Dear Reader, as the year closes...

A few thoughts (and many thanks) to you, Dear Reader, as the year closes...


Wow! New Year's Eve and a blue moon!


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"New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

- Mark Twain


"A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other."

- Author Unknown


"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves."

- ?


"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

-T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"


"We will all open a book today. Its pages are blank. We are going to write words on them. Each of us will be using only our own words on our own pages. The book is called the New Year and its first chapter is opening now."

- ?


"May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young."

- Bob Dylan


"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential."

- Ellen Goodman


"Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go."

- Brooks Atkinson


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From the Keeper Of The Word Farm...


Memorize your favorite poem.

Spend some time alone. In a field, near a lake, alongside a stream... What words may come?

Read more books and watch less TV. A good book is an old friend. Revist old friends once a year - reread a favorite book from time to time.

Pay attention to words. They can be a source of awe, knowlwdge, humor, thought and tears. Treasure them and enjoy the journey they will give you.


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"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."

- Jim Valvano 1993 ESPY speech



"Yes! To dance beneath a diamond sky
with one hand waving free..."

- Bob Dylan

Five More Words

Have you ever found yourself wondering, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were a word for this?" Well, there is a word for almost everything under the sun.

Here are five more neat words I have come across in my wacky web wandering -


spurtle

PRONUNCIATION:
(SPUR-tl)

MEANING: noun: A wooden stick for stirring porridge.


ETYMOLOGY: Of uncertain origin, perhaps from Latin spatula, or from sprit (a pole to extend a sail on a ship).


NOTE: There is a word for everything. And, apparently, there is a contest for everything. There is one for making porridge, grandly named The Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship. It is held annually in Scotland.


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grammatolatry

PRONUNCIATION:
(gram-uh-TOL-uh-tree)

MEANING: noun: The worship of words: regard for the letter while ignoring the spirit of something.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek gramma (letter) + -latry (worship).


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fugacious

PRONUNCIATION:
(fyoo-GAY-shuhs)

MEANING: adjective: Lasting a very short time.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin fugere (to flee) which also gave us other words such as fugitive, centrifugal, refuge, and subterfuge.


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skeuomorph

PRONUNCIATION:
(SKYOO-uh-morf)

MEANING: noun: A design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, the click sound of a shutter in an analog camera that is now reproduced in a digital camera by playing a sound clip.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek skeuos (vessel, implement) + -morph (form).


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epeolatry

PRONUNCIATION:
(ep-i-OL-uh-tree)

MEANING: noun: The worship of words.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek epos (word) + -latry (worship). The first citation of the word is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his 1860 book Professor at the Breakfast Table.

A Consonant Goes Into A Bar

This piece is copyrighted by Gary Roma.

Iron Frog Productions



A consonant goes into a bar and sits down next to a vowel. "Hi!" he says."Have you ever been here before?"

"Of cursive," she replies. "I come here, like, all the time."

He can tell from her accent (which is kind acute) that she is a Vowelly Girl.

'She sure is a cipher sore i's!' thinks the consonantal dude. He remains stationery,enveloped by her charm. His initial reaction is so pro-nounced, he doesn't know what to say. He is, at present, tense. "You've a lovely set of ... teeth," he sputters.

"Do you Crush with breast--I mean, do you brush with Crest?"

"Oh my god, gag me with a spoonerism! Your mind is in the guttural, fer sure!"

Admiring her figure of speech, he falls into a fantasy. He pictures a perfect wedding: they exchange wedding vowels.

The minister says, "I now pronouns you husband and wife."

They kiss each other on the ellipsis.

"I love you, noun forever, " he whispers.

The conjugation is in tiers. (In a word, they are wed) He awakens from his daydream and proposes a dance. She declines.

"Then would you like a beer? Alcohol the bartender--"

"I bitter not," she says, falling silent. Ferment there, she looks like she's going to bee [sic].

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"I'm, like, under a lot of stress...I've got a yeast inflection."

"I knew something was brewing." He calls the bartender. "Listen, bud, my beer is warm." The bartender takes the bottle and empties it into the sink. The consonantal dude watches his hops go down the drain.



