Author: kevinhobbs

Apostrophes: Farewell, My Lovely

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 21, 2000

Apostrophe-s and s-apostrophe are valuable ways of avoiding possible ambiguities in written English. I suspect this may be a dying view. Almost daily I meet examples of missing, misplaced or inappropriate apostrophes accompanying a concluding “s”. Student essays, shop signs, advertisements and newspapers are all responsible. Perhaps it is the will of the folk that the apostrophe should no longer be linked to the “s”. That can be a powerful will. However, I was surprised to find the National Trust, guardian of much of our cultural heritage, apparently assisting in the death.

The National trust leaflet “Runnymede: Birthplace of the Magna Carta”, explaining the character of the document tells the reader that it “defined the barons feudal obligations to the monarch“. If the apostrophe is not safe in the hands of the National Trust, who will protect it?

Dear Reader…

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to AMbrose Merton # 21, 2000

(NOTE, 2011: This editorial has been reproduced because it gives a clue to the circumstances in which LTAM eventually ceased publication.)

A high proportion of contributions to Letters to Ambrose Merton now arrive by e-mail. This is itself is not a particularly striking fact. However, what is worth particular attention is that the contributors themselves frequently received the material by e-mail. In other words, our newsletter becomes the end of one particular branch of the internet communication chain.

This gives us pause for thought. What if any are the distinctive features of e-communications as opposed to material from other sources? Is e-mail significantly changing the character of communications between the people who use it? The most profound question of all may be “What is the role of a publication such as Ambrose Merton when so many of us communicate so much through the internet?”

We do not attempt to answer these questions in this issue. However, it does contain an unusually high proportion of material which has been in circulation as forwarded e-mail and thus provides us with some “raw data” which may be relevant to answering these questions.

It may be noted that many of these items are composed of lists. These are not unique to e-communications, of course. Some of the examples in this issue are in the style of “Colemanballs” a column in Private Eye magazine composed of slips by sports commentators, which subsequently became the content of a successful series of books. However, it is reasonable to ask if there is some particular aspect of the internet which encourages the deployment of lists in humour. Lists were certainly a substantial part of the jokes circulated by computer network in the early 1980s which were presented in LTAM No. 8 (1996).

Dead Man On Campus

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

One of the papers in A Nest of Vipers, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield Academic Press, 1990) is “The roommate’s suicide and the 4.0” by William S. Fox. Fox summarises this piece of contemporary American college lore as:

If your roommate commits suicide, you get a 4.0 that semester.
The value “4.0” means the highest marks available in each subject.

Dead Man on Campus is a feature film whose narrative is built round this concept. Josh (Tom Everett Scott) enters the medical programme at Daleman College on an academic scholarship. He intends to work hard but is distracted by his partying roommate Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and by Rachel (Poppy Montgomery) who becomes his girl friend. Josh’s early grades are so bad that he would find it impossible to achieve the average for the year which he requires to keep his scholarship. Cooper’s business-man father arrives on campus and threatens dire consequences if he does not start working, so both roommates are in trouble.

In a bar, an old drunk tells them of his experience at college, His roommate committed suicide and he benefitted from a college rule that “if your roommate kills himself you get straight As”. Cooper’s reaction is to suggest that Josh sacrifice himself but Josh rejecxts that idea, However, they decide to check out the College Charter in the library. In a section on suicide they discover that it does contain just such a provision. Cooper persuades Josh that they should arrange to have a suicidal student move in with them. They try to increase their knowldge of the circumstances in which suicide s are committed. Josh goes the the Psychology department for information where he is interviewed by Dr Durkheim. Durkheim wrongly assumes that Josh is himself contemplating taking his own life. [This is presumably a knowing reference to Emile Durkheim, the author of a famous sociological analysis of suicide,]

They focus on a number of potential suicides, including a paranoid who believes Bill Gates is trying to control his brain and a rock musician who only pretends to be suicidal to create an appropriate image. Having given up their attempts to benefit from the suicide rule, they find a friend, Pickle, who has swallowed pills and left a suicide note. Believing him to be already dead, they plan to move him into their room. However, Josh realises he is still alive and revives him. Cooper is angry that Josh has spoilt their last chance of good grades and they quarrel.

