Once upon a time a engineer had a monkey and everywhere he go why he’d take the little monkey along and so the monkey would watch everything the engineer would do so one day the engineer had to go get him something to eat and so the monkey got tired of waiting so he thought he’d try out the throttle and down the road he went.

Once upon a time there was an engineer
Drove a locomotive both far and near
Accompanied by a monkey that sit on the stool
Watchin’ everything that the engineer move

One day the engineer wanted a bite to eat
He left the monkey settin’ on the driver’s seat
The monkey pulled the throttle, locomotive jumped the gun
And made ninety miles an hour on the main line run

Well the big locomotive just in time
The big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind

Engineer begin to call the dispatcher on the phone
Tell him all about how is locomotive was gone
Get on the wire, the dispatcher to write
Cause the monkey’s got the main line sewed up tight

Switch operator got the message in time
There’s a north bound limited on the same main line
Open the switch, gonna let him in the hole
Cause the monkey’s got the locomotive under control

Well the big locomotive right on time
Big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind
Left the engineer with a worried mind

It’s not just any old folk song, it’s a Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller song. [Do read about him, he's a fascinating character].

Then, take that song and make it even more popular: make sure that the Grateful Dead play it regularly. In fact make sure they play it 31 times. For good measure, make sure that Bob Dylan also plays on it with them.

My thanks to dead.net for the wonderful photograph of Jerry above.

To make it a little more interesting, make sure someone, David Opie, writes an award-winning book about the song.

So now you have the song. The lyrics. The book. Some dead people. And some Dead people. And some alive people.  Make sure someone makes a video about the song/book/whatever it is by now. In fact go one better, make the video using Lego pieces.

Then get your children to draw what they see.

Song. Book. Video. A bit of Lego thrown in. More people involved than you can shake a stick at.

I think the Copyright Police should try and work stuff like this out every day. Because they’re going to have to.

First off we had the almost-rained-off first day’s play at Edgbaston for the Third Ashes Test. [Now for people who don't know anything about cricket, that's a biennial cricket match between England and Australia]. Play was scheduled to begin at 11am; it rained all day; play did begin at around 5pm. But in the meantime:

The Caroline of Brunswick article in Wikipedia took a mighty hammering, despite stout defence from William Avery, who did everything possible to justify his Senior Editor with Platinum Editor Star status. [Incidentally, I now have a new ambition. To become a Complete and Perfect Tutnum of the Encyclopaedia. It was a joyous morning without a ball being bowled, with edits blazing from end to end, so much so that Caroline of Brunswick was rumoured to have become the 5th most searched item on Google that afternoon.

Not quite the place to look for humour. But hey, this is the internet, where anything’s possible. Laughter in the TMS inbox I could believe, but in an article on Caroline of Brunswick?

Then, today, thanks to Chris Brogan, I found an unlikely streak of humour in an even more unlikely place: The Mountain Men’s Three Wolf Moon Short Tee Shirt.

No, it’s not on the t-shirt. Just take a look at the reviews of the item on Amazon. 136 customer reviews. 13,171 finding the first review helpful. 181 comments on that review. Don’t stop there, you must take a look at some of the other reviews. Preferably while sitting down in a comfortable position.

Culture comes in many shapes and forms; the internet is a land of wondrous promise as people find old and new ways to do old and new things. If we let them.

Zeuglodont: A type of carnivorous whale. Now extinct. Also referred to as phocodontia.

Aristology. A word I first came across when I was about ten, when I started reading Rex Stout. Although Stout first used it in Three At Wolfe’s Door, that was not where I happened upon it. It was when I was reading The Doorbell Rang, surely one of the ten best mystery novels ever written.

It was in the reading of Nero Wolfe that I developed a keen interest in food, in all aspects of food. And, I daresay, sometime in my life I will start growing orchids for similar reasons.

What has any or all of this to do with Twitter? It’s like this. Some time ago, during the debate on continuous partial asymmetry triggered by James Governor’s post, Stu Berwick, an old friend and colleague, made a crucial comment. By keeping it short and to the point, he crystallised something that everyone knows but not everyone appreciates. Twitter is both a communications medium as well as a publishing platform.

