Muddleheadedness

“Muddleheadedness has always been the sovereign force in human affairs – a force far more potent than malevolence or nobility. It lubricates our hurtful impulses and ties our best intentions in knots. It blunts our wisdom, misdirects our compassion, clouds whatever insights into the human condition we manage to acquire. It is the chief artisan of the unintended consequences that constitute human history.”

Paul R Gross & Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition : The Academic Left And Its Quarrels With Science (1994)

The Reverend And The Dandy

Yesterday’s crumbs of Babinskiana provoked an inundation of letters from female readers imploring me to post a picture of the Reverend John Chippendall Montesquieu Bellew, he of the head of hair like a great ball of spun white silk, so they could print it, cut it out, put it in a frame, and make it the centrepiece of a shrine at which they could adore him, as so many women did when he was – becomingly, remember – alive. I managed to track the Reverend down here, where you may note he is categorised not merely under “cassock”, “clergyman” and “Victorian” but also “arms crossed” and “keen eyed”. Et voila!

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Not to be outdone, a plethora of male readers beseeched me, similarly, to post a picture of Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurévilly, the boulevard magnifico, of the gold-knobbed cane and hand-held mirror, no doubt so they could pick up some invaluable tips on personal grooming. As always, I am happy to oblige.

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Please note that these pictures are of Bellew and Barbey d’Aurévilly themselves, not of the criminal lunatic Babinsky in disguise, first as one, emerging from a hovel, then as the other, prancing off a pier.

The Modern Pig Revisited

Some months ago we turned our attention to the modern pig, and I am pleased to post this letter received from Outa_Spaceman in which he recalls his very own modern pig experience:

Many years ago one of my ‘in-between-jobs’ was as a security guard. I had to look after a ‘pig trap’. It looked like a bungalow-sized oil refinery, all red painted pipes, valves and exciting gauges. It was positioned in a small village called Lofthouse at the top of Nidderdale.

The ‘intelligent’ pig (iPig?) had been inserted at Billingham and trundled down the pipeline inspecting and cleaning as it went. Boffins monitored its progress, via in-built T.V. cameras, in a portakabin alongside the pig trap. My job was to make sure no yokels attempted to interfere with the installation, as the pipeline carried a highly explosive pressurised gas (methane I think).

At the end of my night-long vigil I decided to stay and wait for the pig to arrive and watch the trap being ‘blown’. Frantic boffin activity, lots of valve opening and closing, the pig arrived in the trap and the methane burnt off. It created the biggest sheet of flame I’ve ever seen and, even though I was a good way off, singed my eyebrows. After tests and recalibration the pig was reinserted and sent off toward Stanlow.

For me the most amazing fact is that there’s a pipeline that connects one side of the country to the other via the Pennines.

Dabbling

Dabbler-3logo (1)In my cupboard over at The Dabbler this week, find out what happens when Objectivism and Philately collide. There is of course much else in The Dabbler to amuse, instruct, enlighten and entertain, and you ought to be making a point of reading it every day, and telling everyone you know to do likewise.

Piper

From an obituary in the Telegraph:

“Bill Millin, who died on August 17 aged 88, was personal piper to Lord Lovat on D-Day and piped the invasion forces on to the shores of France; unarmed apart from the ceremonial dagger in his stocking, he played unflinchingly as men fell all around him. Millin began his apparently suicidal serenade immediately upon jumping from the ramp of the landing craft into the icy water. As the Cameron tartan of his kilt floated to the surface he struck up with Hieland Laddie. He continued even as the man behind him was hit, dropped into the sea and sank. Once ashore Millin did not run, but walked up and down the beach, blasting out a series of tunes…

“[Later…] Millin was surprised not to have been shot, and he mentioned this to some Germans who had been taken prisoner. They said that they had not shot at him because they thought he had gone off his head.”

R.I.P.

