Manifest

What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!

Fish

While searching for confirmation of the animals the Vatican had reclassified as fish so that they could be eaten during fasting - capybaras, sea turtles, beavers and barnacle geese, allegedly - I was more taken with this video of capybaras placidly stealing cabbage from a curmudgeonly swan.



As you would be.

Phenakistoscope

From, via.

Conflict

All of Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea are available on Youtube, for now. I love these things.



They were played as filler on the ABC for years, but it appears I was wrong to think they were made by the same mob who did the glorious claymation The Red and the Blue films, or AEIOU which made animations out of impressions in sand, which were also used to fill gaps in the ABC's schedule.





But that was Francesco Misseri and his company, someone else entirely, who specialise in animation in odd media. As well as clay and sand they use paper, ribbons and water, or so says their website. A later effort, seeming to be another example of the dire spread of CGI (but perhaps not), is Pozzie, a boy who is a water-droplet. Cute but not as amusing, lacking as it does the hilariously infuriated characters of the earlier stuff.



I suspect the attitude is: small children must be spared conflict. Which means they are spared narrative, character and drama, of course. And laughs.

Cap in Hand

Being on hols at present I am even more than usual out of the mainstream news loop, so it was only yesterday I heard about the death of Chopper Read and of the Australian Labour Party.

I kid, I kid: here's why Bill Shorten is entirely suited to be leader of the ALP.

Apparently he was also schooled by Jesuits, which Gerard Henderson, being an utter cretin, thinks proves something.