wearing bathing costumes, were led to the Temazcal, a brick-coloured pyramid on the south end of the beach… Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out. Each side of the building is decorated with Mayan religious symbols: the sun and baby lizards representing spring and childhood; a bird to signify adolescence, summer and freedom; a crab to represent maturity and autumn; and a serpent – the most sacred in the Mayan Indian culture – to symbolise winter and transformation…
Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs’ ‘energy flow’.
Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant. They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before ‘rebirth’ and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other’s bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside.
The prime minister, on holiday just a month before the 11 September attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace.
Before leaving, the Blairs were told to scream out loud to signify the pain of rebirth. They then walked hand in hand down the beach to swim in the sea.
Quoted in How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World : A Short History Of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen (2004). Elsewhere in this splendid book, we are reminded that Margaret Thatcher was a devotee of mystical ‘electric baths’.
Inanity And Its Bedfellows
I am beginning to think that stealing the titles of other people’s blog postages may be the Way Forward… forward, of course, to that bright upland where I can bask under the Aztecs’ mighty orb when my work is done. Even while the Key cranium is ticking and whirring as it ponders John Ptak’s postage header along comes Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence with “Emptiness; Uncertainty; Inanity”. Again, I advise you to read the original postage, but meanwhile I shall be pondering some prose to which it will serve as a fitting title.
The “inanity” part should give me no trouble, as virtually any anecdote about Blodgett will fit the bill. His tin shadow, his dockside groans, his futile picking at unbuttons… there is so much material. But “emptiness” and “uncertainty” may be more troublesome.
One uncertainty is to what extent I can get away with writing about prose I have not yet written. Best not to dwell upon it, for that way emptiness lies.
ADDENDUM : As Dave Lull notes in a comment, Patrick Kurp’s title is a quotation from Dr Johnson’s A Dictionary Of The English Language (1755). Though that is clear from reading the postage, I ought to have acknowledged it here.
Visionaries
I was much taken with the title of a recent postage at the excellent Ptak Science Books blog, to wit Visionaries, Ice People, And The Marriage Of Stupid And Brutal. Indeed, fomenting within my pea-sized yet pulsating brain is a piece to which I can apply this title, a piece which will bear no actual relation to John Ptak’s post, though that is well worth your attention. Now, on Channel Four News, I have just heard an arresting reference to “a visionary cobbler”.
Clearly the ethereal spirits which reign within my brainpans are gently prodding me to turn my attention to visionaries. Watch this space.
Compendium Of Cow Attacks
Are you terrified of cows? Perhaps you ought to be, given the recent spate of cow attacks. The blogger Mark Wadsworth is keeping track of things, which is certainly an invaluable service, but one wonders what it all means.
A Tin Of Button Polish
Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with all 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar Of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
From Ex Libris : Confessions Of A Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (1998)
Lost In Three Minutes
You lot know I am a devoted fan of the preposterous television series Lost. As, it seems, are millions of Iranians. The clamour for pirated DVDs is such that the main video distributor in the country is putting the series on general release, and talks are afoot for it to be shown on state television. So far, so good. But…
Programmes will be carefully censored to exclude “un-Islamic” scenes such as those featuring scantily clad women or male-female physical contact.
Given the beardy mullahs’ usual ideas about what constitutes being “scantily clad”, given that none of the women characters shuffles about in a big black sack, and given that men and women hang out with each other in a relaxed, trapped on a tropical island kind of way, I am trying to work out which scenes will not be censored.
Lost, the complete series – now available in the digested three-minute version!