Jabberwock Jot Cloud

Origin of the species of word cloud, a summary of all around Jot101, seditiously aimed at foxing the meanderer with buzzwords. In a world where books are generated without human intervention (see Bookride Half Book / Half Biscuit-the story of Lambert, a robot who wrote 150,000 books) engineers are kings; fine minds - but do they have books on their shelves? Are they steeped in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or even the non fiction of Goethe or  Franzen? -- possibly. Now - a boat load of flotsam; claptrap masqueraded - ending with a resounding quote from deathless Robert Burton…

The Jabberwock just awake Finnegan version using organic, optimistic search engine keywords, shade grown too - if you get the drift of my banter... talking big data, the world brain of H.G. Wells, an olla podrida, a rag bag of information, trivia and factoids. A hotch potch, a mélange, a damned farrago, a salmagundi, too hot to hoot... Knowledge is power. Truth is beauty. Need to know this (and much more) on earth. Hail that one silent human (in mocha brown) who will actually get it and reap the whirlwind. A coming world of leisure where time is spent in pursuit of knowledge and robots empty the waste paper basket. A dream of no work, all play and jack not a dull boy any more.

The oddest collection, passing strange, a saga, a fantasy, an unlocked roman a clef, with Captain Cuttle and the pedant Casaubon (a maligned man, Madam George). Keeping some sort of record, factoids, footnotes, ephemeroids, factbooks and essential trivia not lost but kept in a safe deposit box. An information bank, an interest bearing investment (they never saw that they needed it). An index of all knowledge, no less. Know more. In the flat box lay the lost monograph- A Proposal for an Information Sharing Galaxy.

An amazing expanding archive, beyond the algorithmic dream, post Mass Observation, many beautiful things no longer lost, bringing forth the one mind of the Gods, the all seeing eye - the library of Babel, Alexandria, far Antioch and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Universal access to all knowledge [A2K]. A vanished world recaptured. Notes and Queries honoured: New Encyclopaedists [Encyc2]. Nothing lost or forgotten. Time spent in research, curiosity and scholarship (the daring to be dull) the Renaissance ideal, the Victorian vicarage - just 4 hours a week of money yielding work. By Timothy! The answer is written on the wind, on the wall of the world. So much to know. Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus... "He had a tale to tell." Madam, I'm Adam. Exit, pursued by a bear.


Robert Burton takes the baton: "---shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion...Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps…

Very short poem from Spike Milligan

Found in Words Etc.,: A Miscellany (Wordspress, Haslemere 1973) this very short poem (above) by the British comedian Spike Milligan A Poem for the Lonely. Spotify also has a recording of Spike Milligan reading this excellent poem along with another inspired piece Orchids in my Glass. It goes like this:

We have cracked the midnight glass,
And loosed the racketing star-crazed night
The blind harp sings in the late firelight
And your hand is decked with white promises.
What wine is this?

There are orchids growing in my glass,
Good God, I'm pissed.

Spike with the young Prince Charles and fellow goon Harry Secombe

Ostrich Fallacies

Found in The Encyclopaedia of Fads and Fallacies by Thomas Jay (Elliott Rightway Books, Kingswood Surrey 1958) a small section on ostrich fallacies. The reference to a Bergen Evans
book is probably his Natural History of Nonsense.


The Diet of the Ostrich

There is a foolish notion that the ostrich can digest iron. Many zoos and menageries have quite a lot of trouble because the public will feed ostriches with nails or bits of metal. As Bergen Evans points out in one of his books, it rarely occurs to people that the purposes of the bars, moats, and walls at zoos is to protect the animals from us. 

Ostrich

An ostrich does not bury its head in the sand thinking that it is hiding itself. But what some politicians will do without the metaphor I don't know. If alarmed, or suspicious, the ostrich will lie flat on the ground with its head stretched out flat in front so that it can size up the situation. And it can do that very well from that position.

E.V. Knox ('Evoe') Vitamins

 From the papers of Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym Evoe. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years.This piece is probably from the 1950s after his editorship. In the archives is a good pic of him, at present unfindable (will upload soon) - for the moment this below. He was married to the daughter of the Winnie the Pooh illustrator E.H.Shepard. Mary Shepard in her turn illustrated Mary Poppins. His daughter from an earlier marriage was the Booker prize winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald - known in the family as 'Mops' and author of the book below on the gifted Knox family.

                             
VITAMINS
It seems to be the invariable practice of those who are recovering from the fall scourge of influenza; or desire to ward off its attacks, to eat grit. The substance takes various forms, but nearly every family consumes with one or other of its daily meals a spade or shovelful of marl, concretes sawdust, fine gravel, or sand.
    The discovery of this new diet basis was providential in the extreme. An eminent doctor was watching an ostrich at the zoo; and noticed the bird devouring several pieces of paving-stone and a couple of bricks. Interested he returned the following day and found the ostrich looking, if anything, fitter than before. Immediately the idea struck him:
    "What if vitamins lurk in the gritty part of farinaceous substances., banished by modern mechanical methods of food preparation from our daily fare?"
    Analysing a gritty substance he found a vitamin lurking there, and his theory was confirmed.
    Grit became instantly one of the most fashionable ingredients of the British breakfast menu. My friends the Wilkinsons emerge refreshed from the following imbroglio each day:

Oranges

Rubble

Sour Milk

Wholemeal Bread

Koffum

    A word as to one or two of the other salient features of this petit dejeuner.

    Sour milk was introduced many years ago from Bulgaria. An eminent traveller noticed that Bulgarians never died, and thought that there must be some reason for this, as visitors to Bulgaria were not nearly so fortunate. Analysing a Bulgarian, he found that he was entirely full of sour milk. This led him to suppose that the germ of sour milk is equivalent to the germ of perpetual life; and in many cases the hypothesis has been abundantly proved. More than one septuagenarian viveur has confessed that but for sour milk he would be no more than sixty or sixty five years old today.