Hallowe'en in London is a strange sort of holiday, as it's taken on certain elements of US Halloween (trick-or-treating, casual vandalism), merged with elements of Guy Fawkes Night ("penny for the guy", fireworks). Despite Halloween-themed displays in all sorts of shops, plenty of pumpkins for sale, etc. it doesn't seem to have caught on so well (I've certainly not seen many jack-o-lanterns, for example.). As far as I can see, it's celebrated only by:

1. A very small number of parents of very small children, who take them on the London version of trick-or-treating (for comparison, my brother's account of the Young Bee's first Halloween can be found HERE). Unlike the typical US home on Halloween, no one is equipped with bags of candy for such visitors, so they have to make do with the modern version of the "penny for the guy" (minus the effigy, plus a 2000%+ markup as to give only a penny would be an insult). And due to the unwillingness of city dwellers to open their doors to strangers at nights (and also perhaps to maximize the reward:effort ratio), they tend to visit public locations such as shopping centres, train stations and pubs. Mrs. Dunce and I saw two such trick-or-treaters at the Local last night (where I appear to have earned the nickname "Spartan" due to my preference for Milton's Sparta, a very tasty [hoppy] beer in the Ancient Cities series). They looked to be in the under-eight age group and were wearing costumes (well, masks at least) and wandered around the regulars at the front of the pub, shaking them down for cold hard cash. I prepared to make our own donation (20p each) but they didn't make it back to our section. They may have been thrown out of the pub (after all, children shouldn't be in a pub at that hour), they may have gathered too much money to be able to carry any more, or they may have been children of another regular (and thus only administered the trick-or-treat shakedown to known individuals).

Halloween:
+ Wear costumes
+ Say "trick or treat"
- Collect money not candy
- Unlikely to "trick" if treats are not given
- Not scary

Guy Fawkes:
+ "Penny for the guy"
- No fire
- No effigy
- No explosives

2. Feral teenagers, who also participate in a trick-or-treat-like activity. In this instance they dispense with the costumes (or rather, they wear the year-round costume of hooded sweatshirts), but they do go door-to-door, shouting "Trick or treat" and demanding "treats". But more like "Give us 20 quid" than leaving it to the trick-or-treat-ee's discretion. Failure to give them the money? Who knows, it's better not to risk answering the door, although the door/entry/front garden may suffer somewhat. Other activities include throwing fireworks at cycles, cars, trains, basically anything that moves; burning things that will burn (and trying to burn things that will not); drinking alcohol; loitering. Pretty much like any other day, then, with slightly more door-to-door activity.

Halloween:
+ Say "trick or treat"
+ If you don't give a "treat" you may be "tricked"
+ Scary
- They collect money not candy
- Really too old to be trick-or-treating
- No costumes

Guy Fawkes:
+ Demand money
+ May use fire
+ May use explosives
+ Teenagers are thought by many to be plotting the downfall of society
- No effigy

3. University students, who wear costumes to participate in fancy-dress activities such as drunken pub crawls, drunken club nights, drunken scavenger hunts, and drunken drinking. The amount of effort made on male costumes seems to be in direct proportion to the quantity of science-fiction/fantasy material consumed on a regular basis, with a few specific exceptions: Any male may dress in drag regardless of s-f/fantasy tendencies. In such circumstances "comedy drag" (i.e. giant balloon breasts, extreme makeup, etc.) may be employed to prevent passersby from drawing mistaken (?) conclusions about the wearer's sexuality. Also, only members of the royal family (or outlaw bikers, or goths, or Nazis) should wear Nazi regalia. As far as female costumes, the guide from the Onion (2001) still holds: (jpg image)

. Halloween:
+ Full costumes
- No trick-or-treating of any kind
- No vandalism
- Not very scary

Guy Fawkes:
- Spend money not collect it
- No effigy (unless it's a particularly impressive and unusual costume)
- No fire
- No explosives

All in all, I think the feral teenagers are the closest to the (midwestern) spirit of Halloween, AND to the legacy of Guy Fawkes at the same time. Well done to the yoof.

On the bus today I found an index card. Someone had written, in big, bold letters

LOGICLE
FALLACY

I love the misspelling of "logical" (not unique to this particular instance) and have been pondering the purpose of the LOGICLE FALLACY card. Maybe it was part of a set, reflecting common errors of logic (others in the set might be AD HOMINUM [or AD HOMMINEM], BEGING THE QUESTION, CIRCULER ARGUMENT, FALSE ANNALOGY and so on). But there was nothing written on the back so it wasn't a flash card. Maybe it was part of something like a Buzzword Bingo set. I've been at a lot of academic talks in which scribbled notes are exchanged about the speaker's idiocy, ignorance or foolishness, but most of these are in, errrr, a more informal register. No, I think this card was intended for display. Woe betide anyone who tries to sneak a LOGICLE FALLACY past me from now on as I am ready for you.

As a young lad I was especially obsessed with the idea of devising the perfect murder (I blame this in part on growing up without television). I decided right away that the victim had to be a stranger (so that I would have no motive should I prove to be a suspect), and there needed to be no witnesses. These were fairly easy: strangers are everywhere, and they're BAD! (Take the stranger quiz here! [Hint: They're all strangers even the fireman and the nice man with the flowers). So I figured it was probably OK to murder a stranger, as long as I got away with it. I had also decided that I had to do it on my own: accomplices are likely to fold under interrogation, and without accomplices there's no need to keep a story straight. I wasn't so worried about setting up an alibi, as a small child is seldom a suspect in a murder case. Especially if there are no witnesses, no motive (except for my desire to commit a perfect murder [which I did not publicize at the time]), and no accomplices to brag about it on the playground or at church.

