Another curious creature

A couple of days ago I posted illustrations of some imaginary creatures, and to follow this up I am devoting this post to a real one. Proving that the saying about truth being stranger than fiction is not only a boring cliché but completely untrue, here is a real animal which is far less strange—or at any rate far less interesting—than any fictional one could possibly be: Expert On Anteaters Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters is a perfectly cast and beautifully acted piece telling the tragic story of an interviewer who is finally reduced to speechlessness by his guest.

[Anyone to whom this masterpiece is unfamiliar has probably also missed other Onion News Network items. Get the flavour of their morning show Today Now and then sample some of its in-depth reviews of such items as Time Magazine's Annual List of the 299 Million Least Influential Americans.]

Curious creatures

In James Thurber's The Beast in Me and Other Animals, published in 1948, there was a collection of drawings which he called A New Natural History, featuring such creatures as the Hopeless Quandary.....

...the Whitefaced Rage and the Blind Rage.

I wonder whether Thurber got the idea from A Phenomenal Fauna by Carolyn Wells, with pictures by Oliver Hereford, which came out in 1901. I discovered this charming old children's picture book today in Project Gutenberg, where it was posted this week as an addition to its library of 100,000 free downloadable books. Here is the Brick Bat and its accompanying verse:

Oft through the stillness of the summer night

We see the Brick Bat take his rapid flight.

And, with unerring aim, descending straight,

He meets a cat on the back garden gate.

The little Brick Bat could not fly alone,—

Oh, no; there is a power behind the thrown.

Hwurl, hwawrl, wurl, wawrl

I have never been sure how to pronounce whorl; dictionaries give several variations but do not make clear which are the acceptable ones and which would cause contemptuous laughter if I used any of them in conversation with better-educated people.

Happily, it has not been difficult to avoid using it since I have rarely found myself participating in discussions about spinning machines, ethmoidal crests, the verticil of a flower, the convolutions of a spiral shell, fingerprints, or the action of drawing up with a pulley. The word has been used in connection with these things since 1440, but I have been able to lead a fairly full life without the need to use it in any context.

There is of course no problem when writing it, so I do not risk embarrassment by passing on the information that Jalebi is an Indian sweet consisting of a slightly fermented batter forced through a nozzle into hot clarified butter so that it forms loops or whorls. When these have set they are lifted out of the fat and dropped into hot syrup scented with saffron and rosewater, then drained and served.

Mere teeth-rotting delight to us, but in the Middle East this confection has interesting poetic associations and is mentioned in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. There is a poem in which a man describes how he fashioned a chain from the whorls and hung it around the neck of his beloved, and put rings of it on her ears. Very romantic, and of course he would be well placed for a nibble.

Patently obvious

Tipi Eisberg, a contributor to Martin G's Really Magazine, normally reviews the more intriguing American patent applications but has recently started selecting some and showing only the drawings, leaving readers to guess what purpose the devices are intended to serve. That this is not always easy may be judged by looking at the three currently selected (Week 08); you can find the answers by clicking on the drawings, but I will spoil these puzzles by revealing that these patents cover, respectively, an electronic device for training animals, a helmet for wearing in the water which enables you to squirt stuff at other swimmers, and a method of gas stunning chickens before slaughtering them.

But the simplest inventions are always the best, and my current favourite is An Apparatus for Improving the Taste of Beverages. Martin is greatly taken by the idea, as everyone may well be, of turning a bottle of plonk into something really good by putting a magnet in it.

One reason why I like this one is that although it is indeed very simple, its description runs to one sentence of 399 words; I like long sentences. The longest one I have ever posted was a mere 164, but that was in 2004, when I was young.

[Unaccountably, I missed Disposable protector for engaging a clogged toilet and containing splashes in the clogged toilet occurring during unclogging of the clogged toilet by a plunger when Martin published it at the end of 2007.]

The Pharaoh speaks

A rather feeble joke from Private Eye,

but it's a gorgeous picture, isn't it?

Fracas in mid-air

There was an item of news earlier this month which must have been of much interest to anyone compiling an anthology called Amazing Stories from New Zealand, and finding himself a bit short of content.

