A few posts ago (618) I wrote about The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry, and I featured a particularly gormless, mawkish and pathetic example. 618-ulterior-motives.html I had to provide my own scholarly footnotes* to help my dear readers*. Yes. I also tagged on at the end a reference to a shocking clonker of a mistake that happened ..... an upcoming author got an email suggesting that she should write a book .. The Penguin Book of Bird Pottery. And she did. She spent over a year trawling the archives, visiting museums and galleries all over the world, and another year writing the book. She was most surprised to get an urgent email .. which was sent by the baffled and flummoxed publisher who wanted to know what had happened. He was, of course, expecting a collection of Bird Poetry, not Bird Pottery. That's the problem with predictive text ... if you don't check it, it'll wreck it. Red faces all round,emails flying to and fro, and an extremely irked author with an unwanted book. BUT ...having got that far, they decided to go ahead and publish it ... which they did...to great success ... well, reasonable sales anyway. Phew ! After all, who can forget " Ant Hunting in Nepal" ? It was supposed to be " Plant Hunting in Nepal" but it was a bad line when they rang the author. They BOTH got published though, and the "Ant" version won several awards. You might think "that sort of thing" couldn't/wouldn't happen ... but it does. Here's a few "magnificent" examples ... * * If anyone knows why they're called " footnotes", please let me know.
* If you want MORE footnotes, get in touch right away, while stocks last. There might well be shortages*, what with Brexit* looming. * Brexit, the "new" "improved" breakfast treat. It might give you a few dodgy "grumblebum" nights, but before you know it, you'll be dead ! Sorted. * Why do we never hear about "longages" ? I'm sure they happen all the time * Not actual size, obviously. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This next bit is the "answer" to a puzzle I'll write in the future... ... well, a partial answer .... I 've decided to write a quite rambling poem in this cold November that's freezing the phloem my first bird today was a Great black-backed Gull ABC and the second, Black-headed, which some would think dull BCD I was doing quite well, when a Black-throated Diver CDE swam into view, so I bet a fiver that the next one we'd see would have to be a Red-breasted Flycatcher, soon spotted by me DEF it was hopping about in a Mulberry bush 'till a White-fronted Goose , in a terrible rush EFG scared everything off, and darkness descended and we failed to ID an invisible bird FGH and later, a Nightingale v. briefly heard. GHI This poem has in it a sequence to find To get it you'll need to use "knowledge" and "mind." But there's quite a few gaps, that just don't exist but don't worry, you should get a half-decent list. After the music, there's a link you can click which will reveal my dastardly trick ! But ..having grasped the idea, how many others in the sequence will bear fruit ? If UK birds don't get a look-in, you might branch out to the rest of the world. Maybe you'll find an result for that FGH one. Or not, as the case may be.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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