The hard question was really the murder weapon. Although our house had plenty (knives [especially the one I used to chop at the edges of the kitchen countertops. It was more like a machete than a kitchen knife, at least as I recall]; lawn mowers; hatchets; rope; piano wire [inside the piano], just to mention a few), none of them were really suitable. If found (post-murder), many of them could be identified as Dunce family property (I was certainly not planning to let any family members know about it, so one of them might unwittingly incriminate me). So the weapon needed to be something that I could obtain from outside the house. Buying a weapon of some kind at a store was not really a viable possibility as I was young enough that the purchase of any potential murder weapon I could think of would be likely to attract notice, should the weapon be found and its possible purchasers investigated. I was especially worried about the possibility that I could be identified using fingerprints or some other physical residue (perhaps a hair caught on the rivet of a knife handle, perhaps a swatch of fabric from the sleeve of my shirt, perhaps an unusual chemical residue that turned out to match the homemade Agent Orange my father used to kill poison ivy in the yard [as you can see, I read a lot of murder mysteries so I was eager to protect myself against these kinds of possibilities]).

Then it occurred to me: an icicle would be the perfect murder weapon. In central Indiana there was no shortage of icicles, and one could be obtained from many outdoor locations without arousing much suspicion. Stab the victim with the icicle, then abandon it somewhere safe where it would be likely to melt away before it was found. Even a little melting would obscure any fingerprints (I'm not sure why I didn't just think of wearing gloves). A genius plan, or so I thought. The victim's heavy winter clothing would prevent me from becoming too blood-spattered (I didn't consider that it might also make the stabbing more difficult). I could also probably find a single victim on his own (for some reason I had decided that my victim needed to be a man), for example, shoveling snow. I could even commit the crime during a blizzard, which would obscure any telltale footprints which could lead back to me (I would of course take a circuitous wander before the killing, and a similar wander afterwards). It would be important to only do this once: I was worried about being identified by geographical patterns, or being spotted by a witness. Anyway once you've committed the perfect murder there's not really any way to improve on it.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that this perfect weapon is far from perfect, being in fact quite well-known (at least in the realm of possibility):

Google search: Results 1 - 88 of about 174 for "stabbed with an icicle".

Google search: Results 1 - 10 of about 25 for "murdered with an icicle".

And if you search for the phrase "the perfect murder weapon is", Google obligingly provides the following terms (in order of their listing on Google): a big icicle, paper, An icicle, an icecicle, ice that has been shaped into a point, CHAINSAW (also includes "icicle"), an icicle. Maybe my idea was not so original after all. It's even mentioned in a Telegraph article entitled "How to commit the perfect murder" (P.D. James advises potential perfect murderers to "Keep it simple" and "don't tell a soul", while Patricia Cornwell sneers contempuously at crime of all sorts, preferring to plug her misguided notions of the identity of Jack the Ripper). So it's a really good thing I didn't do it. Honest, officer.

The past week has been a great one for live music. So good, in fact, that I am going to barely mention a fantastic show by Sufjan Stevens and the Illinoisemakers (reviewed in the Independent). This is even though Sufjan Stevens is odds-on favorite to win the Dunce household's coveted "Musician of the Year" award for 2005 (the only thing standing in his way is that no such award exists). And I'm also not going to say much about a great show last night by Chris Mills, another of the Dunce family's favorites (aha! his tour blog is over here, but doesn't mention this show just yet). Mainly because anything I write about the show would turn into a rant about the Borderline and the terrible job they've done in promoting shows since they've become a part of the whole Mean Fiddler enterprise. Monday night shows are lower in attendance than other nights anyway, and, well, as Chris put it himself, "Welcome to the secret Chris Mills gig". (see also a couple weeks ago when Mike Ferrio's Monday gig was even more secret, not even appearing on the club's own website). Harrumph, that's what I say.

No, today's entry will focus upon New York City's angriest yodeling banjo player, Curtis Eller, and his recent show at the 12 Bar Club.


From the bio on his website, "He sings about pigeon racing, performing elephants and Jesus, all of which he has seen with his own eyes. He started his show-business career at the age of seven as a juggler and acrobat in the Hiller Olde Tyme Circus in Detroit, but has since turned to the banjo because that's where the money is. His biggest musical influences are Buster Keaton, Al Jolson and Abraham Lincoln." He's made it to London a few times now (solo, leaving the rest of the American Circus behind). The first time I saw him was at the Fiddlers Elbow (the now-defunct Come Down and Meet the Folks club with which regular readers should be quite familiar) where his banjo antics won the crowd over. His songs take a lot of themes from the period between the wars. And by that I mean beteen the Civil War and World War II. For example, one song takes the perspective of Karl Wallenda's wife (shockingly, the Wallendas are still at it [despite all the falls] although they've fractionated into various groups of [superlative] Wallendas). Or "1890" which is a song of misery, with the message

...And I’m hoping this is just a run of bad luck
And maybe next season the crowds’ll be better
And the spanish web will turn in the spotlight
And the blood will return to my heart

And here’s hopin’ things pick up in 1890...

His songs of bygone days aren't just fictional, either. For example, consider the lyrics of his song The Execution of Black Diamond, a tale of a circus elephant shot dead in Corsicana, Texas (Bb minor if you're humming along), and compare it with the historical record (rootsweb.com link). OK there are some questions about the number of bullets it took to bring Black Diamond down, but I bet those questions have been around since the day it happened.

Another historic incident, well, I know I've vowed previously not to turn this into a political blog, but how could I avoid ranting about the insanity in the White House?! It's crazy, that's what it is, the utter madness of the President of the US, and if I'd known about this tale sooner maybe I'd be a political blogger today. Thanks to super-patriot Curtis Eller for bringing it to our attention!! I'm talking, of course, about the madness of Abraham Lincoln as mentioned in the song "Sugar in My Coffin". Digging up the corpse of his dead son (not once but twice), bad enough that Mary Todd had to hold a seance? OK maybe the body was in a tomb and required no mud-digging, but still.

