Theme: Bubble and squeak

Quote: "What rubbish and what offal." (Julius Caesar, ACT I, scene iii)


Next theme: Jamie Oliver

Theme: Jamie Oliver

Quote: "Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers"

Romeo and Juliet, Act 4 Scene 2

Next Theme: Wayne Rooney

Theme: Wayne Rooney

Quote: "I should sin to think but nobly of my grandmother." (The Tempest, ACT I, scene ii)



Next theme: Posh Spice

Theme: Posh Spice

Quote: "Come, you thin thing!" (Henry IV Part II Act V sc iv)

Next theme: Wheelie bins

Theme: Wheelie bins

Quote: "empty old receptacles, or common shores, of filth" (Pericles, Act IV Scene VI)

Next theme: Midsummer's Eve

Theme: Midsummer's Eve:

................... good day, of night now borrow:

Short night, to-night, and length thyself tomorrow.

[Poem 15 of the Passionate Pilgrim, lines 208-9]



Next Theme: Goal-line Technology

Theme: Goal-line technology

(We've already had that, haven't we?)

Quote: "...you may say what sights you see;

I see things too, although you judge I wink." (The Two Gentlemen of Verona Act I sc ii)

Next theme: Druids (drenched or otherwise)

An interlude ... (not part of the challenge but still the best thread to stick it)

Theme: Drenched druids

Quote: "Here's a night pities nether wise men nor fools." (King Lear, ACT III, scene ii)



Next theme: George Formby

Theme: George Formby

Quote: "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool

And to do that well craves a kind of wit." Twelfth Night, Act III, sc i

Next theme: Tax avoidance

This is not an answer, but there is a really good one by Dennis Healey which deserves a mention:

Theme: Tax Avoidance
"The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall"

Theme: Tax avoidance

Quote: "disbursed at Saint Colme's inch
Ten thousand dollars" (Macbeth, Act I Scene II)

Next theme: Fish Suppers

Theme: Fish Suppers

Quote: "...but that's but unwholesome food they say." (Henry VI Part I Act I sc ii)

Next theme: Humphrey the Cat (official title - Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)

Bump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZdh2nKWVPc

Everyone knows Cherie Blair had him murdered. One day his little skeleton will be found under the stairs of 10 Downing St.

This one needs a picture with it ...

Theme: Humphrey the Cat (RIP)

Quote: "So should a murderer look, so dead, so grim." (A Midsummer Night's Dream, ACT III, scene ii)

Picture:



Next theme: Pommies

Theme: Pommies

Quote: "eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?" (Hamlet, Act V Scene I)

Next theme: Undercoat Paint

Theme: Undercoat Paint

Quote: "Fie upon it! foh!" (Hamlet Act II sc ii)

Next theme: I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!

Theme: I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!

Quote: "These may be counterfeits: let's think't unsafe." (Othello, ACT V, scene i)


Next theme: Penalty shootouts

Theme: Penalty shootouts

Quote: "go forward and be choked" (Henry IV Part I, Act II Scene IV)

Next theme: The Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Theme: The Lyric Theatre, Belfast

"Do we shake hands. All come to this?"

Anthony and Cleopatra IV, 12

Next theme: Andy Murray

Theme: Andy Murray

Quote: "...and we,

Great in our hope, lay our best love and credence

Upon thy promising fortune." (All's Well That Ends Well Act III sc iii)

Next theme: OOO and ANT

(I do hope that's baffled you all, as it baffled me. I had to look it up when I got home.)

EDIT: And I'm still none the wiser.

Wouldn't a quote from Post Modern Pooh be more appropriate here? As far as I'm aware, Willie boy never mentioned 'externs' nor 'interactors'.
If you've been tussling with Schiffer and Latour, I'm not surprised you're none the wiser but if you have a revelatory moment, please pass it on.

Oh ferval, I am in despair. A brief digression from the Shakespeare challenge to talk about OOO.

It was at the Study Day in Oxford on Edward Thomas - all those bright young things and confused old things listening to the utterly brilliant (young) Dr Robert Macfarlane holding forth on "Beyond My Thinking: Thomas as Philosopher." I was fine until he got to object-oriented-ontology and actor-network-theory (what is he on about I thought, but didn't like to ask). I think Macfarlane quickly sensed the despair of the older members of his audience, and he promised not to "burden us with any more ologies". But I suppose one should be prepared to be burdened. It's made me think ruefully of the Alvin Toffler comment: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."