Now for me one of the ways of testing something as a publishing platform (as opposed to a communications medium) is the depth of language used, the breadth of subjects covered. So I started “testing” Twitter. What I did was enter “random” words into Twitter search, and observe the results. I converted that into a game. The rules were simple:

1. I had to know the word and what it meant
2. It had to be a word that had found its way into the language proper, as opposed to one that was “technically” included, that made its way only because it formed part of an obscure branch of science.
3. The number of results returned had to be zero.

I read a lot. I have been reading voraciously for over forty years. I read widely. And I have a good head for words, coupled with a decent memory. Years of playing around with crosswords and Scrabble have, if anything, sharpened my vocabulary.

Yet it took me several attempts before I found a zero. Aristology was my best for some time, with just one result returned, until I tried zeuglodont. Bugloss returned two, which was pretty good.

Try it. You’d be amazed at just what Twitter already contains. Which bodes well for its existence as a publishing platform, despite the number-of-characters limit.

[Why would I even know a word like zeuglodont? Simple. The way I remember words is by remembering their size and “shape”, where the shape is a pattern represented by the consonant-vowel sequence. When I try and recall a word, the first thing that comes to me is the size of the word. Then sequences of letters come. And finally the whole word emerges. That process is not alphabetical, although I can sometimes help it by going through the alphabet once I have the word’s length and shape. -UGLO- is a very unusual shape in this context, occurring only in two words as far as I know, bugloss and zeuglodont.

A mashup involving Google Earth, local time and Santa Claus. So that you can show your children precisely where Santa is at a given time. [The rest of the year, Santa lives at the North Pole, located just off 1 Infinite Loop, where his elves make iPhones, iPods and Macs].

My thanks to Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid; his tweet brought this to my attention.

Randall Munroe is a truly gifted individual. We need to knight him. Or something.

So make a New Year’s resolution you’ll actually keep to. Read xkcd every day. You won’t regret it.

My thanks to Dawn Foster for tweeting it to my attention. [By the way, Dawn, I'm still jealous. Still haven't met anyone else whose blog is an anagram of their name!]

• The Alexandra Burke version, the X Factor winner’s single (likely to be No 1)
• The Jeff Buckley version, the one that people my age think is the best version (likely to be No 3)
• The original Leonard Cohen version, which I still stay loyal to (likely to be No 30 or so)

Three versions of the same song in the charts, twenty-four years after the original was released. Who’da thunk it?

Why was I smiling? Because an imp of mischief got to me. I began to wonder. Shall we use the web to make the Jeff Buckley version number 1? Against all odds? Wouldn’t it be a fitting posthumous tribute to a master musician? Wouldn’t it be more of a good thing for the songwriter? And wouldn’t it be a fun thing to try?

So. Are we up for it? Can we make the Jeff Buckley version number 1?

Incidentally, there have only been two instances where number 1 and number 2 were by the same artists (the Beatles in 1964 and Usher in 2004). There has never been an instance where No 1 and No 2 are the same song, by two different people. We have the chance to help make history while having some fun across different generations: I cannot imagine anyone buying both versions next week….

Polonius, Hamlet, Act II Scene II

I had the good fortune to see the recent RSC production of Hamlet last night. And I really enjoyed it. When I looked around the theatre, there were many youngsters about, including a few of my own. I could not help noticing how bored many of them looked. Bored because they didn’t understand what was going on, bored because they’d never been exposed to the plot.

I guess this was somewhere at the back of my mind this morning, when I took a break from preparing my preach for tomorrow. Whatever the reason, I decided to try and summarise Hamlet in 140 characters, see if I could encapsulate the play in a single tweet:

That was my first attempt. So if you’re feeling bored or creative or mischievous or whatever sometime over the next few weeks, see what you can come up with. Then tweet it, using the hashtag #TwitBard

This isn’t meant to be a literary exercise, there’s nothing serious about it. Just a bit of fun if you feel like it.

We like wacky themes. For example, when my wife turned forty, she chose the theme “Come as what you wanted to grow up to be when you were a child”. That led to some great entries, the winners being a couple in their twenties who came brilliantly “aged” as people in their 80s. When the theme was to “come as the opposite of you”, I went as a skinhead. Which was fine, up to a point. This was in the early 1980s, and most of the costume was easy to get hold of. I even managed to buy a plastic thingummybob to cover my hair, a skin-coloured skull-cap-like thing. But it was meant for someone whose skin colour was not my skin colour, and changing that was hard.

