Butterflies

When thinking of a butterfly most people imagine small delicate creatures with amazing wing colours and patterns. In Britain for instance, there is the Peacock butterfly recognisable by the ‘blue eyes’ on its wings and it is found in gardens, woodlands, parks and coastal areas. The Red Admiral is a big, beautiful butterfly which migrates from North Africa and Continental Europe to British shores over the summer. Another migrant butterfly to Britain is the Painted Lady which flies in from the desert edges of North Africa and the Middle East and can be found in any part of this country.

Butterflies usually live on a liquid diet of nectar which they access from deep within flowers using a long tongue called a proboscis. The buddleia shrub is especially favoured by butterflies and for that reason it is sometimes called the ‘butterfly plant’. Butterflies will also eat ripened or rotting fruit which is turning into liquid making it easier for them to access. There is also the suspicion that rotting fruit such as apples or pears may be turning into alcohol and the butterflies appear to enjoy a few pints in the sunshine - just like humans in the beer garden on a sunny day!

Although some butterfly larvae are carnivorous, they stop this behaviour upon reaching adulthood and begin to eat nectar. However, there are some butterflies that have an almost dark secret where their dietary habits are concerned. These butterflies do not eat nectar for food but are in fact carnivorous and predate on carrion.

In southern England, there is a carnivorous butterfly called the Purple Emperor which feeds on rotting animal flesh primarily in woodland areas. It appears that because of its carnivorous nature, groups of people in July each year, the butterfly equivalents of birdwatching ‘twitchers’, can be found wandering around woodlands leaving out rotting fish, rotting meat, animal corpses and even faeces as bait for the Purple Emperor. According to some Purple Emperor chasers, urine-soaked fox dung is the favourite food bait to photograph this elusive butterfly.

Image of a Purple Emperor butterfly (BBC, 2015)

The Purple Emperor spends much of its time 250 feet up in the oak forest canopy where it defends its space aggressively, even attacking birds if they get too near which is not standard butterfly behaviour! Getting them to ground level can be tricky hence the foul smelling and probably foul-tasting food traps to lure them there. Unfortunately, the Purple Emperor only survives each summer from July to the end of August. However, numbers seem to be rising in part due to conservation efforts particularly in the Southwest of Britain to preserve this stunning butterfly.

In South America there is a butterfly family called the Riodinid which contains around 1300 different types of butterfly. These butterflies are also known as ‘metalmarks’ due to small metal looking marks on their wings. The adult Riodinid butterfly feeds on flowers, mineral deposits in damp sand and mud “puddings” but its favourite food seems to be rotting carrion. In a field study in Ecuador, rotting carrion placed in food traps was the most frequently recorded food source for the Riodinid butterflies. Other types of food bait were used but were not eaten as much as the rotting carrion.

Image of Dyson’s Swordtail (Rhetus dysonii, Riodinid) from Ecuador

It may be that by diversifying its food sources and diet these types of carrion-eating butterflies are more capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions thereby giving their species a better chance of survival in tough times than other non-meat-eating butterflies. The Riodinid is a very successful species and this success may be in no small part to its varied dietary habits.

Another butterfly deemed to be carnivorous is the Harvester butterfly of North America. Some argue that the Harvester is carnivorous at the larvae stage only where it eats hairy aphids. Others indicate it eats hairy aphids as an adult as well. However, the adult Harvester butterfly seems to be from another planet with its alien looking eyes and its larvae seems to possess the face of a monkey as the images below suggest. Either way, the Harvester butterfly is widely considered to be the only carnivorous butterfly in North America.

Images of Harvester Butterfly pupae with ‘face’ and Harvester Butterfly with 'almost ‘alien’ eyes

So, the next time you are in a garden or a park or in the woods, whenever you see a butterfly, just remember, some of those beautiful nectar eating creatures have cousins who eat decaying meat for a living.

Butterfly

Butterfly, butterfly, why do
you flutter by butterfly?
Why don’t you rest
a while, spread your wings,
cool down and let things
wander by.
Open your beauty and smile
in the joy of just being, sitting
there, seeing the day unfold,
bright, brash, bold
in summer’s garden.
Have a sweet drink of nectar
from the buddleia, cornflower
or the aromatic Rambling
Rector rose.
Then rested, refreshed
you can be on your way to
whatever fun and adventures
life conjures up on this
lovely, warm, sunny day.

