Yesterday’s advent calendar picture was so terrifying that you have probably had a fit of the vapours and taken to your bed, whimpering and neurasthenic. In such circumstances, you will be subsisting on a diet of invalid food, so voila! today’s picture shows a lovely bowl of pap ‘n’ slops. Yum!
from Toast
Earlier this week in The Dabbler, Brit reviewed Sweeper!, a novel by the foopballist Steve Bruce. Though I have yet to read the book itself, the review was enough for me to recognise genius. I added a comment, saying: “OK, that’s it. I am destroying everything I have written to date and starting all over again with Steve Bruce as my guide, my teacher, my inspiration.” If anybody thought I was joking, think again. In my cupboard today, you will find the first fruits of my new approach. It’s early doors, and I can’t pretend to have mastered the intricacies of the Brucesque method, but I am trying, I am trying.
Incidentally, astute readers will note a particularly clever metafictional sally in my piece. Brit points to Bruce’s repeated use of fundamental spelling inconsistencies in proper names, and is dismissive of the idea that these may be due to a lack of proofreading or copy editing. I have followed Bruce in giving my hero’s name in a number of variations, and I also refer more than once to the actor Bruce Willis. Not only is there a pleasing Bruce / Bruce echo, but of course Willis once reputedly wrote on an online forum the immortal words “proofreading is for pussies”. I leave you to untangle that one.
Your Hooting Yard advent calendar picture today comes with a parental guidance warning, as it may frighten the tinies, not to mention the weak-minded and those of puny brainpans. It is a terrifying still taken from Quatermass And The Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967), showing the Hobbs End tube station demon.
Having much enjoyed Phil Baker’s biography of Austin Osman Spare, I have just started reading his earlier life of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Is A Gentleman (2009). It is as informative, entertaining, and amusing as the Spare book. Here is Dennis, reminiscing about his visit to Germany in 1913 to learn about the family wine trade. He was much impressed by the officer class…
… a race apart, immune from arrest by the police, they could be tried only by their own courts of honour and, if found guilty of a disgraceful act, they were simply given a pistol with which to shoot themselves. The civilian population had been conditioned to regard them with abject veneration. Ladies, as well as men, when approaching one of them in a street, stepped off the pavement into the gutter to give them ample room to pass, which they accepted as their right and did not even acknowledge by the flicker of an eyelid. Awed, and admiring, I watched them greet one another with a graceful salute, a click of the heels and a sharp bow from the waist. It was years later before I realised that very few of them had any brains at all …
Several years ago, I wrote “Accounts of dreams are rarely of interest to anyone other than the dreamer” before going on to describe a dream in which I was about to attack the late actor Roy Kinnear with a chair-leg. Since then, I have occasionally shared with readers other dreams I have had, when I think they may be of interest. What I have not done is to recount somebody else’s slumberland visions. I was so delighted, however, by reader Mark Patterson’s dream that I felt impelled to post it here:
Dreamt last night that my only Christmas present was a ‘Ginger Complains’ dvd. 70 minutes of poor quality footage featuring Ginger Baker grumbling about this and that in front of a succession of run-down cinemas. 25% of his griping was inaudible due to poor sound quality.
Ginger Baker in happier times, with his mum
Today’s advent calendar picture is an old trading card for celery compound. Personally, I always thought a celery compound was a fenced-off area where you grew celery, much as the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts is a sort of fenced-off area for the keeping of Kennedys. But apparently not. You live and learn – especially with Hooting Yard as your guide!
Dear Frank, writes Tim Thurn, I find it somewhat befuddling that we are almost a week in to your excellent Hooting Yard advent calendar initiative and have not yet been given a picture of a bird to print and cut out and paste with glue to our sheet of cardboard. Given that you are one of the world’s foremost ornithologists, sort of, things have come to a pretty pass, and I know a pretty pass when I see one. (My forthcoming book Pretty Passes I Have Known is the proof of that.) So please get your finger out and give us a picture of a bird to print and cut out and paste with glue to our sheet of cardboard! Yours until the cows come home, Tim Thurn.
I pay due attention to my readers, so for today I have chosen not just a picture of a bird, but a picture of several birds, or rather several painted wooden birds, in the form of these excellent bufflehead decoys from M.A.D. Decoys of Birdsboro, PA.
The whole point of this advent calendar hoo-ha is that we are counting towards the celebration of the birth of sweet baby Jesus. Later, grown to mangodhood, Jesus asserted that “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”, so it may be considered inappropriate to include a picture of a rival god in our calendar. But that’s just what we’re going to do here at Hooting Yard, inspired by the spirit of diverse vibrancy, or vibrant diversity, or whatever it is they inculcate into tinies in their community education hubs these days.
Here, courtesy of Bushwick Policy, is a Mayan bat-god, eerily similar to the hideous bat-god Fatso.