And I still haven't mentioned his performing style which has to be seen to be believed (waltzing with the banjo, standing perched on a rickety stool, climbing into the balcony, creeping into a corner, contorting and jigging and stretching in all sorts of directions). Or name-checking Ypsilanti (Actually, come to think of it, of the artists I've seen this week only Chris Mills doesn't have a song mentioning Ypsilanti, thanks to "For The Windows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens). All that and a really nice guy too. It was good to see the 12 Bar packed with people to see him. I'll be making a real effort to see him again, maybe even outside of London.

Finally, cosmik.com has a great interview with him here; I didn't have a chance to weave the link into the tale above.

I've always been someone who keeps my eye on the ground looking for interesting things that have been dropped or abandoned by others. When I was very young I read a storybook about a little old man who had once found some money on the ground. He spent the rest of his life looking down at the ground, eventually becoming permanently hunched over, and never seeing the pretty things like sunsets, rainbows, birds, trees, clouds and so on. In other words, the moral was that you should look up and not down. Even as a child I had a very curmudgeonly response to this, after all, he FOUND MONEY ON THE GROUND!! And probably found A LOT MORE in the rest of his life, along with other great stuff. Perhaps I was sensitive to this issue due to my own downward-looking tendencies, but I felt that spending at least some time looking downwards was an entirely valid lifestyle. Not only can you find great stuff (aforementioned MONEY, bottle caps, colored glass, used-up lighters, nuts and bolts, old keys, etc. etc.) but a lowered gaze is a good way to avoid aggressive reactions from nonhuman primates and bullies (whether human or non-). And I have found some great stuff in my day, without a hint of scoliosis (AND I've managed to see my share of sunsets, rainbows, even eclipses and meteor showers which weren't even mentioned by the silly author I mention above). I should insert here the time-worn phrase "One man's trash is another man's treasure" which is the only way I can really justify the hundreds (if not thousands) of rusty bottle caps that we collected over a number of years. And to be honest, I can't really think of anything that would be universally judged as a "great find" (when I say "universally" I only mean "among friends, family, acquaintances and others who might read this entry"). But fortunately this new-fangled innernet thing has revealed a community of like individuals, (perhaps) centered around FOUND Magazine ("We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life."). And yesterday I found something that would certainly qualify for FOUND Magazine (in fact I shall be sending them the original). It was a page of hand-written text, reproduced below (as written, including formatting as best I can without scanning it in). I think it's a plan we all should follow. Fortunately the 'new' items are only vaguely specified and can be sold in numerous locations. Internet.


**********************************************
Where do I want us to be?

-- Renovate French property with some land (pref. with own water supply and woodland.)

-- Retain London flat - rent out in short term, use as London 'base' in long term.

-- Use French 'base' for workshop to create 'new' items, renovate, reuse to sell in London, Bath, Cambridge, etc. Possibly also Paris in the medium term. Internet.

-- Grow some food, plant fruit, nut trees. Evolve bottling etc. mainly for ourselves but possible sideline business.

'Issues'

-- Language

-- May (will?) need to raise a mortgage (let to buy)

-- Complicated accounts / tax / pensions position

While writing a previous entry I noticed a high frequency of the term "fortunately" in my posts. Perhaps I've had many fortunate experiences, or perhaps I've been telling lots of tales involving possible misfortune, but in which the worst possibilities did not come to pass. Or maybe I just like the word "fortunately". Anyway, since I've been doing some simplistic work analyzing corpora of texts, I thought I'd turn these analyses on my own blog entries and see what other atypical patterns of word choice are present in my writings (up to and including my last entry). I am focusing here strictly upon word frequency: what uncommon words do I use especially frequently? what common words do I use less frequently than would be expected? And what do I write about the most, just in terms of the content words I recycle again and again?

For the sake of simplicity I am using a somewhat out-of-date word frequency database (Kucera & Francis, 1967. Information on the corpus can be found here); this was once the accepted source of word frequency information (approximately 1,000,000 words from 500 different sources), although much larger texts have since supplanted this database (for example, the British National Corpus is based on 100m words). To give you an idea of the distribution, here are a few of the most common words in the K&F corpus and how often each one occurred:

THE 69971
OF 36411
AND 28852
TO 26149
A 23237
IN 21341
THAT 10595
IS 10099
WAS 9816
HE 9543

I combined all the text of my blog entries (including titles, picture captions, and the text of hyperlinks, but not including dates, category labels or comments) and calculated how often each word occurred (a handy online tool for doing this can be found here). I discarded all words that occurred less than five times, and obtained K&F frequency values for each of the remaining words (a handy tool to do this and more can be found here). My ten most frequently used words were quite similar to the K&F set (above):

THE 3218
A 1663
OF 1646
TO 1477
AND 1242
IN 994
I 942
IS 602
FOR 478
IT 470

There are generally similar patterns between the two although I am clearly talking about myself more than the K&F sources ("I" is the 7th most popular word in my writing, and 20th most common in the K&F corpus), and less about other men ("HE" is #10 in K&F, but barely squeaks into the top 50 in my list).