"Let's go outside," he says to her. "I'd like to have a word with you."

"Are you prepositioning me?"

"I won't be indirect. You are the object of my preposition."

"Oh my god, you're like, such a boldfaced character!"

"I see your point. But I'm font of you. C'mon, let's go."

"Do I have to spell it out to you? You're not my type, so get off my case!"

Reluctantly, he decides to letter b. "Now my evening lies in runes," he laments. He leaves, hoping to have letter luck next time.

A Merry Chiasmus To All

A chiasmus is two otherwise parallel phrases with the second being a reverse order of the first. A famous illustration is Cicero's “One should eat to live, not live to eat.”

Here for the holidays are some more - some familiar and some not.



It's not the men in my life, but the life in my men.

- Mae West


"Errol Flynn died on a 70-foot boat with a 17-year-old girl. Walter has always wanted to go that way, but he's going to settle for a 17-footer with a 70-year-old.

— Betsy Maxwell Cronkite, wife of Walter Cronkite.


"When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that."

— Gertrude Stein


"The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him."

— Voltaire


"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

- Robert Frost


Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

- Leonardo da Vinci


There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

- G. K. Chesterton


It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

- Mark Twain


Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.

- Anon (I had to bring back our old friend one more time!)


Money sometimes makes fools of important persons, but it may also make important persons of fools.

- Walter Winchell


Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.

- John Churton Collins


Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

- Thomas Huxley



Remember - The waist is a terrible thing to mind. The mind is a terrible thing to waste.









Here's champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends.

Never End A Sentence With A Preposition

According to Bill Bryson [The Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way], "The source of this stricture... was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad." And further, that "...even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative "in solemn and elevated writing."

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In an effort to coerce his young son to bed, a dedicated father told the boy to go upstairs, to his bedroom, promising him to follow shortly with a book. The father would then read to his son in bed. When his father arrived, with his sons least favorite book, one about Australia, the boy said: "What did you bring that book, that i don't want to be read to from out of about Down Under up for?". This held the Guinness Book record until the category was dropped, purportedly because you can add prepositions to the end of this sentence indefinitely, as follows: "What did you say that the sentence with the most prepositions at the end was 'What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about Down Under up for?' for? The preceding sentence has one more."

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Winston Churchill was editing a proof of one of his books, when he noticed that an editor had clumsily rearranged one of Churchill's sentences so that it wouldn't end with a preposition. Churchill scribbled in the margin, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." (This is often quoted with "arrant nonsense" substituted for "English", or with other variations. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cites Sir Ernest Gowers' "Plain Words" (1948), where the anecdote begins, "It is said that Churchill..."; so we don't know exactly what Churchill wrote. According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, Churchill's words were "bloody nonsense" and the variants are euphemisms.)

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"Excuse me, where is the library at?"

"Here at Hahvahd, we never end a sentence with a preposition."

"O.K. Excuse me, where is the library at, twit?"

Epithets To Live By - Part 2

Thought Provoking, Honest, Lovely, True and Amusing Epithets To Live By

Written by Regina Brett who is a 90 year old journalist - The Plain Dealer newspaper, Cleveland, Ohio.



26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words "In five years, will this matter?"

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive everyone everything.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative: dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

42. The best is yet to come.

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

Epithets To Live By

Written by Regina Brett who is a 90 year old journalist - The Plain Dealer newspaper, Cleveland , Ohio.

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first pay cheque.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't mess up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.


To be continued...

Brave New Words

From Ray Bradbury to Carl Sagan, from "The Twilight Zone" to "Battle Star Galactica", science fiction has emerged from the margins of popular culture to claim a significant presence across media in print, film, and television. It has shaped our vision of the future and the way we talk about it.

Consider the various opening monologues spoken by Rod Serling when introducing various episodes of "The Twilight Zone". They describe rather well the interaction of words, mind, ideas and imagination

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone."

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination - Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone!"

There was also one other monologue that was never used -

"This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you're on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable...Go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of mind itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, you're entering the wondrous dimension of imagination. Next stop....The Twilight Zone."


