Nick Halling, in a very excited voice, during World’s Strongest Man Super Series on Channel Five:
“It’s like a cartoon… but glued to the floor!!!”
Matchless Commentary
Reply
Category Archives: Twaddle
What I Want For Christmas
What do I want for Christmas? Why, a Saint Sebastian pin-cushion of course!
This and other splendid gift items are on display at The Ship Of Fools.
Advertisement
This is a guest post by celebrity beauty editor Nadine Baggott.
Well, not literally, because those scrumptious fishcakes are made by a rival manufacturer which has not promised to pour funds into Mr Key’s so-called Hooting Yard Enterprise Zone. No, today I am here to recommend not one but two great new teatime novelty snacks from Hubermann’s Teatime Novelty Snacks range. And you won’t find any pentapeptides in either of them! First up we have Smokers’ Poptarts, delicious poptarts in two different flavours designed specially for smokers. Simply pop them in the toaster, light a fag, and voila!, before you can say “Hello, I’m celebrity beauty editor Nadine Baggott,†you’ll be sitting down to a plate of delicious smokers’ poptarts. Choose between bread pudding or synthetic bean curd flavours. Yum!
*NB : Nadine subscribes to the definition of a “true fan” helpfully provided by Victoria Beckham: “I think it shows you are a true fan when you cry or pass out. When the paramedics are called I think that is a good sign.”
Very Useful Advice
“If you are considering dyeing a sheep, first ensure that it is your own sheep”.
A huge debt of gratitude to the Guardian for alerting us to that most worrying of modern plagues, the tendency so many people have to dye sheep that don’t belong to them. Would that Dobson were with us now! In his pamphlet How To Dye A Goat (out of print), he hammered home the very same point, or almost the same point, attending as he did to the dyeing of goats rather than to the dyeing of sheep, over dozens of pages, to such effect that there is not a single recorded incident of a person dyeing someone else’s goat for the entire period that the pamphlet was available in all good goat-related bookshops and/or airport terminals.
Elsewhere…
“I’ve often wondered at what point a political leaning becomes a performance, then a pantomime, and finally a mental health issue.†– David Thompson, Phantom Guilt Syndrome
That Cat
The piece below, Dentist’s Potting Shed, ends with a mention of my cat Jeoffry. You can read much more about him in Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart. Jeoffry turns up in Fragment B, Part 4, but I recommend reading the whole thing. Out loud. On a daily basis.
I Heard The Owl Call My Name
Regular readers know that my grasp of matters ornithological is second to none, so it is only fitting that I have been asked to compile an anthology of fictional works with the word “owl†in the title. It might be argued that such a task is purely bibliographical and requires no specialist ornithological knowledge, but I will defend my ramparts, as one must in this world of rascals and cut-throats and people who claim to know rather more about birds than I do. I am used by now to lippy slanderers who accuse me of almost fathomless bird ignorance, and though I have been known to quail and sob, I try my best to turn my becardiganed back on my detractors and get on with the job. So I am pleased to announce that work on the anthology is almost complete.
One of the works I turned up, and one I am annoyed about, and want to take issue with today, is Margaret Craven’s 1967 bestseller I Heard The Owl Call My Name. Now, really! Granted it is a work of fiction, but when did you ever hear an owl hoot “Margaret Craven, Margaret Cravenâ€? That is simply not the kind of call an owl makes, and to pretend otherwise is to be living in a fool’s paradise. Of course, as a fictioneer, Ms Craven has the right to bend the world to her whim, and I am not asking for blinkered stodge, but there are limits to what the reader will accept. And before you start arguing that maybe the name the owl calls is not that of the author, but that of her protagonist, bear in mind in that case that the owl is calling out the name “Brianâ€. I think you will agree that is equally as idiotic an approximation of an owl sound as “Margaret Cravenâ€.
I Heard The Owl Call My Name became a bestseller some years after its initial publication, in the early 1970s, alongside such empty-headed slop as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Coincidentally, my other current project is a wholesale rewriting of the latter entitled Roman Catholicism And The Art Of Booster Jetpack Maintenance, in which the narrator is a futuristic science fiction Jesuit priest. Whether it will sell as ludicrous a number of copies as Robert M Pirsig’s mystic drivel is another matter.
Nonsense?
Apparently, I may have “written more nonsense than any other man livingâ€, according to Sam Jordison in the online Guardian. I’m pleased to note, however, that by the end of his article Mr Jordison acknowledges that Hooting Yard is a fundamentally sensible place, sober and reasoned and measured.
