OutaSpaceman sends news of some exciting paint samples. A company called Green-Scene offers tins of General Muck, Corporal Crap, Devon Soil, and – my favourite for obvious reasons – Yard Filth. There is something endearing about a website advertising paint samples on which most of the pictures are missing, promising “Image Coming Soon”, dated 2005.

Regular readers will know that here at Hooting Yard we do our utmost to keep up with innovations in the world o’ gruel, pap and slops. Someone has to, and who better for the task than our team of tireless Gruel And Pap And Slops Monitors hunched over their consoles from dawn to dusk and then again from dusk to dawn? Anyway, one such Monitor has just alerted me to a newly-sighted slop, spotted on the BBC, where Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesman Vince Cable spoke of “credit default slops”. The term will be added to our database after a due period of slobbering.

Pansy Cradledew tells me that she has recently devised a new method of empowering her pod-on-a-lanyard. Rather than plugging it into a socket in the wall, via a recharger, she has obtained a piece of gubbins which is attached to her window with a sucker. Wings on the gubbins are exposed to the glare of that blazing mighty orb in the sky, the one John Donne rightly called a “busie old fool”, and the pod thereafter is fed from the power stored in the gubbins.

This is all very well, but it occurs to me that it could be the beginning of a slippery slope which might see Pansy becoming an Aztec fundamentalist. Now that she relies, with obvious enthusiasm, upon that burning golden disc for the empowering of her pod, can it be long before she is tearing out the still-beating hearts from the breasts of sacrificial victims upon a stone altar to assuage the angry Sun?

Before you accuse me of overreacting, bear in mind that this is the woman who gleefully announced only the other day that she had bought a DVD of The Royal Hunt Of The Sun for £3. This is the film, you will recall, in which Christopher Plummer gives a truly unforgettable performance as Captain Von Trapp Atahualpa. I rest my case.

A “crude but effective” rendition (in his own words) by OutaSpaceman of A Rustic Lesson, performed at the City Folk Club in Chichester and posted here for the edification of all.

Let’s play Spot The Fatal Flaw. On the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, a United Nations rapporteur or envoy or some such said: “The deal is that the Russians must withdraw to where they were before. The problem is that we don’t know where that is.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been wondering if it is time for Hooting Yard to obtain a kitemark.  Readers from overseas will wonder what on earth I am babbling about, so let me explain. Every single person in this country, man, woman and child, upon seeing a little picture of a kite, knows viscerally that whatever it is that the picture of a kite is attached to is an absolutely fantastic thing, and they can confidently begin to drool with glee. Why this should be so is not quite clear, but is probably bound up with age-old traditions of bureaucratic twaddle.

It has its critics, of course, those in the reality-based community who suggest there is something inane in the equation picture of a kite = gleeful drooling. But we can only go on the evidence before us. I tested the Pavlovian responses of passers-by in a bustling hamlet yesterday. First, I offered people a string bag packed with oozing squelchy muck. There were no takers, and indeed on more than one occasion I was clouted around the head or threatened by the attentions of community hub vigilance officers. But then I made the same offer having stuck a picture of a kite to the bag with Blu-Tac. The transformation was astonishing. People began to openly drool in the streets, their glee uncontained, and several grabbed at the bag full of muck until I had inadvertently created a melée. In the end I had to hide behind a piece of civic statuary, but my point was proved. 

Thrilling TV news! A fantastic new quiz show called The Bleakest Link begins tomorrow. Each week, the ghoulish wraiths of long-dead polar explorers, caked in ice, compete with each other to answer really hard questions. The winner is the icicle-dripping phantom who intones his answers in the bleakest, most ghastly tones. Filmed at an abandoned Antarctic weather station, the quiz features a tethered goat. A brain scanner attached to the goat measures the extent of its dreadful awe as each answer is boomed at it through a funnel, while a goat-physiology monitoring mechanism registers its fearful trembling. The quizmaster is Dale Winton, in a reindeer-hide anorak.

Hey there Key!, writes the insufferably jaunty Dr Ruth Pastry, The crunch of credit seems to be turning into complete economic meltdown. If you don’t believe me, read the papers. Anyway, from my bolt-hole here in the paradise that is an out-of-season English seaside resort, I have a solution to the whole bloody mess. We know, from listening to the news on the wireless, that economists witter on about a “basket of currencies”. No wonder we face fiscal Armageddon if all the money is put in baskets! If everyone did as I do, and kept their cash in a pippy bag, I think we would see a dramatic about-turn in the global economy. Now I am going to take my dog Skippy for a seashore walk. Bye bye.

