Six Things, Volume 84

Scarry | Coral | Road | Colour | Cookie | Words

Thing 1 – Scarry

Hallowe’en came and went, and of course I thought of Linus, waiting patiently in his sincere pumpkin patch for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.

Growing up in Oxfordshire in the 1970s, the whole Hallowe’en palaver – pumpkins, trick-or-treating, general spookiness – was almost completely alien to me. Like summer camp, ice hockey, psychiatry and Willie Mays, it was American¹, and only known at all through my relentless reading and re-reading of Peanuts.

No, this time of year was strictly reserved for short-lived sparklers, damp Catherine wheels and half-raw ash-infused baked potatoes. Tradition is a wonderful thing.

SIDEBAR: Hallowe’en also always reminds me of this sketch by the peerless John Finnemore, who is now on Substack.

Fascinated though I was by every iteration of the running Great Pumpkin gag (it was the gag that was running, not the Great Pumpkin – now that would have been worth staying up for), it never once occurred to me to wonder exactly what differentiates a sincere pumpkin patch from an insincere one. It is of course exactly this kind of ignorance that got Linus so exercised, and only serves to underline the many fundamental differences between us. Linus was thoughtful, analytical, slightly pompous; I just meandered through childhood hoovering up whatever came into my immediate vicinity without questioning. (The slight pomposity, for those poised to comment, came later.)

Another American thing that I loved and completely failed to analyse was the work of Richard Scarry. I rejoiced in the existence of his wonderfully detailed world, and could lose myself in it for hours, but while I looked at the pictures over and over and over again (don’t forget to look for Goldbug!), I certainly didn’t think deeply about them or search for any hidden meaning. It was a charming, warm, comforting universe, and definitely not a brutally dark one in which pigs were butchers selling bacon and sausages.

Porcine cannibalism wasn’t the only thing in Scarry’s world that went unexamined – in fact, the non-humanness of the characters barely registered. They were simply my friends and companions – heroic Huckle, naughty Bananas Gorilla and his many watches, brave Sergeant Murphy, and of course the lovely, unlowly Lowly Worm.

All this was prompted by this really nice piece about Scarry by artist Chris Ware.

“Richard Scarry somehow made me feel safe and settled.”

“Like Charles Schulz’s early experiments drawing actual adults in Peanuts (the effect of which is psychedelic), Scarry’s humans feel just, like, wrong.”

Thing 2 – Coral

Until a few days ago I knew nothing about the annual spawning of coral reefs.

Today, thanks to a post by Trish Greenhalgh, I know a little more. Specifically, I know that it’s a beautiful and glorious thing to see, simultaneously calming and awe-inspiring (as so often with nature videos on here, I add the caveat that it’s best viewed with the sound turned down, my personal view being that music most often adds nothing to the footage and is more likely to detract from the experience. Your view may of course vary, so if you want to watch with the sound turned to 11, knock yourselves out.)

If you want a bit more than “ooh look, pretty!”, you can read this basic guide to coral spawning. And here’s a fascinating piece about efforts to train coral to spawn on demand.

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Thing 3 – Road

Happy Birthday to the M1, opened 65 years ago today.

Well, not all of it. Just the bit from Watford (junction 5) to Crick (junction 18). The rest followed shortly after.

Incidentally, fans of mortality maths will be excited/dismayed to learn that 65 years before that (or at least 65 years and a day, to be absolutely correct) the reign of Tsar Nicolas II started. Time flies like a banana, as the saying so nearly has it.

While I’m not really the kind of person who gets excited about roads, I was drawn to the Pathé footage covering the event. There’s the timeless classic, Motorway Open Soon. (I note in passing that some of the footage was shot from the middle lane, in the process laying the ground for a long tradition of terrible driving.)

The second in the Motorway franchise, Motorway At Last!, must surely compete with Godfather 2 and Toy Story 3 for the award Best Movie Sequel Ever.

A lot of the pleasure of these old newsreel footage lies in the music, which in this case sets the tone of breathless excitement and drama so familiar to modern motorway users – there’s nothing like jaunty brass fanfares and scurrying strings to invoke the familiar motorway experience of sitting motionless in a 12-mile contraflow in the pissing rain while being kicked in the back by a six-year-old.

All movie franchises spawn related productions, and the Motorway series was no exception. 110 Miles? Just A Walk! reports on a long-distance walking race (it was won by Barbara Moore, who was not only a committed walker and the Soviet Union’s 1932 long-distance motorcycling champion, but a fervent adherent of breatharianism).

The most startling section of the film, and a perfect illustration of how unimaginably things have changed in 65 years, features people walking blithely – gaily, even – in the slow lane and central reservation of the M1 as traffic thunders past just feet away from them.

The past, as I think I’ve said before, is a foreign country.

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Thing 4 – Colour

Following on from the brief exploration of colour back in Volume 76, (not to mention the Mushroom Colour Atlas of Volume 77) I note with enormous pleasure that someone (Nicholas Rougeux, to be precise) has made an online version of Abraham Gottlob Werner’s seminal 1814 work Nomenclature of Colours, which was updated seven years later by Patrick Syme, and used as reference by Darwin on his travels.

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Thing 5 – Cookie

Courtesy of the consistently excellent Shaun Usher, here is the best ransom note ever written.

“ME HAVE COOKIE. YOU WANT COOKIE.”

Thing 6 – Words

Here’s a fun game for a laugh-ter is the best medicine ball-room with a view to a kill-joy in the morning has broken glass half full time flies like an arrow.

Ahem.

Word Association is a simple game. You are shown a word. All you do is enter the first single word that enters your head on reading it.

Inevitably, I think of this sketch.

For which there is, should you need it, a transcription here.

1. Readers from Scotland and Ireland will at this point be jumping up and down shouting ‘but guising!’ Your objection has been noted and will be dealt with in due course. You are number 389 in the queue.