Ridiculosa!

 The Sparky Book 1978 includes two adventures for "Ma Fia and her Mob". Not a regular strip in the weekly Sparky comic, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else.

I thought they might have been borrowed from somewhere else to fill space in the annual (the Sparky at this time did include The Circus of P. T. Bimbo, imported from America and similarly playing on old American stereotypes), but research on the internet draws a complete blank - a lone website cataloguing the contents of this Sparky Book is all Google turns up. The website in question describes it as "relying on cheap racial stereotyping for humour! Yet another case of scraping the barrels bottom again." - which, yes, is fair, but I always rather liked these two comics and hoped to see more of them!

Is there really no more than this? You could churn out a good few more strips along these lines before you run out of the stock of tired old clichés, and I know I at least would like to see them! Could they have appeared under a different name somewhere? I think Ma is due a revival, anyway.

I did put the second strip into Google's image search to see if anything would turn up, but all I got was Google's AI summarising the story in its own unique style:

No, thank you. Honestly, I can't help thinking they need to work a bit more on the whole AI thing before automatically forcing it on people who use Google to search for things. There are some very stupid people out there, after all, and I worry about what they're going to end up believing. I do like the way it's quite good at interpreting the dialogue, but spectacularly fails to pick up on what's actually happening in the story. It's reassuring to know computers are still so dimwitted, we can thwart their inevitable takeover of the world by asking them to define love.

How old is Johnny?

 A couple of Christmases ago, I went on at great length about the Johnny Ludlow papers written by Mrs Henry Wood, and noted that compiling a definitive chronology of Johnny's life and times is something I'm going to do one of these days. It still is, but it's more a thing to do when I've won the lottery and have nothing better to do with my time for months or years on end.

But as I said in that essay, the lynchpin for establishing Johnny's timeline is the story in which Easter Monday falling on April 24th is an essential part of the plot. Since the whole point of this game is to pretend Johnny is a real person, telling true stories, he can't have been mistaken about the year there, and it must have happened in 1848. Which makes the story "Roger Bevere", featuring a well-established London underground railway, rather problematic. And there's another story which gets anachronistic in the other direction...

"Anne", a three-part story published in the Argosy Magazine from October to December 1876, is a good one for tying all the stories together in one coherent chronology. Johnny tells us it's the year when Jacob Lewis, the old rector of Timberdale, died and was replaced by his stepson Herbert Tanerton (who goes on to appear in many other stories). And Johnny the narrator is even kind enough to remark parenthetically that "This year that I am now telling of was the one that preceded the accident to King Sanker." - so we can set this as early in Johnny's life, and prior to the other stories involving the Sanker family and the people they interact with.

Johnny doesn't tell us how old he is during this story - he's clearly a youngish boy, "years and years" younger than the heroine Anne Lewis, but still able to have mature conversations with her about her problems. Which are, basically, the plot of Cinderella. Mrs Henry Wood loved the Cinderella story and told it over and over in her works, but never more so than in this story. And it's when Anne acquires her wicked stepmother and two ugly sisters that the date of the story comes into question.

"St. Michael's Church stood in a nook under the cathedral walls: it is taken down now. It was there that the wedding took place." says Johnny the narrator. And the unusually-located church was indeed a real place in Worcester. And it was 'taken down' in 1843. A replacement church nearby had been built in 1839, and you wouldn't think the old place was still being used for weddings right up to its demolition. So does this story, and by implication all of Johnny's youthful adventures, take place so far back as 1840 or so?

You wouldn't think it could be. It's ambiguous exactly how old Johnny is here, but we can't really put it five or more years before "Watching on St. Mark's Eve". Let alone twenty years before the London Underground opened, if we're to believe "Roger Bevere".

And speaking of trains, when Anne and her father first come to the (fictional) village of Crabb, they're collected from "the station". All the other stories set in and around North and South Crabb have a very busy train station, Crabb Junction, in South Crabb - it's explained that the little place happens to be on the intersection of multiple train lines, which is reasonable enough, but surely must mean that the station was built during the "railway mania" of the 1840s. Shifting Johnny Ludlow's childhood back early enough to set that wedding in St Michael's throws everything just that little bit askew. It's surprising how "Victorian times" actually encompasses a whole lot of rapid change and development once you start looking at railways.

I think Johnny's getting his churches confused and misremembering. The unfortunate Dr Lewis and the awful Mrs Podd got married in the new church, and all those years later when he comes to write the story for the magazine Johnny thinks it was the old one. This is the kind of thing you have to read into the text if you want to be a chronologist. I'll write that full Johnny Ludlow history one day, and it'll all make sense, you'll see!

Cuphead and his pal Mugman, they like to roll the dice

 Further to my last-but-one blog post, the latest cartoon I've been enjoying is The Cuphead Show. And I'm fascinated to see that seasons 1 and 3 are rated PG, with the warning "Rude humour, threat", while season 2 gets a U certificate but the extended caution "Rude humour, dangerous behaviour, violence, threat". I'm not sure which season is more unsafe to watch, based on this.