Dear Mr Key, writes Dr Stan Bismark, Whilst ripping out an old fireplace in my very own hovel I found, amongst a lot of bird poop, dead crows and other muck, a small package tied up with rusty wire.  On opening  the package all it contained was a small card-mounted photo of a style which I think is called carte de visite.  On the back of the photo in green ink was written the following: “Dobson, shortly befor he died” [sic].  Do you think this could be your very own pamphleteer?  I attach a copy of the photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I attended a seminar recently which had the jaunty title “Comments Policies For Bloggers : How To Make Them Harsh And Unforgiving”. It was all very tiresome, and the “facilitator”, as he insisted on calling himself, in spite of the fact that the facilities were woeful, had little understanding of a blog such as Hooting Yard. Here, the prose is defiantly sensible and the comments more sensible still.

It struck me, however, that I have never made the Hooting Yard Comments Policy clear. I will do so now. New visitors may not be aware that reading the comments here is compulsory, and is due to be enforced by an exciting – if somewhat alarming – software device. If, in future, you do not click on the comments, your computer will be disabled, your tongue will cleave to the roof of your mouth, your hovel will be infested with pale mutant creeping things, and you will no longer receive visits from outreach workers from your local Harsh And Unforgiving Community Outreach Cadet Squadron.

I have taken this step to ensure that readers do not miss such treats as the discussion of pippy bags to be found here, or – to pluck just one of numerous profundities – wst’s emotionally wrenching comment on The Roads To Jaywick.

Moves are afoot to make the writing, as well as the reading, of comments equally compulsory, but the boffins in the software lab have all gone on a well-deserved autumn break to the eerie Land of Gaar.

The engine of capitalism is said to be the creation of desires. Advertising and allied brain-manipulation techniques persuade us to covet things we did not even know we wanted, and illusory wants soon become needs. Sprawling insouciantly in my ivory tower, it is very easy to pretend that I am above such grimness. For example, I do not own – nor covet – a mobile phone, and would much rather curl up with a copy of Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart than go shopping for fripperies. But of course, such pretence is delusional. I am as eager as anyone else to get my hands on stuff, depending on the stuff. Thus I am indebted to OutaSpaceman for drawing my attention to a product which I did not know existed, but realise I have always wanted, no, needed. I can say in all honesty that without this magnificent item my life would remain forever incomplete, pointless, wasted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I speak, of course, of the cardboard cut-out model of the Hindenburg disaster, available here.

Mr Key is averse to the habit of computer boffins to constantly tweak and fiddle with software, even if there may be good reasons for doing so. But as you can see, Hooting Yard is undergoing some form of WordPress “upgrade”, so things may look a bit odd for a few days until the new fanglements have been ironed out. Bear with me.

I find myself wondering if it is possible to read an article about John McCain which does not include the word “maverick”, or one about Sarah Palin which eschews the phrase “a heartbeat away from the presidency”.

An entertaining letter arrives in the Haemoglobin Towers postbox from, I think, the United States. It is headed “The Hooting Yard Effect”, and sounds a cautionary note for podcast listeners. Here it is, in full:

Dear Mr. Key,

In late May of this year, I was pointed toward Hooting Yard (in the metaphorical sense of having the Hooting Yard podcast suggested to me as an enjoyable listening experience, as opposed to the more literal sense of being given directions to the physical location of Hooting Yard). After listening to a few shows, and being introduced to the works of Dobson, Blodgett, and Pebblehead, learning about Bonkers Maisie, Marigold Chew, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, Mrs. Gubbins, and diminutive adventuress Tiny Enid, and being exposed to some highly suspect, albeit scrupulously alphabetical, soup recipes, I felt a bit lost and resolved that perhaps if I listened to the complete archive of Hooting Yard shows, I might gain a more thorough understanding of the world of Hooting Yard, and possibly even learn how to spell “Bibblybibdib’s.”

I have now completed my task, and in the space of little more than two months, have listened to all 140 shows that I was able to find on the internet. Whether or not this effort has noticeably improved my understanding of Hooting Yard, its environs, and inhabitants is a matter open for debate. However, I have noticed an unusual side effect of absorbing so much Hooting Yard over so little a time: I find that my “internal voice,” when applied to odd bits of prose I come across in the course of the day, now sounds exactly like Frank Key.

For example, I was recently in San Diego, California. In want of something to do, wandering the Old Town section, I happened across an old, restored cemetery. Most of the graves were marked by blank wooden crosses, with small interpretive signs made of deteriorating photocopied text sandwiched between glass plates. One of these signs read, as best as I can recall:

“THE UNKNOWN GERMAN
This grave marks the resting place of the Unknown German. This man came to San Diego from Germany in 18– [terminal digits illegible]. Very little is known about his life here. How and why he came to San Diego, as well as how he died, is unknown.”

I read this, silently, to myself. But the voice I heard was plainly Frank Key’s. This doesn’t happen with newspaper articles, magazine stories, street signs, short stories, or novels. It occurs only when I read unusual bits of prose like that above. I would caution any other Hooting Yard listener contemplating ingesting a large amount of your shows in a short period of time. The effect, while not unpleasant, is unusual.

Thank you for the hours of entertainment you’ve provided.

Very respectfully,
Dr Jeffrey Chilton