When it comes to "fortunately" (and words like it), unfortunately I neglected to consider an important aspect of the K&F frequency database: it seems that certain kinds of derivational terms were counted under their stem rather than as a specific wordform. So "fortunately" (which I have used 40 times) did not ever occur in the K&F database. Nonetheless, a list of my most frequently used words that never occur in the database is still somewhat informative about my usage tendencies. Among those that don't occur for derivational reasons are (in decreasing order of frequency)

especially (50)
seems (50)
fortunately (40)
words (33)
times (31)
folks (27)
things (25)
minutes (23)
probably (23)
definitely (22)

So it's not just "fortunately" but quite a few other similar adverbs that characterize my writing. Some other terms that I use frequently but don't appear in the database are contractions (I'll, 51; that's, 32; I'd, 31; there's, 21) or abbreviations (ABV, 40; UK, 33; OED, 23). Once all of the above are excluded we are left with the terms that I definitely produce more frequently than the database would predict:

dunce (61) (no surprise there)

bike (39) (I am quite bike-obsessed, and perhaps this abbreviation for "bicycle" is more popular now than in the mid-60s? It's been around since the 1880s, though.)

blog (30) (a very new term: OED's earliest citation is 1999, although the source "weblog" is seen as far back (!) as 1993.)

google (24) (rarely used except in cricket until 1996)

Tallinn (19) (I guess there was not so much mention of Soviet cities in the [American] texts that made up the K&F corpus).

website (14) (another new one; OED's first citation ("WEB site") is from 1993)

spam (14) (The product made of pork shoulder and ham certainly existed in the sixties, but this dirty little secret was brushed under the rug as far as the frequency corpus goes. Spam as a verb dates back only to 1991, again according to OED [but which does not mention the Monty Python origin)


So there are a few (but not many) quite predictable terms that I use more often than the corpus would predict. Now how about the other direction? I selected the 200 most frequent words in the K&F database and checked which (if any) I used less than five times. There were four such words: (wept, 507; united, 482; government, 417; knew, 395). "Wept" and "knew" are irritating because these are clearly derived from "weep" and "know" (why do these appear in the database, but "especially", "seems" and "fortunately" do not? Probably because they're irregular, but still...). I don't use the word "weep" in regular conversation unless I'm being dramatic, but am surprised not to have mentioned "knew" given my constant discussions that seem related to knowledge). "United" and "government": my infrequent use of these terms is probably a very good sign that I'm not a political blogger (I get riled up enough writing about traffic, meal times; classifications of nerds and so on).

Finally, I looked at all of those words that appear both in the frequency database and my own writing. I did some statistical tricks¹ in order to assess which words occurred unexpectedly often in my writing (as predicted by K&F frequencies), and which words occurred unexpectedly rarely. Here are the results:

My "unexpectedly often" words came from specific topic areas which I must admit I've spent perhaps too much time on: the consumption of alcohol (pub, ale, beer, cider), transportation (zebra, bus, cycle, traffic, destination, commute, London, route), language (noun, etymological, Albanian, verb, slang), and other more specific matters which have drawn my attention (marmalade, Portuguese, quince; slug, bug; badminton). Strangely very little about music ("festival" had a z-score of +1.79 but I've also referred to beer festivals). I should also note here that "toilet" still appears more often in my language than would be expected. I'm still the same little boy who got in trouble on a third grade assignment to write sentences including the words from that week's spelling list. All of my sentences included the word "toilet", and I was therefore given the opportunity to write "toilet" another 500 times. It clearly didn't cure me of it. In general, I also used content words (the, a, an, to, etc.) more often than would be expected from the corpus; perhaps this comes from my (attempted) conversational tone.

When it comes to words I didn't use as often as would be expected, there were a lot of male terms (men, himself, man, "John", Mr., him), and a lot more terms which you'd expect to see a lot on your bog-standard political blog (system, social, state, development, program, action, war, court, general, power, against, society, American, freedom, business). Am I intentionally avoiding these hot-button topics? Yeah, I guess so.




¹Technical note: Frequency data like these are notoriously exponentially distributed, so in order to do this comparison I first transformed frequency by taking the logarithm, then converted the log frequencies into z-scores within each sample (K&F z-score for "the" = 4.16; K&F z-score for a word with frequency 1 = -3.22). I took the difference between K&F z-score and the z-score derived from my own word frequencies as a measure of the difference beyond the distributional patterns.

My final tale of the Folks is the tale of the Dunces. It begins shortly before my Tale of Adam Ant; the exact beginning of this tale can be identified as 3 November 2001. The occasion was the "Beyond Nashville" festival at the Barbican, featuring not only a series of evening concerts but also loads of free musical performances starting about noon and continuing after the evening's main event. On this particular day the event was an eagerly-awaited gathering of assorted luminaries of the (so-called) alt-country world, led by Howe Gelb (including Giant Sand, Vic Chesnutt, PJ Harvey, Kurt Wagner, Mark Linkous, Evan Dando, perhaps others but this tale is not about the show [reviewed here if you are especially interested] so I'll stop there [if these names are not familiar to you, you'll have to trust me].). During one of the free music events I was a-wandering and ran into L____, one of the central (and most lovable) characters of the Folks family, who took a moment to introduce me to another of his friends who had not spent much time at the Folks of late. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was indeed the future Mrs. Dunce, and L____ was the Cupid who brought us together.

One look at each other and we both got dizzy and weak in the knees, flushed of forehead and perhaps a little shaky of hand. I would like to say this was because of love at first sight but a more realistic explanation was that we were both already suffering from assorted ills (I should also note that it couldn't be love at first sight because (the future) Mrs. Dunce had already noticed me at previous music events [I should note that she has a steel-trap mind when it comes to recognizing people's faces, while I am severely deficient in this area]). So we made our introductions and a moment of light conversation before staggering off in our respective directions. Fortunately I had extracted a key piece of information from her: that in the very near future she would be attending a Hawksley Workman gig with her sister (who was in town at the time). Seeing that as an invitation of sorts, I arrived at the Spitz only to find the show sold out (and very sold out, as no one was selling an extra ticket, and my various attempts to blag my way in, or even blagging my way into buying a ticket, were rudely rebuffed). Denied entry, I sought other entertainment: a terrible evening with London's top Grateful Dead tribute act the Cosmic Charlies (I have enjoyed them on many occasions, but this was not one of them: a lackluster performance by a subset of the band, played to a very small, mostly unappreciative [and in one case, outrageously offensive in behavior] audience). Fortunately (the future) Mrs. Dunce resumed attendance at the Folks, so we met again soon after that evening, and quickly became inseparable (not literally).