Thanks for reading and please leave a comment as they are always welcome.

Dermot.

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Butterflies

Williamson Park in Lancaster is a wonderful place to visit with its 54 acres of parkland, woodland walks and sublime views to Morecambe Bay and the Lake District mountains. The Ashton Memorial is beautiful. Unfortunately the cafe at the top is closed for the time being but there are food outlets. Luckily the problems do not extend to the building next to it.

Formerly an Edwardian palm house, the Butterfly House is now a home to Koi carp, terrapins and caterpillars. I prefer to visit in the winter when you can step from cold to very, very warm in a few steps. From Lancashire to the deepest tropics in its trees, twisting vines and waterfalls.

Butterfly House, Williamson Park in Lancaster

And Butterflies. A slow walk amongst some of the world’s most wonderful butterfly species, including the blue morpho, emerald swallowtails and camouflaged owl butterflies. It’s impossible not to take a seat and absorb the special atmosphere. You can view it all from above by way of the twisting staircases to the balconies.

At times you can see butterfly pupae emerging in their glass display case. Learn about the diet and lifecycle of a butterfly from the information boards or talk or listen to one of zoo keepers telling the life story of a butterfly.

I can remember stories about hot houses and conservatories but not actually Butterfly Houses and it seems that the first version of the butterfly house was demonstrated in Guernsey in 1976, when people were invited by businessman David Lowe to walk through a humid greenhouse filled with plants and exotic creatures.

Inside Williamson Park Butterfly House

This idea was taken to the next level by lepidopterist (the term for a person who studies butterflies and moths) Clive Ferrel in 1980, when he set up the London Butterfly House, the first ever entertainment-focused installation which ran from 1981 to 2007. Ferrel went on to establish butterfly farming facilities in places like Costa Rica and Malaysia throughout the mid-1980s, which, according to a study in Conservation and Society, is what really got the attractions off the ground.

From what I can see there are now seventeen Butterfly Houses in the UK.

Nowadays, butterfly houses appear worldwide—from Missouri to Austria and even the Singapore airport—often attached to museums and botanical gardens. Some make their home old buildings; the Schmetterlinghaus in Vienna is part of a 200-year-old group of structures and gardens. While larger, newer facilities has space for even more butterflies; Stockholm’s Fjarilshuset, for instance, holds more than 700 kinds of butterflies in a 3,000-square-foot greenhouse.

Caligo Eurilochus (the owl butterfly from above)

Much to my surprise there are people who suffer from a fear of butterflies. Nicole Kidman isn’t scared of snakes. The Oscar-winning actress is one who has a deep fear of butterflies and moths, a condition known as lepidopterophobia.

She has said that as a child growing up in Australia, she would go to great spans to avoid them. ‘Sometimes when I would come home from school, the biggest butterfly or moth you’d ever seen would be just sitting on our front gate.’ She would climb over the fence, crawl around to the side of the house – anything to avoid having to go through the front gate.

There doesn’t seem to be one separate list of Butterfly Houses in the UK. You can find a list embedded in wiki under Butterfly Houses.

Incidentally, I do think a better name for butterflies is flutterbies.

Butterfly House, Lancaster

On the balcony it was even hotter,
sweat trickling
to the rhythm of piped water
oozing into humid air,
down and around
Oleander and Amorylis,
the Morpho Peleides
and the school trip
watching motionless
as vivid tattoos
on the arm of the Keeper
rose and fell
telling the six month story
of her butterflies,
slowly drawing them in,
an artist,
leaving the Owl till last,
Caligo Eurilochus,
the size of a book.
Seven year olds hid behind hats
while behind the Citrus Tree
I edged down the spiral staircase
absurdly pleased at the show
but also wanting a few minutes alone
in this nave of green stained glass
and its spectral flock.

Until I saw the terrapins,
two grey creatures
shuffling down a channel.
Forty years of crawling
up a red brick channel.

I sat on a bench after the children left,
not moving much, thought flitting.
Rock stars, Keats, Dylan,
Einstein, time, age,
too quick to settle
on the wings of a notebook,
so I left it closed,
a pupae hanging down,
ready to emerge in the café outside.

