Those Venomous Beetles

I know that lots of Hooting Yard readers are keen entomologists, and I do not want to find my postbox clogged with letters asking me about the venomous beetles mentioned in the item below entitled One In A Series Of Hiking Pickles. Let me make it crystal clear, then, that I was referring to blister beetles. If you are not one of the merry band of entomologically-inclined readers, and have no idea what a blister beetle is, here is a picture of one:

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One In A Series Of Hiking Pickles

Dobson lived in the era before mobile phones, of course, so when he found himself imperilled in an isolated spot he had to harness every last scrap of ingenuity to summon help. You or I would simply make a call on our mobile – well, you would, but I wouldn’t, because I do not own a mobile phone and never shall, for they are an abomination unto me – but this was not an option for Dobson, so what did he do?

Let us take a closer look at the circumstances. It was a Tuesday in February. Football fans were grieving the loss of the Busby Babes in the Munich Air Disaster, Pope Pius XII had declared that Saint Clare was to be the patron saint of television, and little blind David Blunkett was just eleven years old. Meanwhile, Dobson got lost on an ill-advised hiking expedition and found himself exhausted, in a spinney, menaced by feral goats. The out of print pamphleteer had also managed to get himself hopelessly entangled in a thicket of thorny brambly creeping greenery rife with puffy spiders and venomous beetles. That’s the kind of spinney it was, at least twenty miles from the nearest village, and with no paths nor country lanes leading anywhere close to it. There was, it is true, a big pylon a couple of dozen yards away, but it was a lone pylon, unconnected to any kind of electrical grid or other wiring system, a pylon the purpose of which was unknown, and it was a pylon of rust, suggestive of abandonment and disuse.

This was not the first time Dobson had been in a hiking pickle, and it would not be the last. Indeed, late in life he had enough material to furnish a pamphlet entitled An Anthology Of Disastrous Hiking Mishaps Cobbled Together From A Lifetime Of Ill-Starred Rustic Pursuits (out of print). What was significant about this particular pickle was the manner in which Dobson succeeded in extricating himself from it.

This was the period during which he had joined an experimental knitting circle, and as luck would have it he had in his noddy bag that day his latest project. It was an interpretation, in wool, of The Wreck Of The Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dobson realised that, when fully unravelled, the yarn would stretch for miles. He sat down in the brambles, lit his pipe, took the scrunched-up woollen masterpiece out of his noddy bag, and unravelled, unravelled, unravelled. Two hours later he was still unravelling. The sun was setting by the time he was done, but Dobson had no fear of the night, for he was sanguine.

Frequently Asked Question : Why didn’t the pamphleteer use his portable metal tapping machine to call for help?

Answer : He was unable to use his portable metal tapping machine because there was no ground-level pneumatic hub within reach.

The wool fully unravelled, Dobson tapped out his pipe on a stone and beckoned to one of the feral Toggenbergs. The goats were still gathered in a gang on the edge of the spinney, and it is a mystery why they had not attacked the bramble-trapped pamphleteer. In the Anthology, Dobson suggested that a combination of acrid pipe smoke, unravelled wool, and his sanguine nature had deterred the goats, but it seems that for once he was being modest. Almost certainly, the decisive factor was Dobson’s eerie ability to mesmerise goats, especially Toggenbergs. It is a skill which has not been much remarked upon, possibly because Dobson himself made light of it, and – curiously – never devoted a pamphlet to it. But he had been practising goat mesmerisation since he was a babe in arms, and now his expertise paid off. Beckoning a Toggenberg, as I said, Dobson tied one end of the length of wool around one of its Satanic horns, then whispered goat-language into its ear. We do not know what he said, but presumably it was something like “Scamper away, goat, in a straight line, and do not stop until you reach a village”.