Addendum :Â It occurs to me that a Guardian article is likely to lure many new readers here, some of whom will flit swiftly away but others who will become entranced and quite possibly spend the rest of their lives trawling through the Archives. To the latter, may I draw your attention to the Donation box on the right? All this prose is offered freely, I don’t get paid, and I don’t have a private income. I do need to keep a variety of wolves from my door. End of begging letter.
The Right Sort Of Stoning
Is stoning ever justified?
“It depends what sort of stoning and what circumstances,” he replies.
– From an interview with Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, in the Daily Telegraph,
It goes without saying that stoning to death is the only proper way of dealing with certain crimes, but as Dr Bari so wisely says, one has to be clear about what sort of stoning. That is why Hooting Yard is pleased to announce a soon-to-be-out-of-print pamphlet entitled How To Choose The Right Sort Of Stoning To Death For Ne’er-Do-Wells. This helpful work gives tips on many different techniques of throwing rocks at defenceless women until they are dead.
The Cow And Pins CD
Here is a treat. Using his considerable technological wizardry, David OutaSpaceman has masterminded an exciting compact disc featuring over an hour’s worth of lopsided Hooting Yard prose from 2004, taken from the original ResonanceFM recordings. Personally, I can’t think of a better gift for readers or their nippers to find stuffed in their Christmas stockings. The disc comes in a Pansy Cradledew-designed sleeve featuring the famous “Cow And Pins†tavern sign drawn by Mr Key aeons ago. To get your copy, inclusive of postage and packing, shove £6 into the Hooting Yard PayPal account over there on the right (under ‘Donate’), and send your name and postal address to the Duty Git at hooting.yard@googlemail.com using the header “Gosh, Frank, I can hardly wait to receive my Cow And Pins CD!”
Words o’ Wisdom
While we are on the subject of gormlessness, I think praise is due to John Philbin, the man who organised the completely fake press conference for the US government agency Fema. No reporters turned up for the last minute briefing, so the resourceful Mr Philbin got agency staff to pose as hacks and ask questions. When the ruse was exposed, he explained: “I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening”. This seems to me to be a splendid way of saying “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on”, and I intend to use it often as I bumble through life perplexed and befuddled, as I do. I think it will also be a good idea to retitle the story below Tiny Enid And The Nipper With Poor Situational Awareness.
An Evening Of Lugubrious Music And Lopsided Prose
It’s not often that the command “Drop what you’re doing and go to Slough!†is irresistible. This is one of those times. Or rather, next week, Friday 9th November is one of those times, for on that day you should drop what you’re doing and go to
Addendum : Ten thrilling photographs from the evening can be found here.
Head To Head
Barring cancellations or hissy fits, next week will see the first of Hooting Yard’s new Public Seminars where matters of great import will be debated by a mix of experts, intellectuals, charlatans, rascals, and persons of fecklessness.
The topic of our first debate is Life Beyond Death, and will be an exciting head-to-head pitting the enormously wealthy best-selling author Deepak Chopra against Hooting Yard’s very own Little Severin, The Mystic Badger. Mr Chopra will argue that he has spiritual insights into life after death, based on his rigorous and expert understanding of quantum physics. Little Severin will scrubble about in the undergrowth and snuffle the air in his mystic way, thus proving a worthy opponent. Claims that the debate is weighted too heavily in Mr Chopra’s favour can be summarily disposed of. Little Severin knows just as much about quantum physics as his human opponent, if not more so, and to suggest that the badger will be outwitted is plain wrong. You’ll see.
The debate will take place in a tent in the middle of a field near
Readers’ Letters
Dear Frank, writes Jonathan Coleclough, I recently attended an illustrated lecture at the History of Reading Society on the subject of chalk mining in
The subject of chalk mining is of interest in this area, as the enclosed photo illustrates.
The History Of Hooting Yard : Part One
It is twenty years since “Hooting Yard†first appeared in print. The words were tucked away in a squib of verse included in the 100-page pamphlet Smooching With Istvan, half of which was written by Mr Key and half by the estimable Max Décharné. Alas, like the complete oeuvre of Dobson, this Malice Aforethought Press publication is now decisively out of print.
On page 96, we find the squib in question, entitled “Slab’s Songâ€, the first verse of which is:
The man with the hammers is Traitor Bill
His flag is made of shoes
He shut up shop in Hooting Yard
And drowned himself in booze
This was actually written a few years before 1987, but I can’t recall when that might have been with any precision.