Babinsky, Master Of Disguise

In considering the career of the killer Babinsky, the jaws even of the most imperturbable researchers drop when it is realised how frequently the deranged brute outwitted the coppers who were forever in pursuit of him. In their chronicle A Dull, Workaday Assessment Of The Vile Criminal Babinsky, for example, those two old sobersides Totteridge and Whetstone report:

When we thought about the seeming ease with which Babinsky always escaped the clutches of the plod, we were both bedizened. Totteridge’s jaw dropped, while Whetstone banged his head repeatedly against a granite wall. (page 429)

The received wisdom in the matter is that Babinsky had innumerable lairs and hideyholes to which he fled, from caves by the seashore to chalets in the hills. While this is of course true, it does not address the question of how the lumbering psychopath evaded capture, time and time again, between the site of his slaughter and the lair in which he hid.

Recent research, by a writer who could show Totteridge and Whetstone a thing or two when it comes to maintaining the reader’s interest, reveals that Babinsky was a master of disguise. In Babinsky – Master Of Disguise!, the Korean historian of blood-drenched enormities Park No Lip writes:

Not for Babinsky weedy ruses such as the adoption of a limp and the padding out of his cheeks with cotton wool. His genius lay in his ability to impersonate real people. Following the slaying of the Punch and Judy Man at the end of the pier in Sawdust-on-Sea, over a hundred coppers lay in wait for Babinsky on the promenade. They were nonplussed when, several minutes after the screams and gurgles had died away, off the pier walked Barbey d’Aurévilly, the boulevard magnifico, with the port of a Spanish hidalgo, a gold-knobbed cane in his right hand, a little mirror in his left, the one to emphasize, the other to confirm his identity. He pranced across the promenade on to the boulevard quite unmolested, and made his escape. It was, of course, not d’Aurévilly at all. It was Babinsky. The very next day, a few miles inland in the awful little village of Gack, he killed a monkey-trainer named Perkins, and made such a racket while doing so that dozens of police cars screeched up to the hovel wherein the fell deed was done. The coppers formed a ring of steel around the hovel and waited for the maniac to emerge. Hours passed. Eventually, Detective Captain Cargpan himself, Babinsky’s Nemesis, strode to the door and banged his big blackbegloved fist upon it. It opened, and there in the fetid gloom stood the picturesque, striking-looking parson, the Reverend John Chippendall Montesquieu Bellew, whose head of hair was like a great ball of spun white silk. A magnificent orator, and adored by women, he lived, becomingly, in an atmosphere of adulation constant enough to turn an ordinary man’s brain. He certainly turned the brains of Cargpan and his toughs, who swooned like girlies as the parson climbed into one of the police cars and drove away. Several more hours passed before the witless coppers realised that the man they thought was Bellew was, in fact, the killer Babinsky!

Park No Lip labours the point with a dozen or so further examples, but it is fascinating stuff and certainly sheds new light on the man they called “the killer Babinsky”. Next week, we shall be taking a closer look at the interior decoration of some of his lairs and chalets, paying particular attention to wallpapers and sideboards.

Knob

knob

Knob.

From an exquisite alphabet at Ptak Science Books, originally published in 1879, the year of the felling of Binsey Poplars. Not that there is the remotest link between Kantner’s Illustrated Book of Objects and Self-Educator in German and English and Father Hopkins’ aspens dear. I just thought I’d mention it. I can’t see that year written down without thinking of them.

Your Ogsby Packaging

When you remove your brand new Ogsby Steering Panel from its box, do remember that you can put all of the packaging materials to good use, not just the box itself but the string, the adhesive tape, the rubber bands, and the excelsior. The latter, for example, can provide comfortable bedding for your hamster, if you have a hamster, or, if you do not have a hamster, for some other small scurrying mammal you keep as a pet, such as a guinea pig or a water-vole. If you have neither a hamster nor a guinea pig nor a water-vole, what the hell is wrong with you? Sorry… sorry, I should not have let that slip. It is perfectly possible to be a fine upstanding citizen of unimpeachable moral character without lavishing your love on a small scurrying mammal. Love can be lavished elsewhere. It can be held in abeyance, awaiting the exquisite prick of Cupid’s dart. Or it can not be lavished at all, smothered by yet nobler sentiments, if there are any.

