The first impression of a flight from danger I can remember was that of the Von Trapp family. Good heavens, no, I’m not one of those people that would mar an otherwise perfectly enchanting visit to a beautiful city like Salzburg by insisting on trying to sing songs […]
The German word for “dungeon” is “Verlies“. An unusual word, originating in Low German and Dutch, meaning loss, or leaving. Verlies sounds like the past form of “verlassen“, which means to leave. A place where you leave people, to an awful fate? There were dungeons like that in […]
Confusion in the Castle. The plot thickens, while dastardly villains conspire. Two assassins already dead in the forest, replacements dispatched. Guns that shouldn’t have been working, but which our hero had repaired… History is of course full of foul assassinations. Have you heard of any that occurred in […]
Baden Baden. The German Wagga Wagga? For the non-Australians among you, the latter is a town in western New South Wales which does not derive its name from “the Aboriginal word for Italians” (an old joke based on the no longer so insulting term “wog”). But what of […]
Inheritances. There’s an old German saying, “Wenn’s ums Erben geht, besser frueh handeln, als zu spaet…” (“When it’s a matter of inheritance, it’s better to act early, than too late …”) There’s a fairytale castle Iocked in a bitter dispute about the matter of who inherited it. A […]
Strange, that Electra’s beloved should say of Thorbrand that he may be “evil” but not “dreadful“, and that he would “never take a penny from a man he knew to be poor”. A German Robin Hood? Some say that the before-mentioned Eppelein von Gailingen was one; however, there […]
Some years after Cobb began writing for the New York Ledger, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a public lecture in East Boston. The honour of introducing him happened to fall to one of Cobb’s brothers. On the subject of modern literature, Emerson made a contemptuous mention of “yellow-covered literature […]
Give me them good ol’ days of guns, of snakes, an’ gapin’ jaws Of wolves an’ ragin’ catamounts, with blood upon their paws; W’en six-foot heroes courted girls that they had snatched away From out a bloody bandit’s clasp, an’ tramped him into clay. I wish we had […]
Did anyone notice, ages ago, the noble Bunce occasionally nip over to Hearst’s farm at Deerhurst to court the farmer’s pretty daughter Susan — even trying to steal a kiss one time — before coming onside and making himself useful as an occasional lookout for her and Goliah […]
The unflappable Clara rebukes her “gentleman” kidnapper, Marsham: ‘You forget,’ she added, ironically, ‘the law against bigamy.’ Her quip anticipates Morticia Addams’, who, bitten by the green-eyed monster, tests a barb on her unwitting husband: ‘Gomez, do you know the penalty for bigamy?’ ‘… Two wives?’ It must […]
Furin Chime 