Josh climbs the College Tower and threatens to jump. A crowd gathers but Cooper succeed in “talking him down”. Once saved, Josh secretly tells Cooper that he figures that the college would not expel a student who had shown himself to be suicidal. He is correct and he stays on to study psychology rather than medicine. Cooper’s father, impressed by his success in saving Josh from suicide, agrees to finance another year at college. Things seem to have worked out well for them both, but they arrange for Pickle to move in with them, “just in case” things go wrong.

Dead Man on Campus was copyrighted in 1998 by Paramount Pictures. It is an MTV Production, directed by Alan Cohn and produced by Gale Anne Hurd. The story is credited to Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder. The screenplay is by Michael Traeger and Mike White.

The Cookie Thief

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

In her paper, “Preaching tolerance?” Folklore, 106 (1995) pages 21–30, Veronique Campion-Vincent discusses four short films which present variants of the legend she calls “Sharing by Error”. They were Blues, Black and White (Switzerland, 1987), Boeuf Bourguignon (Netherlands, 1988), The Lunch Date (USA, 1989) and Clin d”Oeil (France, 1991). To these may now be added a British film, The Cookie Thief, copyright 1998 by Big Daddy Film Company.

This film which is around 10 minutes long was shown in late 1999 on British television Channel Four’s series Shooting Gallery, which features short films. The Cookie Thief was produced written and directed by Toby Leslie and Hugh Currie who were interviewed briefly before the film was shown. They describe it as an “urban myth” and a “friend of a friend pub story” but also give as a source a poem by Sylvia Potts written in the 1960s. The poem is also noted as a source in the end credits of the film.

The story has a simplicity similar to the films discussed by Veronique Campion-Vincent. A woman (played by Honor Fraser) buys a bag of cookies, she to a station cafe and sits down at a table with her cofee. A man (Jack Davenport) wordlessly asks permission to sit at the same table. She sees him taking a cookie from what she believes to be her bag. She takes one herself and together the eat all the cookies in an atmosphere of mutual hostility. The woman leaves the cafe and catches her train. Once seated, she opens her handbag and finds there her own cookie bag, unopened.

Although the makers of The Cookie Thief did not indicate any awareness of previous version, knowingly or unknowingly they have extended the range of relationships between the characters. Veronique Campion-Vincent points out that two of the four films she discussed involved a White Female and a Black Male. One involved two Females, one Black one White and one involved two Males, one Black and one White. In The Cookie Thief both the Male and the Female are White.

The Lost Iraqi Boy

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| Letters to Ambrose Merton # 17, 1999

The following extracts are from The Diary column, edited by Matthew Norman, and published in The Guardian newspaper.

17 March 1999

I am distressed by Tam Dalyell’s wilful refusal to… stop being beastly to poor Robin Cook. By way of justifying bombing Iraq… Cookie cited a boy – now aged 16 – who has been in prison since the age of five for throwing a stone at a mural portrait of Saddam… However, when asked for details, such as the boy’s name and that of the prison, Cookie became vague, merely insisting his source was reliable. Cynical old Tam was unconvinced by this, and tabled a parliamentary question asking for the source of this heart-rending tale. After prevaricating for weeks, the written answer finally came on Monday. That impeccable source, said Robin, was the Defence Secretary… Tam has now tabled a question to George Robertson…

19 March 1999

Mr Robertson responded, “I will reply” he said, in a written reply, “answer shortly”. Take your time, George. There’s no hurry at all.

24 March 1999

Here, then is George’s written reply. “The information came to me from my noble friend the Minister for Defence Procurement [Lord Gilbert…] who was told of the case at a private occasion by a reliable source who had been in Baghdad at the time.” George’s answer continues: “I am withholding further details under Section 12 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government relating to the privacy of an individual.” Presumably, in other words, the informant was a spook. “The account is consistent with other accounts of the repressive brutality of Saddam’s regime. For example, the Iraqi National Accord [an anti-Saddam outfit funded by the CIA and MI6] a six-year old boy was accused together with his father of participating in an uprising against Saddam. He and his father were shot.” Amnesty International’s Iraq specialist was yesterday unable to find any record of this new case, or other the other one with which George concludes his reply – that of a 12-year-old boy imprisoned for three months because his father had opposed Saddam. Having received his reply, Tam Dalyell yesterday went to the Commons’s Tabling Office to put down a follow-up question requesting from George the names of these two new boys… the Tabling Office refused permission, citing the same source-protecting Section 12…

Cartoon Halloweens

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 16, 1998

To me one of the most satisfying features of commercial popular culture in recent years has been the appearance, and indeed the success, of television cartoon series aimed at adults. Matt Groening’s The Simpsons is the outstanding example. Halloween has been a recurring theme in The Simpsons, starting with The Simpsons Hallowe’en Special (also known as Treehouse of Horrors) in the second series. A number of different horror stories are told, which as is typical of The Simpsons, contain many allusions to other works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist. This was followed by Treehouse of Horror II , III, IV, V, VI and VII, all of which seem to be compiled to a similar formula. This note deals with how Halloween has been treated in two of the other adult cartoon series, South Park and King of the Hill.