But even in such an extreme case, you can still make use of the excelsior! If you have no small scurrying mammal to provide bedding for, what about your own bedding? The most comfortable mattress in the universe can be made that little bit plumper with the addition of a brand new Ogsby Steering Panel’s packaging-worth of excelsior. Simply slice a slit in your mattress with a sharp blade, cram the excelsior in, and then sew up the gash with a length of drapers’ wool. I guarantee you will sleep twice as soundly thereafter. If at any point in the future you are waylaid by pangs of love for small scurrying mammals and decide to obtain a hamster or a guinea pig or a water-vole after all, you can always rip open the slit in the mattress by tugging savagely at the drapers’ wool, remove the excelsior, and then redarn. If you want to ensure that your chosen pet is as comfortable as can be, there is nothing to stop you from seizing a few handfuls of the original mattress stuffing and adding that to the excelsior. With your mattress no longer at optimum plumpness, you may no longer sleep so soundly, but you probably wouldn’t in any case, given that you will spend many hours of your future nights watching over your hamster or guinea pig or water-vole, burning with love.

I have not forgotten about the box and the string and the adhesive tape and the rubber bands, or indeed the Ogsby Steering Panel itself. Untold hours of fun and frolic are to be had with each of these items, singly or in combination. I mean in combination with each other, for example the string and the box or the rubber bands and the string or the adhesive tape and the Ogsby Steering Panel and the box or the rubber bands and the adhesive tape and the string, and so on, but I can see there was some ambiguity there and you may have thought I meant in combination with the small scurrying mammal upon which you lavish your love. If that is what you thought, you are correct, for there are lots of games you can play, such as Jump Off The Box Like Little Ruskin, Dangle The String In Front Of The Hamster, Shake The Rubber Bands In Front Of The Guinea Pig, and Manipulate The Adhesive Tape Into A Sticky Entangled Mess In Front Of The Water-Vole. These and other pastimes will keep the pet you adore enchanted, although sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

Teaching your small scurrying mammal to take control of the Ogsby Steering Panel, sitting with the wheel in its paws, wearing goggles, is a much more ambitious project, and one you would be ill advised to pursue without proper training.

The Purple Nose

“The audience… was the coarsest and most brutal assembly that we have ever chanced to see. Every variety of dissolute life was represented in it. The purple nose, the scorbutic countenance, the glassy eye, the bullet head, the heavy lower jaw, the aspect of mingled lewdness and ferocity – all were there. Youths, whose attire exhibited an eruptive tendency towards cheap jewellery, lolled upon their seats, champing tobacco and audibly uttering their filthy minds… The atmosphere fairly reeked with vulgarity.”

The “fanatically decorous” New York Tribune, reporting on an 1866 staging of “Mazeppa”, quoted in Bernard Falk, The Naked Lady, or Storm Over Adah : A Biography Of Adah Isaacs Menken (1934). Plus ça change…

Ted Volta

A while back, in his Ragbag, Gaw posted an excerpt from David Kynaston’s book Family Britain 1951-1957 recalling inhabitants of a lost world, variety acts of the time including mental telepathists the Piddingtons and Valantyne Napier the human spider. Lost indeed, but that trace of them survives, both in Kynaston’s book and, duly quoted by Gaw, on het internet. Imagine how pleased you would be, as one of a younger generation of Piddingtons, to do a Google search and find your grandparents or great-grandparents (and so on, yea unto the last generation) remembered, even in so tantalisingly vague a fashion.

But what of those who vanish utterly from memory? I thought, perhaps naively, that everything could be found on het internet, somewhere or other, hidden in some cobwebbed corner. This morning, in The Naked Lady, or Storm Over Adah : A Biography Of Adah Isaacs Menken by Bernard Falk, I came upon this:

“Ted Volta, the famous clown, happily still alive in the winter of 1933-34, remembers how he, and the young men of his day, rushed over Westminster Bridge to be shown the bold hussy, whose surprising dress was said to be that of Mother Eve.”

