Martin Fone's Blog, page 188
July 20, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Five
The death of Alan Abel, 1980
We’ve come across serial hoaxer, Alan Abel, before when looking at the vexed question of whether animals should wear clothing and the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA). I always thought it was appropriate that he made his home in Southbury in Connecticut, the accepted abbreviation for the state being Conn.
One of the many concerns about slipping off this mortal coil is how the world will remember you. How will your obituary read? Would it be kind or a hatchet job? Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1816, overheard some people discussing a newspaper article reporting that the poet had hung himself. Introducing himself to the group, they were most concerned to ensure that they had not hurt his feelings by talking about him in that way. In an early example of never the twain shall meet, a reporter, upon hearing that Mark Twain’s cousin was dying, mistook him for the eminent writer, prompting Twain’s riposte that “the report of my death was an exaggeration”.
On January 2, 1980 both the New York Times and the New York Daily News carried an announcement that, at the age of 50, Alan Abel had passed away following a heart attack at the ski resort of Sundance in Utah, where he was investigating a potential location for a film. The Times was particularly kind in its obituary, drawing attention to the fact that he specialised in satire and lampoons, making a point in his work “of challenging the obvious and uttering the outrageous”.
Flattering as these sentiments were, there was one teeny little problem; Abel was still alive, a fact that was self-evident when he held a press conference the next day. He told the assembled newshounds that the news of his demise was a hoax designed to attract publicity and to publicise the fact that he was a serial hoaxer. He had a team of twelve to help him pull it off, some to send the story off to the media – these were the days before fake news could be distributed widely at the click of a button – and some to confirm its veracity.
The editor of the Times was so furious that he had been duped that he vowed that Abel’s name would never grace the pages of his organ ever again. When a reporter from the paper rang him, Abel asked “what can I do for you?”. “Drop dead”, was the response. But Abel provided copy that was too good to miss and even they had to run a story in 1985 about him inducing members of the audience at a talk show to stage a mass faint.
Abel’s original intention was to stage his seeming resurrection at a memorial service held in honour – now that would have been spectacular. However, for all of us meticulous planning, Abel had overlooked one thing. As soon as the obituary was published, his bank froze his assets and he could not access the monies he had set aside to fund the memorial. To make matters worse, his credit card company, Diner’s, cancelled his card and when he rang up to get it reinstated, he was called an imposter. Abel had to come clean sooner than he had wanted.
When Abel did eventually die at the grand old age of 94 in September 2018 at his home in Conn following complications from cancer and heart failure, the news had to be confirmed by the Regional Hospice and Palliative Care who had tended to him in his last days and Carpino Funeral Home before everyone was relaxed enough to believe that the serial hoaxer had really gone to meet his maker.
That’s the problem with being a successful hoaxer.
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If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
July 19, 2020
Find Of The Week (2)
There is an old Amsterdam joke that the average depth of an Amsterdam canal is 3 metres, made up of one metre of mud, a metre of water and another of bicycles, some fifteen thousand of which are fished out each year. The canals are much cleaner these days, no longer being used as a convenient repository for the city’s waste and sewerage, but the authorities still carry out extensive cleaning operations.
And it is surprising what they fish out.
Less than a thousand Mondial 3.2 sports cars were produce by Ferrari in the late 1980s. One was reported as stolen in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, never found and the insurance company duly paid out.
Last month, though, in the water off Javakade in Amsterdam Oost, divers found the car. Its condition was described as “completely rusted” and it will be scrapped. Some, though, think that would be a waste and are campaigning for it to become a feature in the aquarium at Artis Zoo, where fish can swim in and out of it to their heart’s content. Seems like a good idea.
Why it was ditched in the canal, perhaps it was too hot to handle, no one knows, although after a forensic investigation, police confirmed that there was no proof of a violent crime having been committed.
It makes a change from bikes, I suppose.
July 18, 2020
Alibi Of The Week
With less traffic on the roads, drivers are tempted to put their foot down. Rightly, though, the police are cracking down on speedsters. I’m sure they have heard every excuse in the book but “I’m trying to fend off a snake” is probably a new one.
In Queensland, a trucker was stopped driving in excess of 70 mph on a busy road. The police’s intervention was probably a relief to Jimmy as he was in a life and death struggle with an eastern brown snake, one of the deadliest in the world, which had tried to wrap itself around him as he drove. Using a knife and twisting his seat belt Jimmy held it at bay and managed to escape without being bitten.
