At a loose end one blustery Thursday morning, Dobson decided to write a lengthy critical analysis of the The Life & Times of Captain Cake. He began, as he always did, by sharpening his pencil. That done, in a single burst of inexplicable enthusiasm, he penned an essay much, much longer than his usual pamphlets. It is a bewildering piece of work, caustic and trenchant even by Dobson’s standards, and was issued in fifteen weekly instalments. Flush with cash from the sale of his Big Mysterious Piece of Hardboard, Dobson took out advertisements in the press to announce his new part-work, offering the first issue at a discount price, and including a two-inch high plastic figurine of Captain Cake* as further inducement.

Each of the fifteen instalments addresses a different aspect of the text. So, for example, Volume IV is entitled Welk, Bankhead, Loy : There’ll Be A Welcome In The Hillsides while Volumes VIII and IX both concentrate entirely on the game of ping pong. Long out of print, this superb (if unintelligible) essay is ripe for reassessment in the 21st century which Dobson did not live to see. Over the coming months, the Hooting Yard Foundation hopes to publish on this site a hypertext version of the essay. Be in no doubt that it will prove a boon to scholars worldwide.

• An extract from “The Thing that Dined on Death” by John Fowls-Knox
• ‘Johnfowlsopoly’
• The Burnt Maps of Clytemnestra Bim
• Recipe of the week
• “Dark Star Crashes”
• “A Guide to Pointy Town”
• “Lines Written upon first listening to Dr Bogenbroom by Jethro Tull”
• Charles Babbage: Street Disturbances
• Dobson at the Festival of argumentative music in Ulm.
• The Life and Times of Captain Cake
• A critical analysis of “The Life and Times of Captain Cake” by Dobson.
• Extract from “Shamanism in Cyberia”

Note: This was the first regularly scheduled broadcast of Hooting Yard on the Air