It's a good cartoon, though, in an uneven kind of way. But I've only watched the first season so far, and maybe it improves. Anything inspired (via a video game) by Max Fleischer cartoons has to be worth a watch, at least. And the game itself was great-looking and not as great to play as it probably should have been. I'm just too picky, possibly. And rude.

Anton's Syndrome is no laughing matter

 To commemorate its eighteenth anniversary, I would like to provide the answer to the riddle posed by this story. Henry, as the reader can easily deduce from his depiction throughout the text, is the type of person who would ensure the ceilings of his home are a colour that no human being could under any circumstances ever express dissatisfaction with. When the Archbishop of York said he didn't like them, Henry realised that the Archbishop must be blind and not be personally aware of it. So making him believe he'd fed paupers to hungry lions was a simple matter of Henry making the appropriate noises.

I'd intended to include that explanation in the story, but then decided it would be funnier not to.

NUTS2U

 

I've got Netflix as part of my Sky subscription. I wouldn't have Netflix if I had to pay for it, because there's almost nothing on it that anyone would want to watch. The same applies to all telly, actually. I've only got Sky because I don't want people to think I'm too poor to afford television. I've gone without TV for lengthy periods when there wasn't going to be anyone seeing that I haven't got it. I probably shouldn't care so much about what people think, and focus solely on telling people what I think.

Anyway, the only thing any sane person could want to watch (extensively) on Netflix is "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks". And I'm intrigued by the content warnings applied to each season's box set. They all merit a U certification, but Season 1 follows it with "Language". Seasons 2, 3 and 4 seem to be a little more risqué, because they all warn of "Rude humour, references to crime, violence, threat". And then Season 5 (the best season), tones the warning down to "Rude humour, violence".

I think Chipmunks is minimally rude - there's certainly no 'language' worse than the occasional use of "nuts" to express annoyance in a chipmunky kind of way. And while there are occasional references to crime, I don't think these are reduced in Season 5. People who tremble at the very mention of crime should definitely still avoid it. Theodore steals Ms Croner's cherries in one episode. A criminal from the future steals Simon's invention and threatens to maroon Alvin in dinosaur times in another. Really, references to crime and threat abound in this cartoon, and people should definitely steer clear!

Englishness at 78% and still rising

 Happy Halloween! October is a special month not just because of my birthday, but because of ancestry.co.uk's annual update of their DNA ethnicity estimate! It's become something of an annual tradition - check out my previous blogs on the subject!

In October 2022, I got the results of the sample I'd sent in, and found that it said I'm 69% from "England & Northwestern Europe". A bit on the low side, I thought. And significantly Swedish or Danish on my mother's side too, with a big chunk of Scotland on my father's. Plus 1% of Norway.

In October 2023, Ancestry had improved their estimations, and upgraded me to 76% Englishness, draining away a bit of the Swedishness and Scottishness.

In October 2024, I had inched up to 77% on the Englandometer, with decreasing Danishness and a surprising shift in my father's heritage into the unexplored regions of "Germanic Europe" and the Netherlands. What will this latest year's update bring?

Well, it's the biggest update ever, and England has fractured into at least three independent parts!

Which makes it a little harder to track just how English the Ancestry world thinks I am, but we can just add together the East Midlands, West Midlands and "Southwestern England & Northwestern Europe" to see I've gone up one more percentage point, making 78%! I'm getting ever closer to being the Full English Breakfast!

"East Midlands" seems to include Sheffield, where a big chunk of my father's side come from (his father's family originated in Rutland and moved to Sheffield in the 1800s; the Millership side were longer-established in Sheffield), so it does work. And people who aren't familiar with the precise details of my family tree and can't be bothered to read those old blogs might need to know that my maternal grandfather (who died when my mum was a baby) came from London, so giving me 25% of that doesn't seem unreasonable.

But let's have a look by parent. You have to give Ancestry money to get it to say "mother" and "father", apparently, but we can see from the cheap version that "Parent 1" is my dad and "Parent 2" my mum...

My dad is now twice as Dutch as he used to be, and 2% Irish too! Meanwhile, my Scandinavian side has shrunk sharply, leaving me just 3% of Denmark, with a big part of my mum suddenly having become Scottish or Northern Irish. Parts of me are shifting slowly around Europe, but it's gradually coalescing into making me English. Give it another couple of decades...

My dad did go to Amsterdam once, you know. Among his effects I found an old temporary passport dating to 1976, and I very vaguely remember that there was some kind of anecdote about "the time I went to Amsterdam, before you were born." So maybe he was getting in touch with the distant ancestors.

Happy birthday, Leonard Starr!

 The principal creative force behind perhaps the greatest cartoon series of the 1980s was born 100 years ago today! Thundercats remains a delight to watch, even after all this time, and I've celebrated the centenary by watching the first episodes, on the videotape I recorded them on when they were first shown. It doesn't get old.