Not All Awful Books ...

The website Awful Library Books points us to just what the title indicates. For example:


Rules to Be Cool from 2001, which I'm sure resulted in dozens of cool-rule-obeying youngsters.

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The Central Youth Employment Executive of Her Majesty's Stationery Office presents The Mastic Asphalt Spreader, with a deliciously attractive cover.

A Good Family Crest

Le Febve de Vivy

Crest of the Le Febve de Vivy family, about which I know little other than they are Swiss and Belgian and like cute cartoonish birdies.

Mesmerist and Handwriting Teacher

[Post updated-- scroll down for more info.]

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This is a scan of an 1844 printed poster advertising a performance by a traveling mesmerist. I found it recently clearing out some old work and sadly I can't conjure the mesmerist's name for certain. I believe it was Charles Webster, an itinerant showman. If I recall correctly, at various times he taught handwriting, too.

It's a lovely old advertising print, I think. Click the image to enlarge and see it more clearly.
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Update: With the help of a friend, we've recalled the name of the mesmerist: Jonathan Palmer Webster, aka J Palmer Webster.

Webster was from a farming family in New Hampshire. He set up a penmanship school called Webster's Academy of Penmanship and Stylographical Card Drawing. A relative gave him funds for medical school, which he attended in New York until the money ran out.

He also called himself an "Itinerant professor of phrenology," and wrote a book about that science.

In the early 1840s, stage mesmerism was a popular entertainment. P.T. Barnum and other impresarios presented regular exhibitions.

Webster began performing stage mesmerism, particularly in Virginia, the Carolinas and New Orleans, where this print is from. In towns where he exhibited he also offered mesmerism classes at as much as $50 a pop -- a hefty charge in those days. Sometimes a clairvoyant named Frederick would perform with him.

For stage hypnotists of the era, clairvoyants would be put into a trance state and see things at a distance or in the future. Sometimes they would act as healers by "seeing" into the bodies of audience members and identifying diseased organs.

In 1849 Webster migrated from New Orleans to San Francisco (Gold Rush, perhaps?). There he apparently worked as a physician despite not having completed his education. After that I know nothing of J. Palmer Webster, a very minor figure who left behind some great handbills and posters.

Titus, it's your anniversary!

Titus Oates, with a name that sounds like a country singer's, was a scoundrel. He fabricated the Popish Plot -- which led to the execution of over fifteen innocent men and which exacerbated an anti-Catholic mood into a frenzy -- and committed sundry bad deeds that were more prosaic.

His punishments include something I was unfamiliar with:

He [James II] had Oates retried and sentenced for perjury to annual pillory, loss of clerical dress, and imprisonment for life. Oates was taken out of his cell wearing a hat with the text "Titus Oates, convicted upon full evidence of two horrid perjuries" and put into the pillory at the gate of Westminster Hall (now New Palace Yard) where passers-by pelted him with eggs. The next day he was pilloried in London and a third day was stripped, tied to a cart, and whipped from Aldgate to Newgate

That was probably too good for him considering the standards of the day. But yearly pillory was something I hadn't considered before.

It is nearly the anniversary of his birth (15 September 1649). I'm curious as to what was the day (or days, or week, or month) for his annual pillory. Would have made for a whale of a birthday celebration if they combined them.

Oates went from penury to having Whitehall apartments and allowances, to various punishments, to a small royal allowance, then a suspension of that allowance, then a bigger royal allowance of £ 300. Ultimately, I understand, he died.

Happy Titus Oates day!

It's the time for scoundrels to whip a froth into a frenzy, human suffering be damned.

Simulating the Turnip Harvest for Fun

Turnip Strength Tester, a Soviet arcade game where one attempts to pull a stand-in for a turnip from a stand-in for the ground. Available for play at the Museum of Soviet Video Games.

This is not a jape.

That museum is infinitely cheerier than the North Korean Arcade, which hasn't even a mangelwurzel, real or fake.

Old Quips

While going through the belongings in an old house, I found a small booklet of fragile yellowed paper.

Wehman Bros' Vaudeville Gags and Jokes, published by Wehman Bros, 126 Park Row in 1916.

Maybe I'll scan part of it sometime. Many of the individual bits have been clipped out so the book in some parts looks like a collection of ribbons with jokes on them.

The material is scatter-shot (perhaps all the best gags were snipped decades ago). Most of the jokes rely heavily on puns, some simple:

- What did the vegetarian say when called upon to offer grace?
- He said: "Lettuce pray."

And some spectacularly labored and askew:

Billy and Geraldine sat on the porch.
Billy said: "I like your company Gerry."
Gurgled Geraldine: "Me, too."
Whereupon Billy became a holding company and drew up his articles of incorporation so close that Geraldine went into the hands of a receiver.

Here are a few more.