It was not a village that the goat scampered to, however. Three hours after being entranced, it came to a wire fence, chewed its way through, and, in so doing, set off a hideous caterwauling alarm system. The night was filled with noise, and the Toggenberg was caught in the white glare of a Kleig light. Within seconds, it was surrounded by a clomping troop of visored commandos armed with Simon & Garfunkel rifles. Inadvertently, the mesmerised capricorn had stumbled into a top secret military intelligence compound. A commando with a captain’s badge bundled the goat onto a bauxite cradle chained to a winch, while a second commando, this one with a cadet’s badge, untied the wool from its horn.

Miles away, Dobson was smoking his pipe and lackadaisically paying out the wool, hand over hand. Suddenly, he felt it jerk, and held on tight. And then he was yanked free of the thorny brambly creeping greenery rife with puffy spiders and venomous beetles and dragged across a wasteland of fields and gravel pits and sumps and countryside filth until he fetched up at the feet of the commandos who reeled him in, just as midnight struck.

That is how Dobson got out of a hiking pickle, only to find himself in a very alarming dilemma indeed, slap bang in the middle of a military intelligence compound that was top secret for very good reasons – reasons which, even at a distance of fifty years, I am far too terrified to divulge. He was placed in a holding cell with the feral goat and interrogated at length. The wool was returned to him and he asked for, and was given, a pair of knitting needles. Between interrogations he was able to re-knit The Wreck Of The Deutschland, although much of his woollen reimagining of the lines about the Tall Nun was gnawed into scritty by the Toggenberg. By the time the commandos released the pamphleteer, having scrambled his brain pan so thoroughly that he remembered nothing after the spinney, Richard Milhous Nixon had published his book Six Crises, Pluto and Neptune were in alignment for the first time in 403 years, and little blind David Blunkett was no longer so little.

Dobson returned home even more sanguine than before the hiking pickle. As for the feral goat, it stayed with the commandos. They adopted it as a pet, and called it Flopsy.

All Hail Yoko!

Today is a very special day at Hooting Yard. It’s Yoko Ono’s 74th birthday. Just as the people of Tanna, in Vanuatu in the South West Pacific, worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a god, we here at Hooting Yard recognise the divinity of Yoko.

Our devotion took a bit of a battering a few years ago when Mrs Gubbins dallied with Yokonetics, but a course of brain-sluicing with Baxter’s Terrible Fluid and a visit from Yoko’s lawyer set her back on the true path.

If anyone wants me, I shall be spending this special day in that field near Blister Lane Bypass, sitting in a bag with wool wrapped round my legs, screaming.

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Strictly Pamphleteering

At last, a modicum of sense from the pubescent noodleheads who run the television schedules. I wonder if their ranks have been infiltrated by a Dobsonist? Apparently, there is a forthcoming series called Strictly Pamphleteering, in which contestants will write pamphlets and declaim them on live television. Week by week, the panel of judges and the public will vote out the most hopeless would-be pamphleteer, until at the end of the series, the winner is crowned Strictly Pamphleteering Pamphleteer Of The Year.

No details have yet emerged of who will be on the judging panel, though names such as Dale Winton, Yoko Ono, V S Naipaul and Leo Sayer have been touted. The panel will also decide on each week’s pamphlet topic, with subjects ranging from ospreys to goat husbandry to the astronomical innovations of Tycho Brahe. We can be sure that the eventual winner will have shown a splendid ability to declaim mighty pamphleteering prose about pretty much anything under the sun. Could this show bring us a 21st century Dobson? I live in hope.

Tremendous Potato Urgency

One morning Tiny Enid awoke from uneasy dreams with a sense of tremendous urgency related to potatoes. She was based in Winnipeg at the time, and had taken a room in a motel of undoubted seediness. “I could not pinpoint the reasons for my sense of breathless urgency on that grim March morning,” she wrote, many years later, in her Memoirs, “All I knew was that potatoes had something to do with it.”