The traffic officer soon realised that Jimmy’s tale was not a shaggy snake story and summoned medical assistance. He was OK and was let off a speeding fine.
It is not reported what happened to the snake.
July 17, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (291)?…
Fed up
I am writing this piece during my enforced period of social isolation and it is fair to say that I am fed up, by which I mean that I am listless, somewhat annoyed, browned off, cheesed off, bored. Fed up is usually associated with a situation that has prevailed for some time. Fed is the past tense of the verb to feed so why has it been appropriated to convey a sense of annoyance and ennui?
Unsurprisingly, fed up was used in its literal sense, to denote someone or, in the case of livestock, some thing that has eaten well, possibly even to excess. Pope’s Bath Chronicle, in its edition of May 3, 1764, when opining on Whether Love be a natural or fictitious Passion, observed that “in some Parts of the East, a Woman of Beauty, properly fed up for Sale, often amounts to one hundred Crowns”. In describing the Greek hero, Achilles, the Southampton Town and County Herald on May 9, 1825 noted that he “was not only born and bred, but fed up, too, for a hero, was nourished with the marrow of lions”.
Hawks, noted the Reverend Richard Lubbock in his Observations on the Fauna of Norfolk, published in 1845, were allowed to gorge themselves “for if the bird’s behaviour has been good, it is fed up by way of encouragement”. In discussing whether the Duke of Bourbon could have hung himself, the Middlesex Courier in February 1832 lambasted the inability of Princes to do anything for themselves; “they are fed up, as it were, in a stall to exist and not to act”. Although they may have been bored, the sense is that, rather like Terry Jones’ Monsieur Creosote in The Meaning of Life, they are stuffed and can barely move.
The intriguingly entitled The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher Tadpole at Home and Abroad, published in 1848 by Albert Smith reveals a slight ambiguity in the usage of fed up. “Glad enough to come, and then you get fed up, and insolent, instead of grateful”. There is no reason to think that Smith used the term in anything other than its literal sense, but the modern reader could see that it carries a hint of annoyance or boredom.
It was around the middle of the 19th century that the modern figurative usage emerged. The Dundee Courier on March 3, 1858 wrote, “many a man has been fed up to an ill-humour” and the Southern Reporter, a paper based in Cork, noted on August 20, 1867 that “he has been fed up with a certain class with a certain class of cheap literature till he loathes it”. A Charles Reader, who had practised medicine in India, wrote in relation to a conjuring trick involving a girl who vanished, “I am completely fed up with the business”. In all the examples, the writer has been sated with something to such an extent that they are bad-tempered.
They say that life as a soldier is 99% boredom and 1% action, leading some authorities, including the Oxford English Dictionary, to suggest that fed up originated as a piece of military slang. That it was used in a military context is clear, as this snippet from The Westmoreland Gazette from November 1900 shows: “it may be quite true, to use an expression in South Africa just now, the men are fed up with the war”. However, there are enough examples dating from earlier than that usage of the figurative use of fed up in a context other than military to pour cold water over that theory. As with many a phrase, it transitioned from literal to figurative.
I will leave matters there before I get fed up with the subject.
July 15, 2020
Book Corner – July 2020 (3)
The Murder of my Aunt – Richard Hull
Published in 1934 and Hull’s debut in the genre, this is a delightful romp with quite a twist on conventional murder mysteries from the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction. There is no mystery as such as the reader is quite clear from the outset that the protagonists and narrator for four of the book’s five chapters, Edward Powell, is out to murder his aunt, Mildred. The tension, such as it is, centres around whether he will succeed and how.
Rusticated to the Welsh village of Llwll and forced to live with his aunt, Edward leads a miserable life, or so he thinks. He is effete, hates the countryside and all forms of exercise, indeed being forced to walk down to the village and back makes his mind up to do with her, smokes scented cigarettes, keeps a Pekinese called So-so and has a collection of risqué French novels. Mildred is a hale and hearty country figure, well imbedded into the local community, despairs of Edward’s ways and unwillingness to make his own way in the world. They are like chalk and cheese and the slightest incident in their cocooned existence is blown out of all proportions.
It is possible to read that Hull is portraying Edward as a closet homosexual, although that may just be imposing modern sensibilities on to a characterisation of an example of the effete idlers of the time but if you do think there is that subtext to the book, it makes Mildred’s suspicions that he is making a pass at one of the servants even more amusing. It is impossible to like Edward or even to have some sympathy for his plight. In Hull’s hands he is a man obsessed with his own comforts, selfish and not quite as clever as he thinks he is, the polar opposite of his formidable opponent, Mildred.