Time passed and things went well. An image of a calendar shedding pages would be appropriate (if clichéd) here (or feel free to insert your own narrative device to express the passing of time [if the overt "Time passed" is not sufficient]). OK, that'll do.

It's "now" about two years later, or to be exact 14 December 2003. As usual we had made our way to the Fiddlers Elbow for the Folks. Performers that evening were NYC's own primitive-style dobro flatpicker Breadfoot, and Neil Cleary (I ended up with a N.C. bumper sticker which says "If you're in a folk song, don't go to the river" which is sensible advice indeed) among others. But this isn't about the music; unbeknownst to (the future) Mrs. Dunce some plans were afoot. The Autocrat played a couple of songs then (by prior arrangement) made an announcement: something like "A friend of mine has a bit of a performance now, please welcome Mr. Dunce to the stage". And then it was my moment as I came to the stage and took the microphone. I started with a bit of rambling about how I'd been coming down to the Folks for a while now and had made a lot of friends and gotten to know a lot of good people very well, that it was a really great community &c &c. I made the mistake of using the phrase "I'd like to come out ... " which was met (of course) with a heckle concerning my sexuality. But then I continued, mentioning that it was thanks to the Folks (and L____ in particular) that I had met (the future) Mrs. Dunce. And then I asked her to marry me (not from bended knee, at least as I recall. Sorry about that). Needless to say the crowd erupted and called on her to come up and give an answer. Which will be no surprise (given all my signaling what with "the future Mrs. Dunce", &c) was a loud and enthusiastic "YES!" into the microphone. And with that, we were engaged. With the expected consequences: cheering, a few tears here and there, hugs, pats on the back and so on. The rest of the evening was a major celebration, unfortunately slightly marred by some degree of excess (I blame the pub locale, and a surfeit of enthusiasm [and I would fully support any Governmental move to make absinthe illegal again]) but definitely my personal highlight of my Come Down and Meet the Folks experience.

It looks like I will have to delay telling my third (and favorite) "Folks Tale" until another day, thanks to what certainly qualifies as a case of unforseen circumstances. Yes, the Dunce has suffered another injury due to clumsiness/awkwardness/etc. It used to be (in university days) that the Dunce Parents would learn of such happenings through the family's health insurance policy (at least when the happenings were mild enough not to require their immediate attention), but now that the Dunce is under the care of the NHS this option is no longer available. However even if you are not a Dunce Parent you are welcome to read on and share in my misery (fortunately fairly minor, so even you sensitive sorts will not require more tissues than a usual entry of mine warrants).

On our way home from a birthday gathering (another individual putting an end to the evils of 35 for the delights of 36) I was distracted by a 24-hour bakery which had opened its doors now that the Sabbath had come to an end (it being somewhere in the vicinity of midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning), and did not pay complete attention to safely exiting the bus. So it was not really a surprise that I failed to step on a flat piece of the curb (kerb) but instead took my first step onto a rounded part of the road surface which had somehow been formed into a bulge/slope/(whatever you'd like to call it, it was not a typical road surface formation). And my foot happily turned underneath me (inward) taking my not-insignificant weight upon it as I toppled to the pavement (fortunately [one of my favorite words, it seems] not under the wheels of the bus). Fortunately (again!) Mrs Dunce was there to assist me to a seat at the bus stop where (being a delicate flower) I may have had a little swoon before the arduous three-legged race toward home. Ice and ibuprofen were the main treatments, and fortunately there was little (if any) swelling. Sunday should have been a stay-in-bed day but instead we ventured out to the last day of the Folks at the Fiddler's Elbow (with a minimum of steps, I should note, and also that I had no ankle discomfort whatsoever so was able to do an awkward walk using the heel of the injured [right] foot).

Today the soreness hadn't really reduced so it was a trip to the hospital for me. No complaints about the NHS, perhaps it was my arrival in A&E ("Accident and Emergency") at 10am on a Monday. Not too many patients waiting before me (almost all of them sharing some foot-related injury, which I guess as in my case can wait until Monday), and I had prepared by bringing some reading matter (David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, IMO a far better collection of Wallace's short stories than his previous Girl with Curious Hair [possibly sic]). Three hours later I had been triaged, then "seen", then X-rayed, then "seen again" with a diagnosis of "not broken, but nicely sprained" ("nice" not my terminology, thank you). So it's a bandage and a limp for a while.

Service to resume soon.

If I'm telling tales about the Folks, I can hardly omit my one and only performance on stage at the Folks (I mean my one and only musical performance on stage; I'll discuss that other performance in my next entry). It was Christmas Eve eve, and the last Folks of 2001. And what says Christmas more than a musical tribute to Johnny Cash, featuring London's best Johnny Cash tribute act The Folsom Four (featuring Morrisey's guitarist Boz Boorer) with "special guests"? As usual anyone was welcome to perform a couple of songs beforehand, and on this occasion the suggestion was made that floorspot performances should really be Johnny Cash related.

