i've been listening to a box set of of Joseph Haydn's arrangements of Scottish songs, of which these folk are in the course of recording as a complete program, which they say includes stuff never performed in modern times. He made them mostly in the last couple of years of his life, many of them with verses by the immortal Robert Burns. I'm reminded of a set of old encyclopedias I recently threw out because I found that I was tending to use Wikipedia all the time. I can't remember the name of it now in spite of it being my close companion for fifteen years. Harmsworths? Anyway, I liked having this set in particular because it was sixty years old and still had all those old forgotten English gentlemen who have tended to drop out of more recent encyclopedias, and it was useful to have all that when I was doing From Hell. But all its values belonged to a distant age. On the subject of Burns it discussed his poetry in a lengthy entry and then added that he wrote verses for several hundred sentimental songs of no account. That certainly isn't the modern estimation of his songwriting, or of songwriting generally.

In another article, on that magnificent beast, the Elk, the encyclopedia told me all about this noble creature, its size, its habits and its habitat and then added 'It tastes of musk'.

I caught a few lines of The Simpsons recently while passing through our living room. Homer is driving somewhere with Bart also in the car. They are disagreeing about something, I can't remember what, and Bart says "but in Wikipedia it says..." and Homer responds, "We'll fix that when we get home."