Hull’s writing is wonderful. The reader feels that they really get under the skin of the narrator but at the same time is able to spot what is really going on and how unreliable Edward is as a narrator. The book is permeated by a wry, satirical, sometimes slightly black humour and there are some laugh out loud moments as carefully wrought plans are come to naught.
The reader is brought to a halt by the abrupt change of narrator for the final section of the book. I will not say too much about that as it will spoil the denouement of the tale which is surprising and leaves the reader with a smile on their face.
This is a wonderful addition to the British Library Crime Classics series. If you want something slightly offbeat and funny, you will not go far wrong in picking up this gem of a book.
July 14, 2020
Error Of The Week (11)
Records are there to be broken and Usain Bolt’s 200 metre sprint time of 19.19 seconds has lasted for eleven years.
That was until Noah Lyles came along. Last Thursday the athlete, whose previous personal best had been a sedentary 19.50 seconds, set a blistering pace to reach the finishing line in just 18.90 seconds at the Inspiration Games in Zurich last Thursday.
So astonishing was the feat that there was an immediate inquiry. When all was said and done, it turned out that Lyles had been placed in the wrong lane by the organisers and the athlete had run just 185 metres. Bolt’s record still stands.
Unsurprisingly, Lyles was less than impressed, commenting “you can’t be playing with my emotions like this. Got me in the wrong lane”.
How difficult can it be to measure out the right distance?
July 13, 2020
The Streets Of London (111)
Wood Street, EC2
Although it now runs from Cheapside in the south, crossing Gresham Street and London Wall on its journey north until it joins Fore Street, a shorter street ran through the Roman Fort in Londinium, from its northern gate which became Cripplegate to its southern gate, near what is now Love Lane. It is one of London’s most venerable streets. Unsurprisingly, it appears in the Civitas Londinum, a woodcut bird’s-eye view of London, erroneously attributed to Ralph Agas, and produced in 1561, as Wood Streat.
The antiquarian, John Stow, was never averse to speculating upon the origin of a street name. He came up with two theories: “[i]t ſéemeth therefore that this ſtréet hath béene of the later building, all of timber, or it take[s] the name of an ancestor of Thomas Wood, whose predecessors might bee the builders, owners and namers of this streete after their owne name”. Others suggest that it may owe its name to the fact that timber was sold there. There is no definitive answer.
The self-declared Water Poet, John Taylor, wrote a pamphlet around the turn of the 17th century entitled The Praise and Vertue of a Jayle and Jaylers. In it he listed London’s eighteen prisons, one of which was the Counter located in Wood Street. Provided you had the money for food and other creature comforts, life in prison was tolerable but for those who either had no money, many were imprisoned indefinitely for debt, or had run out, they were often transferred to a subterranean area in the Counter known as The Hole. Prisoners were kept in crowded conditions and either died through starvation and cold or from lack of exercise and the insanitary conditions. What food they were provided with was provided by charities and gifts from the Lord Mayor and the City guilds.
There are a couple of unusual sights in the modern-day street. First, sitting somewhat forlornly on a traffic island in the middle section between the intersections with Gresham Street and London Wall and overshadowed by modern office blocks, is a tower, the remains of the church of St Albans. Named after Britain’s first Christian martyr, Alban was killed in the 3rd century CE, its origins are thought to be Saxon and to be sited on the spot where King Offa’s palace once stood. By the early 17th century it was in a state of disrepair, the antiquarian, John Strype, describing it as “wonderfully decayed and perished”, and was rebuilt to a design by Inigo Jones in 1634.
Sadly, it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 but rebuilt once more, this time under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren in the Gothic style, work being completed in 1685. Opposite the pulpit was positioned an hourglass by which a commentator wryly noted, “the preacher could measure his sermon and test his listeners’ patience”. The building was further restored in the 1850s and the pinnacles on the tower were added in the late 19th century.
Alas, on December 29, 1940 St Alban’s was hit directly by a Luftwaffe bomb, one of 18 London churches destroyed that night and the nave and apse were gutted. The rest of the building was finally demolished in 1955, leaving the tower remaining as a rather sad testament to one of London’s most historic churches.