"Brave New Words", the first historical dictionary devoted to science fiction, has been described by the Library Journal as "an admirable and unique source that demonstrates on nearly every page the surprising extent to which the language of science fiction has entered everyday English terms." It shows exactly how science-fictional words and their associated concepts have developed over time, with full citations and bibliographic information. In addition, the book demonstrates how many words we consider everyday vocabulary-words like "spacesuit," "blast off," and "robot"-had their roots in imaginative literature, and not in hard science.

"Brave New Words" was first published in hardcover in May 2007. On August 9th 2008, the first edition was named recipient of the prestigious Hugo Award (for Best Related Book), given to the best science fiction titles of the previous year.

Consider the following summary of some of this book's contents.

The television show Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, is another show that had a great effect on the English language. It has had more of an effect than any other single science fiction creation, with the possible exception of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Words coined for the series and its spin-offs have stuck in the popular imagination, and are used by people in all walks of life. Some, like mind-meld and warp speed, are mainly used figuratively outside of science fiction. Starfleet has found a foothold in science fiction itself, while cloaking device and nanite straddle both worlds. Star Trek also introduced the world to Klingon, the language created by linguist Marc Okrand for the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and which has since taken on quite a life of its own.

Naval Terms

When SF writers want to describe the life of a spacefaring society, they frequently use nautical terms. The analogy between travel in space and travel on the seas is a straightforward one - both entail enclosing people in a self-contained vessel, protected from a hostile environment by only a thin shell, in which they may spend long periods of time between ports, whether on islands or planets. This analogy is most directly made by simply using a nautical term in an outer-space setting, so boat, craft, ship, and vessel, as well as cruiser, destroyer, and dreadnought, can describe both watercraft and spacecraft. Similarly, like a seagoing vessel, a spaceship may be composed of an external hull, punctuated with portholes, which encases and protects the decks, bulkheads, cabins, and bridge, not to mention the captain and crew. If it is a military vessel, it may belong to a navy, in which case the ship's captain probably reports to an admiral. Even the familiar science-fictional alien mother ship is an appropriation of a naval term. Frequently, SF writers take a nautical word and add "space" or "star" to it, as in space dock, space liner, space pirate, spaceship, starfleet, starport, etc. "Sea" can be replaced in compounds such as spacefaring, space-going, and space-sick, as can "ship," in words like spaceyard. Sometimes these appropriations and substitutions can be a matter of expedience, but there is a poetry to it as well; science fiction has often been a literature of exploration and adventure, and drawing on the language of the sea can hearken back to the excitement and romance of the Age of Sail.



It is just fascinating how words can take us from what we know to a new place that we want to know, that we are afraid to know or even to where we don't even know if we can know.

More Late Night Questions

Ah, yes! Those wonderful times while lying in bed, just before sleep arrives and the mind is nodding and throwing out questions like lifelines from a sinking ship.

When physicians treat you, why do you end up paying?

What do they keep in a pole vault?

Isn't extraordinary just a lot more ordinary than usual?

Is it the crack of dawn that causes daybreak or is it nightfall that causes the crack of dawn?

Isn’t someone anesthetized in the operating room an outpatient?

If you float an idea, how long before it sinks in?

Who coined the phrase “coin a phrase?”



The last one I can answer -

'To coin a phrase' is now rarely used with its original 'invent a new phrase' meaning but is almost always used ironically to introduce a banal or clichéd sentiment. This usage began in the mid 20th century. For example, in Francis Brett Young's novel Mr. Lucton's Freedom, 1940:

"It takes all sorts to make a world, to coin a phrase."

Coining, in the sense of creating, derives from the coining of money by stamping metal with a die. Coins - also variously spelled coynes, coigns, coignes or quoins - were the blank, usually circular, disks from which money was minted. This usage derived from an earlier 14th century meaning of coin, which meant wedge. The wedge-shaped dies which were used to stamp the blanks were called coins and the metal blanks and the subsequent 'coined' money took their name from them.

