I love Agence Eureka. Here’s a duck and a bucket found there.

I’ve decided to start a keeping a note of interesting names as I come across them. First names, for the most part, though spectacular surnames may also earn a place in my collection.

Two to begin with: Michael Gilleland (“antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon”) at Laudator Temporis Acti reminds us that one of the signatories of the US Declaration of Independence gloried in the name of Button Gwinnet. And ever since I heard him being interviewed on the radio a few weeks back, I’ve had a soft spot for deaf activist Tomato Lichy. His assertion that deafness is not a disability is, um, unusual, but his name is Tomato and that’s good enough for me.

“Here’s the way I want to show up at the gates of heaven. I want to come skidding in there on all fours. I want to be slipping and sliding and I want to hit the gates of heaven with a bang. And when I stand up, when I stand before Christ, I want there to be blood on my knees, and my elbows. I want to be covered with mud. And I want to be standing there with a ragged breastplate of righteousness, and a spear in my hand. And I want to say, ‘look at me, Jesus, I’ve been in the battles, I’ve been fighting for you’.” – Retired Lieutenant-General William Boykin, addressing a conference of apocalyptic Christian Zionists, April 2008.

Cut around the edges of the cow with a sharpened pair of scissors, then keep it on your mantelpiece or in a glass-fronted display cabinet.

It is easy to laugh at the English judiciary, with all those bewigged judges who seemingly know nothing of the wider world outside their chambers. But they know how to turn a phrase, those judges. With Nicholas Van Hoogstraten back in the news, it is worth recalling that many years ago he was described in court as “a self-styled emissary of Beelzebub”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s used that phrase ever since when filling in his “Occupation” on documents.

I recently came across a fascinating personality test. Normally, I give short shrift to such things, because they tend to be devised by airheads drunk on a combination of psychobabble and inanity, but this one delighted me. Unfortunately I can’t reproduce it here. Rarely have I seen a document so thoroughly protected by copyright, threatening extreme measures up to and including the crushing of one’s skull and the sale into slavery of one’s descendants, yea unto the fourth generation. Very occasionally I have shown a devil-may-care attitude in the face of such warnings, but I am not an idiot.

Anyway, as far as I can see, there is nothing to stop me paraphrasing a few questions from the test, so that’s what I’ll do. It’s called “Are You A Bird Or A Cow?”. I looked in vain for any indication that these are meant as types of human personality, so I can only assume that we are meant to take it literally. Maybe the test is meant to be conducted on behalf of your bird or cow acquaintances who are confused about their identity. That would make perfect sense.

So, for example, there are questions like Would you say you were flighty or given to rumination? and Do you prefer standing in a field or perching high in a tree? Please remember that I am only paraphrasing. One question asks specifically whether for breakfast you would prefer to eat millet or cud. Oddly, it doesn’t go on to ask about elevenses, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper, and nor is there any mention of snacks. This may indicate a certain laxness in the methodology employed, par for the course with tests such as this, but given the ferocious look on the face of the deviser, whose photograph appears at the top of the first page, I am minded not to level any criticism.

I completed the test for myself, rather than as a proxy for my crow Martin or for a cow I know called Degustibus, and the results were extremely interesting.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Antipodes, longstanding Hooting Yard rapporteur Glyn Webster has devised a diagram showing the development of the modern metal tapping machine. It should be noted that the metal tapping machines occasionally mentioned in these pages bear greater resemblance to the one in the top left corner than to the one at bottom right. Click on the picture for a larger image.

In the post, a very nice letter from Brooklyn poet Gregory Vincent St Thomasino responding to the recording of Jubilate Agno:

Dear Frank,

Once again I thank you for bringing this reading/recording to my attention. It is simply extraordinary. It is excellent, it is historical. And if I may, I think it is remarkable the having a female voice in the response, this makes the listening easier, never monotonous (never wearisome!). The voices compliment and complement each other. Smart is my affinity, my kin. He is encyclopaedic. I sense so deeply his sense of isolation, I am so deeply moved by his sense of isolation and frustration. At the 1:56 time there begins the part “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” and at that pont I followed along in my text. This complete reading of Jubilate Agno has not only been a pleasure and an education for me, it has been an episode.