The heroic young adventuress eschewed the motel breakfast, a Winnipeg-style egg ‘n’ dough platter, sneaking out of a side entrance to avoid the man with the twisted lip at the front desk. The city was still new to her, and she had yet to locate any of the potato-related premises she felt such a tremendous urgency to visit. She limped across the plaza to her rented booster car and threw off its tarpaulin in one elegant sweep. Tiny Enid had been practising her elegant sweeping arm movements for some weeks, and the superb elegance with which she swept the tarpaulin off the car won her a round of applause from a nearby line of patient pastry persons queuing outside a pastry shop.

Before revving up the engine of her booster car, Tiny Enid tramped over to the queue. She wanted to find out if she would sense an aura of potato urgency here, so close to her motel. It was possible, after all, that among the pastries sold by the pastry shop could be pastries with a potato filling. Was that urgency that cracked her awake a premonition that a Winnipeg-based criminal mad person had poisoned the potato pastries? If so, it would make sense for her to be bang on the scene rather than having to speed around the city, lost, unnerved, and not knowing quite what she was seeking, nor why. So many of the adventures of the tiny adventuress had begun from these moments of curious intuition.

But it was still early in the day, and the pastry shop proprietor had not yet hoisted the shutters, hence the queue. Tiny Enid was hopeless at small talk, and she was at a loss how to engage with the still-clapping queue which was so impressed with the elegance of her sweeping arm movements. She pulled her sprightly black gold green crushed crepe hat down low, and pretended an interest in pebbles piled close to the pastry shop shutters. If her instincts were correct, she must be first into the shop when the shutters went up, before a poor innocent Winnipegite was felled by a poisoned potato pastry pie. Tiny Enid was a girl of impeccable manners, and she flushed with shame in anticipation of having to push aside the unkempt hobbledehoy who was first in the queue and who looked as if he had not eaten for a month.

Luckily, as the pastry shop proprietor appeared with a hook on the end of a wooden pole with which by some shenanigans he hoisted the shutters, there was a distraction. Over by the statue of prominent Winnipegite Elias Conklin, who had been the city’s mayor in 1881, a swarm of killer bees appeared out of the blue and set upon a defenceless old woman wearing her widow’s weeds. The massed buzzing of the bees was nauseatingly loud, and the reaction of the pastry shop queue was instantaneous. Even the starving hobbledehoy forgot his grumbling belly as the line broke up, sprinting over to the Conklin statue flailing impromptu bee-scarifiers.

Our tiny heroine took the opportunity to sneak into the pastry shop. Thumping the proprietor in the guts with her girly bludgeon, she incapacitated him with a few kicks to the head, swiftly located behind the counter every single piping hot pastry with a potato ingredient, and stuffed the lot of them into a canvas sack. She dragged the sack over to her rented booster car, chucked it into the boot, and sped away, just in time, for the killer bees had been confounded, the widow woman was safe, and the patient pastry people were heading back to the pastry shop with coinage clutched in their fists.

An hour or so later, having dumped the canvas sack of potato pastries into the river at the Forks, where the Red River meets the Assiniboine, and then driven around until she found verdant parkland, Tiny Enid slumped onto a tuffet, dusted off her sprightly black gold green crushed crepe hat, and lit one of her high tar Paraguayan cigarettes. Soon, she knew, she would have to hunt down the criminal mad person and bash them about, but for now, the world could take a pause, and she could sit on her tuffet and smoke and watch the coots and moorhens for whom a Winnipeg pond was home.

Soap Theft

More from Carl Sagan’s excellent The Demon-Haunted World. He tells us that, according to alien abductee Betty Hill, the pesky visitors from outer space “frequently help themselves to some of [the abductee’s] belongings, such as fishing rods, jewelry of different types, eyeglasses or a cup of laundry soap”.

Remember that, and next time you see a myopic angler festooned with rings and necklaces emerging from the launderette, you can make a citizen’s arrest and cart it off to your secret underground lab.

