I am adamant that i have read a tale of nursery crime entitled Who Killed Cock Robin, done Jack Spratt muder investigation style based around the nursery rhyme of Who Killed Cock Robin, i think it may be by Margaret Duffy but i am not certain. Does anyone know anything about this? Does JFf himself know anything about this?

I have vague recollection about this too. Hang on! goggle check...

Yes, written by Margaret Duffy and part of a series of murder mysteries all with bird titles (A murder of crows; Gallows Bird; etc). Gotta love these mystery books with the 'title theme' thing.

Yes, I find a good title to be very hard to resist. There's a series of Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries by Tamar Myers; I haven't read any yet, but they all have tremendously clever titles like "Too Many Crook Spoil the Broth" and "Eat, Drink, and Be Wary". I mean to see sometime if the books can live up to their names. Does anyone here know them?

I am also very much enjoying Simon Hawke's new Shakespeare and Smythe mysteries ("A Mystery of Errors", "The Slaying of the Shrew", "Much Ado about Murder" so far). Extremely entertaining dialogue, for a start.

humilitas

"Excuse me, are you in my way?"

The Penn-Dutch mysteries are my favourite mystery series! They are absolutely fantastic. The heroine is Magdalena Yoder, who is a Mennonite Inn Keeper with serious attitude! I love her. I've tried a couple of the recipes (Shoofly Pie, yummo!) Highly recommended books.

Another favourite series is the 13BC series by Marilyn Todd. It's set in 13BC (Funny that) Rome and has a fiesty heroine who also has major attitude. But whereas Magdalena is a nice Christian with a down-take-that-tone-with-me attitude, Claudia has a get-the-hell-out-of-my-way attitude.

I'm a sucker for a clever title as well -- that's how I got into Christopher Brookmyre's books (they're mystery/thriller books, too -- what is it about the genre?)

His books include "Quite ugly one morning", "A big boy did it and ran away" and "Boiling a frog".

And they're actually quite good, if a bit bloody



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Damn, blast and damn! Who is this Simon Hawke, and when did he start intercepting my ideas?!



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"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious or the already said, but Agatha Christie based a murder mystery around a nursery rhyme back in the 50s - 'A Pocket Full of Rye', which was based loosely around 'Sing a Song of Sixpence'.

I think it was later published in America as 'And Then There Were None', presumably because the original title was felt to be too confusing for American audiences or something equally nonsensical (akin to the film 'The Madness of King George III' having a third chopped off the title on US release in case people thought it was the third in an ongoing series of films - I mean, hello?!?)



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* I'm backing the campaign to get the official Stalker for 2007 evicted *

PS thinking about it, wasn't 'And Then There Were None' a retitling of 'Then Little Indians' which had originally been ten little something else's altogether which we shouldn't really mention in this enlightened day and age? And didn't Agatha Christie also write a book called 'One Two Buckle My Shoe' or was that ANOTHER alternative American title to something else altogether?

Oh, I'm so confuddled.... time for my nap I think!

While on this subject, I have in my collection an absolutely hilarious short story by Neil Gaiman in which "Little" Jack Horner investigates whether Humpty Dumpty really did fall off the wall or whether there was anything more sinister going on. It contains allusions to most nursery rhymes you can think of, and it's written in the style of Raymond Chandler. Check out the Queen of Hearts!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Sadly enough, I'm told that American test audiences for "The Madness of King George III" actually did come out and say they enjoyed the movie, but thought they would have gotten more out of it if they'd seen the first two. Sigh. Sometimes being an American is embarassing.

What's truly depressing is watching the "Jaywalking" segments on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He goes out on the streets asking people (mostly younger than me) questions about history and current events, and airs the most ludicrous answers.

For example, did you know that Pearl Harbor was attacked by China in 1967? And I've got a mental block on when someone claimed Columbus 'discovered' America, but I believe it was some time after the American Revolution, and possibly even after the American Civil War.

From someone elses webpage:

Last week, Leno’s crew went to the University of New Mexico, where one student said the French Revolution was fought in England. Another knew that former Vice President Dan Quayle couldn't spell “potato,” but couldn’t spell the word either. Someone thought Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman in space, while someone else thought she was the first woman to swim the English Channel (she is, in fact, the first female supreme court justice).

And from another page:

the feature where Leno goes out onto the street, in Burbank or on a college campus, and asks passersby elementary questions about history, government, and geography.

Invariably, people give answers indicating substantial ignorance about how the world works, who did, what, and why things are the way they are.

The Civil War was fought in the 17th century. Rudy Giuliani invented the radio. The Mayflower Compact had something to do with a moving van.

In this video village, everyone's the village idiot.

The segment is fun to watch in a bone-chilling sort of way, what with these people constituting a part of the electorate, and our economic fate turning on their ability to compete with the well-schooled populations of China, Germany, and India.

