Elberry at The Lumber Room has an excellent solution to feral youths and knife crime:

I imagine there are several thousand, or hundreds of thousands, of young men carrying knives ‘in self-defence’ who will, however, pull it as soon as they imagine a confrontation is in the air. They would be far better to carry expandable batons, and far less likely to accidentally kill someone. They would do even better to stay at home reading Sir Philip Sidney.

Personally, I would recommend The Anatomy Of Melancholy, but just staying indoors, reading improving literature, seems to me a splendid idea.

Number one in a series of paintings showing birds on windowsills. This is Ein Besuch by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885).

Here are some photographs. The brief accompanying text is splendid.

An exciting letter arrives from OutaSpaceman:

I don’t know why but, while researching British Seagull outboard motors, I thought of Hooting Yard. Then, yesterday, when I was out on my velocipede (which is named Potato), I passed a field of cows, and stopped to have a chat with them. As I declaimed, at length, on my conviction that they should rise up and cast off their collective yokes of oppression, I failed to notice a family group walking along the path behind me. They began to move much more quickly in the opposite direction.

Clearly the family had not read Dobson’s pamphlet How To Conduct Yourself When Encountering A Cyclist Speaking With Cows In A Field (out of print).

OutaSpaceman enclosed a delightful photograph of the cows he met:

As usual during a major football tournament, I have been keeping note of the bon mots (and bon Motsons) of the commentary teams, always a joy to listen to. Euro 2008, hosted by Austria and Switzerland, is not yet over, but it is unlikely that this gem will be bettered:

“Here we are in the field of dreams, surrounded by fields of cows.”

The global merchandising arm of the Hooting Yard franchise, always keenly aware of what passes for the zeitgeist, will shortly be launching upon a delighted public its latest product. Years of ruinously expensive research come to fruition with the appearance in a shop near you of the Malevolent Homunculus Action Figure.

Deceptively innocent-looking, this tiny homunculus-sized homunculus is actually a model of a particularly evil homunculus, one which can be sent out on nocturnal escapades to terrorise one’s unsuspecting neighbours. Although not as minuscule as the homunculus favoured by spermist theoreticians, it is still remarkably small, about the size of a newborn squirrel. It has moveable arms and legs, a fully rotating head, and a well-ironed shirt the better to conceal its inherent malevolence. Package also includes a scenic backdrop, made of sturdy cardboard, of “those pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing” from Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) against which the malevolent homunculus can be posed, spookily.

Time for another exciting Hooting Yard poll. This time we ask that burning question…

Free poll

I want to take this opportunity to thank those readers and listeners who click that rectangular orange emblem over to the right and make donations to Hooting Yard via Paypal. There aren’t that many of you, and you know who you are, and you should be aware that your donations are genuinely appreciated. They do actually help me to meet such essential costs as my gas bill or bus fares.

If you haven’t yet donated, and enjoy the teeming thousands of words here or the countless hours of podcast audio of me babbling into a microphone, please consider doing so. If nothing else, you will get your reward in heaven, or in hell via a handcart, depending upon your moral probity.

I know next to nothing about computer games, but tireless Hooting Yard researcher Tristan J Shuddery tries hard to keep me abreast of the latest developments. Many thanks to Tristan, then, for alerting me to an exciting “interactive text adventure computer game” called Lost Pig. What topic could possibly be more thrilling? I admit myself to be befuddled by it, but for those of you who know how these things work, here is a link to it. Happy pig finding!

The game of lawn tennis, or sphairistike, as it was played eight years ago:

From Paleo-Future

This morning on the Today programme on Radio 4, a titan of industry (whose name I have already forgotten) said “this is the problem of small baskets trying to survey very complex… things”. He paused beautifully at the point where I have inserted that ellipsis. Leaving aside the intriguing notion of baskets carrying out surveys, this seems to be a statement of brilliant profundity. I have been thinking about it for a couple of hours now and have yet to winkle from it the core of its wisdom.

Let us turn our attention to the world of gaming. There has been a fantastic buzz in the industry as we approach the launch of the latest version of one of the most popular games on the planet, a multibillion-dollar money-spinner instantly recognisable from the three letters GWD.

I am speaking, of course, of Grovel With Dampier, the cardboard and chickenwire strategy game that numbers among its fans Yoko Ono, Dale Winton, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov of Turkmenistan, and Stephen Fry. I have been fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of version four and, let me tell you, it is everything it’s cracked up to be.

As with the earlier releases, the basic concept of Grovel With Dampier is deceptively simple. Sorry, that’s not quite right. There’s no deception involved. It is simple! You, the player, accompany a simulacrum of buccaneering sea captain Sir William Dampier (1651-1715) on his three circumnavigations of the globe. Every now and again, you both disembark from your ship, whether it be the Cygnet, the St George, or the Duke, and grovel in the stinking, muddy tidewaters of whichever land mass you are at the edge of. Then, your hair festooned with kelp and your eyes sore from salt water, you clamber back on to your ship and voyage onwards to seek further grovelling grounds.

Aficionados will be pleased to learn that most, if not all, of the irritating additional features have been removed from this new edition, allowing players to concentrate fully on the essence of the game. There is no distracting music, no bleeps and blips and high resolution graphics, just a sheet of cardboard and some chickenwire and the opportunity to pretend you really are grovelling with Dampier. Does it get any better than this?

As I am sure all Hooting Yardists know, Deuteronomy 8.8 reads : “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” – now all packed into one delicious snack bar!

You can find some other holy confectionery here, but before stuffing your face to the point of gluttony, do remember that elsewhere in Deuteronomy we are reminded of “that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought” (ie, Pointy Town).

“Ah, but look! The stricken ship has been abandoned by its crew. Their puddings had been over-egged and they all fell into the sea. And they were swallowed up each one, and fed the monsters of the deep. Now not a trace of them remains, except bones strewn on the ocean floor, and their stricken ship above, pecked at by indifferent auks.”

From The Contaminated Eggy Pudding Eaten By Incautious Sailors And Other Maritime Tragedies by Dennis Beerpint

“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation.” – Humphrey Lyttelton, 1921-2008, President of The Society For Italic Handwriting