Coining later began to be associated with inventiveness in language. In the 16th century the 'coining' of words and phrases was often referred to. By that time the monetary coinage was often debased or counterfeit and the coining of words was often associated with spurious linguistic inventions.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

The Roots of Money

There are about twenty modern nations whose currency is called the "dollar." The word apparently derives from "taler," which in turn comes from "Joachimsthal," the name of a place in Bohemia where the taler (a silver coin) was created -- with the "-thal" part presumably meaning "valley." (The modern German spelling, by the way, has been changed to "tal," which explains the new spelling of the English word "Neandertal.") So as far as I can tell we use dollars today because certain coins were once minted in a valley.

A few months back I read a marvelous article (which I gather originally appeared in the New Yorker) on, among other things, the history of money. The author noted that at one point in human history cows were used as a medium of exchange, which is why the word "pecuniary" derives from pecu, meaning money or cattle. (To peculate, by the way, is to steal.) Hence, a syllogism:

Cows are the root of money.

Money is the root of all evil.

Therefore, cows are the root of all evil.

Whence we get the phrase "qui tollis pecu mundi," "he who takes away the cows of the world." In theological terms, such a taking-away is known as bovine intervention.

(And while I'm here, I might as well mention that "money" is from "Juno Monetas," at whose temple money was minted.)

Slang terms for money derive from some similarly unlikely places. I used to have trouble remembering whether a fin was a five-dollar bill and a sawbuck a ten, or vice versa, until I learned that "fin" (also "finnif") is from "finf," Yiddish for "five," and "sawbuck" refers to a kind of sawhorse with crossed wooden legs, forming an X, the Roman numeral for 10. A double sawbuck is thus a twenty-dollar bill. "Sawbuck" is sometimes abbreviated "saw," but not, of course "buck."

The 1920s and 1930s were a particularly rich time in terms of American slang terms for money, some of which are still in use today. Some terms presumably referred to money's use in purchasing food: bacon (as in "bring home"), bread, dough, and so on. (One term for counterfeit money was "sourdough.") Other terms referred to the green color of American bills: cabbage, lettuce, kale, folding green, long green. Yiddish was the source of some terms, such as "gelt" -- though that particular one had been part of the English language since at least 1529, possibly by way of German and Dutch. There were other old terms for money: "rhino," for instance, of unknown origin, entered the language in 1670, two centuries before the word was used as a shortened form of "rhinoceros." I'm not sure, but I suspect that "jack" derives from "jackpot," originally referring to the large amounts of money you could win playing a jacks-or-better poker game. Some slang money terms I have no idea of the origin of: mazuma, moolah, oscar, pap, plaster, rivets, scratch, spondulicks. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some monetary slang was invented by Damon Runyan or other writers of the time...

A dollar bill can be called a "rutabaga," for some reason -- and in Rutabaga Tales, Carl Sandburg frequently uses the term "cash moneys." "Cash" referring to coins and paper money comes from French, Italian, and Latin, with roots referring to a money box -- and is completely etymologically distinct from the Chinese and Indian coins called "cash," with roots in Portuguese, Tamil, Sanskrit, and Persian. Though both meanings of "cash" entered English in the last few years of the 16th century, so perhaps one influenced the other.

Other slang terms for a dollar include ace (which term derives from a word referring to a copper coin in Latin), bean (as in bean counter), boffo (presumably from Variety headlines' shortening of "box office" referring to money collected at theatres), bone, buck, bullet, case note, clam, coconut, fish (which in '20s slang could also refer to a convict), frogskin, lizard, peso, rock, scrip, simoleon, and yellowback. The heavy dollar coin was once known as an iron man, plug, sinker, or wagon wheel. And the old Spanish peso coin could be physically broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, an eighth of a peso; hence the coins were called "pieces of eight," and a 25-cent coin, a quarter dollar, is "two bits."

A $100 bill can be referred to simply as a "bill" ("He gave me five bills for the merchandise"), or as any of several variations on "century" (meaning 100), most commonly "C" or "C note." Another term is "yard," perhaps from the word's meaning of "a lot" -- "He reeled off yards of data..."

A thousand dollars, of course, is a "grand," or a G for short.

In the USA, paper money is sometimes referred to as "dead presidents." This is a bit odd, since not all of the people pictured on money were presidents. Quick quiz: name the people shown on each denomination of American money currently in circulation, without looking.