Part of the fun is the role Jay plays through it all, that of a responsible, erudite citizen, one who, along with the viewing audience, knows all the answers, because, come on, they are so fundamental. So the joke is between Jay and us, nodding at the stupidity of the people who step up to the microphone, and seem so unapologetic about their stupidity as they try to explain what continent Canada is on.

And from yet another page:

Jay Leno went Jaywalking during a now archived "Tonight Show" and asked an ordinary woman on the street if she knew how it happened that the faces of four of our greatest presidents were on the side of Mount Rushmore.
The unassuming woman said the faces on Mount Rushmore were caused by erosion. "Zillions of years of wind and rain."
She had no answer when Leno asked how the wind and rain knew to put a beard on Lincoln.

During another Jaywalking episode a man in his 20s claimed he read the Bible once and that Jonah built the ark but it went down in flames.

There was also a guy who insisted that Hitler did not have a first name. "He was just Hitler. Like Cher."



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"I've often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around."
--Ross Smith

Oh dear <bangs head on wall repeatedly>



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

I, too, feel embarrassed when I watch "Jaywalking" and I have sworn that my future children will never be that ignorant. Even if I have to strap them to a chair and make them regurgitate it back to me a zillion times until they remember it! That and I will teach them not to take part in street interviews by late-night talk show hosts! LOL

But the Civil War was fought in the 17th Century . . .

(hee hee)



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

I bet I'm the only person here who has a CD of the early Genesis album 'Nursery Cryme'. I've got no shame.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I know someone who has all the genesis albums. All of Steve Hackett's stuff too.

*All* of them? Even (ulp) Abacab? Has this person sought help?



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Ah, Guy, you make me proud. I'd wondered if anyone would pick up on that little irony.

While it is granted that *your* civil war was in the 17th century, *ours* was in the 19th. We weren't even a country yet in the 17th century.

But somehow, I don't think the people in question were making that particular mistake. In fact, I bet if you asked them who the "Roundheads" were they'd think they were from a Saturday Night Live skit.

Well I didn't really think they were talking about our (ie English) civil war -- I was just being mischieeveous.

Actually, it's not even particularly accurate to talk about 'the English Civil War'. Firstly there were three wars in a row -- the First Civil War, aka the Great Rebellion (a misnomer as the King started it), aka the Great Civil War (fair do's) in 1642-1645/6, followed by the Second Civil War in 1648 and the Third Civil War in 1650-1651. And to describe any of them as an "English Civil War" is ignoring the fact that Scotland was involved all three times (and Wales, but we're used to ignoring them!). And about half of the Royalist forces in Scotland in 1645/6 were Irish! And there were Scots and English pro-Parliamentarian forces fighting the Catholic Irish in Ireland too (though that's usually reckoned to be a separate but related conflict, as the causes were rather different).

I could bore for England on this subject, you know -- it's one of my favourite periods of history. Not least because it includes the "English Revolution" -- which wasn't actually yet another civil war as such, it's a portmanteau term used to describe the various radical religious and political movements that emerged in the confusion and chaos generated by the First Civil War (so roughly 1646-49).

These included the Levellers, the Diggers (who called themselves 'the True Levellers' and were essentially 17th century anarcho-syndicalists!), the Ranters, the Family of Love and the Quakers (one of the few movements from the period that's still around.) One of the fascinating things is that all these groups were essentially movements of the labouring classes, and many of their political ideologies were remarkable sophisticated or modern-sounding. For example, the Diggers believed in complete equality of the sexes, which is not something you come across very often in 17th-century Europe.

Most of the ideas and events of the period are not that well documented, and what we do know is mostly drawn from the accounts of Cromwell's officers trying to suppress them (most of the leading Levellers were common soldiers in Cromwell's army). But if anybody's interested there's a really good book about the period by Christopher Hill, called 'The World Turned Upside Down', published by Penguin I think.

Right I should probably stop boring you all now . . .



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Evesham's contribution to the civil war appears largely to have been to pay a fine of 1,000 bootsfor not destroying the bridge.

The UK also has too much history to make straightforward names for events possible. As well as 'the' civil war, there was also the Jacobean rebellion, the Monmouth uprising...

And why don't any of the various Scottish problems count as a civil war? Apart from the fact there was nothing terribly civil about them?



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

And the War of the Roses? Stephen and Matilda? King John v. the Barons? (TKO)? and GSD knows how many other 'civil wars', though at what point a rebellion becomes a civil war is difficult to say. Of course the USAians have had two civil wars; what they are pleased to call the American Revolution was nothing of the sort, and 'Americans' fought on both sides quite as much as they did in the War of Secession. (BBC2 9.00 pm tonight, good prog all about it, btw).

I suspect that why both our and the USAian late unpleasantnesses became known as *the* Civil War is because they were the last one (so far) in each case, rather as for most of us still The War means WW2. Although when people in Arkansas say 'before the war' they generally mean pre-1860, even yet.

As for the Diggers, Putney is one of those places where nothing interesting has happened since (rather like Deptford, which disappears from history after Marlowe's little spat with Mr. Frizer).

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"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" - Leveller slogan