Reports in the Australian and New Zealand press were fairly incoherent, but most included some of the following details: 33-year-old Blenheim woman (or in some reports, "Somali refugee") attempts to hijack small commuter plane going to Christchurch, produces a knife and has another in her shoe, says there is a bomb on board and demands to be taken to Australia, tries to seize the controls, wrestles on the floor with the pilots, stabs one on the hand and the other on the foot, plane lands safely and armed police with dogs arrest the woman.

Two of the passengers, according to one newspaper "were named as a man and a woman".

Clearly an exciting time was had by all, and there were international repercussions: "...the England cricket team's flight from Christchurch to Wellington was delayed for two-and-a-half hours".

Nowadays the threat posed by two knives and a bomb does not dismay experienced airline pilots: one wonders whether the incident might have ended less happily if the woman had armed herself with something more calculated to inspire terror.

Julius de Basil and his icons

After all that depressing stuff I wrote about websites, let's have a nice picture of an icon. Nowadays we use the word most often in one of its two modern meanings. The OED says:

1a. An image, figure, or representation; a portrait; a picture or illustration in a book
1b. An image in the solid; a monumental figure; a statue.
1c. Computing A small symbolic picture of a physical object on a VDU screen.
2. Eastern Church A representation of some sacred personage, in painting, bas-relief, or mosaic, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship or adoration.
3a. Rhetoric A simile. (Obsolete)
3b. Philosophy A sign which represents its object by virtue of having some character in common with the object.
4. A realistic representation or description in writing. (Now rare or obsolete.)

Oddly, the other modern meaning apart from 1c appears in the OED as a draft addition from 2001, though it was recorded in print fifty years earlier:
A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc., considered worthy of admiration or respect. (e.g. "Hollywood's female gay icons Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon and Jamie Lee Curtis").

But never mind about those, or about the bits of art that clutter up our screens. Meaning 2 has the best images, and here's one from the 6th century: the oldest icon of Christ Pantocrator (encaustic on panel, ca 6th century:Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai). My friend Julius de Basil, a bit of an icon himself, is dotty about the things, and has some nice ones among the family anecdotes in his blog.

Your genial host

In 2003 I started designing and publishing websites for individuals, small businesses and charities. They were simple, rather amateurish affairs, but adequate for their purpose, and some of them are still useful and remain on line. I charged very little or nothing for the work as it was an enjoyable pastime.

But of course I had to register the domains and buy some webspace, and I chose the cheapest host I could find, an outfit aimed particularly at students. I hadn't been a student since George VI was on the throne, but they were happy to accept me as a paying guest, and all went fairly well until last December, when it became clear that things were going wrong with my host: it became impossible to get replies to emails, their billing portal was inaccessible so that I couldn't pay for renewals, and technical support was non-existent. So I had to think of transferring my webs to a new host, and thus began a three-month nightmare.

For a start, wresting control of my domains away from the firm I had light-heartedly handed them over to four years earlier proved difficult since they would not co-operate, and I had to open an account with another firm, get a Domain Release Certificate and obtain Authorisation Codes (for the .coms) and get the tags changed (for the .co.uk ones) so that the domains could be transferred, and then find a suitable new host.

All this would be child's play, of course, to an experienced computer person. Well, I suppose I am experienced in one sense—I have been playing with the things since 1982—but I am not an expert: I was never much good with them, and most of the skills I acquired are either forgotten or irrelevant (who nowadays needs to write DOS batch files, or use DbaseII?).

But the real reason it all became a nightmare is that the kind of people who work in the Support departments of computer companies are not, to put it mildly, of the highest calibre; never before have I encountered in such a short space of time so many stupid, pig-ignorant, incompetent, ill-natured swine. It has been like taking a winter break at Conservative Central Office.

There were times I have needed every ounce of those qualities for which my name has long been a byword—the quiet diffidence, the mildness of temper under provocation, the reluctance to rebuke or even to criticise, the calm tolerance of human frailty—in order to stop myself from speaking out severely or even intemperately.

Then I was recommended to a vast telecoms outfit who are business-oriented but were prepared to accept my little account, and I started another transfer process. All went swimmingly until, after an exchange of some forty-eight emails and several hours on the telephone, I found out that they could not provide something I needed (FrontPage extensions, if you must know), and I had to start looking again.....

