I rather left myself open to being teased about staying "focused", didn't I Priscilla?

I've decided to delete the name of one possible fake eccentric I had mentioned.

@Priscilla wrote:The attention seeking - those who effect weird things about them have decided themselves to be eccentric and make damn sure others are aware of it and hopefully will react to it in some way; always fodder for the media to use when things are quiet. The use of social sites must be a boon to them. And people who have to draw attention to themselves actually have little to impress the world otherwise.

 A true eccentric does not decide anything for effect, I suggest. They adapt circumstances solely to suit themselves. The more I think on them so I realise I had many in my family - an elderly aunt, for instance who delivered all her local mail abd odd gifts from her garden by motorbike in the early hours of the morning and then never got up before noon, neither did she ever lock a door. When almost blind she said she opened tins of food without knowing the contents and had only peas for a week...… someone was paid to shop for her.

Priscilla,

I am glad you mentioned this, because I was struggling since yesterday how to answer to Triceratops about Ludwig II. But you cleared my mind, because that is the distinction that I wanted to point to. That's the true excentric I wanted to mention. And I suppose Ludwig was such one and many artists are the same. And I suppose there are many such ones among us, they have only not the might and the money to deploy their thinking into reality. We have also in Dutch the term "zonderling", they translate in the dictionary by: strange, odd character. In French: original, singulier, excentrique. Not sure about the semantics in the other languages, but I would pick up as the most appropriate: the term: "singular". Thinking and acting in his/her own particular way, not looking what the others think of them. And thinking about my own life, I think if MM, organizing "team building" in the time in his (steel factory?) had to include me I would have been a special case among the rest, thinking and acting otherwise than the group. It was only later as I saw the reactions in the working environment, that I started to adapt to the general behaviour of the group. Although there remains always "something" of your personality, character?

I hope that it wasn't this "psychobabble" (I learned the term from Temperance), what nordmann meant, when he said: hopefully not...
And I hope Caro, GG and Triceratops are not deterred from this forum by all "this"...

Kind regards, Paul.

One for Trike! This is a proper folly, but was the 4th Earl of Dunmore eccentric? He sounds very sensible to me: he decided he wanted to grow pineapples (apparently pineapple fever swept through Scotland in the middle years of the 18th century) so, like you do, he built a "summerhouse" in his garden, complete with a "hotroom" and furnace, to produce unlimited supplies of the exotic fruit for his household's consumption (presumably building an enormous summerhouse etc. was cheaper than buying pineapples). Having a huge pineapple sprouting from the top of the building obviously seemed to the Earl to be a perfectly reasonable additional feature - and why not? Good job pineapples were legal.

I thought the conversation yesterday was very interesting indeed: I shall add nord's long post to my Little Book of Nordmannic Essays - fascinating stuff, sir!

I agree with Priscilla that being genuinely eccentric means you don't give a hoot: you just do what you want, blissfully unaware (and unconcerned) as to whether anyone else is noticing you or not. Worrying about "what people think" is terribly bourgeois after all!

Only two weeks ago I attended the most eccentric funeral ever. On the day of burial, the widow of the deceased went with a friend to the morgue and collected her husband's body, which they arranged neatly in a rather tasteful willow coffin. The corpse was then loaded onto a trailer!!!! and was driven to the Natural Burial Site near Bude where the interment took place. The lady in question was very upper-middle-class, very bohemian and did not believe in "fancy" funerals involving a funeral director. Fair enough, but I was worried that what she had done was not quite legal - must have been, as the hospital released the body. Thank God they didn't lose the trailer on the North Devon link road. BBC Spotlight South-West would have had a field day with the story. I have not made this up for effect: it is true!

That's a corker of a building, Temp

I shall add nord's long post to my Little Book of Nordmannic Essays - fascinating stuff, sir!


Is that not a bit eccentric??

Probably, but harmless!

Available in all good Exeter bookshops soon ...

Brilliant!

You can pre-order it from Amazon too!. 

In that case we need an edition our friends across the pond will order ....

Who is this Beaton man? How dare he challenge what may be read for free here?


PS Only joking, sir. I still think you should publish a book of essays - musings we have read here on things serious and not so serious. Essay-writing is a neglected field.


Going back to the thread: how many genuine "eccentrics" have published books - little or otherwise - that have become enormously popular and influential, even if the contents were complete b*llocks?? I have never read Mao-Tse Tung's little red volume, but I suspect he counts as villain, not  an  interesting eccentric. I am very ignorant about the Chinese. Maybe his book was not complete whatever: I have no idea. It is nearly as popular a book as the Bible:




A Popular If Odd Little Book






 It takes all sorts, as they say.

It will have a rival soon ... (the only book where the blank pages hold more wisdom than the ones filled with type)



Pearls of wisdom from Chairman Trump (or "Chump"):


On gay marriage:
"It's like in golf... A lot of people - I don't want this to sound trivial - but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive... it's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist."

On health care and volunteer medics:
"The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA-infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great - but must suffer the consequences!"

On global warming:
"It's really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!"
and
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

On the greatness of America:
"Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories any more. We used to have victories but [now] we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China, in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time."

On Hillary Clinton:
"If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?"

On his own credentials as presidential candidate:
"I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody's ever been more successful than me. I'm the most successful person ever to run. Ross Perot isn't successful like me. Romney - I have a Gucci store that's worth more than Romney."

On shaking hands:
"The concept of shaking hands is absolutely terrible, and statistically I've been proven right."

On his own sex appeal:
"All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."

On family and good fatherhood:
"She does have a very nice figure... If [Ivanka] weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her."

On the War Against Convenience Stores:
“I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down”

On immigration and a revision of the "bring us your huddled masses" invitation:
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here?”

On breastfeeding mothers:
“You’re disgusting.”

On History:
“In life you have to rely on the past, and that’s called history.”

On "the anti-missile", or something ...
“We’re … increasing our budget by many billions of dollars, because of North Korea and other reasons, having to do with the anti-missile.”

On something else ...
“Despite the constant negative press covfefe”

I don't want to derail the thread and I guess there are worse things the English could do than possibly cherish their harmless eccentrics (harmful eccentrics is another matter).  I was thinking though that there are problems with stereotyping any race* - my sister-in-law is from Colombia and any jokes about her being in a drug cartel (she isn't by the way) wore thin a long time ago.  One of my friends from London said that the types of jokes that the English used to tell about the Irish (to the effect that the Irish were a bit dim - nordmann I know you're not dim) were told by the Irish about people from County Kerry (her husband hails from Kerry so there might have been some marital teasing occurring there).

* For the avoidance of doubt I am in no way implying that in her original post Priscilla was stereotyping the British as eccentric.