Falk’s book was published in 1934, when the aged Ted Volta could still be described as “the famous clown”. Intrigued by that splendid name, I looked him up online but could find not a trace of him anywhere. Not a trace. And The Naked Lady is out of print. So will Ted Volta be completely forgotten? Or, by tapping out that quotation, have I singlehandedly rescued him from oblivion?

It is my hope that one day a historian of clowns will stumble upon this postage, and set off in pursuit of Ted Volta, and, after months and years of tireless research, produce a thumping great biography in book form, and a website dedicated to the famous, not forgotten, clown.

With My Siphon And Funnel

With my siphon and funnel I march to the hills, stamping on insects to add to my kills. I have distributed thousands of pills, and now I must hide in a grot.

My siphon! My siphon! I dropped it back there. I must go and fetch it while the weather stands fair. I will need it within my elfin grot lair. So I retrace my steps at a trot.

My pathway is barred by a knight at arms. Alone and pale, he lacks all charms. I think I have seen him patrolling the farms, the farms where I poisoned the poultry.

Palely loitering like a monitor lizard, the knight plunges his lance right into my gizzard. “I am no knight, I’m a pinball wizard!” cries this latter-day Roger Daltrey.

I crumple to earth and let fall my funnel. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. A cliché I know, but as long as the sun’ll shine I’ll stay clear of the fiery pit.

The wizard twirls a mic on the end of a lead. By Christ, it is Roger Daltrey indeed! Is he going to sing in my hour of need? He’s such a preposterous git!

I reach for my funnel and chuck it at him. But the light at the end of the tunnel grows dim. My immediate prospects are decidedly grim. To die at the hands of The Who!

“See me, feel me, touch me –” I groan. “No, you must reap what you have sown” says Daltrey as I wail and moan. I am but left to rue.

I rue that I killed every hen, every duck, all the innocent pigs in their filthy muck. I was being an evil countryside Puck. Now I just want my Mommy.

Gore spouts from my gizzard, my life leaks away. But worse is to come ‘fore I call it a day. With his awful hair like a bale of hay, Daltrey shakes it and starts to sing “Tommy”.

At the last, the mercy of God doth abide. As he opened his gob, I died.

Gethsemane Picnic Time

One vile broiling August afternoon, Blodgett sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Ever the wheeler-dealer, he then immediately sold the mess of pottage to a wealthy fool for thirty pieces of silver. Blodgett licked his lips and punched the air with his hairy fist. “At last!” he thought, “I have sufficient funds to organise a picnic in the Garden of Gethsemane!”

Blodgett travelled thither by hot air balloon. He was accompanied by his next door neighbours at the time, a peevish couple who rarely spoke directly to each other but babbled incessantly at Blodgett, who eventually stuffed cotton wool into his ears. For all his faults, Blodgett was a singularly honourable fellow, and he felt a sense of obligation to Mr and Mrs Fagash for a favour done to him long ago, though he could no longer remember what it was. Thus he was able to kill two birds with one stone, as they say, by fulfilling a personal picnicking ambition at the same time as repaying a moral debt by providing a treat for an elderly impoverished couple.

The picnic hamper was an exact replica, scaled down, of the balloon basket. The wicker of which both were woven had even come from the same wicker factory. Blodgett had stocked the hamper before the voyage with much provender from his favourite picnic supplies shop. Without bothering to quiz Mr and Mrs Fagash on any dietary preferences they may harbour, he had spent some of his pieces of silver on sausages and lemonade and sandwich paste and pork scratchings and flan and jam and buns and sultanas and mashed potatoes and raw liver and meringue and plums and milk. The threesome took it in turns to keep flies away by waving fans, of the same wicker as the hamper and the balloon basket. Flies, they knew, would find a way to wriggle through the tiniest gaps in the wickerwork.