Most of the time, I try and go as a hippie; the family are used to it. I’m strange that way.

But I digress. Suffice it to say that we like dressing up in costumes.

Now as you know I come from India; when I first entered the West, I could not get over the kind of pampering that pets received, in terms of food and beds and toys and even shampoos. As a child I was told that the USA and the UK spent more on pet food than on aid, and I believed it. And since I’d been brought up to believe that a dollar of trade was worth a hundred dollars of aid, I was pretty relaxed about it.

Like most families with children, we’ve had canaries and budgies and hamsters and goldfish over the years. When it comes to serious pets, it’s been about cats; we have two great cats, Mudpie and Midnight, inherited from friends who’ve emigrated to the US, and a kitten, Tiger. Here’s a shot of the three of them quietly observing an interloper in the garden.

And here’s one of the kitten on his own. Sometimes he gets left out of things, because Mudpie and Midnight are sisters and they go back a long way. But he doesn’t let that get to him:

I hope by now to have established that (a) we love fancy dress as a family and (b) we’re used to pets. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for this, very topical, juxtaposition of the two:

What can I say? Politics makes strange bedfellows. Hat tip to Sarah J-L for the tweet that led me to the photo, which is to be found here.

It was an inflection point for me. Until then, I had always thought of poets as creative people who expressed themselves in verse when caught by the muse; as artists who penned off heaps of poems in seconds flat as and when the mood took them. I had never considered the possibility that some poets worked at structure and tone and metre and scansion. A whole new world opened up for me, suddenly and with no warning, a world I liked as much as the world of “normal” poetry. I loved it, there was something satisfying in knowing that some poetry was worked on with perspiration rather than created by inspiration, without effort.

As a result of looking for the unusual in poetry, I found out more, not just about mnemonics and acrostics in verse, but also about satire. I learnt to enjoy Joyce Kilmer’s Trees (I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree/A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast) while still being able to enjoy Ogden Nash’s variant Song of the Open Road (I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree/Indeed, unless the billboards fall/I’ll never see a tree at all). Similarly, I could enjoy the Lewis Carroll Father William as much as the Robert Southey one. And all because my father introduced me to Alliteration, or the Siege of Belgrade. [At least that was how the AA Watts poem was taught to me].

Which brings me to this BBC article that told me about Christian Bok’s Eunoia. A book of five chapters, with each chapter dedicated to the use of one vowel and no more than one vowel. Gimmicky? Artificial? Yes, but so what? It’s the kind of offbeat thing I enjoy.

Incidentally, while looking for the Siege of Belgrade piece (which I found here, my thanks to Poet’s Corner), I also came across this offbeat site, Abecedaria, which introduced me to the delights of Tamil unicode. Now I must admit it never occurred to me to Google that.

Wasilla’s all I saw

If that was not enough, he went further: he called it a Palin-drome.

Which had me on the verge of snorting green tea out my nostrils in ways God never intended nostrils to be used. Thank you Chris.

You know something? I had absolutely no idea what the etymology for “palindrome” was, so I had to look it up. The -dromos was not the problem, but the palin- sure was. And guess what? Palin is Greek for “back”. Figures.

The wikipedia article does a reasonable job of describing pretty much everything you need to know about palindromes, so if you’re curious or bored go take a look here.

The article also mentions my favourite, apparently said of de Lesseps:

A man. A plan. A canal. Panama.

While on the subject of word games and puzzles, I belong to a generation where learning to type was a normal thing to do. And, particularly when one was young, it meant hammering away at holoalphabetic sentences, sentences that contain every letter in the alphabet.

The commonest one was “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” 35 letters. And that was beaten by “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”. 32 letters. Pretty good going, I thought, using 26 letters with only six duplicates, while still making sense.

Letter-crazy kids like me were naturally interested in being the first to get to the ultimate, a 26 letter holoalphabetic sentence.

Sadly, even before I entered my teens, it was done: CWM FJORD-BANK GLYPHS VEXT QUIZ. Translated as Drawings on a fjord bank in a valley confused the expert. Or so they tried to convince me. And they did, enough for me to stop trying.

Anyone got any better palindromes to share, discounting those already in Wikipedia? Anyone got any better holoalphabetic sentences to share? Do let me know.