I've gone into a new business: making artificial limbs.
That so? How is it?
Oh, rushing. I put on two new hands yesterday.

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I think my client will lose his case.
Have you exhausted all the means at you disposal?
No, but I've exhausted all the means at his disposal.

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- My father has a new kind of typewriter -- he fills it with ink.
- My father has the kind you fill with wine.

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I have a horse and taught him to talk.
I never knew a horse could talk.
The only thing is you can't hear him very well.
Why?
Because he talks horse.

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My flight is boarding, so I'll leave it at that. Maybe I'll return to this book soon.

Happy gags to all.

One of the excellent images from a fine collection of New York photos from the seventies and eighties.

Found thanks to Roy Edroso, who wrote an elegiac post recalling his life during those times.

Hind Hind Hand

Hat tip to The Iowa Firecracker.

See if you can suss her devious plan

Slightly familiar? *

Spartanburg woman, 39, accused of stuffing burger down pants: "Turner ordered two sandwiches and two small coffees. When a cashier gave Turner the bag with the sandwiches while her coffee was being prepared, the report states, Turner took one of the sandwiches out of the bag and stuffed it down her pants."

Figured it out yet? I'm sure she thought she was cunning. It's explained at the linked page.

*Doesn't she look a bit like Katy Brand?

Extraordinary

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

--Noel Coward

(A name which, to Americans, sounds like he's scared of Christmas.)

It's an old line, I know. But I was just listening to some cheap music -- less than a dollar per hour -- and the potency was truly remarkable.

Artisanal Document Destruction

In order to keep nosy paparazzi and garbage-trawlers away from my financial details, I purchased a decent shredder. It makes fine short strips and would possibly thwart even the reassembly skills of Iranian Revolutionaries.

But my shredder is mechanized and mindless and has no soul. No élan vital. So I've decided to rend my papers by hand, with the help of the 5-bladed shredding hand scissors available at the retailer MicroCenter.Soon, shredding will once again be an act of personal expression and fulfillment.

[I may be prepared to provide this service for a fee for the discerning and profligate who appreciate sustainable craftsmanship.]

Shoe-bury-ness? Really?

With a punishing austerity budget due to descend upon Britain (my thoughts are with you), it's time for lefty troubadour Billy Bragg to speak up for the ragged masses.

Let's get enthused about road maintenance with his stirring song A13 Trunk Road to the Sea, which is basically (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66. Kind of.



Lyrics [with notes] from Braggtopia:

A13 TRUNK ROAD TO THE SEA

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the OK road that's the best
Go motorin' on the A13

If you're looking for a thrill that's new
Take in Fords [The Ford factory in Dagenham], Dartford Tunnel [Road tunnel under the River Thames to the east of London] and the river [The River Thames] too
Go motorin' on the A13

It starts down in Wapping
There ain't no stopping
By-pass Barking [Billy Bragg's birthplace] and straight through Dagenham
Down to Grays Thurrock
And rather near Basildon
Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea,
Chalkwell, Prittlewell
Southend's the end

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the OK road that's the best
Go motorin' on the A13

Goat Confiscation in Virginia

Bedford authorities find goat in trunk at DUI checkpoint

"She told deputies she is from the United Kingdom and transporting goats in this manner is acceptable there."

According to Ms. Enderdy--who said she had kindly obtained the animal as a pet for her four Kenyan passengers--the standards of caprine conveyance in the UK are lamentable. Please, Britishers, leave your livestock handling practices behind when you come to the USA.

Life By the Throat-- With Dijeridoo

Wilhelm Reich was a castoff of early psychoanalysis who believed that the energy of life, including that from orgasms, was a distinguishable and collectible force called "orgone energy." An orgone accumulator could be built (and he built them-- in part for which he was imprisoned in the USA and his books were burned) which would enable those positioned in the small cabinet to be revitalized by the forces of life and of ecstasy

Yes indeed, that's a schematic outline of part of the most prurient of Reich's ideas.

The Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev used those Reichian themes and more to shape a "70's ludicrous," * tedious and hilarious movie called WR: Mysteries of the Organism in 1971.

Makavejev subsequently made a well received "serious" movie called Montenegro in 1981 dealing with political themes from his native Yugoslavia and beyond.

Four years later, for some reason we can only celebrate, an international consortium paid for Makevejev to create a sublime concoction of politics, commerce, surreal humor, cultural imperialism and romantic comedy called The Coca-Cola Kid. Eric Roberts plays a good-ole southern boy sent to the Australian outback to capture for American business the drinking habits of one of the few places in the world that had not yet succumbed to Coke.

It's a universal movie; it resonates more over the decades. It features a luminous Greta Scacchi. It has fewer Australians than expected in lead roles. And yet, as a character in the following clip jests, it's "As Australian as a barbed wire canoe. It's as Australian as a shit sandwich."