Collection Box

Here is another opportunity for readers to help save ResonanceFM. Let me just point out that the station’s financial circumstances are dismal and Your Help Is Needed.

A collection of rarities by (or including) your favourite Hooting Yardist is going up for auction. Many of these items predate the Wilderness Years (1993-2002), and this may be your only chance to obtain such gems as Sidney The Bat Is Awarded The Order Of Lenin.

So get out your wallet and make your bid!

UPDATE : The closing date is 21st February at 11.59 a.m. and the current highest bid is £120.

FURTHER UPDATE : The winning bid was £150, and the lucky recipient was someone using the pseudonym ‘mustardplaster’. Many thanks to them, on behalf of Resonance.

Satan’s Spa

Pansy Cradledew bought a new kettle recently. Tempting though it is to use this as an excuse to regale you with my all-encompassing kettle theories – and believe me, you will be impressed – I’d like instead to say a few words about the particular make of kettle Ms Cradledew purchased.

There is an egg-shaped window in the side of the kettle which enables the pleased-as-punch kettle owner to see at a glance the water level of the water that has been poured out of a tap or spigot into the kettle. It may be argued that I could rewrite that sentence so that it is less ungainly and doesn’t mention the kettle three times, but I want to be absolutely clear and I am writing in a rush. There is a pot of tea to be brewed, and I cannot type and make tea at the same time. You try it, and see how difficult it is.

When the power is on, but the kettle is switched off, that is, when it is plugged in to the wall socket and the wall socket is switched on but the kettle remains in its default, at rest, idle state, an internal light is activated, and through the egg-shaped window the excited kettle owner sees a blue glow. This has the effect of making the water look not unlike a tropical sea, or at least a tiny portion of such a sea, on a blazing hot summer day – no small benefit when one lives in a land of ice chaos.

Depress the switch underneath the kettle’s handle, however, and the blue glow is instantly transformed into a glow that is bright red. The kettle is now on, and begins to boil the water which was poured into it from the tap, or spigot. Gradually, it begins to bubble. As it approaches boiling point, the combination of seething, bubbling water and a blood-red glow makes it look like a scene from hell. Satan’s spa!

I may write about further kitchen-based excitements at a later date, but now it is time for that pot of tea.

Ice Chaos

[This story was written as part of a fundraising drive for ResonanceFM, and broadcast today on Hooting Yard On The Air. Listeners were invited, in return for a donation, to provide a sentence, a phrase, a string of words or a name which was then incorporated into the text. A list of those who so generously handed over their cash follows at the end.]

“Ice Chaos” was the headline in one of the newspapers last week. This followed a day when the unthinkable happened. A flurry of snow, that settled for about twenty four hours, in the winter, in Britain (a country in the northern hemisphere)! Chaos indeed. Or perhaps just a cold snap.

It’s true, though, that extreme or freakish weather conditions seem to be on the increase. There were tornadoes in London, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami… (Incidentally, let us take this opportunity to recall the name of a seismologist involved in lack-of-tsunami warnings, Waverly Person.)

Now, it has been pointed out to me more than once that I am hardly qualified to talk about extreme weather conditions, as the only weather we get at Hooting Yard is rain, sometimes torrential, sometimes a drizzle, and this is true. What my critics fail to note is that, ensconced in a cabin somewhere over by Blister Lane Bypass, we have a superb forecaster. I speak, of course, of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger. When it comes to predicting the weather, Little Severin is second to none, not even to the BBC’s magnificent Dan Corbett. If you have not watched Dan, visit That’s The Weather For Now and be amazed. Little Severin the Mystic Badger has not yet been blessed with a fan site all his own, but it can only be a matter of time.

Before we go on, I want to make it absolutely plain that there is neither a jot nor scintilla of truth in the rumours that have been flying around. Little Severin did not pass through the catflap to the afterlife. In any case, he would have eschewed a catflap and sought a more appropriate badgerflap. Flaps for badgers, and indeed for stoats, pigs, wild hogs, otters and curlews, some of which are flaps to the afterlife and some not, are easily available, for example from Zip Nolan’s Flappery in Basoonclotshire. (That spelling is correct, as the name of the shire derives from basins, not from bassoons.)

