Greetings Ffordites,

Am I missing something (or did Jasper?), with the unresolved minor sub plot of Big Martin, or was he just a blatant plot device premise?

What, or who showed up at the lighthouse and 'had words' with Aornis?
Was this related to Big Martin, or just left to tease?

Maybe I've missed some reference that Big Martin pertains to.

Could someone enlighten me, so that I can move from the back of the infinitely stupid queue, and push in somewhere around the middle of the partially stupid queue.

I've just realised I may have asked some spoilers and tried to edit accordingly. (Looks like I'll be at the back of the queue for a while longer.)

Thank you.



Post Edited (10-02-03 11:47)

erm.... *this* forum is supposed to have spoilers.

So don't worry :)

Dunno about your issues.... same questions here hehehe

I assumed that Big Martin was a variation on the old shaggy dog story,

A cowboy walks into a crowded salon and orders a whisky. Looking round the room, he sees a single unoccupied chair and walks towards it.
“I wouldn’t sit there” Calls the Barman. “That’s Big Martin’s seat”
(this exchange continues for as long as you can think of new people to say “I wouldn’t sit there; that’s Big Martin’s seat”…)
Suddenly the room darkens as the light from the doorway is blocked. A huge man walks into the bar. His coat is made from the hides of 10 bullocks (etc..etc…)
He walks to the bar and orders a pint of whisky.
Turning round, he scans the room, then leans on the bar. The first cowboy plucks up courage to ask, “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
“No.” the giant replies, “Hasn’t anyone told you? That is Big Martin’s seat”

I first heard it on TISWAS, but Jasper’s version was better.

Jasper confirmed at the launch that Big Martin was from a shaggy dog story so I suppose that is the one, or at least a variation.

As for Aornis and the lighthouse - I took the thing to be Thursday's own 'bogey man' - that 'thing' that scares you and lurks constantly in the back of your mind, coming to consciousness only occasionally even though it doesn't really exist. I have one - for example. our bathroom is downstairs and sometimes if I have to visit it in the night, I can walk down without having to turn on any of the lights and there's no problem.

Other nights - for no logical reason whatsoever - I have to put all the lights on as I go down the stairs, through the kitchen, the utility room and the bathroom. Then, on the way back, it's a deep breath and a run back through all the rooms hitting the light switches on the way until I'm safely back in bed.

If someone asks 'what scares you?', you say spiders, tony blair or whatever - no-one says the thing that lurks in the back of your mind etc. So I reckon that's why Aornis didn't know 'it' was there and therefore it was the only thing that could destroy her power over Thursday.

Drubbing _
Wwelcome to the fforum.

Auntysassy _
I agree with you about who/what it probably was that turned up at the lighthouse.

Everybody _
Did those cats in the Well remind you of the ones in Roger Zelazney's second "Amber" novel, 'The Guns of Avalon'?



Post Edited (10-03-03 19:51)

Auntsassy - you've just made me feel so normal! I do the "all-lights-on-on-the-way-downstairs-leg-it-back-up-turning-them-off" routine. And guaranteed when I'm in that state of mind I always see something move just on peripheral. I think the lighthouse bit was just that sort of manifestation of undefined fear.

jdaxf wrote - "Auntsassy - you've just made me feel so normal!"

Glad to oblige!

Yep... I thought it was a sort of monster-figment-of-imagination thing as well. I wonder what happened to Aornis in the End? ;p She probably got eaten alive >:p

nah, the old leave the outcome unkown gag - the door is open for a further appearance.

In any case, that was just the version of Aornis in Thursday's mind. The real Aornis still awaits when Thursday leaves the bookworld.



--------------
"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

Erm... I know it's a cultural thing but where is the shaggy dog you're referring to in the cowboy joke above?!?
I thought Big Martin was something like the big boss of all cats. He has to exist, hasn't he? After all there were these big pawprints etc.

About the thing in the lighthouse: I agree with Auntysassy and the others that it's some kind of personal scary monster. (When I was little, I often had to do a start-up and jump onto my bed - normal climbing in would have given the thing under the bed the chance to grip my ankles. Later, watching some of the X-Files episodes has scarred my vivid imagination for life, I think...)

:o)

blaubaerin - A shaggy dog story is a long and rambling joke, leading to a cop-out punchline. I think that the original sds may have been along the lines of a search for the world's shaggiest dog, with the punchline "Well, he doesn't look very shaggy to me", but I'm sure that there are many 'original' stories.

From a quick websearch:

The first shaggy dog stories seem to have been variations on a tall tale that was indeed about a shaggy-haired dog. Eric Partridge wrote a little monograph called The ‘Shaggy Dog’ Story, Its Origin, Development and Nature in 1953. He said that “the best explanation of the term is that it arose in a story very widely circulated only since 1942 or 1943, although it was apparently invented in the 1930’s”. The term itself is even more recent than those dates: the first reference I’ve found is to a piece by David Low in The New York Times Magazine in 1945. An obscure collection of shaggy dog stories under that title was published in 1946.
There are many candidates for the original or ur-shaggy dog story. William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, give a version of it that involves an advertisement being placed in The Times to announce a competition to find the shaggiest dog in the world. After a vast amount of effort and investigation (described in detail, after the nature of this type of story), the winning dog was presented to the aristocratic instigator of the competition, who said: “I don’t think he’s so shaggy”.
Eric Partridge gives another version as the original. A grand householder in Park Lane, London, had the great misfortune to lose a very valuable and rather shaggy dog. He advertised repeatedly in The Times, but without luck, and finally he gave up hope. But an American in New York saw the advertisement, was touched by the man’s devotion, and took great trouble to seek out a dog that matched the specification in the advertisement and which he could bring over to London on his next business trip. He presented himself in due course at the owner’s impressive house, where he was received in the householder’s absence by an even more impressive butler, who glanced at the dog, bowed, winced almost imperceptibly and exclaimed, in a horror-stricken voice, “But not so shaggy as that, sir!”

(Stolen from [www.worldwidewords.org])

Thanks a lot for the information, KT and Magda! - But (there always has to be a 'but' *g*) I still don't quite get the link between Big Martin and the shaggy dog story, I'm afraid...

blaubaerin feeling a bit stupid

The story about the cowboys waiting for Big Martin in the KT's post above is an example of the genre of 'shaggy dog stories'. Or rather it would be, if told in it's complete and verbose form. Most shaggy dog stories take at least 15 minutes to tell, and the punch line is never worth the amount of time you spend waiting for it.

In both the original joke and WOLP, you keep thinking Big Martin has arrived, and then discovering that you're wrong.

So apparently the great library contains books of bad jokes.

Wouldn't shaggy dog come under the oral tradition? In which case, was Big Martin at the protests?

Ooohhhh....good point.

Well, I was going to say that since Big Martin never actually appears in the story, he might not actually exist. Except it ocurred to me that Godot never appears in "Waiting for Godot" either, and he obviously does/did exist, and work for Jurisfiction.

H'mmm, I wonder whether Big Martin (secretly?) works for JurisFiction too ? :-)

Dunno....if he's really that big you'd have thought Thursday would have noticed him at one of the meetings.

Big Martin doesn't do meetings... :-)