Finally I have got back to where I was last November, with the domains safely ensconced and the webs uploaded. My new webhosts seem all right, but it is early days yet: in response to one complaint I made to them I received an email which was addressed "Dear Individual" and read: "...I have checked the extensions on that domain name and can confirm that there was an issue. To resolve this I have tried removing and re-adding the extensions from here."

There was an issue... This is computer-speak for "Yes, there was something wrong at our end but we don't do apologies. Anyway, we have no idea what it was, but we may well have put it right now, for all we know."

Well, they had fixed it, so I suppose I must try not to worry any more....

The Isambard Look

Time, I think, for another Sensational Hats post. Most of the headgear featured in this popular series is in one way or another extraordinary, but this is an exception: for men of substance in Victorian times, hats like the one illustrated here were thought to be absolutely ordinary, in fact de rigueur, and you would be considered eccentric or possibly even subversive if you were seen in public without something of this kind on your head.

I have taken a holistic approach here and shown the hat not in isolation but as part of an ensemble which is very much of its time, with regard not only to the crumpled trousers but also to the massive chains forming the background; this was the age of real heavyweight engineering, when mighty machines were clanking and steaming rather than buzzing and flickering like the piddling toys of our effete age.

If ever a man had an excuse for displaying crumpled trousers and a waistcoat in disarray, it was the great Brunel in this picture, though his demeanour, coolly smoking one of his 40-a-day cigars, belies the stress of the occasion, the difficult sideways launching of the SS Great Eastern (two people were killed). This was an iron sailing steam ship he had designed, the largest ship ever built at the time, with the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refueling.

Sadly, Brunel suffered a stroke and died in 1859, just before the Great Eastern made her first voyage to New York.

Rhyming the Rhythm Method

When writing the other day about a Prophylactic Poetry Competition to celebrate the opening of National Contraceptive Awareness Week, I was quite wrong to suggest that it would not attract many entries: in fact, there were more than fifty.

I have to say, though, that the standard of those selected as winners and runners-up was not very high; most of them had uncertain metre and defective rhymes. I mean, "silly" with "willy" is OK if a bit obvious, but "johnny" with "funny" should have been grounds for instant disqualification.

Anyway, none of those I saw were in the same class as the one I submitted on behalf of one of my correspondents whom I know only as Outeast; he couldn't enter it himself because he lives outside the UK* and couldn't afford the stamp, so he sent it to me in a comment on this post. Pity he didn't win, because I had promised him that the prize would have gone to the Save the Children Fund.

The competition was clearly a success, but I am less certain about the NCA week which has just begun. It may well be that preparations have been hindered by death threats from the Vatican's hit squads, and that at this very moment heavy mobs from Opus Dei are tearing down the displays.

They do these things better in the United States. For instance, over there during National Gall Bladder Week every Main Street has its parade (with the Cholecyst Queen), its banners, and stalls manned by top brass from the Gall Bladder Society of America.

Let the final poetic word on contraception go to Tom Lehrer, who ended his version of the Boy Scouts Marching Song with:
....If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you chance to meet a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared....Be Prepared!

* I have no idea where; indeed, I know very little about him. Or her? I have an idea that she may actually be a young Turkish widow whom I remember meeting once some years ago under curious circumstances in the Levant. I do know that he/she is a poet of note: a sonnet of his/hers is included among THESE.

Cantuar cocks it up

Actually, he is formally known as The Most Reverend Father in God, Rowan Douglas, by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, but that would have made too long a title for this post.

When I told the story of my shameful failure to accost Michael Ramsey, the one hundredth of this line of churchmen, when I encountered him and his sensational eyebrows some years ago in a corridor of the Okura Hotel, I compared him very favourably with his successors, the obscure Coggan, the sycophant Runcie and the slimy Carey, friend of Pinochet, but was non-committal about the next one, describing him in a kindly if patronising way as a little bearded Welsh fellow.

How wrong I was! Williams is clearly a remarkable man, having succeeded, with a few suggestions about Sharia Law, in putting back racial harmony in this country by a couple of decades and hastening the eventual demise of the Church of England by perhaps a similar period. If its leader doesn't have the sense to realise that his words were certain to give rise a flood of clips on TV news showing floggings and beheadings, how can this palsied institution hope to survive much longer?

