The Round of Imaginary and Unproven Beings

Probably a bonobo or something (Source).

 Another fortnight rolls around and with it another quiz, so here's my round! Don't click on the image source links if you don't want the answers, which I'll post in the comments section as ever... "The Unexplained" we used to call this stuff when I was a nipper, but it really wasn't...

(source)

1. In 1917, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright produced these images of the "Cottingley Fairies" by...
a) Doctoring the negatives?
b) Photographing cardboard cutouts held in place by hat pins?
c) Nobody knows?

(source)

2. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin's famous Bigfoot footage from 1967 was shot where in California?
a) Shit Creek?
b) Bluff Creek?
c) Hoke's Creek?


3. According to former BBC Breakfast Time sports presenter David Icke, who gave away that they were actually a shape-shifting reptile in a Sky TV make-up room in 1989 when their eyeballs turned completely black?
a) Former Prime Minister Ted Heath?
b) Future Prime Minister Tony Blair?
c) Stephen Fry?

(source)

4. What's this then?

a) An X-ray of a "ghost"?
b) An X-ray of a "genie"?
c) An X-ray of a "mermaid"?

5. According to Algonquian folklore the northern forests of Nova Scotia are haunted by cannibals called Wendigo whose insatiable hunger has caused them to chew off their own...
a) Hands?
b) Lips?
c) Bum?

6. Which of these images is not based upon Whitley Strieber's descriptions of the aliens that abducted him in his book Communion?
a)

(source)

 b)

(source)

c)

 (source)

7. What famous monster links:
a) The 1964 film The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao
b) The 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
c) The 1961 film What a Whopper!
That's not actually multiple choice, I realise.


8. Also not multiple choice: Which of the above film's depictions of this monster is the odd one out, and ideally why?


9. Back to multiple choice. This...

  (source)

... is perhaps the most famous image of which uncaught, eyelidless serial killer from creepypasta lore?
a) Slenderman?
b) Scary Mike?
c) Jeff the Killer?

 

(source) 

10. In 1871's The Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton describes the An-ya, a hyper-advanced subterranean offshoot of humanity whose women are bigger than its men. But which household product derived its name from the force that powers their wands?
a) Bovril?
b) Oxo?
c) Cillit Bang?

Make Yourself At Home

 I shower and get dressed before sitting down to work these days, and showering's still new enough to me to trigger memories, but I don't know of what, of being on holiday perhaps. I work mainly in the kitchen as well, on the hardwood floor, so when I step into the living room now, where I used to try to work, the carpet beneath my feet triggers– but again, I don't what. I suppose if I can't remember, I shouldn't really call them memories, but they seem to occupy the same imaginary space. It might also be the same space that going outside occupies if you're not used to going outside, or being somewhere new, remembering something as it's happening. Not déja vu, but feeling exactly as you'll come to feel again when you remember it. "Membering" is probably not the best word for it, but I think it's whatever the opposite of waiting is. I also think it might have something to do with posture.

Titus Bemoan (York's from Wales now. And Lancaster's from York.)

 

I looked up what a "gorget" is (source).

 Pah, just missed midnight, and I'm still a post behind if I want to average one a day (there was no post on Wednesday the 29th) but anyway, Act Two of the definitiver Richard II is now uploading, and will be posted below once done. There were ninety minutes of recording to cut down this time, but I'm glad I'm having another run, now I'm clearer what's going on: Richard having no idea actually how hard he's pushing people's buttons is a lot more interesting to play longterm, Bolingbroke feels like someone people might now be genuinely happy to meet, and – upping the Celtic quotient – York's more fun to play now he's not so stiff-jawed and uptight and sounds like Titus Andronicus, another ill-starred old soldier whose loyalty to the state turns him against his own son – that's all in the future though; right now, it's just a more enjoyable voice to complain in. York should bark. Its partly his overestimation of the power of that bark that loses him so many allies. And it's nice to recast a voice. If you're following these videos, I think that's Mark Antony's voice as Mowbray, and possibly Cassius' as Harry Percy, but his part's going to be built up.

