I Am Not Sure How Up You Are On Your Heraldry
My experience with same dates from reading 'The Once And Future King', which is a novel worthy of a whole Intro by itself - I just gave away 5 books to Darling Daughter so may now have moral justification to buy a copy as I've not read it for a good 40 years in the Eighties. Art!
Disney's partial adaptation
ANYWAY allow me to instruct you on what a 'Saltire' is, courtesy my 'Collins Concise English Dictionary': "An ordinary consisting of a diagonal cross on a shield". You may be more familiar with this version. Art!
Mock this flag in the Gorbals, I dare you. It's one of the oldest flags in Europe, supposedly influenced by a battle in 832 AD, where the brutish Sassenachs were defeated thanks to the intervention of Saint Andrew with a sign in the sky that resembled the saltire. Conrad considers a mixed force of cavalry and infantry would have been more useful but what do I know.
So, that's a saltire. I'm glad we got that out of the way, and you now have a ready-made answer for pub quizzes.
Onto satire. This is defined by the CCED as "A novel, play, entertainment, etc, in which topical issues, folly, or evil, are held up to scorn by means of ridicule and irony." Art!
Come on down Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce! As you can hardly fail to have noticed, we here at BOOJUM! have been ploughing a lonely trail in publicising the South Canadian satirist's work, so at least 2 or even as many as 3 people across the globe now know of his name. He rather burst onto the publishing world as a journalist in 1868, having a forty-year career, for twenty-five years of which he compiled his 'Devil's Dictionary', wherein his column in the different papers he worked for related his bitterly amusing work. Art!
It has to be said that South Canada in the 1880's and 1890's was not a terribly safe place to live, since, as today, everybody walked around packing heat. Bierce had the reputation of being a crack-shot with a revolver, a heritage of his army days during the American Civil Unpleasantness, and he further had the reputation of going around carrying said revolver. This insulated him, somewhat, from the incredibly caustic and insulting columns he posted in the press on a regular basis.
Let us look at how he defined satire in his very own satirical work.
"Satire, n: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humour we mistake for it, like all humour, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are 'endowed by their Creator' with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim's outcry for co-defendants evokes a national answer."
As mentioned before, this definition is from 'The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary' and Ol' Ammy had an earlier definition from 'The Cynic's Word Book'. Art!
"Satire, n: see WASP" The upper-case implying that there is another entry under that title. There is not. Ho ho ho, what a wag you were, Ambrose!
Ammy also adds in a bit of doggerel composed by the suspiciously similar to a pseudonym 'Barney Stims' (I am avoiding hyphens to keep up the Word Count), which I have not been able to unscramble as a name or entity.
"Hail Satire! be thy praises ever sung
In the dead language of a mummy's tongue
For thou thyself art dead, and damned as well -
Thy spirit (usefully employed) in Hell.
Had it been such as consecrates the Bible
Thou hads't not perished by the law of libel."
Interestingly, if we look at that very last word, 'Libel', which Bierce must have been intimately acquainted with, it's derived from Old French, which in turn was derived from Latin. It comes from the Latin 'Libellus', meaning 'Little book', which referred to a plaintiff's statement in court, taken down by longhand. Leading to the whole concept of libel being a defamatory statement in permanent form. Or - a newspaper column.
Whilst On The Subject Of Libel -
Have another unflattering picture of Pumpkinhead, which I Snipped a while ago and haven't used yet, as it contained text. Art!
Conrad is unsure how a television broadcast can be 'corrupt', and King Piggy would have a hard time proving it in court. He is, of course - obviously! - bitter and vengeful because the BBC didn't back down in the face of his ludicrous $10 billion lawsuit against them, and settle with him for a mere $10 million. He will probably be long dead by the time the case gets to court. If not I can tell you how it will go: the case will fail, he won't get any money, then he'll refuse to pay his lawyers because they lost (not because it was a stupid case in the first place), then they will sue him in order to get paid and vow never to work for him again. This has happened frequently in the past!
If the deed had been done in print, it would never have seen the light of day, as Fat Caligula cannot read.
More For Me To Be Unhappy About
Which makes me happy, for Conrad is nothing if not a contrarian and I will argue that out with anybody. Another bizarre item posted in my news feed. Art!
I mean, What On Earth? When have I ever expressed the need or want for a 'well pump', let alone a shallow one, whatever the difference is. I can work out that it's one and a half horsepower - is that good or bad? - and one hundred and fifteen volts - so not suitable for UK use - but fail to understand what '1200 Gph' - actually no, I get it now, 1,200 gallons per hour. '87 Psi' is 'Pounds per square inch' in PROUD IMPERIAL MEASURES like the rest.
The algorithm sucks. Do you see wh - O you do.
I Did A Bit Of Digging
As threatened, to see if "The Once And Future King" by T. H. White, was available at a reasonable price. Yes and no. It transpires that there's no single volume edition that includes the posthumously published 'The Book Of Merlyn', and all the published works seem to be two-parters. I shall enquire further. Art!
The Wicked Pen Of A Romanien
Don't carp, I'm being poetic. There are really Romani, except they hail from Finland, and 'Daractenus', whose Tweet I am nicking, is from Romania.
ANYWAY I am returning to his hilarious and satirical thread about South Canadian foodstuffs that are banned from retail in Europe, as we have food safety laws here. Art!
"Stuffed with enough BHA and BHT preservatives to give the product an expiration date of absolutely never, most of Europe has outright banned the product, depriving Europeans from what is otherwise a cheap and convenient way to encourage hair loss."
Bierce would undoubtedly approve. O - Idaho is renowned for growing potatoes, hence the brand name. You think he was joking? Let me update you with some Google-fu results.
First part: "100% Idaho potatoes, vegetable oil (coconut, sunflower), maltodextrin, salt, sugar, buttermilk powder, nonfat dry milk, and butter"
The second, kicker, part: "mono- and diglycerides, calcium stearoyl lactylate, natural flavors, and preservatives like sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bisulfite, citric acid, and mixed tocopherols"
Finally -
Ending with another quote from my 'QI Book Of Banter'.
"The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it." - Salvador Dali
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