First published in ‘away’, circa 2010

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Butterflies

I’m sorry, butterflies. The buddleias are in such a sorry state, like the rest of the so-called garden and it’s my fault. I’m not responsible for the lack of rain or the heatwave – did I miss that? – but we went away for weeks on end, leaving plants to look after themselves. Garden neglect. No sooner were we back from our travels south, when we were off in the caravan. We didn’t go far, probably only a half hour walk away from home to Marton Mere for a Haven break. It wasn’t a holiday, though being there made it feel like one. We left our house to the mercy of the company entrusted to replace our damp course. We relaxed with ice creams, beer and whatever was on the menu in the Boathouse, then returned home to a job perfectly done. Thanks, team. Within days we were missing caravan life and quickly organised a trip north to join family and celebrate our wedding anniversary. The garden was beyond all hope, so I left it.

Buddleia, white blooms and quite majestic, fared better than the purple or pink and a few butterflies were enjoying themselves, but not the abundance we’ve known in previous summers. Those summers when we’ve stayed at home and I’ve tended the garden properly.

One dry day when the air was still, I spent time chopping up bramble that had crept along the ground. At last, a path for me to reach the marigolds and dead-head them.

Not a single nasturtium has graced us. Lack of water, so down to my absence again. The grandchildren were fascinated with watching the caterpillars that fed from them, growing from tiny to huge. The survivors would go on to become butterflies. The grandchildren have grown out of the story, ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, but I haven’t. It continues forever in the infant’s library I help to look after.

When I started school, age 4, 1959, my coat peg had a picture of a butterfly above it. Each child could identify their peg by a picture. Children have names, now. I would have recognised my name at the time, but it’s just the way things were done in those good old days.

I found this poem,

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted,
And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said, ‘Do not eat the poor butterfly.’
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing,
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother’s lap.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry 1888 - 1923

The butterfly cross stitch is one of mine, from when I could see what I'm doing.

Thanks for reading, Pam x      

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Wormholes

Really? Okay. They come in two varieties. Do you want the fact first or the fiction?

Fact: There are over 3,000 species of worms globally. Of these, earthworms - 27 known species in the UK - serve a vital purpose by making wormholes (systems of tunnels) in the soil. These wormholes help to aerate and drain soil as well this keeping it healthy. Earthworms have been called the living, breathing engineers of the underworld, and no lesser a figure than Charles Darwin afforded them this accolade:

"It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.”

wormholes on earth (assuredly)

As important as the structural impact of their tunnelling activity (known as bioturbation, my word of the week), is their agency in recycling nutrients through their diet of dead plants, leaves, fungi and bacteria, breaking down organic matter and converting it into rich, friable soil. Bravo earthworms, without whom et cetera et cetera.

Fiction: It is posited by theoretical physicists that tunnels in space-time may be possible, and if they were to exist they would allow rapid movement from one region to another without the need to travel thousands of lightyears to get from a to b; a nip through or short-cut in the convoluted fabric of space-time, if you like.

wormholes in space (allegedly)

That's great as a premise for imaginative flights of science-fiction, but the hard physics of it suggests that even if such wormholes exist, matter may not exit the tunnel in the same state it entered, if it even emerges at all. Not for the faint-hearted. Leave it to the Time Lords.

And then there's Marilyn Monroe, at which point you're possibly wondering how we got here. Think of it as an imaginative wormhole.

For all her (dumb) blonde bombshell sex-appeal persona, Marilyn loved reading, both fiction and poetry. There are over 100 published photographs of her reading books, and these were not simply staged shots. She was a bookworm with a personal collection of over 400 titles, including works by James Joyce (she read 'Ulysses') and Thomas Mann. Her favourite poet was Yeats and she even wrote poetry herself. 

Marilyn Monroe (bookworm)

I found that quite heartening, given a recent report into literacy in the USA suggests that 21% of the adult population is illiterate (can barely read) and 50% have never picked up a book since grade school. 

Maybe it wasn't so surprising that she married one of the leading playwrights of her era, a better proposition than a retired baseball player.