What better occasion, then, for me to make my performance debut? The Autocrat and I had gotten together a couple of nights beforehand and ran through a couple of appropriate songs (No Depression in Heaven, Daddy Sang Bass) until I was able to manage to get everything mostly right, or at least close enough. We were on first and I'd never seen so many people crowded into the Golden Lion. Fortified with a sip or two of the dark stuff I was ready to take the stage (or as ready as I'd ever be). I don't recall much at all about the performance, other than that the songs were really short, that my (brief) solos were pretty much disastrous, and worst of all that I didn't sing the "Daddy sang bass" line particularly low, which ruins the whole effect (thank goodness the Autocrat was able to provide a quality falsetto for the "tenor" part, as well as being an excellent player despite my hacking performance). We did, however, receive a roaring ovation when we finished (perhaps out of pity, but it doesn't matter, I'll take it) and it was such a relief to be finished that I can't exactly remember what happened immediately thereafter.

Eventually the Folsom Four came on stage and ran through the whole range of Cash material (they played pretty much everything you'd expect), but the best was yet to come as the special guests started to appear, each one backed by the Folsom Four. First up was one of the guys from psychobilly band The Meteors (at least, I think that's who it was. If not, well you'll have to blame my unfamiliarity with the world of psychobilly [or anything-billy for that matter]). Following him was UK comedian Mark Lamarr, radio personality and host of the music/comedy TV program "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" (a favorite in the Dunce house). Surprisingly enough he was quite good as a musical performer as well (follow this link if you'd like to book him for your event. Fee bracket £11k - £15k) although I can't recall any details of his performance. Because of my shock and awe at seeing the next performer...

At first I thought it was just another drunk crazy guy off the street, a common occurrence at the Golden Lion. But then he was introduced... as Adam Ant! He was wearing a cowboy hat, a dark jacket and some heavy sunglasses, loads of rings and camouflage trousers. When he took off the hat it was clear why he was wearing it: a mohican doesn't look so good when the front half has been devastated due to baldness. In honor of the Johnny Cash tribute theme he began by complaining that Elvis Presley is underappreciated, and therefore he'd treat us to a few Elvis songs. Very strange to hear an aging, crazed Adam Ant singing "In the Ghetto", that's for sure (not to mention "Bang a Gong [Get it on]" which was also part of his performance according to my records). Once he'd staggered through the Elvis songs it was time for some Eighties classics (Cleopatra, Young Parisians, Prince Charming among others). I think his performance was rubbish but by that point it didn't matter, everyone was crowded toward the front, standing/dancing on every available horizontal surface (and some not-quite horizontal surfaces). Eventually it was over and Adam Ant eventually staggered off into the Camden night. What a memorable night it was... the night I opened for Adam Ant.


Epilogue: Only a couple of weeks later, Mr. Ant (real name Stuart Goddard) got into a bit of trouble around Camden Town. The NME headline says it all, really: "ADAM ANT IN MENTAL WARD", while the BBC was a bit more sensitive "Adam Ant detained in hospital". According to follow-up reports (BBC source), "The singer was charged earlier this year after the incident in January at the Prince of Wales pub in Kentish Town, north London. He returned to the pub after regular drinkers there laughed at his "cowboy" clothes. He was said to have smashed the pub's windows - injuring musician Plato Contostavlos - and waved a starting pistol at customers who ran after him. It appeared he was furious that customers had mockingly sung the theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly when he walked in.". Fortunately it seems that things have improved for Mr. Ant, according to gigwise his autobiography is on the way: "The book, entitled, ‘Stand and Deliver’ will chart the singer’s dysfunctional childhood and his rise to fame and his decline into manic depression. Ant has kept in-depth diaries of his life since the 1970’s and has signed a lucrative deal to spill the beans on his crazy life."

A London institution is to be no more. I've already been scooped by Sarmoung who gives a brief report here (if reporting on a publically-circulated email can be called a scoop) about the imminent demise of the weekly music club "Come Down and Meet the Folks" (website still to be found here at least for a while). According to the Folks History page it's been a regular event since 1996, held every Sunday early evening (supposedly ending in the vicinity of 8pm which, in theory, allowed a full musical experience without excessive suffering come Monday morning [I said "in theory"])This Sunday will be the last Folks (at least as a weekly event, and contrary to what the "forthcoming events" listing on their website may suggest), and as it was an important part of my London experience I thought I should mention a few of my Folks highlights.

My first Folks experience was at the end of April 2001, definitely a time of transition for me as a couple good friends had packed up and left London earlier that day. Casting about for something to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon I picked up a copy of Time Out and noticed two important words, neither of which I had formerly associated with London: "free" and "bluegrass". How could I resist? The event calendar said 4-8pm so I thought I'd wander in a little after the starting time. At the time the Folks was held at the Golden Lion in Camden Town (rated 4.5/10 on b.i.t.e. with this quite-accurate user comment "...It's one of those inner London locals with little in the way of redeeming features. The pool table is tiny and seems to be monopolised by 10-year olds. It has an air of loneliness. It sounds very patronising, but you come out feeling sorry for the place."). Little did I know that the Folks didn't really start going until 6:30 or so, so there I was in a rather down-at-heel pub where I found myself in conversation with a couple of drunken, lairy locals. One of the "highlights" of this conversation (besides the predictable piss-taking of all things American) was a wacky practical joke I would urge you to play on all your friends as it's quite hilarious!!

1. Put your finger in your bottom.
2. Wipe it under your friend's nose.
3. Hilarity ensues!!

Fortunately I was neither a putter nor a wiper (I got over this fad about the age of five or so), yet somehow this delightful frivolity did not drive me out of the pub (to somewhere I could lie in the fetal position, no doubt). Eventually a less "local" crowd started to gather, some in Midwest/Southwest lowlife costumes (think "truckstop chicken", "gas station attendant", "leering guy who sits on his porch with beer and a gun", etc. And not a nice truckstop, gas station or porch either), others in full-on rockabilly costume, others who looked like they were trying to be the early Rolling Stones, and everything in between (or so it seemed).