South Park was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone and produced by the company Comedy Central. The episode reviewed is available in Britain on a video released by Warner Vision International. It has no on-screen title, but in the packaging is labelled Pinkeye Halloween Special.

The central characters in South Park as four boys who attend the same school, Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. The episode ones with Kenny being killed by the Russian Mir Space Station when it crashes to earth because of a malfunction. Kenny’s death will surprise only those unfamiliar with the series, since one of the running jokes is that Kenny gets killed in every episode. Kenny is taken to the local morgue where one of the attendants remarks that “Death is least funny when it happens to a child”. Kenny is embalmed but one of the attendants allows the Worcestershire sauce he has been putting on his snack drip into the embalming fluid. This has terrible consequences since, as we later discover, there is a warning on the bottle that the Worcestershire sauce should not be used for embalming. Kenny revives, bites the attendants and returns to his friends. The attendants go to a clinic for help and are diagnosed as suffering from pinkeye. However, from now on they and Ken seem to have a need to consume human blood.

There is a costume competition at the school. Cartman’s mother has made him a Hitler costume. The teachers disapprove. Cartman is made to watch a documentary which explains that “Adolf Hitler was very naughty man”. Almost all of the kids at school have turned up dressed a chubacas. Despite the fact that they are identical one of them wins the competition. The boys go Trick or Treating but are not very successful, in part because Kenny has a tendency to bit the householders. More and more of the citizens are turning into flesh-eating zombies and the school chef realises that the diagnosis Pinkeye is wrong. This, he decides is “The Living Dead”, an allusion to the film, Night of the Living Dead. He is himself turned into a zombie before he take effective action, but the boys ring the Worcestershire sauce hotline and are told “Kill the original zombie and the others will return to normal”. Of course, Kenny was the original zombie, so he gets killed again. After the community has returned to normal, the boys discuss the meaning of Halloween.

Stan: “You know, I learned something today. It isn’t about costumes or candy, it’s about being good to one another, and giving and loving.”

Kyle: “No, dude, that’s Christmas.”

Stan: “Oh! Then what’s Halloween about?”

Kyle: “Costumes and candy.”

Kenny is buried and, as happens in horror films, he begins to emerge from his grave. However, an angel from a nearby tombstone falls on him and he is killed for a third time.

King of the Hill was created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. It is produced by Deedle-Dum Productions, Judgmental Films and 3 Arts Entertainment for Twentieth Century Fox. The episode under review has no on-screen title, but has the code number SEO6 and was copyrighted in 1997.

The central character in King of the Hill is Hank Hill a rather straight Texan who lives in a small town, Arlen, with his wife, son and teenage niece. As the episode opens, we discover that Hank has the contract to create a Haunted House for the local school’s Halloween celebrations. He is keen that his son Bobby should have “the perfect Halloween, the kind I had when I was a boy”. While Bobby is taken shopping by his parents to buy a Halloween costume, Luanne, Hank’s niece, attends the Church Youth Fellowship. A guest speaker, Junie Harper, is introduced as someone who has made herself known through “a series of gutsy letters, complaints and threats”. When she asks the audience to identify a picture, Luanne says it is a witch. This leads her to ask Luanne if she herself knows any witches. Luanne says that witches aren’t real, but Miss Harper explains that they are real. Halloween is the special holiday for witches, goblins and satanists.

The next day, Luanne conveys this information to the family. Hank objects that Halloween is “Just good clean fun” and is “Nothing to do with the devil”. The latter point is slightly undermined by the fact that Bobby is wearing the devil costume Hank himself wore as a child. Miss Harper is to organize a Hallelujah House, in opposition to Hank’s Haunted House, and indeed goes further in her campaign. She complains to the school principal about the school celebrating Halloween because “Our constitution guarantees separation of church and state”. The principal tells Hank that he has to go along with this because “She has a point – and an attorney”, The school just can’t afford another lawsuit”. Upset, Hank takes Bobby out on a trick or treat expedition which seems to be entirely devoted to tricks. When Miss Harper sees them throwing toilet rolls outside her house, she sets out the chase them in her car, accidentally running over her own cat as she leaves. She calls the police and attributes the anti-social behaviour to the Hill family’s “Anti-Christian values”.