We are used to celebrities pontificating on subjects way outside their area of expertise—if they have such a thing—and are merely irritated when we are told Prince Charles' views on architecture or medicine, or the Pope's on family life, though I suppose pontificating is what pontiffs are expected to do. But when an archbishop holds forth with proposals for changes to the English judicial system we can only marvel at their idiocy and his presumption.

Not all the effects of this are depressing. Hearing that most of the legal profession and all three political parties promptly and roundly condemned what Williams said is cheering, and the notion that having 26 clergymen of the established Church of England, the Lords Spiritual, serving by right in the House of Lords must surely now be recognised as lunacy.

National Ballet

I have absolutely no comment to make on this picture

The Gendarmes once more

I have noted before that quite often someone hits Other Men's Flowers in search of the lyrics of a song about two gendarmes which they mistakenly believe was written by Gilbert and Sullivan. I had always assumed that the familiar words were a translation from the French, for the song is from a comic opera by Offenbach.

I was curious to know the original French words but so far I have not been able to find them anywhere. Geneviève de Brabant's two-act French libretto was written by Louis-Adolphe Jaime and Etienne Tréfeu, and the operetta was first staged at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, Paris in 1859. Thanks to Boosey and Hawkes it was easy to download the censor's copy of the libretto and I ploughed through it all to see if I could identify the words which became "We run them in..." A word search showed me that there were no gendarmes in the operetta (there weren't any in the medieval legend on which it was based, either, but Offenbach had an offhand way with legends—there were no Can-Cans in Orpheus' underworld) so I assume that the translator had simply interpolated a comic song in English that had no relevance to the plot. But I couldn't even locate in the libretto the original words which must have gone with the tune that we and the US Marines know so well.

Wikipedia tells us that Henry Brougham Farnie (1836–1889), a British librettist and adapter of European operettas, wrote the English version, which became very popular and was produced in New York in 1868. Some of his English-language versions of other operettas became record-setting hits on the London stage of the 1870s and 1880s, strongly competing with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas being played at the same time (and he wrote a song called Sweet Dreamer with Arthur Sullivan, so perhaps thinking that Les Deux Gendarmes is by G&S is not so silly).

By now I am bored with these public guardians bold yet wary and so I do not want any comments on all this. But I would still like to know the French words which were sung to that tune, and if anyone can find them and tell me or give me a link to them I will send £20 to the Save the Children Fund.

H. B. Farnie was not a bit boring. Apart from writing or adapting libretti for dozens of operettas, he wrote the first book on golf instruction, The Golfer's Manual: being an historical and descriptive account of the national game of Scotland, under the pseudonym, "A Keen Hand". Here he is, without a huge stovepipe hat but otherwise a typical Victorian, gazing at us sternly as eminent sitters for portrait photos usually did. No vapid smiles for the photographer: these were men of character, making no attempt to look cheerful. Glum, hirsute and even with a hint of anger, they seem to be saying: Look, I've just built The Great Western Railway and started work on the Oxford English Dictionary, and I've grown these terrific whiskers, you expect me to twinkle at you as well?

Good blog, bad blog

It has been said that the best blogs:
have a consistent style; are focussed on a particular theme; are honest and sincere; contain no offensive material; are planned to appeal to special groups, or to a general readership; are written tightly, without padding; are unpretentious, avoiding the use of words which few will understand; and are pleasingly styled, with original and striking graphic design.

Other blogs are:
inconsistent; unfocussed; deceitful and disingenuous; full of objectionable content; totally unplanned and therefore likely to appeal to hardly anybody; verbose and banal; show-offs, using rare words for effect; and based on a bog-standard template which the writer cannot be bothered to modify.

Foremost among these is Other Men's Flowers. During its four years on line it has attracted both brickbats and bouquets, and some of the former can be considered as compliments. Take the Weblog Review, for example: one of its reviewers gave the blog 2 out of 5 and wrote: I left this site feeling ripped off... feel as if I have nothing from it ... no bit of wisdom to carry on ... no real desire to return to this site at all, which is fair comment if a little blunt, but another noted that ...the vast majority of the posts are off topic and trivially nondescript.