Yours sincerely,

Gregory

The letter has also been posted on Mr St Thomasino’s e-ratio postmodern poetry blog, where you will find a link to his own Elegy For Christopher Smart amid much else.

So. My harebrained scheme for 2008 is to turn Hooting Yard into a daily blog. This will not change the fundamental character of your favourite website, for it will continue to record the doings of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson and all those other characters, such as the tinies of Pang Hill Orphanage, who you have come to cherish in your bosoms. But I thought I should make an effort to be busier during those times when the muse fails to strike.

By looking at the Categories list over to the right, I see that during 2007 I posted 99 pieces of prose, which isn’t bad going, but clearly trying for 365 would be foolhardy. Though I prize the quality of foolhardiness more than most, I am not going to set myself an impossible task. Brimming with enthusiasm as I am today, however, I can see no reason short of idleness why the year to come cannot be packed with more entries under Random Twaddle, Things I Have Learned, or indeed Quotations. The latter has only one entry for the year just about to end, which I suspect is due to my having shoved other quotations into the wrong category. And I think one thing I have tended to neglect is drawing readers’ attention to particularly splendid items I find elsewhere on the net – such as this piece about the Mundaneum.

I am hoping that the idea of a Daily Hooting Yard does not crumble to dust by, oh, about the third or fourth of January, so bear in mind that suggestions and contributions are always welcome from readers, either in the Comments or directly to hooting.yard@googlemail.com

Meanwhile, go and listen to Jubilate Agno again. It is “strangely mesmeric” according to one correspondent, who tells me he has so far listened to it, all the way through, four times. Very sensible man.

Many thanks to all my readers and listeners for your support during the year.

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Use Your Loaf is an exciting new panel game in which contestants are challenged to recreate the feeding of the five thousand. Those of you who have read your Bible will be familiar with the story. Having gathered five thousand men, and an unspecified number of women and children, in some wild and remote backwater, the Christ manages to eke a slap-up lunch for the lot of them from five loaves of bread and two fish, also unspecified. On the face of it, this seems unlikely, and one suspects either charlatanry or perhaps defective memory on the part of the chroniclers who recorded the event. But the game is about wholesome family teatime entertainment , not theology, so a pox upon those who get into a skeptical flap, say I.

Incidentally, I use the term “the Christ” because this is now the accepted way of referring to the beardy preacher man following Melvin Gibson’s motion picture The Passion Of The Christ, also a piece of wholesome family teatime entertainment, with added homoerotic violence.

Although lacking in homoerotic violence, Use Your Loaf is nevertheless an energetic and quite dangerous game in which blood is often spilled. Each member of the panel is given a bread bin containing five baps, and a tray with a couple of fish on it. For health and safety reasons, the fish are not actual fish, but replica blennies made of marzipan. Contestants must then answer a series of bap- and blenny-related questions to win either a reasonably sharp kitchen knife, a pair of pinking shears, a huge and lethal slicing machine, or a fretsaw. When the tools have been allocated, the panel members – usually consisting of Stephen Fry and Stephen Fry’s friends – are given ten minutes to cut up their bread and fish into as many pieces as possible. After the advert break, in which celebrity beauty editor Nadine Baggott extols either pentapeptides or smokers’ poptarts, a lovely and arithmetically competent assistant counts up each contestant’s bap and blenny bits. The winner is, of course, the one who achieves a score as close to five thousand as possible.

Use Your Loaf is shown on The Bread And Fish Programmes Channel every weekday at teatime.

Long, long ago, in what seems like another life, I used to be paid a pittance to write capsule film reviews. Since then, I have always had great respect for those who have mastered what is a bewilderingly difficult form, summarising a film (or a book, or a play, or whatever) in one or two sentences. I was prompted to recall my own faltering steps in the art by the television listings in today’s Guardian. There are four films on the terrestrial channels tonight, with only BBC2 eschewing cinema, in favour of snooker. And what an inspired choice the viewer has! Here are condensed versions of the (uncredited) capsule reviews:

BBC1, 11.20 : The Ghost And The Darkness : tedious adventure.

ITV1, 11.05 : Showtime : leaden action comedy.

Channel Four, 10.00 : Happy Gilmore : feeble sports comedy.

Five, 10.00 : The Glimmer Man : dull and cliché-ridden action thriller.