Oh heck.

I pondered on these things whilst I sat in my car for a couple of hours in the middle of the roadworks near the Swindon junction of the M4. It was not exactly an Adlestrop moment, I'm afraid.

Any road up (so to speak) when I got home I diligently searched the net for all the OOO and ANT stuff I could find. Read Ian Bogost's blog (bless him, he seems a nice boy who's tried to make it a bit clearer for the likes of me), and discovered Timothy Morton who also seems to be an interesting chap. A faint glimmer of light dawned as I read about how this new (is it that new, I wonder - Thomas and Lawrence and Wordsworth and E. Bronte and Hopkins and others had got there long before Latour and the ecotheorists - not to mention St. Francis??) philosophy can be applied to *poetry*, but how on earth do you apply it to history? Apparently two historians, Jerome Cohen and Eileen Joy, both medievalists, are all for OOO.

Here is a definition of OOO:

"A philosophy based around objects - "things" - without a humancentric bias" (Harman) - "All object relations, human and non human, are said to exist on equal ontological footing with one another."

Philosophy is leaking into everything these days. These French thinkers will drive us all mad before they're done - that Latour man who started all this OOOing is French, I suppose? I wonder if historians, like the Eng. Lit brigade (well its older members, that is) sometimes wish the philosophy mob would just bugger off and leave us all in peace?

PS I don't really mean that - it's just my brain hurts.

PPS Good job Nordmann is away - I'd be in trouble for this digression from the Challenge. Remove this if you wish, ferval - I won't storm off.

PPPS Here is the blog on OOO "for ordinary folk" that I struggled with thismorning (still bafflled):

http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml

Wouldn't dream of it Temp, why should we be the only ones to gaze in blank incomprehension at this stuff. Let the others suffer as well. One of the courses I did last year touched on this, briefly the ANT side (where was Dec, I wondered) but I managed to almost completely ignore it, nasty and mechanistic, but more on OOO with the object as an active subject which, in archaeological terms, seemed a lot more relevant and interesting.

I now intend to forget all about it for a while except that I came across OOP - suggestions please!

Theme: OOO and ANT

Quote: "Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper." (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III Scene I)

Next theme: General Practitioners

Honour have no skill in surgery, then? - Henry IV Part 2

Work on, My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught. - Othello



Regards.............Alan

We need a new theme from you, Alan.

Have to admire your persistence, Temperence. I am going to ignore OOOs and ANTs. Seems to be knowledge I can do without. Can there be objects without humancentric input really? Do animals think in terms of objects? Apart from natural things, objects are nearly all man-made anyway. I daresay I have this all wrong.

Caro wrote:

Have to admire your persistence, Temperence. I am going to ignore OOOs and ANTs. Seems to be knowledge I can do without. Can there be objects without humancentric input really? Do animals think in terms of objects? Apart from natural things, objects are nearly all man-made anyway. I daresay I have this all wrong.

I think I have it all wrong too, Caro.

"Champagne corks, sailors' hats, Antwerp beer bottles, fish boxes, oranges, lemons, onions, banana stems, waterworn timber and the most exquisite flat and round pebbles, black, dove grey, veined wheat coloured."

"I come home daily with pockets full of smooth pebbles, often pearshaped (flattish), rosy or primrose coloured and transparent nearly...& in the fresh moistness wonderfully beautiful: others white and round or oval: some split & and with grain like chestnuts: not one but makes me think or rather draws out a part of me beyond my thinking."

That's Thomas writing to Gordon Bottomly, and it's that last bit that's got me pondering - how things draw out things from *us* beyond our thought. Is this OOO all about what existence really means? What is reality? What actually "exists"? Does something only exist because we "think" it - do we conjure up our reality, so to speak? I think the OOO-ers maintain that objects do exist independent of our thought... Oh Lord, I don't know. But the ecotheorists are big into OOO, and I suppose all the "Nature" poets are now being interpreted with OOO in mind. I was actually more comfortable with the other lecture - "Time and the Poetry of Edward Thomas" - Prof. Patrick McGuinness who compared Thomas with Proust. Oh good, I thought, this makes more sense - a blackbird, a bank covered with willow-herb, a hissing train, a bare platform, a man, a moment in time (12.45 pm on 24th June 1914) - all come together, and together will forever be/mean Adlestrop, a railway station in England, which will forever mean... a memory becomes an epiphany, or something like that. But that's OOO too, I suppose.