By the time the music started, I was sold. I don't remember who all played (there has been a long-standing custom that pretty much anyone who wants to play can stand up and do a couple of songs). The main act was Foghorn Leghorn, a north London bluegrass band perhaps best known for their cover tunes (Motorhead's Ace of Spades being the one I remember from that day [and many others]). I think they're still around although it's been a while and their website doesn't appear to be in action at the moment. I don't think I met any of the "Folks" themselves (there was always a bit of tension between the Folks and the Locals, about which more later) but I decided I'd start attending regularly. Which was good indeed for me...

This weekend the Dunces were guests at the wedding of our friends (two lovely people who met at our wedding reception) at the historic and scenic Trafalgar Tavern (famous for its whitebait suppers and apparently the setting for the wedding breakfast in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens).


Although we were suffering from some undetermined illness (sore throat, light-headedness, coughing and runny noses) so were unable to fully enjoy the event, we still had a really good time. The food was good (unfortunately it did not include whitebait, possibly at the bride's request) and we met a lot of interesting people, as well as catching up with some old friends and the usual gang.

Here are a few photos; please forgive their low quality which should all be blamed upon the photographer. How could I not start with a photo of the couple themselves just after the ceremony. We are in the process of being received by them and I am blocking the receiving line in order to take a picture.


The happy couple then wandered outside for some family photos along the Thames. In this one they are posing with Uncle Horatio (I'm not sure which side of the family he comes from, but he was rather standoffish and didn't say a word to anyone the whole day).


Here are the Dunces in our wedding finery. I am sorry to say we got no pictures that show more detail of Mrs. Dunce's outfit (mine is nothing special as I wear it for every single court appearance and other similar occasion).


Mrs. Dunce and one of her oldest London friends, a Mr. R_______. When I say "oldest" I am not referring to the number of years Mr. R_______ has spent on this earth (although recently he has rather impressively cast off the shackles of 35 and joined many of us in the freedom that 36 can offer) but the duration of friendship (uninterrupted, I should also note):


The wedding was not without its intrusion by paparazzi trying to capture the moment and then cynically sell it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately equipment malfunctions prevented this particular pap from capturing any unauthorized images.



As far as the location, the review on Fancyapint.com says "Anybody who's ever been to Greenwich knows the Trafalgar. It's a huge, handsome pub, well in keeping with its grand and historic surroundings. It's right on the river with views to the north and as a result, is incredibly popular. We usually visit this pub when we're meeting people who are new to the area and then we have to move on. It's not the pub's fault, but the tourist crowds, seemingly packed floor to ceiling, cause us to repair to other establishments, should we require quiet conversation - you'd do the same same in any tourist haunt in any city."

Comments on beerintheevening.com are largely negative (the pub itself earns a passable 5.2/10 rating), but mainly related to the crowds of tourists and the poor state of the toilets. As far as the former goes, hard to say from our perspective as the wedding party had the entire upstairs area (including a small bar, a large dining room/dance floor, and another room which served mainly as the location for the gift table). The toilets, however, were not the best I've seen (nor even "average for a pub"). Quotes from beerintheevening give a good indication of the situation. "There is no excuse for the state they are often in." "The toilets are the filthiest I have seen in a pub for ages." "Never have I been to a pub where the toilets are consistently in such a disgusting state." and so on. My own toilet experience at the Trafalgar Tavern went beyond mere filth; I found myself in what can only be described as my own Fortunato moment. I went into one of the stalls and shut the door. Although it had no latch it seemed to close fairly securely, so I went about my business prepared to shout out if someone else started to enter. Fortunately no such interruption occurred so once my needs had been seen to, I prepared to make my exit (and grand return to the wedding party). But the lack of a latch which had led to my own dismay at the possibility of being interrupted now caused equal dismay as there seemed to be no surface on which my fingers could gain purchase to open the door. For hours I waited for someone else to enter, all the time working at the door, shredding my fingertips to the bone, breaking my spectacles and twisting them into a hook, sharpening my belt buckle on the floor tiles in order to dig out the hinges, then eventually writing messages to loved ones in the filth on the wall before expiring. Or else I opened the door by gaining purchase on its underside with my fingers (despite the caked filth which I spent the next few minutes feverishly washing off my hands).

Um, perhaps this is a bad way to make the transition into giving the bride and groom all my best wishes for the future. But now I have no choice. "To the bride and groom: Best wishes for the future, and may your marriage be like a clean toilet cubicle whose door opens and closes as it is meant to do." Errrr, maybe these wishes should not be thematically related to my own toilet experience. "To the bride and groom: Best wishes for the future; never mind the toilet comments."

Last night I went to a small, low-key bachelor party for a friend of mine who's getting married tomorrow. And all manner of hilarity ensued. Here are just a few of the things that happened.*

... The bride and her friends dressed up like prostitutes in order to spy on the groom, but accidentally found themselves in a room full of Japanese businessmen, with predictable consequences.

... A donkey died from a drug overdose. What's funnier than that?

... A naked man fell out of a hotel window and fell through the roof of a car, right between a couple who were just about to kiss. Whoops!

... Someone with a gun was trying to shoot the guests.

... The groom ended up fighting with the bride's ex in a movie theater. But as the film was being shown in 3d, the audience thought it was just part of the show.

... A nerd fell in love with a transvestite; much hilarity ensued when he discovered the secret.