This showed great discernment and I was much encouraged when I read it in 2004, for it is exactly the effect I have always aimed at.

What makes us good?

Earlier this month the New York Sunday Times Magazine had a cool and cogent article by Steven Pinker called The Moral Instinct which attempts to analyse the influences which have created our moral codes, or at least our sense of morality. He mentions Kant, Russell, Chomsky, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and a host of lesser-known philosophers, anthropologists, neuroscientists and psychologists—and quotes Chekhov—but it is not until near the end of the piece that he mentions a possible source of our morality which until recently most of mankind believed was the only one, and which many still do.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem of how we know right from wrong, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not—if his dictates are divine whims—why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child; would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others—if a command to torture a child was never an option—then, Pinker asks, why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The article poses many other questions in its nearly eight thousand words, and attempts to answer some of them. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

Dirty rotten swine

With bitterness I noted a year ago that some vicious and small-minded creep, may his toes turn green and drop off, had cited "terms of use violation" and bludgeoned YouTube, probably by threat of legal action, into removing a clip to which I had given a link: Eartha Kitt singing See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.

This was a sad loss, for it was one of the 0.0001% of the YouTube clips which are worth watching. It was in a show which was supposedly a tribute to Marlene Dietrich, but this number was actually a brilliant parody and a marvellous performance in its own right; I fear it is gone from the public domain for ever, unless some noble person can somehow make it available again.

But, though it is no substitute, I have been consoled to discover that a 45-year-old clip of An Englishman Needs Time has been available for some months. This appears to have been filmed in semi-darkness, but is a rare joy; Eartha plays up the wit of the lyrics as only she can.

Secret voices

In a more gracious age, for which I was sadly born too late, persons of distinction visiting a restaurant, hotel or place of entertainment would expect to be greeted and generally looked after by the proprietor or other big cheese in person. I realised how gratifying this must have been—though no doubt it was taken for granted by knights of the realm and above—when it happened to me at a cinema the other day.

I had never been to this one before; it had three screens and popcorn but was other ways a little different from the usual. The General Manager's name was up on a board by the ticket office but somehow the place gave the impression that it was privately owned. Anyway, my wife and grand-daughter had stopped off for some clothes-browsing while I went ahead, and after I had to bought the tickets I was accosted courteously by a man who asked me which film I was going to see and engaged me in conversation; I had the feeling that I was being officially welcomed by the owner, and when the others arrived I somehow felt the occasion called for formal introductions: "Anne, this is Mr Galloway...", I said, and we all shook hands and had an agreeable chat. All very civilised, not the sort of thing you expect at a multiplex.

One of the things we discussed was the way in which those who supply voices are no longer anonymous; who remembers who sang and spoke for Snow White, or the name of the elderly gent whose high tenor wished upon a star? But the poster for Bee Movie announced that Jerry Seinfeld and and Renée Zellweger were "starring" in it, and the Shrek movies promote the names of all the celebrities who provided the voices.

This doesn't extend to all the highly talented singers who warble on behalf of real actors, perhaps because the stars demand discretion about the the names of those who sang while the actors moved their lips. So let us raise a glass to a few of the invisible singers of the past, of whom I had never heard until I looked them up:

Marni Nixon sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I
LaVerne Hutcherson sang for Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones
Danielle Licari sang for Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
and
Musical Director Johnny Green's daughter Kathy sang for Mark Lester in Oliver! Twenty years later Green amusingly revealed the story of how this came about.

...but Laurence Olivier sang (rather nicely) as well as acted the part of Captain MacHeath in The Beggar's Opera.

Gallia est omnis divisa...

Bet you didn't know that of all the peoples of mainland Europe the Belgians are the bravest because they can't import feminine fripperies and because they are nearest the Germans, with whom they are constantly fighting, and that the Swiss are also pretty tough because of their battles with the Germans.

At least, that was how it was around two thousand years ago. Of course, modern Europe isn't Gaul, and its nations don't correspond to the tribes who were around at that time. But even after the unifying efforts of the Romans, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler and the EU, what was written then about the diversity of the squabbling ruffians over there on the mainland is still largely true today.