I have an idea for a poem about Marilyn Monroe as a bookworm, but I just haven't had the space-time to develop it yet. It's waiting patiently in some white hole of the Imaginarium, but I'll add it below when it emerges. Right now, just the title will have to suffice.

Book Your Sexy

tbc

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Wormholes

So I’m a bit late for a date, about 20,000 years too late. No problem. Just slip into your local wormhole and you can be there in seconds. Obviously sheer fiction, both for the wormhole and the date.

The ability to ever actually use wormholes as interstellar superhighways seems extremely remote. Yet physics does not close the door completely on the existence of these bridges through space-time says Adam Hadhazy in an article in Live Science published February 22, 2012. He quotes Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon. ‘The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point. No one thinks we’re going to find a wormhole anytime soon’. But what is a wormhole?

theoretical wormhole

Put simply it is a tube through the four dimensions of space-time, potentially connecting two regions vast distances apart. Think of two dots on a sheet of paper that is then folded so the dots overlap. That overlap is your wormhole, and it could theoretically allow for the transfer of matter from dot A to dot B instantaneously, instead of traveling the normal, long way across the sheet.

The science of wormholes dates back to 1916 and followed on from the consequences of Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity when Ludwig Flamm at the University of Vienna realised that the equations behind a black hole have an equal but opposite solution, a ‘white hole’, which cannot be entered from the outside, although things can escape from them. Flamm noticed that the two solutions could be mathematically connected by space-time conduit, and that the black hole entrance and white hole exit could be in different parts of the same universe, even different universes.

Ludwig Flamm

Einstein himself explored these ideas further in 1935, along with the physicist Nathan Rosen, and the two achieved a solution known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge which could pave the way to the possibility of moving colossal distances. However, research by Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose shows that the boundary beyond which gravity’s inexorable pull allows nothing, not even light, to escape.

So, wormholes have been bandied about by scientists for over a century now. They have also been bandied about by novelists and film makers. Perhaps the oldest reference to these cosmic portals can be found in The Meteor Girl, a 1931 book by the American science fiction writer Jack Williamson.

They also figure in a wide range of science fiction films, from Interstellar and the Marvel cinematic universe to various TV series, such as Babylon 5, Farscape, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the longest running sci-fi series of all, Doctor Who and to mark the 25th anniversary of Stargate SG-1, the National Science Museum Science Director Roger Highfield talked to physicist Alexey Milekhin and Stargate advisor, Mika McKinnon.

Mika McKinnon said ‘You get more interesting stories when you have rules that you have to work within – it’s not fun if you can always just magic your way out of a situation and there’s no tension. We were incredibly consistent, not only using real wormhole science but a specific type. Every time we had a new episode, I would go and check if there were any new relevant physics papers. I had about 700 papers by the time we finished.’

Going back to my date there is also the slight problem that time goes more slowly for the traveller in the wormhole so I will have aged mere seconds whilst she would have been 20,000 years older and I’m not sure if the flowers would have lasted.

As for the poem then the following seems so appropriate for these times. It is by Michael Swann, and won the Poetry Society’s Members' Poems Competition in 2008.

A Sort of Ark

I’ve had enough of it,
with everything here
being evicted, poisoned,
cut down,
trapped, netted,
wiped out.
We’re off,
the lot of us,
through a wormhole
to somewhere better.

Well,
not strictly
a wormhole –
I’ve nothing against worms,
some of my best friends are worms,
but you can’t get a whale
through a wormhole.

And the great whales are coming,
believe me,
along with the Siberian tiger,
the red squirrel
the white rhino,
a moth
that no-one has ever heard of,
a marsupial antelope,
a very ugly kind of parrot,
that wonderful tree with buttresses
from Tasmania,
and all the others.
Before it’s too late.

All of us,
scooting off through the whalehole
next Tuesday,

Will you come?

                               Michael Swann

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Giving Up

I know I've written blogs about the Gaza conflict twice before (October 2023 and November 2024) but I'm going to do so again today. Please bear with me It feels like a moral imperative.

Regardless of how we got to this dire situation, with two million displaced Palestinians now at risk of starvation, international pressure must surely force the Israelis to halt this genocidal stranglehold on Gaza, allow the aid trucks to roll in and let the UN humanitarian organisation resume its efforts to distribute water, food and medicines to the people of the Strip. 