Little Severin’s method of weather divination is simple yet brilliant. He is not known as the Mystic Badger for nothing. At various times of day or night, he emerges from his cabin and scrubbles around in the muck, like badgers do. Then he goes back indoors. Voila! Those able to read the omens and portents of his scrubbling know whether tomorrow will bring rain, downpour, or drizzle, and not only that, for Little Severin can predict more than just the weather. Few people are aware that he forecast both the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland, which lasted for seventeen years, and the Corned Beef Wars between Ireland and Argentina, which lasted thirty, among many other world-shaking events. As far as I am aware there have not yet been any Oregano Wars. Bear in mind that a number of Little Severin’s predictions are retrospective, for as his name implies, he is only little. And mystic.

It is the mysticism which so upset Braithwaite, the one-time bus-seat companion of Clytemnestra Duggleby. It was Braithwaite, with his pipe, his face, his cheese, his keys, his rissoles, his cup, his roll-on-roll-off rim-fire thiamin, and that lip on him, the lip and the sculptured boy-hair, Braithwaite who called into question the accuracy of Little Severin the Mystic Badger’s paw-scrubbling weather forecasts. But what did he know? As Clytemnestra Duggleby attested in court after the incident with the wheezing scrivener and the invalid postscript font, he spent most of his time slumped in front of the radio, like some antediluvian beast, listening distractedly to The Sagans, (or Les Sagans) a long-running serial about husband-and-wife team Carl and Françoise and their thrills, spills, window sills and gas bills as they bring up their papoose Boo Boo. The show’s theme tune features the papoose Boo Boo singing “Meinen Mootzenzimmer” backed by an orchestra of massed banjos and ducks with electronic implants. Clytemnestra hated the drama, but adored the music, and hummed it as she went about her many and various janitorial doings in the town aquarium. It was a submerged aquarium, hewn out of the geological strata underneath the abandoned zoo, and it was rife with weird tentacled aquatic beings (actual size) including squid. According to the aquarium guidebook, “Squids are mammals, just like plants and clouds”, for the book had been compiled by Zip Nolan (he of the Flappery) in a break from writing his pot-boiler series of animal-flap related thrillers such as Creepy Raoul And The Partridgeflap, Creepy Raoul And The Beeflap (serialised in Harpy magazine), and the million-selling Creepy Raoul And The Ineffable Mystery Of The Pentecostalist Cormorantflap, which famously begins “Rendered placid by the sickening stifle, this cumbersome vision of Britney lolled like some spastic hound, a revolutionary Lolita trying in vain to calm my wayward reflexes”. Quite why Zip accepted the commission to compile the guidebook is as much a mystery as one of his thrillers, for he was no lover of waterworld – and I am not talking about the Kevin Costner film. Zip was a dry land sort of person, so much so that he avoided ponds and puddles, and made daily treks all the way from his Flappery in Basoonclotshire to consult with Little Severin The Mystic Badger about the weather, the weather, the weather.

Ah yes, the weather. Rainfall, wild winds, ice chaos. Cool-a-stoop and a heary blear, thunderstorms, tornadoes, forked lightning, slush and frost and winter sunlight, Dan Corbett, and Little Severin, the Mystic Badger.

[Those who donated money to help save ResonanceFM, and whose suggested words appear in “Ice Chaos” are, in alphabetical order: Pansy Cradledew, William English (on behalf of Fotheringay), C J Halo Goat Luncheon (anagram), aka John ‘Alcohol Nut’ Cage (also an anagram), Sandra Harris, Carolina Herbst, Lancton, Outaspaceman, Michael Pierce, Marvin Suicide, Chris Weaver, and others who wished to remain anonymous, which, as it begins with A, ought to have been at the beginning of the list, but wasn’t. I am pretty sure I have not forgotten anyone, but if I have, my profound apologies.]