This movie will repay your attention but it's not what you expect.

Behold Neil Finn of Crowded House toying with the American corporatist for all he's worth and then performing the best Coca-Cola jingle that the corporation would never allow to represent it.



Lyrics:

Don't want to go
Where there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Choke back the tears
When there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Under the hot sun
When the day is done
And you're dying of thirst
There's only one drink
It's universal

Don't want to go
Where there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Choke back the tears
When there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Keeps you up 'cause
there's nothing like Coke

* Footnote: "70's ludicrous" is a category of films from the late sixties through the seventies that are bold, experimental, "counter-cultural," sometimes tedious and often outrageous. It's my own designation. I know it when I see it.

Cleese?

From some angles, this guy looks to me like John Cleese.

But he isn't--I hope! He's a member of Winterband, the the world's gob-smackingest combo. They're a group of musically dull old hippified belligerent Christian rightwingers who created Obama Muslim 911, among other classics.

Thanks to The Awl for the marvelous collection of mind-rending videos.

Crow Smoking

Easily anthropomorphized animal photo, ergo comical. Details here.

Add that corvids are such striking and impish animals, and that these are perched on what appears to be a thatched or straw roof (in the Maldives, no less), and that the photographer is from Crowborough. There is little more to desire.

Slow and Sad

The world has one fewer compassionate soul: My mother has died.

Things will be slow here for a bit. From Billy Connolly's poem Tomes:

even though it never mentions my mother,
now that I think of her again,
who only last year rolled off the edge of the earth
in her electric bed,
in her smooth pink nightgown
the bones of her fingers interlocked,
her sunken eyes staring upward
beyond all knowledge,
beyond the tiny figures of history,
some in uniform, some not,
marching onto the pages of this incredibly heavy book.

Goodbye Mother.

The UK Press is different

I usually think much of the difference between the UK and US press is attributable to the nakedly partisan and sleazy nature of the UK tabloids. But even the broadsheets editorialize humorously in subheads of actual news stories:

Guardian: "Lord Mandelson denies incident is a metaphor for Labour's election campaign"

Made me laugh!

Common Misconceptions

List of common misconceptions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "This list of common or popular misconceptions corrects various fallacious, misleading, or otherwise flawed ideas that are described by multiple reliable sources as widely held. The statements below are not the misconceptions, but are the actual facts regarding those misconceptions."

Most I knew. Some I didn't. Fun either way.

An Election I Can't Vote In

Comments on something about which I know only a little: the UK election. First, from UK Election Trend, polling summaries through today.
UK Election Trend analyzes this graph: "It's too close to call, and it seems like there will be no clear answer till the morning of the 7th. It does however look sure to be a hung parliament of some kind. "

UK Election Trend is fascinating. It's a bit more analytical and seemingly independent compared to the UK Polling Report, which I also visit a lot.

The Tory reaction to a hung Parliament (ditching their planned Party Political Broadcast and doing a pseudo-satire on the horrors of what Clegg and others are humorously calling a "balanced Parliament" ) indicates their utter fear of this outcome. Hilariously, they tried to get Armando Iannucci to direct it.

The sentiment of the UK is apparently more left-leaning than the current 2.5 party electoral system reflects. Perhaps a coalition could rework the electoral system to allow voter sentiments to be more closely tracked. A Liberal-Labour coalition could conceivably change the system and create a permanent minority Conservative Party. I'm pleased that I somewhat align with David Mitchell in that impulse.

The Tories would rather drink poisoned cider than change the electoral system. Their idea for "more democracy" is referenda and initiatives. Not necessarily awful ideas in themselves but which they plan to implement in a horrific manner (look at California for the wreckage left by such a system).

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I've been considering why I find this election so fascinating, apart from my rank Anglophilia. I've assembled some reasons.

While the election is important to the UK, the outcome is, in all likelihood, of small consequence to my daily life (unless the BBC is affected!). I can enjoy the ins and outs without being emotional about them. It's hard to do that with elections in my own country.

By temperament and politics, I find the Tories pretty repellent. Labour seems old and tired. So the game-change that came from Clegg's performance in the first debate was thrilling, especially considering the fact that it happened during the first ever televised leadership debate in the UK.

I'd be satisfied if Murdoch took a whacking, and the LibDems aren't tied to Rupert as the other parties are. Murdoch is such a malign influence here in the USA: any comeuppance he gets is a boon to me.

And, ultimately, it's exciting, interesting, and a bit exotic. Yes: exotic, to this American.

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Britain has a notoriously partisan press and I'm largely unfamiliar with the inclinations of the major papers. In order to "consider the source," I've often returned to this handy chart from the Guardian listing the parties the various publications have supported over the decades. Most helpful.

Click through for a commendable article about the Guardian meeting regarding their endorsement, as well as a click-sortable (and more legible) version of this table.