I am of the opinion that what we are witnessing is genocide, and that a large faction of the coalition Israeli government would dearly like to annex the Strip as Israeli territory and force the relocation of the Palestinians elsewhere (to Egypt? to Jordan?) They have even voted in principle to proceed with a formal annexation of the West Bank, territory they have held illegally since 1967. But first and foremost must be aid relief for the starving  in Gaza, or the world doesn't have a conscience anymore.

What is equally troubling is that in the wake of the decision by the UK government to declare Palestine Action a proscribed "terrorist" organisation, any member of the public peacefully demonstrating against the actions of the Israeli IDF or the illegal Israeli settlers, and in favour of a Palestinian state, could face arrest and imprisonment. It's as though 1984 has arrived here forty years late, and it's scary.   

I am in favour of an immediate ceasefire. After that can come negotiations to end the war, and I believe it is vital that western nations formally recognise the State of Palestine as part of an eventual 'two nation' solution in the middle east. That to my way of thinking will require the giving up of territory by Israel, at least back to pre-1967 boundaries.

And it should never be forgotten that it was an Israeli terrorist organisation that first commenced a civil war in Palestine after WWII and unilaterally annexed part of the region, expelling nearly a million Palestinians from their homeland, to create the State of Israel in 1948. The UN and western powers failed Palestine's Arab population then, under pressure from the United States. We must not fail again.

I find it difficult to write a poem to order about something as monstrous as what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, but I hope this hits the mark. I must also warn you that because it's a 'concrete' poem approximately in she shape of the Gaza Strip (see above), it may look completely jumbled up unless viewed in landscape mode. Anyway, here goes...

                                                                                                                                                                        Gaza Stripped

                                                                                                                                                         From north to south,

                                                                                                                                                  neither living nor dead

                                                                                                                                          but breathing corpses,

                                                                                                                                   nil by mouth. Dr Josef 

                                                                                                                        Mengele could hardly

                                                                                                                 have managed it better

                                                                                                          this inhumane suffering

                                                                                                   imposed on a population.

                                                                                             Hungry on waking,

                                                                                      walking like sticks

                                                                                their thin shadows 

                                                                         pointing seawards 

                                                                  where Israeli warships

                                                             block aid. Constantly

                                                        defiled. Hungry on

                                                 sleeping, emaciated ribs

                                           encaging hopeless hearts,

                                     huddled into rubble, their

                               shadows at dusk lengthening 

                          eastward across what was once

                     their homeland, before the Nakba.

                    Israeli soldiers fence them in, block aid,

                     shoot down men, women, children, babies

                       desperate for food. The IDF are razing the

                        Gaza Strip, hoping it will be theirs some

                         day, this riviera death camp ripe for

                           redevelopment. Lots are being 

                            reserved already as we view

                             skin and bone newsreels

                               nightly, wringing our

                                 complicit hands

                                     again.                                                            

                                                                               

Those previous blogs on topic are linked here. I urge you to read them too:

Glittering Prize?  (the detailed historical background - part one)

Injustice (the detailed historical background - part two)

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Lancashire Dead Good Poets' August Open Mic Night

Here's notice of our August event on zoom, from 19.30-21.30 BST.

All are welcome. Like it says, email: deadgoodpoets@hotmail.co.uk to book a place to read (or just to listen along). 

I hope you can join us from wherever in the world you are.

Steve ;-)

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Giving Up

Last week I was browsing through the shelves of the Library when my eyes alighted on an Agatha Christie that I’d never heard of, never mind read. I was so excited.

That night I left aside the book I had been reading and started on 'The Big 4'. I lasted two chapters before realising that it was not very good, not a Christie type at all. I looked it up and found that it was written in 1927 and described by Christie in 1942 as "that rotten book". I gave up on it.

In the UK alone it’s reckoned there are 200,000 books published every year. It would be impossible to read all of them, so everyone must have a filter that works for them be it genre, recommendation, prize winners, fiction or non-fiction etc.

