I have decided to devote the next few days to research. I want to understand the inner workings of the brain of a lobster. I shall present my findings here in due course.
Research
2
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Exchange & Mart
The following advert appeared in Exchange & Mart in 1936:
UNLUCKY AT GAMBLING?
If so why not experiment by buying a pack of Surrealist Forecast Cards? Designed by a famous mystic artist and author, they were originally intended as a joke, but he found that they picked the winners in his case, and in many others. Can be used for any race, anywhere, any year, and the same pack will last for years. These cards are not guaranteed, as they re-act differently in the case of each individual, but they do enable you to conduct an interesting and perhaps profitable experiment with luck. Obviously, if they were infallible we would be so rich that we wouldn’t need to advertise them. So we make this very fair offer. Buy a pack with full instructions for 5/-. If you find them to be of no use to you your money will be refunded without question or argument.
SURREALIST FORECAST CARDS,
261, Lauderdale Mansions, London, W.9
The “mystic artist and author” was Austin Osman Spare, and a rare photograph of a set of the cards (now worth considerably more than 5/- or 25p) can be seen here.
Obsessive Dabbling
Never reluctant to revisit the same material again and again, I turn to what some have called one of my obsessive themes in The Dabbler this week. And what theme might that be? Well, answer the following picture quiz before clicking on the dabblelink, and you will know what to expect.
What is the connection between this man
and this bird?
The Vanbrugh Chicken
The first thing I did this morning, after getting up at 4.50 AM, was to find out about Sir John Vanbrugh. The real, historical Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), architect of Blenheim Palace and author of The Provok’d Wife, turned out to have little in common with the Sir John Vanbrugh (dates uncertain) who appeared in the dream from which I had just awoken.
My dream-Vanbrugh was famed as a painter of chickens. He had painted a particular type of white chicken so many times that it was known as “a Vanbrugh chicken”. Connoisseurs eagerly sought out Vanbrugh chicken paintings in auction salesrooms, where they sold for tidy sums.
Wide awake now, I can still see a Vanbrugh chicken, white with a red crop, in my mind’s eye.
More Mystic Woo
Yesterday I posted Outa_Spaceman’s psychic cream tea photograph, along with some questions. Within an hour, this little gem popped into my postbox:
Hello,
I am Cassandra Marquez and I am the PR representative for Juliette de Sousa, World Famous Psychic.
Psychic Juliette de Sousa is now available on Keen and is offer you free minutes
We would also like to know if you would be interested in networking with Juliette through her website and promotional materials.
Please Visit psychicJuliette.com for details.
Have a Beautiful Day!
Cassandra Marques
I would have been impressed had it arrived before I posted the photo.
Matters Bloggy
Recently there has been prattle in certain corners of Interwebshire predicting the imminent demise of the blog. It is, we are told, an outmoded form, due to be tossed into the dustbin of history, conquered by the implacable might of social networking, wittering and twittering. Such a prediction is quite obviously ballocks (as Beckett would spell it). The blog will continue to thrive, at least in this neck of the woods, for your beloved Mr Key long ago realised that it is absolutely the perfect medium for the outpourings of his puny and pea-sized brain. And I am of course not the only one whose blatherings could never be constrained by arbitrary twitter-lengths and similar barbarities.
This by way of preamble to news of a brand new blog for which I must take a small measure of responsibility. It is not Hooting Yardy in any way, rather the result of protracted cajoling and mental thumping on my part. Believing, as I do, that some of us were born to blog, I have finally managed to bash some sense into the noggin of a friend, who until now has been writing indefatigably but shoving everything into a drawer to moulder unread. What on earth is the point of that in the era of Het Internet?
Thus the birth of BlackberryJuniper and Sherbet, wherein we are promised “waffling” about such matters as “modern neo-paganism, established religion, food, animals, astronomy, history, books, music, pub quizzes, TV, films, philosophy, psychology, and my feeble beginner attempts at gardening”. I told you it wasn’t Hooting Yardy. What it is is an individual voice, babbling away in inimitable fashion, and allowing the babble to be read, rather than muffled and hidden and forgotten in that dust-choked drawer.
I commend it to your attention. Start here, lap it up, add it to your RSS feed, and don’t forget to post your comments.