Today’s advent calendar picture shows a bog, or more precisely a blanket bog. (A blanket bog ought not be confused with a Blunkett bog, which is the type of bog the blind philandering erstwhile Labour Home Secretary may stumble into when attacked by cows.) This particular bog is on Dartmoor, but I suspect it is similar to an Isle of Wight bog through which Margo Williams may be dragged by her ghostly spirit guides.
In my first book “GHOSTLY GIFTS” I related some of the earlier cases where I uncovered physical objects in the presence of witnesses. Since then my talent has developed greatly and I travel around the Isle of Wight seeking out these unhappy souls whose greed, foolishness, jealousy or other sins have held them prisoners without chains waiting for release.
I may be busy at home going about my daily chores, dusting, ironing or one of the many jobs a housewife performs when a voice speaks and tells me to go to a certain place where someone needs help. The voice I hear is one of my spirit guides. I then have to make suitable arrangements with one of my small team of helpers who provide me with transport as I have no car to travel to the place I have been told. I may not have a hazardous or rich social life but it is certainly never dull as I set forth upon these journeys not knowing what story I shall hear and what I may be led to find. All I need are willing helpers, a pencil and paper because as soon as I hear a ghostly voice speak I write down every word in strange writing at great speed, the pencil never leaves the paper so that each word is joined to the next. My helpers usually arm themselves with some tool to dig with and we all wear old clothes as ghosts seem to have a habit of leading us through mud and bogs or making us crawl under barbed wire, through thick brambles, scramble down cliffs or push aside a herd of cows!
from Margo Williams, Out Of The Mist : More Adventures Of An Isle Of Wight Psychic (1982)
It was a little late to search for the philosophers’ stone in 1669, yet it was in such a search that phosphorus was discovered. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) described it in the following manner: Brand, “a man little known, of low birth, with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did, found this luminous matter while searching for something else. He was a glassmaker by profession, but he had abandoned it in order to be free for the pursuit of the philosophical stone with which he was engrossed. Having put it into his mind that the secret of the philosophical stone consisted in the preparation of urine, this man worked in all kinds of manners and for a very long time without finding anything. Finally, in the year 1669, after a strong distillation of urine, he found in the recipient a luminant matter that has since been called phosphorus. He showed it to some of his friends, among them Mister Kunkel.”…
To obtain phosphorus, a good proportion of coal (regarded as a type of phlogiston) was added to urine, previously thickened by evaporation and preferably after putrefaction, and the mixture was heated to the highest attainable temperature. It was obvious that phlogiston entered into the composition of the distillation product. The question remained whether this product was generated de novo. In his research of 1743 to 1746, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709-1782) provided the answer. He found the new substance in edible plant seeds, and he concluded that it enters the human system through the plant food, to be excreted later in the urine. He did not convince all the chemists with his reasoning. In 1789, Macquer wrote: “There are some who, even at this time, hold that the phosphorical (‘phosphorische’) acid generates itself in the animals and who consider this to be the ‘animalistic acid.’“
Although Marggraf was more advanced in his arguments than these chemists, yet he was a child of his time. The luminescent and combustible, almost wax-like substance impressed him greatly. “My thoughts about the unexpected generation of light and fire out of water, fine earth, and phlogiston I reserve to describe at a later time.” These thoughts went so far as to connect the new marvel with alchemical wonder tales. When Marggraf used the “essential salt of urine,” also called sal microcosmicum, and admixed silver chloride (“horny silver”) to it for the distillation of phosphorus, he expected “a partial conversion of silver by phlogiston and the added fine vitrifiable earth, but no trace of a more noble metal appeared.”
from Eduard Farber, History Of Phosphorus (1965)
Today’s advent calendar picture may upset those of a nervous disposition and those subject to fits of the vapours when confronted by images of lightning-struck cows. The picture – of cattle struck by lightning – is a print from 1872.
Instructions for making your advent calendar can be found here. What I forgot to mention is that, having glued the picture to your sheet of cardboard, you should use a thick black marker pen to write the appropriate number above, below, or to the side of the picture. Deploy Roman numerals, please.
Here at Hooting Yard we try to keep up with all the latest seabird news. As headlines go, this is rather impressive:
Lost puffin found at sex clinic
and it may or may not have something to do with this piece of signage:
Thanks to Andrew Dale (puffin) and Jeff Chilton (penguins).
This week in The Dabbler I confess to my teenage crush on Harold Wilson. Required reading, I think, for anyone interested in pipe-smoking premiers, political paranoia, spiders, and bedridden teenagers who have lost the use of their lower limbs.
For younger readers, here is a photograph of Harold Wilson. On no account should you confuse this with December’s daily advent calendar picture. While there is always the possibility that Wilson may appear on your calendar at some point, that day has not yet come.
For instructions on making your advent calendar, see here. Today’s picture shows Old Halob and fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol (played by an actor) on a winter sports enthusiasts’ holiday, date unknown.
Thanks to vintagewinter