I wish I understood more. This OOO business is probably a lesson in humility. I'll ask the next 18 year old I meet if they have heard of Ian Bogost. I bet they will have. He's a philosopher, but his day job is designing computer games. Some young person will explain it all to me.

I have messed up the Shakespeare Challenge.

I am sorry.

Alan - we need another topic, please!

New theme:-

Jesters!

Regards..............Alan

Theme: Jesters

Quote: "The sweet and bitter fool

Will presently appear;

The one in motley here,

The other found out there." (King Lear Act I sc iv)

Next theme: Spanish slugs

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2167558/Spanish-slugs-munching-gardens-weather-creates-perfect-environment.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Theme: Spanish slugs

Quote: "It cannot be, this weak and writhled shrimp

Should strike such terror to his enemies." (Henry VI, Part One, Act II sc iii)

Next theme: Curly hair [I read that Rebekah Brooks has toned down her curls for court case; apparently curls are seen as a little uncontrollable and subversive.]

Theme: Curly hair

Quote: "Let him have time to tear his curled hair..." (Rape of Lucrece)

Next theme: Electric cigarettes

Theme - Electric cigarettes



Put out the light, and then put out the light.

Othello ii.1.

For violent fires soon burn out themselves. Richard II



Theme: Space

Regards...........Alan

Theme: Space

Quote: "betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust
a bodkin's point" (A Winter's Tale, Act III Scene III)

Next theme: Diesel

Theme: diesel

Quote: "A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" (Sonnet V)

Next theme: Meeting minutes

Theme: Meeting Minutes:

"Brief abstract and record of tedious days"


Richard III 4, IV



Next topic: Scientology

Theme: Scientology
Quote: Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad? Hamlet 2;2.


Next topic: A bar with no customers

Theme: A bar with no customers

Quote: "The fold stands empty in the drowned field." (A Midsummer Night's Dream Act II sc i)

Next theme: The jet stream

This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Hamlet

Next theme: opal

Theme: opal

Quote: "Indian stones" (Henry VI Part III, Act III Scene I)

Next theme: Sandwiches

Theme: Sandwiches

Quote: "O monstrous! But one half-penny-worth of bread..." (Henry IV Part 1, Act II Sc. 4)

Next: Bunting

Theme: Bunting

Quote: "I must show out a flag and sign of love,

Which is indeed but sign..." (Othello Act I sc i)

Next theme: HP Sauce

Theme HP Sauce:

Come, give us a taste of your quality - Hamlet

Next theme: Nose Painting

Theme: Nose-painting

Quote: "Such childish humour from weak minds proceeds." (The Rape of Lucrece)



Next theme: Donald Duck's trousers

Theme: Donald Duck's trousers

Quote: "...unseen, inscrutable, invisible..." (Two Gentlemen of Verona Act 2 Scene 1)

Next theme: Olympic security

Theme: Olympic security

Quote: "Give up yourself merely to chance and hazard from firm security" (Antony and Cleopatra, ACT III, scene vii)


Next theme: President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria

Theme: President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria

Quote: The tyrant's people on both sides do fight;( Macbeth, Act V, scene VII)

Next theme: bed linen

Theme: bed linen

Quote: "a bag of flax" (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V Scene V)

Next theme: Egyptian Mummies

Theme: Egyptian mummies

Quote: "Tut, Tut, thou art all ice, thy kindness freezeth." (Richard III, ACT IV, scene ii)


Next theme: Alcoholic ice popsicles

Theme: Alcoholic ice popsicles

Quote: "...let them not lick

The sweet which is their poison..." (Coriolanus Act III sc i)

Next theme: Marigold rubber gloves

Theme: Marigold rubber gloves

Quote: "Gloves as sweet as damask roses" (A Winter's Tale Act IV Sc. 4)

Next theme: Birthday cards