If it had been vile and broiling back at home, it was even more vile and more broiling in the Garden of Gethsemane when their balloon basket thumped to earth. Blodgett himself broke out in a sweat so deep it was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground, like Christ. Hearing a series of bangs from inside the hamper, he realised the sausages were exploding. Mrs Fagash, who was a devout Catholic, suggested they seek shelter from the sun in the misnamed Grotto of the Agony, and as they staggered towards it, she explained the misnomer, dating back to the removal of a stone in the fourteenth century. Blodgett found it hard to follow what she was saying, and resolved to consult a reference work when he returned home after the picnic. He was beginning to wonder how sinful it would be to abandon Mr and Mrs Fagash in the grotto and make the trip back alone.

In all the years he had dreamed of this picnic, Blodgett never envisaged that he would find himself sitting in a dark cave eating raw liver in the company of a pair of scowling geriatrics. Even the lemonade had gone flat, due to a bottling mishap. As he chewed and glugged and swatted away flies, he reflected that perhaps he would have been better not to sell his mess of pottage, which even now the wealthy fool would be lapping up in the cool luxury of a shaded arbour. And he further reflected that it might have been better never to have sold his birthright for the mess of pottage in the first place. For what had he gained?, what had he gained?

It was this thought, as gloomy as the gloom of the grotto, that was bloating in Blodgett’s brain when, inside the hamper, the last unexploded sausage exploded with a mighty bang. Birds scattered from the branches of the olive trees outside.

“Forgive me, Mr and Mrs Fagash, for I know not what I do,” blurted Blodgett. He stood up, flicked crumbs from his person, and sprinted out of the Grotto of the Agony across the garden to the hot air balloon. He clambered into the basket and set the burners roaring, and very soon he was aloft, and he sailed away into the blue.

Source : Picnics Of Disillusionment by Dobson (out of print)

A Dozen Nuns

Twenty years ago, under the Malice Aforethought Press imprint, Mr Key published an important pamphlet by Professor Zoltan Crunlop regarding crop circles. It is, of course, out of print, although one lengthy sentence from it was abstracted and recycled as a helpful brain-strengthening tool, available in the Archives here.

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Out of the blue, a letter from the Professor arrived today, sent from the St Blodwyn Mercy Home For Decrepit Cerealogists.

Dear Mr Key, he writes, or rather scratches with a crabbed nib, As you know I am a man of science, and that being the case, I revise my theories in the light of new evidence. Much as I would like to stand by every last syllable in that important pamphlet I wrote for you twenty years ago, I fear I can no longer do so. On no account must you ever allow it to be reissued, although god knows I could do with the royalties, as it is costing me an arm and a leg to maintain some form of comfort here in good old Saint Blodwyn’s. My morning bowl of gruel has already been reduced to a morning half-a-bowl of gruel, and some of my cushions have been taken away. Oh, listen to me, groaning and moaning! That is not what this letter is about. The thing is, you see, that what I never considered, when I was writing my important pamphlet all those years ago, was the very real possibility that all crop circles are created by twelve Belgian lace-making nuns. Why didn’t I think of that? In spite of the fact that my eyesight is fast failing, everything now seems clear to me. Of course, of course, it was nuns all along! Passionately yours, Zoltan.

I am pleased we have cleared that one up.

Gritty Realism

“I see there was a short piece in the Guardian Review yesterday about authors making appearances in their own work, how it is usually done out of vanity but can, as in the cases of John Fowles or Martin Amis or Paul Auster or, recently, Michel Houllebecq, be a vehicle for self-criticism or bleak self-awareness, though the general view is that it is almost always a terrible idea,” said Frank Key, a vision of magnificence with his tremendous bouffant and glorious cravat, his noble pulsating brain throbbing with fantastic vibrations.

“For god’s sake stop wittering and put a sock in it,” said Pansy Cradledew.

It was a summer’s day in the twenty-first century, on another planet.