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Second, surrounded by iron railings on the corner with Cheapside is a London plane tree, once a familiar sight on the capital’s streets. It is subject to a tree protection order and stands in what was once the churchyard of St Peter Cheap, one of the 89 churches that were not rebuilt after the \Great Fire. It is probable that the tree is over 250 years old, it being bought by the City of London for sixpence. No one knows for certain whether it was already in situ or how large it was. Known once as the “lungs of London”, plane trees are a rare sight indeed.
July 12, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (11)
Add to the list of the consequences of a bout of Covid-19 “previously unidentified priapism”.
A 62-year-old man, unnamed, was seriously ill with the virus and was placed on a ventilator in intensive care at the Centre Hospitaliser de Versailles in Le Chesnay for two weeks. He had to be put on a ventilator.
On top of all the usual consequences, he was found to have an erection which lasted for four hours. Up to 30% of coronavirus patients develop potentially dangerous blood clots, usually in the lungs. This man, though, was found with the two chambers of issue in his organ rigid, due to clotting, although the tip of his penis was flaccid.
Doctors were able to remove the blood using a needle, pricking any thoughts he made have had of a pleasurable recuperation.
I’m told this is the first recorded instance. Be warned, stay alert!
July 11, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (10)
The use of face coverings in public spaces, particularly on public transport and in shops, is now increasingly de rigueur around the world. But how do you encourage people to wear the coverings properly?
Berlin transport operator, BVG, has hit on a novel approach. Increasingly concerned that their passengers were not covering their noses, they have launched a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign to encourage those who use their services to forego deodorant. They reckon that confronted with the smell of hundreds of smelly, sweaty armpits on a crowded underground train in the peak of summer, recalcitrant users will rush to cover their nose. The strap line is “So, now do you still want to leave your noses out?”
It’s worth a try.
July 10, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (290)?…
The dog’s letter
It is a long time since I had to learn the alphabet. There are two aspects to, recognising the shape of the letter, usually by having a mnemonic consisting of a word that begins with said letter such as a for apple, b for bee and so on, and the sound of it using some form of phonic tag. The letter r is normally sounded in English as if it was spelt like ruh, but a more dramatic and spittle-laden (and Covid-19 unfriendly) way of pronouncing is to roll it with the tongue. In some languages, the Spanish word for a dog, perro, is a good example, the letter r is formed by rolling the tongue and making a more nasal sound.
The Roman satirist, Persius, in his first Satire, when lambasting his fellow satirists, noted the propensity for the letter r to sound like the growl of a dog; “sonat hic de nare canina/ littera” (1.109 – 110), translated as “here there is the nasal sound of the canine letter”. Some of the texts of Persius survived the cull of Pagan literature by the early Christians, the depredations of vermin, moths, bookworms and the like, to reach the sunny uplands of the Renaissance. In the developing phonetics for the printing industry, his observations on the resemblance of the pronunciation of the letter r with the growl of a dog took hold.
The French printer and librarian, Geoffroy Tory, compiled a treatise in typography, published in 1526. When he reached the letter r in the alphabet, he called it “lettre Canine”, citing Persius as his source. A century later Ben Johnson gave a detailed explanation in The English Grammar, published in the year of his death, 1637, of the letter r. “R” he wrote, “is the Dogs Letter, and hurreth in the sound; the tongue striking the inner palate, with a trembling about the teeth. It is sounded firme in the beginning of the words; and more liquid in the middle, and ends: as in rarer, riper. And so in the Latine”.
The association of the letter with a dog was certainly current in the 16th century. Alexander Barclay, a poet and clergyman, wrote in his The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, published in 1506, that “this malicious man who is troubled with wrath/ sounds nothing else but the hoarse letter R/ though all be well, yet he has no answer/ save the dog’s letter”. Shakespeare got into the act in Act 2, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet when the nurse says, “doth not Rosemarie and Romeo begin both with a letter…Ah, mocker, that’s the dog’s name”. Not a direct usage, for sure, but his audience would surely have picked up this well-signposted but indirect reference to the dog’s letter.
By the 19th century, though, it was consigned to obscurity, the plaything of critics who wanted to display their erudition. Reviewing Satan, a collection of poems by a Mr R Montgomery, a correspondent in the Westminster Review of April 1830 wrote, “we are somewhat startled by these three words on the next page, To My Friend. As there is only the difference of the dog’s letter between friend and the quality of the subject, we looked to the Errata, thinking it probable there was a misprint of fiend”. Of course, misprint there was none.
Perhaps the dog’s letter is overdue a renaissance.