Here is a translation (via Project Gutenberg) of the opening words of what Gaius Julius Caesar actually wrote to introduce De Bello Gallico, his commentaries on the nine years of the war in Gaul:

All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.

The river Garonne separates the Gauls from the Aquitani; the Marne and the Seine separate them from the Belgae. Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because they are farthest from the civilisation and refinement of [our] province, and merchants least frequently resort to them and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; and they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war; for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valour, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles, when they either repel them from their own territories, or themselves wage war on their frontiers.

Poetic licence

I never expect anything in the way of thrills or titillation when I scan through my local newspaper, but this week there wasn't even much in the way of interest: a naughty vicar, "Gales damage a school roof", "Doris is 104" and "Builder head-butted off-duty policeman", and that was about it.

Until, with a shock, I encountered an item which left me open-mouthed and which, if TV news and the national papers are on their toes, must surely soon become a hot topic throughout the country. I leave out the names, but here is the piece (honest, no kidding):

Wordsmiths are being invited to compete in a prophylactic poetry competition to win £50 in vouchers. [Our local] Primary Care Trust's chlamydia screening programme and [-]'s Pharmacy have joined forces to run the contest which covers two age groups. Young people aged between 16 and 25 are being asked to pen a poem using the word chlamydia, while over 25s are called upon to write a piece containing the word contraception, or a form of contraception.

There are several things to be said about this. For one thing, the rules are somewhat vague: Do they really mean any sort of poem, or do they want some verses which rhyme and/or scan? Must chlamydia be used in its proper context and refer to the infection or can it be treated as just a word? It would make things much easier if could be used as a proper name, so that you could submit a sentimental ode titled To Chlamydia, with a line similar to the one Ernest Dowson very nearly wrote: I have been true to thee, Chlamydia, in my fashion.

If it must be used as a medical term, on the other hand, then the poems would have to outline the bacteriological background, symptoms and treatment (what else is there to write about on this subject?), and references to C. trachomatis, purulent exudate and Azithromycin would have to be featured; these are very tricky things to work into even the loosest rhyming scheme or metre.

For the older competitors, contraception as a subject offers lots of possibilities, since no particular approach is specified. The poem could be lyrical, romantic, theologically controversial or merely practical. In the latter case, the various methods alone provide plenty to say; references to them in popular song go back to 1930, with Ira Gershwin's lyrics to I Got Rhythm.

This competition seems to me to be much more difficult than one I set before Christmas, and that attracted only five entries. Somehow the sponsors will have to ensure that there are at least two entries in their Prophylactic Poetry Contest, even if they have to write them themselves, for the winning poems are to be displayed at the town's main shopping centre on February 9th to mark National Contraceptive Awareness Week. Anyway, I shall not fail to be there to see how the young poets of the town have risen to the challenge.

Bill Kenny

Apparently Ella Fitzgerald didn't like him, because he would fool about behind her when they appeared together on stage, and although his talent was much less than hers he and the group often got better billing because they were more popular.

Well, maybe*. It is said that together with the Mills Brothers his group helped define the musical genre that led to rhythm & blues and rock and roll, and the subgenre doo-wop. In 1934 they toured the UK with Jack Hylton's Orchestra, and were reviewed in the Melody Maker thus:

The sensation of the programme is the coloured quartette, the Four Ink Spots. They accompany themselves on three tenor guitars and a 'cello—which is not bowed, but picked and slapped like a double bass. Their natural instinct for hot rhythm is exemplified in their terrific single-string solo work and their beautifully balanced and exquisitely phrased vocalisms. They exploit all kinds of rhythmic vocalisms - straight solos, concerted, scat, and instrumental imitations. They even throw in a bit of dancing to conclude their act, and the leading guitarist simultaneously plays and juggles with his instrument.

Bill Kenny joined them in 1936, and by the early 40s their recordings with him as the lead singer mostly featured his high tenor, their close harmony and a trademark piano and guitar accompaniment which was virtually the same whatever the song. But one thing that makes them still a pleasure to listen to today is Bill Kenny's impeccable diction, with every vowel clear as a bell and every consonant clicking into place.

*Decca, recorded 11th June 1940. You can hear this and eleven others HERE.