The Canal Is Kind and The Scenery Delicious

 Yesterday afternoon, making my way home along Regent's Canal, just before the aviary, I noticed raspberries among the brambles. Some were delicious. Free food. This evening, strolling along Wankers' wharf while waiting for Act Two to load, I found Nic and Paul and Eddie on the grass steps of King's Place where, to facilitate social distancing, large lollies were recently set. And now I'm drunk. Free drink. The canal is kind and the scenery delicious, and may you all bump into the best people.

"You'll be back..." RICHARD THE SECOND RICHDUX

 Richard Pasco now models Ian Richardson's cape. I hear the two actors tossed a coin each night to see who would play Bolingbroke and who would play Richard. 

Imagine turning up to the wrong one.

 Here is the first act of Richard the Second THE SECOND... From the defeated republic of Julius Caesar, via the elected dictatorship of Titus Andronicus, to the now seemingly unchecked power of God's Anointed, it's interesting how the further back in history Shakespeare goes, the more recognisably democratic become the

systems he writes about. Take that, progress! This isn't Rome then. Kings are a proper thing now, second only to God, and this one has definitely had his uncle Gloucester murdered. Mowbray is definitely the one who did it, and the only hope of avenging that murder is the King's cousin Bolingbroke. Them's the stakes. And the prouder I play Richard, the humbler I can play Bolingbroke, even though the humble man is still going to have to kill the proud man. So maybe the play's about that. Of course by going full Gloriana - or, okay, full Ian Richardson - there is a risk if not a complete inevitability of turning Richard into a full-on, Disney-style queer-coded villain. But... 

 

 Well firstly, those guys are great. But secondly, it might still be a better starting point for understanding this play than what I had before, because if you simply play the King as a wag you make it too easy for the audience to side with him against his huffing and puffing subjects, and that lets him off the hook. There is a system in place where he's the Sun and his subjects have to function within that, which is not their fault. This isn't Rome, as I said. And it isn't Marlowe's Edward the Second. Richard isn't martyred for love. This is the play the Earl of Essex staged as a prelude to revolution. This is taboo. Here's Richard the Second again then, but more alien, with eggshells, stiller shoulders and less busy mouths. Let's see.

Dream City Cheats

Not like this.

 

 Ian Hubert's youtube channel hosts beautiful minute-long performances – "tutorials" in the same way that watching someone make balloon animals is a tutorial. Comparing him to a guest on The Paul Daniels Show is meant as a compliment by the way, but I'm sure bafflement isn't Hubert's chief aim and that for anyone with Blender who understands what he's saying, this patter's packed with practical advice. Still I just enjoy watching him. 

 I wonder if there's something in these shortcuts which might help to answer a question about the human brain that's been bothering me for decades: how every single place we go to in our dreams, from the old bedroom that's not quite our old bedroom, to the cities we're driven through and the crowds we're passing, are fabricated night after night, without gaps or repeats, for just a second. Let alone why. Here's Ian building a city:

 

 And its people:

 And its moths:

 

(art by anon) 

Awaymania

One of Margaret Gordon's original Womble designs. 

I don't remember this bit.

 There's a fine Brian Aldiss quote I can't find now about how humanity's greatest schism with the ecosystem was brought about by the invention not of the motor car, but of the flush toilet – because instead of returning waste to the soil, we now flushed it into the unrelated sea.

The construction of the Embankment enclosing Bazalgette's sewers. 

Notice the open-top  steam-powered London Underground, bottom left. (Source.)

  Actually, the flush toilet was invented a good few years before Bazalgette's sewer, so although waste was originally being flushed into the Thames, it was then just left to rot on London beach, and in this week's Ships, Sea & the Stars you can hear me read an account by Dickens of the smell. I also get to read some Wombles by Elizabeth Beresford, and there are further typically good insights into plastic, amber, the influence of rationing on seventies kid's television, how the London Sewer could be said to have started the mania for just sending stuff "away", and a schooner whittled from mutton bone.