Hands up those of you who remember the cartoon character Billy Parallelogram. For decades in the last century he appeared weekly in The Pabulum, a comic which also featured Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Whereas all Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet’s adventures followed a strict, unchanging formula, you could never guess what might happen in the Billy Parallelogram strip. Sometimes he was accompanied by his cousin, Tilly Dodecahedron, or by the Massed Hordes Of Gruesome And Frightening Things From The Pit Of Foulness.

Sometimes the weekly adventure might be as simplistic as Billy Parallelogram buying an accordion and learning how to play it. There were serial stories, too, spread over two or three months, where Billy Parallelogram would be shown teaching children how to cultivate wheat, or to devise spring, prong and lever mechanisms to automate household tasks, or even to compose majestic symphonies for full orchestra so emotionally charged that listeners would blub into their handkerchiefs. His cousin Tilly Dodecahedron’s appearances often signalled storylines involving bees, turpentine, silhouetteists, farm implements and Dakkadakkadakka. This last was a speciality of the Billy Parallelogram strips, an ill-defined yet curiously unnerving monster goblin with bulging eyes and forehead, seemingly bent on destroying the universe but always distracted by parlour games such as snakes-and-ladders or gluttons-and-rhubarb.

One of Weems’ vile henchmen from the popular cartoon strip “Billy Parallelogram”.

• Horse Begone ( An unfortunate encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoodadooronron Woman )
• Tadeusz Kapisko and his Ears of Wheat
• Dobson in the Land of Nod
• When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto; Or, The Greaves of Way-O
• Give me a Glossary ( an explanation of “When Haddo-Haddo becomes Musto” )
• Nomenclature of diminuitive persons who plunge down 150-Ft Cliffs and survive with hardly a scratch.
• Billy Parallelogram
• Metal of the week: Tin
• Dietary News ( Foods of the future )

This episode was first broadcast on the 7th September 2005.

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In those days we had many gods in Gaar, but only one was authentic, the one whose name could not be uttered. In addition, we had fifteen green-eyed weasel gods, a pair of plastic marchmont gods, the hideous centipede god of Tuesday evenings, Bosh the crumpled god, eighty squirrel gods, numberless gods with two or more heads, even one god with no head at all, and a god whose breath ignited stars. We had the bucket god and the athletics track god, the god of railway platforms and the gods of puddles. Some gods were ephemeral, tiny things, like your mayflies. Others were massive and solid and permanent. But only one god was real, the God with the upper case G, the one whose name could not be spoken.

Nowadays, those of us who rode the motorcycles in the sidecars of which blasphemers languished, muffled, in pods, are thought of as fanatics. I still get sidelong looks of contempt or loathing when I go to the post office or the greengrocery. I was spat at in the street as recently as six months ago. When I buy my fireworks, they are invariably tampered with, so that they sputter rather than sparkle. I can’t remember the last time one of my fireworks went whoooosh!

My favourite god was the gas god. It made a tremendous growling noise and it was usually sixty feet high, but sometimes smaller. Every now and then, because I was a motorcyclist, it would carry out its godlike doings in my back garden, and I would watch from the window, entranced. Our windows then were made of cellophane, and I would prick holes in my window with the point of a sharpened pencil, the better to appreciate the misty wafts of the gas god.

• Quotation from the Bible
• The Game of Bosanquet (Some handy tips)
• Smashed Gods ( of Gaar )
• Cinematic Dobson ( A Numbers Racket )
• And I Shall Walk
• Murder in the Murk (By Chlorine Winslow)
• Destiny’s Darning-Needle Pierced My Very Soul (A Trebizondo Culpepper devotee’s enrapturement)

This episode was oringinally recorded on August 31st 2005. For transcripts of today’s podcast please visit the Hooting Yard website.

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UPDATE: The auction is now open. You can bid on eBay until 8pm next Sunday. In the meantime you can discuss this auction on the Resonance Forums.

My name is fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol and I’d like to speak to you today on behalf of the Hooting Yard Benevolent Fund For Distressed Out Of Print Pamphleteers.

I don’t know about you, but often, as I go about my day, waiting for a bus, say, or roaming in the hills and getting my socks snagged in a thicket of brambles, or sheltering in a kiosk from a thunderous downpour, I find my thoughts turning to out of print pamphleteers… you know, those poor bewildered wreckages of humanity, snivelling in their rags, covered in pustules and boils and running sores, with whole colonies of flies whirling around their heads, those wretched figures whose pamphlets were once in print.

Now they are reduced to destitution, sprawled hopelessly with their spindly legs dangling in the brackish water of some pond in the middle of a field, watched over by sinister cows, but forgotten by those who once read their printed pamphlets with a mixture of glee, excitement and drooling. They may even have danced to the text of a pamphlet in a seaside disco, out at the end of the pier, before jumping into the sea and flailing around, waterlogged but happy.

Ah… but for the out of print pampleteer such a joyous readership has long since disappeared. And that is where the Hooting Yard Benevolent Fund for Distressed Out Of Print Pamphleteers steps in to help. On this occasion, we are pleased to announce an exciting auction. We have one copy of the exceedingly rare paperback book “Twitching And Shattered”, a 136-page compilation of work by Frank Key originally published as long ago as 1989. Here you will find over a dozen texts, including “By Aerostat To Hooting Yard”, “The Churn In The Muck” and “A Zest For Crumpled Things”, together with many fine illustrations, scribbled drawings, and old photographs, including a big A3 fold out diagram and a piece of real sandpaper.

HOW TO BID: This charity auction will begin at Sunday 21st May, 2006 at 20:00 BST. This will be a 7 day auction. You can place your bid by visiting ebay lot number: 8815045576 .

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