The next day, Luanne tries to persuade Bobby that Miss Harper is right about Halloween. She tells him that Hank is a satanist.

“Did your father ever make you drink blood?”

“He made me eat liver once.”

“That is called a recovered memory. Think, Bobby, what else can you remember?”

We see in flashback a couple of earlier incidents. In the costume store, Hank objected to the inappropriate costumes with the words “Where are the vampires and monsters and ghosts?” Hank had also praised Bobby, saying “You’re a regular hell raiser just like your old man!”

Bobby remarks on how keen his father seems to be for him to visit a Haunted House. He recalls that the last time his father had been so keen for him to go somewhere, he woke up without tonsils.

“This time he may be after your soul” comments Luanne.

Meanwhile Miss Harper goes to the city council demanding action on Halloween. She succeeds in persuading them to impose a Halloween curfew. The clinching argument was that the satanists made her run over her own cat.

On October 31st Luanne secretly takes Bobby to Miss Harper’s Hallelujah House. We see to of the scenes enacted to persuade the children who are attending. In one a young unmarried couple who “let their hormones get the best of them” end up deed in the morgue. Moral” Sex kills. In the second, a father tells his wife that he can’t stop grandpa (a gorilla) eating the baby because “It’s against the law to teach creationism”.

Disturbed by the quietness on Halloween, Hank dresses up in his old devil costume and walks the streets, shouting “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” gradually, he is joined, first by his friends, then by other including Luanne, who has been confronted by Mrs Hill. The party arrive at Miss Harper’s house. Bobby has already signed a Hallelujah Club Pledge, and at first is resistant when Hank calls on him to leave. However, he does so because he just wants to be with his dad. Miss Harper shouts defiantly that without these lost souls there will be more room in heaven for her.

Note that both Luanne and Bobby gave up their attachment to Miss Harper’s views not on grounds of arguments but because of the strength of family ties.

Child Abduction Scare

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David Cornwell & Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 16, 1998

Under the headline “Bizarre truth behind story that’s shocked the city”, the Evening Times (Glasgow), 14 November 1998, reported that a story of child abduction which had swept the city was actually “the world’s greatest” urban legend. The newspaper had received more than a dozen phone calls from worried parents afraid to take their kids into Glasgow city centre. They had heard the following story:

“A young mum shopping in Marks and Spencer’s Glasgow Argyle Street store finds that her three-year-old daughter has vanished from her side. After a few minutes frantic search, she rushes to a security man, who contacts his control room. The store’s electronic shutters are rolled down – preventing shoppers leaving.

“Security staff then begin to search the store from top to bottom – and make a bizarre and terrifying discovery in the toilets. Two paedophile perverts have captured the tot and are calmly cutting off her long hair and changing her clothes in an attempt to smuggle her out of the store disguised as a little boy.

“The men are said to be part of a gang of paedophiles, and since arrested are said to have been secretly helping the police with investigations into a city-wide pervert ring.”

A Strathclyde police spokesman stated “There is no truth in this story whatsoever”. A Marks and Spencer press officer was quoted as saying: “There was a similar case in one of our Manchester stores – the same story down to the last detail, Somebody is obviously maliciously starting these rumours. It’s quite serious because it worries people inordinately and is starting to upset both parents and our staff.”

However, the author of the article, Beverley Lyons, sees the story as an urban legend rather than a malicious rumour. She notes that the Urban Legend Archive website mentions a story labelled “Code Adam” which is virtually identical with the story going the rounds in Glasgow.

Beverley Lyons reinforces her argument for a readership which may not be familiar with the concept of an “Urban Legend” by outlining a number of other examples. These included: Elephant sits on mini; Eddie Murphy in Los Angeles lift; Ghost boy in Three Men and A Baby; Drug tattoos turn children into addicts; Alligators in sewers.

Tartan Tinkers

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 16, 1998

Under the title “The tartan tinkers who turned into the real-life Deliverance Clans and brought terror and evil to every American state”, the Scottish newspaper, The Sunday Mail, on 22 November 1998 of criminal groups in the United States which originated in Scotland. The author Maggie Hall, writing from Washington DC, focused on the plight of Patsy Hart. She lives in daily fear for her life after having “rescued her two small boys from the horrors of life with the Con Clans”.