NOTE : The episode of Hooting Yard On The Air including this story has been given an early podcast release. Go to the podcast archive to listen or download.

Cow Byre Tsar

Old Russia had only one tsar at a time, but now of course we have many of them, each with their own speciality, like patron saints. Traffic tsars, drugs tsars, respect tsars… every week some bug-eyed government wonk creates yet another tsardom. Such power!

Apparently, Blodgett used to be a tsar, for a few weeks. It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, and he was putting the finishing touches to his sleek gas-powered überpod when one of those bug-eyed government wonks came prancing up the path, out of nowhere. Blodgett put down his rag on a pile of other rags, dipped his hairy hands into a tub of swarfega, and wiped them on one of the other rags from the pile, or perhaps on the one he had just dropped. He adjusted his lorgnette with exquisite daintiness and looked the wonk over, as if he were examining a beetle. Blodgett had history with wonks, as they say, and he was prepared for anything.

“You are Blodgett?” asked the wonk, in a wonky monotone.

Blodgett was tempted to curl his lip, but he was still wearing a protective cotton dimity thing over his nose and mouth, so instead he nodded his assent.

“We need to appoint a cow byre tsar,” announced the wonk, without preamble, “And your name has been put forward. There is a modest stipend and an armband. Congratulations.”

If the wonk said anything else, his words were wasted, for he was drowned out by the sudden appearance of swooping corncrakes. Blodgett ushered him into his hut and put the kettle on.

“What does the job involve?” he asked, his booming voice only slightly muffled by the dimity thing.

“Oh, you know, just go and hang around cow byres being sort of tsary,” replied the wonk.

What Blodgett was not told was that he was expected to send in daily reports, including the Latin names of the cows in each byre he fell upon, looming in his fierce Blodgettian way in the shadows. An added difficulty was that all the cows he visited seemed to twinkle, like stars in the heavens. His first report was sent back to him, his lovely handwriting virtually obliterated by comments and corrections scribbled with an impossibly thick black magic marker pen. Blodgett wept that night, huge convulsive sobs wracking his frame as he crouched next to the überpod. His second and third reports fared no better, so he stopped sending them. And nothing happened. Each morning, as dawn broke, he would don his cow byre tsar armband and stride out towards yet another cow byre of twinkling cows, and loom, tsarily, for hours upon end, before returning home to his soup and his fireside. No word came from the wonk, for the wonk wed his sweetheart and fled to a city of curious puddles and gigantic towers of granite, and he never again thought much about cows, twinkling or otherwise. And after a few weeks, nor did Blodgett. He put his cow byre tsar armband on his pile of rags, and soon it was smeared with swarfega, just another Blodgett rag.

Postscript. Six months later, Blodgett’s hut was crushed by a stampede of twinkling cows. He was out at the time.

Why Am I Obsessed By Nixon?

The great Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World : “Occasionally, a vegetable or a pattern of wood grain or the hide of a cow resembles a human face. There was a celebrated eggplant that closely resembled Richard M Nixon. What shall we deduce from this fact?” I won’t continue with the quotation, but it may be worth posing the question: What can we deduce from the fact that I am obsessed with Nixon – to an extent I had never quite realised? Soon, inevitably, I shall have to drum up a recipe for eggplant and mashed potato.

Light Reflecting Booster Technology

It is with some trepidation that I announce an imminent court case. For a long time I turned a blind eye to the continued boasts of the L’Oreal company that some of their shiny hair products are enhanced by Light Reflecting Booster Technology. I am appalled that they continue to make this claim in their television adverts despite numerous letters urging them to desist. Well, I have been provoked far enough. Here at Hooting Yard we will be suing L’Oreal for infringement of intellectual property rights. Regular readers will be aware that every single word that appears on this website, and every word broadcast in the associated podcasts, could not have been wrenched from the innermost depths of Mr Key’s soul without Hooting Yard’s very own Light Reflecting Booster Technology. We got there first, L’Oreal!