I’m guessing that most people who read these Dead Good Blogs have a background of reading and from an early age, in my case from 'The Famous Five’ to this year’s ‘Orbital’ that I loved. This builds up experience and a feel for what I consider will be a good read and so given that and the point about the number of books being published, I feel justified in giving up on books that don’t feel right, from sometimes the first sentence. Not everyone agrees with that and sees it as a sort of moral duty to finish all books they start.

As the topic is Giving Up, it seems appropriate to follow on from the above and give some examples of what books I gave given up on. Before I do that I would like to air a bugbear of mine. I don’t even start books with a Prologue. There, I’ve said it, so on with the fiction books in some sort of my own chronological order.

One of the first such books is Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. I vaguely remember getting through some of the first volume but ground to a halt in total boredom. Then, of course, I needed to be seen with a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ casually resting on the table in that sort of cafe. I did slightly better with Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ and got through the first two volumes before realising I wasn’t that bothered.

Another sort of book that disappointed is the follow on novel from books that have a special place in my heart. Top of that list would be A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Children’s Book’ which although not the immediate book after ‘Possession’ was the first I saw after reading that totally wonderful novel which had/has everything I want in a story and is in my all time top 10 of books whereas ‘The Children’s Book’ I thought was going to be too long, dull and pretentious to get beyond the first few chapters.

A more recent book in a similar vein of being disappointed to the point of giving up on it, which is not the same as not really enjoying it, is the fifth book in Kate Atkinson’s series featuring Jackson Brodie. The first four are quite brilliant and the sixth is fine but ‘Big Sky’ has a start which is baffling and irritating and more than enough for me.

Moving on to non-fiction and I put my hand up to say that I have never been able to finish Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. And heaven know I’ve tried enough times and I’ll probably have another go.

Another author who also writes about physics and I really admire is Carlo Rovelli whose ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ was published in 2014 and has sold well over a million copies. I haven’t actually given up on reading this book as he is such an entertaining writer, more that the book has given up on me. Because he is so good in explaining the Lessons I think I have understood them until later I realise I haven’t and start again.

I’m going to stop there with those few examples as I have just realised that there are many more areas of Bookland that I could cover, such as Travel, History, Biographies etc that I could be here all week.

So onto the poem. I have a sort of Given Up file of poems and this is in it. It is based on Larkin's poem which in itself is a Giving Up sort of poem and so is this:

Is this the Year
(along the lines of Philip Larkin)

What have they done your Mom and Dad
They didn’t mean to but they did
They’ve filled your head with what they had
And what they got for just a quid.

But what they’ve got’s about to turn
And what you’ll get’s a tipping year
You know from Gore you know from Stern
Yet still you screw the atmosphere.

The child is parent to your age
Your parent is the child you’ll stay
So stuff the rest and take your wage
Your kids will hate you anyway.

Terry Q.

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Laugh To The Max

Max was born in 1952. He was the creation of Pericle Luigi Giovanetti, a Swiss draughtsman, painter and illustrator of Italian and French parentage, born in Basel during the First World War. 

Among Giovanetti's earliest commissions were some cartoons which were published in 1951 in the British satirical magazine Punch. These were soon followed by the artist's defining creation, the wonderful Max, a marmot and the main character in a series of homonymous comic strip adventures, published initially in Punch but soon to break out into the wider world.

Max the Marmot by Pericle Luigi Giovanetti

Max was based on Giovanetti's love of the European marmot, then to be found in the hill country of his native Switzerland. (I don't know if there are any left... that could be a poem: 'Are There Still Marmots In Switzerland?') The illustrator depicted his anthropomorphic marmot in a steady stream of witty and wordless cartoons which soon became best-selling books the world over, for Max's humorous mis-happenings transcend the barriers of language, and have amused and delighted children and adults alike for generations now..

I still have a slightly marmot-eared copy of 'The Penguin Max', dated 1962, in which, across a succession of double-page spreads, good-natured but accident-prone Max engages in adventures ranging from four to a dozen story frames, all of which are beautifully sketched and very funny. 

My favourite is probably the strip in which Max writes a letter. I've had to reduce the scale of the scan to fit the blog, but you can probably click on the image to enlarge it and linger over the exquisite detail in each frame. 

