Comments on: Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXIX

By: ninme

ninme — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:56:50 +0000

What? That’s not what I meant, nut. “Mm, quite,” with reading glasses lowered, in a thoughtful, almost scholarly tone.

By: Rueful Red

Rueful Red — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:16:19 +0000

Sorry for going on a bit.

By: ninme

ninme — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:10:32 +0000

Mm, quite.

By: Rueful Red

Rueful Red — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:53:41 +0000

I’d bunged the floowing clerihew into the Arthur’s Seat competition and it needed an appropriate handle:

Brezhnev, when he’d all his powers Told his chums “the future’s ours!” Not having reckoned On John Paul the Second.

“Rueful Red” sprang to mind from somewhere. Whether it had anything to do with a brief side trip round cod-Shakespeares I took at school is moot. I don’t know. The tag stuck in my mind because it was my friendly neighbourhood local estuary, the Humber, that was being turned that colour.

Bluish Hugh’s a terrific handle. Agreeably recondite.

By: ninme

ninme — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:48:32 +0000

Well he got it from poetry, but not that one, that I know of. I mean, I was there, but who knows what he had in mind.

By: Bluish Hugh

Bluish Hugh — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 23:18:33 +0000

What! You didn’t take your moniker, as I did, from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine? Containing the immortal lines: Thus are we come, victorious conquerors, Unto the flowing current’s silver streams, Which, in memorial of our victory, S hall be agnominated by our name, And talked of by our posterity: For sure I hope before the golden sun Posteth his horses to fair Thetis’ plains, To see the water turned into blood, And change his bluish hue to rueful red, By reason of the fatal massacre Which shall be made upon the virent plains.

By: ninme

ninme — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:43:17 +0000

No not ninme, ALGORE!

And I don't think I was clear. It didn't snow that much (I mean, a lot for here, but for crying out loud I'm a bloody Canadian aren't I). It was more a comment on the steepness of the hills and the ridiculousness of our public transport.

By: Rueful Red

Rueful Red — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:48:29 +0000

So ninme’s to blame the Chinese for her weather? You got me there on that quote. Clue? Can’t find it on Wiki. CS Lewis? The Red handle’s of political origin - commies and all that. Just made it up for Mr Seat’s clerihew competition and it sort of stuck.

By: Brett_McS

Brett_McS — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:18:00 +0000

Even the diesel locomotives have to be de-rated to account for the lack of oxygen when they go over the pass - all done by computerized engine management systems these days. I couldn’t imagine a steam train having much hope - although the Chinese did (do?) still make steam engines, at least until a few years ago - all that coal to burn.

… called Truthfull for he was that above all else, but also Red because of his flaming red locks…

By: Rueful Red

Rueful Red — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:06:13 +0000

I was actually very very careful not to discount the possibility of the wooden horse story being true - it’s powerful enough as a story to have survived several centuries before being written down, which would indicate that in the early days at least some people believed it to be true. The bit of Yorkshire I come from has a bit of woodland named after a bloke called Jackie Duffin, who was generally assumed to be of mythical existence, possibly Robin Hood-related. There was no family in the village or for miles around of that name, so he wasn’t local. Perhaps he’d resisted the Norman invasion. He was of that order of myth. Then someone checked the parish diary kept by a succesion of vicars (my village being a pretty dull sort of place it hadn’t been thought riveting reading) and it turned out that the land had been surveyed in the early/mid 18th century, and the woodland caused to be planted, by one John Duffin, Surveyor - who certainly can’t have known he’d have assumed a mythical existence a couple of centuries later. Had I been writing this a hundred years ago I’d have said the Wooden Horse story was vastly more plausible than Brett’s Wonderful Railway. Leaving aside questions of tundra and permafrost, the sheer impossibility of getting a worthwhile head of steam up using conventional boilers would have rendered the very idea of the railway literally fantastic. Seattle sounds like Edinburgh was for a couple of winters 20-odd years ago. The absence of snow chains made for entertaining driving.