P.S. : If anyone can recommend a suitably shabby and cheap solicitor, please get in touch. Because I’m worth it.

Dobson’s Chartreuse Weskit

In her book Neglected Classics Of Hysterical And Overwrought Prose, the scholar Constance Mufton mentions in passing “an out of print pamphlet by Dobson in which he gives a highly amusing account of his purchase of a chartreuse weskit”. This reference, buried in a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, long perplexed Dobsonists of various stripes, none of whom could identify with any confidence the pamphlet Mufton had in mind.

An alarming young Dobsonist named Ned Pondlife tracked down the aged scholar to a chalet perched on a flinty outcrop, and hammered at her door, intending to question her directly about the source of her assertion. Nowhere else is there any record of Dobson wearing, or even owning, a weskit, chartreuse or otherwise, and Pondlife thought that if he could solve this admittedly small mystery his reputation as a Dobsonist would be boosted. Alas, upon opening her chalet door, Constance Mufton took one look at the young upstart and fell into a swoon, a swoon that presaged a decline, a decline which had her carted off to a bewilderment home, a bewilderment home where she muttered and dribbled and chewed brazil nuts and sucked butterscotch and finally passed into the Realm Beyond Petty Earthly Cares. Indeed, Ned Pondlife’s countenance was truly terrifying. On a blistering September day during his childhood, Pondlife had had the misfortune to be attacked by both a flock of starlings and a swarm of hornets, and although he was left with no physical scars, thereafter the horror of what he had undergone, on the lawn and at the mouth of the cave, in the September sunshine, in his little sailor’s suit, aged six, could be seen on his face, all twitching and bonkers.

The ambitious young Dobsonist’s next step was to consult an inventory of the out of print pamphleteer’s wardrobe, if such a thing existed. He visited any number of libraries and academic institutions, clutching a bus pass, but wherever he went found he had to avert his gaze from frightened puppies which yapped at his approach, and his progress was thus accompanied by such a din that serious research became impossible.

Q – Why were there so many puppies in the vicinity of these libraries and seats of learning?

A – Because the puppies were the offspring of the guard dogs, left free to roam with impunity until they were old enough to join the elite corps of library hounds and do sentry duty in their turn.

Ned Pondlife was in danger of growing old and creaking before he discovered the truth about Dobson’s chartreuse weskit. From time to time, he thought about diverting his attention elsewhere, by making a special study of Dobson’s breakfasts, or of his failed thought-control experiments, his pin cushions and pencil sharpeners, the big flap when he became wedged in a crevasse, his correspondence with Ringo Starr, his lapsang souchong, his tin, his talc, even his encounter with the rancorous squeegee goblin. But not one of these projects could ever inspire him as thoroughly as the mystery of whether or not Dobson had bought a chartreuse weskit, and if he had, when and where he had worn it, and why. What was so maddening was that it just didn’t seem like a piece of Dobsonian attire. And yet, until her late befuddlement, Constance Mufton had been one of the most assiduous of Dobson scholars, and her work was respected from Pointy Town to Mustard Parva and beyond. Surely she could not be mistaken?

But she was.

Blasphemy

There is another flurry of outrage, in Cambridge this time, because someone has published a picture of a seventh-century mystic. Apparently, it is absolutely forbidden to draw pictures of “the prophet Mohammed”, as the mystic is known. (I worry about that definite article, as I’m sure there have been other prophets from time to time.) Back in September 2006 (scroll down to Blodgett’s Jihad) we published a picture of this fellow, and it seems like a good idea to reprint it now, if only to remind readers just how outrageous such depictions are. When you have stopped quaking with fury – and outrage, of course – you can go and read this.

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