*When I say "happened", I mean "happened in the 1984 film "Bachelor Party" (starring Tom Hanks, Tawny Kitaen and, errr, Adrian Zmed)", and not in last night's bachelor party which would surely not make a rollicking, good-time movie that stands the test of time. It is a travesty that "Amadeus" received the 1984 Best Picture Oscar, and that "Bachelor Party" was not even nominated. Did "Killing Fields" have any donkey overdoses? Did "A Passage to India" have any fights in movie theaters?! Did "A Soldier's Story" have any characters named "Nick the Dick"? And don't even get me started about "Places in the Heart" and its lack of comedy scenes involving prostitution.

As a blogger who hasn't been at it for so long (110 entries and not quite 9 months), eventually I must come to the time when I express amusement and befuddlement about the search terms that bring visitors to my site (perhaps in part as a not-so-subtle announcement that the blog is being read by more than just my parents, siblings, spouse and relatives-in-law [insert obligatory in-law joke here]). Now is that time; sorry about that. I've already mentioned the frequent visits by referral spammers (here) but now I'd prefer to discuss real visits by real people. Most of my regular visitors seem to come from bookmarks or (one of a few) blogrolls, and occasional visitors follow links from other blogs (thanks for linking me!). And then there are those who reach me by web searches. Especially Google's fairly recently-launched blog search. As it turns out, here are the top 5 search terms in the past month or so:

1. Inzest: (German translation of "incest". Who would have thought my post about the Inzest-Baby would be so popular. Yes, I do come from Indiana. Yes, my parents do live in Kentucky. That doesn't mean anything in this day and age! Anyway, I suspect (hope?) most of these visitors are leaving entirely unsatisfied.

2. Zigni House: (Eritrean restaurant in north London). My review was a good one and there are not so many other reviews of this place online (undeservedly few!). I'm going there again soon, I promise.

3. Confederacy of Dunce: I'm pretty sure these are all misplaced references to the excellent novel A Confederacy of Dunces which is of course the inspiration for the name of my blog. I share perhaps a few too many characteristics with a particular character in that novel.

4. Boswelox: I was irritated at the pseudo-scientific tone of advertising (boswelox is frankincense + manganese), and I'm not the only one curious about this mysterious, amazing substance which (allegedly) helps reduce the appearance of lines caused by facial micro-contractions. Bah!

5. Sawney Beane: Lots of people are curious about this legendary cannibal about whom I wrote back in the very early days of my blog (only my seventh entry!). He's also known as "Sawney Bean", and apparently Sawney is a nickname for Alexander. No official word yet on whether he really existed, though. Here is the original post (in which I take a fairly a-sawney-ic position).

I can't leave this topic without mentioning my favorite searches of the month (none of which are actually relevant to anything I've written). Special credit is due for the MSN search: do girls fart. Although I have not written on this subject before I will officially reply with a solid "Yes". Second favorite is transporting a motorbike in an inflatable boat. Although I haven't written anything about this before either, I think I'll step forward with an equally solid "No". Finally there was gorge warshington. I'm not quite sure how this found me, but nonetheless it did (But not any more. If you google gorge warshington dunce, you get only one page [not mine]). I like this alternate spelling and may adopt it myself.

Yesterday one of my colleagues circulated an email about a future event, specifying the time as "just before the lab meeting next Thursday". It set off a whole bundle of confusion (does she mean "The next Thursday we will experience", or "Thursday of next week"?) and got me thinking about this kind of reference to time.

There are quite a few ways to express a future day of the week: my own variant of English makes a strong distinction between "This Thursday" and "Next Thursday". The former refers to the next Thursday that will be experienced, while "Next Thursday" is the Thursday that follows "This Thursday". This is in addition to the simple "Thursday" which is essentially synonymous with "This Thursday". "This" and "Next" when used with days don't seem to work the same as "This" and "Next" in other contexts (I would use "This bus" only if it can be seen, otherwise "The next bus" to refer to the bus-equivalent of "This Thursday"), and there are additional constraints. For example, if today is Wednesday (which it is not), it doesn't sound correct to say "This Thursday" when "Tomorrow" is a possibility (unless I have lost track of which day it is [sadly this is a fairly common occurrence]). So in this circumstance "This Thursday" has been replaced by "Tomorrow" while "Next Thursday" remains "Thursday of next week". And it also gets awkward once Thursday of a particular week has passed; if today is Friday, "this Thursday" used in a future tense then means "Thursday of next week" ("this Thursday" may also be used in the past tense in order to mean "The previous Thursday"; fortunately English verbs allow this ambiguity to be avoided), but "next Thursday" is much more ambiguous (it could mean "Thursday of next week", although I still typically use it to mean "the second Thursday in the future". But the use of "next" for a day 13 days in the future may be a bit much). My distinction between "This" and "Next" does not depend on the boundary between weeks; I would still use "This Monday" to refer to the upcoming Monday even if today is Thursday (which it is not), and "Next Monday" to refer to the following one.

However, other English speakers do not typically use "This Thursday" as I do (I also occasionally use "This coming Thursday" or "This past Thursday", but this kind of disambiguation is not really necessary). Hence the confusion arising from my cow-orker's email (She meant "Next Thursday" in the sense in which I use it, but other colleagues misinterpreted it as meaning "This Thursday"). This may be because British English uses "next" differently, thanks to the "week" expression. UK "Thursday week" apparently has the same meaning as my "Next Thursday", and UK "Next Thursday" has the same meaning as my "This Thursday" (one of OED's definitions of "week" is "Seven days after the day specified"). Here's an instance of someone who ran into the next/week problem (The blogger's user info suggests that this is also a US/UK translation difference); and here is a discussion related to learning English as a second language. It's unclear to me whether such expressions also apply for a day that has just passed (if today is Wednesday [which it is not], is "Tuesday week" six or 13 days in the future?). Or expressions like "Next Tuesday week" which just make my head spin.

"I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" (Image no longer hotlinked, sorry about that!)