Alaskan Range: Wilderness Of Monkeys
The inimitable Greg Hill tells of The Great Panjandrum, a mnemonic claim and a wilderness of monkeys. Do read on!
The inimitable Greg Hill tells of The Great Panjandrum, a mnemonic claim and a wilderness of monkeys. Do read on!
One night in 1755 a London tavern-keeper named Charles Macklin claimed his memory was so formidable that he could recite any speech after reading it over just once. Macklin had been one of the most renowned actors of his age, primarily due to his innovative approach to playing Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice . In which he actually researched Italian Jews, and played the character realistically and seriously, instead of comically as was the earlier practice.
In 1755 Macklin was sixty-five and retired from the theater, but he still performed. Every night Macklin's tavern featured a "British Inquisition: a lecture by the proprietor followed by a debate. At one such event Macklin made his mnemonic claim, and a young literary blade named Samuel Foote took him up on it and presented the following poem:
"So she went into the garden
to cut a cabbage leaf
to make an apple-pie;
and at the same time
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
pops its head into the shop.
What! No soap?
So he died,
and she very imprudently married the Barber:
and there were present
the Picninnies
and the Joblillies,
and the Garyulies,
and the great Panjandrum himself,
with the little round button at top;
and they all fell to playing a game of catch-as-catch-can,
till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."
Foote used nonsense verse to successfully befuddle the older gentleman, who didn't stop making farewell performances until he was 99 and could no longer remember all Shylock's lines. I'd bet that, as is the wont of the young, Foote also enjoyed getting his elder's goat. Old Macklin certainly was full of himself, and "panjandrum" quickly entered the language as "an important or self-important person," according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
In 1944 the British created an experimental bomb propelled by rocket-powered pinwheels that they called "the Great Panjandrum." It was a bomb in several meanings of the term. Wikipedia says the British Admiralty's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development devised the Panjandrum to breach the German's concrete Atlantic Wall defenses with a ton of high explosives delivered by "two gigantic wooden wheels, ten feet in diameter with steel treads a foot wide, joined by a central drum … propelled by sets of cordite rockets attached to each wheel."
After a series of increasingly disastrous test failures caused by the contraption's wheels' rockets coming loose and the Panjandrum careening out of control, a final trial was arranged for the top brass. Right off, several rocket clamps gave way and flew at the observers. Small craters in the beach disrupted the Panjandrum's trajectory, and it rumbled away from the target and down the beach towards the photographer documenting the show, who saw the bomb suddenly change direction again and roll at the officials. Admirals and generals dove into barbed-wire entanglements to escape and, needless to say, D-Day proceeded without any Panjandrums.
Some of us are long past whipper-snapperism and should take note of the Reuters news report from last August by Bernd Debusmann that discussed a study about elders' attitudes towards the young. The research was conducted at Germany's Zeppelin University where two groups of subjects, ages 18 to 30 and 55 to 60, were shown ten pre-selected articles and given the choice of reading positive or negative versions of the articles, each of which was accompanied by a photograph of a young or old person. The older readers had little interest in any positive or negative articles about older people, but did enjoy reading negative articles about young people. Younger readers preferred positive articles about young people.
How to ward off such creeping codgerism? The best way is to keep active mentally and physically. Work out your body in the gym, and work out your mind in the library. You'll meet some youngsters there, because a recent Pew study found that 62% of Generation Y Americans (roughly aged 20-32) used a public library in the past year.
They're aware of attractions unknown to those who last entered a library during the Clinton administration. When it comes to entertainment and mental stimulation, as Shakespeare said in Merchant of Venice, I wouldn't trade it "for a wilderness of monkeys