Max writes a letter

I'm down south for the week-end, celebrating my elder daughter's birthday, looking through old family photographs and enjoying some time with my grandson, who is now walking. He's the happiest little fellow and a reminder that laughter  (a proper chortle in his case) arrives quite early in a child's development. He's not eighteen months old yet, but clearly finds all sorts of things funny, as did my elder daughter when she was at an even younger age (see below). Happy birthday. 

my elder daughter (and her mum) circa 1987

Today's poem is a steal and an extension from a joke doing the rounds on social media at the moment (for all poets are magpies). It's a marker of the times and an ode to paranoia.

Laughter

This evening I arrived home

to find the wifely one

sitting in the kitchen in the dark

nursing a large glass of white wine.

'Bad day?' I enquired solicitously.

'Not so loud', she replied sotto voce.

'Why are you whispering?' I asked.

Nervously, she enunciated softly

'Alexa reports on everything we say.'

I laughed, but my wife scowled.

 

Then I swear that Alexa laughed quietly, 

Siri, Telegram and Tik-Tok all chortled,

the refrigerator shook with silent mirth,

kettle, microwave and toaster giggled,

while outside the Tesla laughed

and somewhere off in the night

Chinese five spies snickered,

Muttley or a TV chuckled,

Mona Lisa gave a flicker 

of a painted smile as

the credits rolled 

on the floor.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Laughter

Alvy: You add fake laughter with a machine? Do you have any idea how immoral that is?
Max: We tape in front of a studio audience.
Alvy: But nobody laughs because the jokes aren't funny.
Max: Yes, that's why this machine is dynamite.

Alvy watches the editor add laughter, chuckles and applause to awful jokes under Max’s direction

Alvy: (to Editor) Do you have booing on that?

Alvy and Max, scene from Annie Hall

That was Woody Allen as Alvy and Tony Roberts as Max from the film Annie Hall and sums up the split between the studios and actors such as David Niven who said in a 1955 interview, “The laugh track is the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of, and it will never be foisted on any audience of a show I have some say about”.

There were some radio shows in the 30s and 40s that used canned laughter but not many, for instance, when Bing Crosby began pre-recording his show – which allowed his engineers to add or subtract the laughs in post-production.

And then came Charley Douglass who didn’t like the laughter he was hearing. The sound engineer, who was working at CBS in the early days of television, hated that the studio audiences on the US TV channel’s shows laughed at the wrong moments, didn’t laugh at the right moments, or laughed too loudly or for too long and began amping up or tamping down laughter recordings according to the effect he wanted, rather than relying on audiences’ natural reactions. 

Charley Douglass

He soon made a machine full of taped laugh tracks (according to historians, recorded mainly during dialogue-free sequences in a programme, The Red Skelton Show) that would evolve to become the industry standard after Douglass’s laugh-track debut in 1950 on The Hank McCune Show.

Douglas’s machine, known in the industry as the ‘laff box’ – was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Douglass used a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter to select the corresponding style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, general laughs and belly laughs.

the Laff Box

Rather than being simple recordings of a laughing audience, Douglass's laughs were carefully generated and mixed, giving some laughs detailed identities such as "the guy who gets the joke early" and "housewife giggles" and "the one who didn't get the joke but is laughing anyway" all blended and layered to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show in question. A man's deep laugh would be switched for a new woman's laugh, or a high-pitched woman's giggle would be replaced with a man's snicker.

In the UK all of the BBC’s comedies, such as Are You Being Served? had laugh tracks. But in the 1980s, the laugh track’s hold on UK comedies began to falter, following The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s abandonment of the device. The political satire show Spitting Image filmed its first episode with a studio audience at the insistence of broadcaster ITV, then ditched it too.

Spitting Image

So canned laughter is pretty well defunct now and thank heavens for that.

As for laughter in terms of poetry there are many poets that can make me smile but very few who can make me laugh, and especially, make me laugh every time I read the poem. Off the top of my head I’d say Dorothy Parker and Billy Collins as examples.

This is one I wrote years ago but given that it hopes to raise a laugh and relates to the current season so I can only use it once a year here it is:

Allergy (Written in a Country Churchyard)

The pollen tells the tale of parting day
The flowing nose winds slowly to a sneeze
The tissue upward prods its weary way
And leaves are worlds of darkness in a wheeze.

First published in Purple Patch 2004ish

Terry Q.

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