However, she believes it worthwhile if other children are saved from “the Deliverance-style inbreeding and incest of the degenerate tartan tinkers”.

These people are “degenerate Scots Americans” whose “secrecy and cunning put them virtually beyond the law”. According to Patsy Hart, Con Clan girls are married off at twelve to teenage cousins. So many deformed and mentally retarded children are born that the Clan, also known as the Travellers, are seeking “fresh meat”. Patsy Hart was offered £75,000 for her sons a day after marrying a Clansman.

“These families of Scots and Irish decent have created their own Gaelic-based language called Cant… And with their ill-gotten millions they build Southfork-style mansions – and then live in caravans parked in the backyards…

“The Scots Con Clans were founded by Robert Logan Williamson, who landed as an immigrant in the 1890s. His only qualifications to help him prosper in the New World were the survival skills he’d used as a tinker plying his dubious trade around Glasgow and Edinburgh…

“In the Fifties, a tribal elder called “Uncle” Isaac Williamson used to claim “We can trace our blood back to the Picts”… The Williamson Clan became such a target for the police that most changed their last name.”

The name “Con Clan” comes from the fact that men clan members practice home-improvement scams.

The article cites many types of crime but states that a pending court case could be the first to end in one of the Clan being convicted.

Two features of this piece are remarkable. One is the fact that a Scottish newspaper should carrying such references to a Scottish group without conducting a little research into the Scottish Travelling communities which have been such a fruitful source for folklore collectors.

The second is that the description of the travellers should be in terms which are close to racism. Asssume all the accusations are true, would members of any other ethnic group have been described in such hostile terms in a mainstream newspaper?

Angel & Devil on Your Shoulder 6

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

In my first note on this topic, I mentioned a film Angel on my shoulder which at that time I had not seen. It was shown recently on BBC television, which has allowed me to clarify how the concept is employed in this context. The film, released by United Artists in 1946, concerns a dead gangster, played by Paul Muni, who is released from Hell by Mephistopheles, whose aim is to discredit a crusading judge by allowing the gangester to take over the judge’s body. The gangster is attracted to the judge’s fiancee and begins to move away from “bad” to “good” behaviour. They go to a clergyman’s home to ask him to marry them. The clergyman’s is interrupted while composing a sermon. In conversation, he says, in a way which suggests that he is quoting:

“Heed not Mephistopheles, my children, lest you suffer eternal damnation. When he whispers in your ear, turn away your head, and harken instead to the angel on your shoulder.”

The gangster asks: “What if you ain’t got no angel on you shoulder?” To this, the clergyman replies: “You have, if you live right, son”.

Can any reader suggest a source for this quotation?

Note that only the angel is explicitly said to be on the shoulder. Note too that it is Mephistopheles himself, not simple a devil, who is pictured as whispering in the ear. This could be done while sitting on the shoulder, but obviously equally well by a human sized figure standing beside you. Left and right does not appear as a feature in this case.

(The film, which was directed by Archie Mayo, was written by Harry Segall and Roland Kibbee, from an original story by Harry Segall.)

Angel & Devil on Your Shoulder 5

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Jean-Bruno Renard | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

Herge, the celebrated Belgian comic strip artist, has made use of the motif of the Good Angel and Bad Angel which stand on either side of every human being (and even of animals!)

A strip featuring the characters Quick and Flupke, which first appeared in the 1930s, was republished in Archives Herge: Quick et Flupke (Paris – Tournai: Casterman, 1978). When Flupke sees a poster for a Colonial Lottery, A devil appears and expresses the hope that he will buy a ticket. However, an angel reminds him that in his reading book it says that “Money doesn’t bring happiness”. The devil counters by pointing to the lottery slogan “Get money without working”. The angel reminds him of the ennobling power of work. The devil has the last word showing Flupke what work might be – carrying an advertising placard in the pouring rain.

Note that the devil and the angel both ressemble Flupke and are around his height. The devil stands on his left; the angel on his right.

In Tintin au Tibet (Casterman, 1958) the dog Milou (renamed “Snowy ” in English translations) is shown accompanied by a angel and a devil, each of which is portayed as standing on two legs like a human being but having a dog’s head just like Milou.