1 cent (penny)
5 cents (nickel)
10 cents (dime)
25 cents (quarter)
50 cents
$1 coin (two types; neither is currently minted or in wide circulation, but there are still some out there)
$1 bill
$5 bill
$10 bill
$20 bill
$50 bill
$100 bill

(The $500, $1000, $5000, and $10000 bills have not been printed since 1946.)





ANSWERS







1 cent (penny): Abraham Lincoln
5 cents (nickel): Thomas Jefferson
10 cents (dime): Franklin D. Roosevelt
25 cents (quarter): George Washington
50 cents: John F. Kennedy
$1 coin: Dwight D. Eisenhower(1971-1979), Susan B. Anthony (1979-1981)
$1 bill: George Washington (first issued in 1963; silver certificates before that)
$5 bill: Abraham Lincoln
$10 bill: Alexander Hamilton
$20 bill: Andrew Jackson
$50 bill: Ulysses S. Grant
$100 bill: Benjamin Franklin

Flaming Idiots?

Ahhh! More evidence of Twits In Power has surfaced.

One of the many reasons I loved my time in England has taken a hit.

Every year on November the 5th, the Brits commemorate the foiling of a 1605 plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Named after the plot’s ringleader, Guy Fawkes Night usually involves lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks.

However, as the following article from The Daily Mail that I found just yesterday recounts, health and safety fears have prompted the Ilfracombe Rugby Club in Devon to treat revellers to a “virtual bonfire” night. Well, at least the article uses one of my favorite Brit words - yobs.

Here is the article -


It's NON-fire night! Thousands forced to watch big-screen TV bonfire... after health and safety killjoys ban the real thing

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 10:40 AM on 05th November 2009



There's something magical about the moment a bonfire roars into life on Guy Fawkes night.

But in Devon this evening there won't be any waiting around for the flames to take hold.

The blaze will be raging just as soon as the organisers press the on-button on their giant television.

Revellers will enjoy a 'non-fire' night at Ilfracombe Rugby Club in Devon after organisers deemed a real bonfire not 'financially viable'

Thousands will celebrate November 5 crowded around a screen showing film footage of fire after organisers gave up wrestling with health and safety rules to hold the real thing.

The event - dubbed 'non-fire night' - will leave families holding sparklers and staring up at a 16ft by 12ft screen showing images of a roaring blaze.

Organisers at Ilfracombe Rugby Club say they were put off having the real thing by the 'mountain' of paperwork and regulations set by council bosses.

Officials at the authority said that to have a bonfire they would require five qualified fire marshals and metal barricades to keep onlookers at a safe distance.
What's on the box? A boy left holding a sparkler as the virtual bonfire flickers in the background

What's on the box? A boy left holding a sparkler as the virtual bonfire flickers in the background

The non-fire night will also involve giant heaters, lighting and a smoke machine to give the crowd the taste of a real bonfire night.


Sounds of crackling wood will also be broadcast on loudspeakers and £2,500 of fireworks will be fired into the sky.

Club captain Leo Cooper, 25, said: 'Certain regulations make it difficult for us to have a real bonfire. It is not really a financially viable option.

People will be treated to a fireworks display after watching the virtual bonfire.

'So we tried to come up with an original, imaginative and fun way to fill the void left by the bonfire.

'The bonfire is often the focal point so we decided to have a big screen that would do the same job.

'I think it was a brilliant idea. The health and safety stuff was a real pain.

'The idea of the virtual bonfire was to give our event an edge.' The scheme was hatched after organisers began to 'wade' through the strict rules behind the lighting of fires at public events.

But residents branded the virtual blaze 'health and safety nonsense'.

Amy Collins, 26, said: 'The whole point of Guy Fawkes night is to watch and smell a real bonfire. I doubt Guy Fawkes would have been able to blow up Parliament with virtual gunpowder.'

Zoe Payne, 31, added: 'If I want to watch TV I'll stay in and watch EastEnders.'

Officials at North Devon Council had cracked down on safety rules after yobs hurled fireworks on to a nearby football club bonfire five years ago. A spokesman for the council said the virtual bonfire did not fall under health and safety laws.

She added: 'If people are employed to provide a real bonfire or firework display then health and safety legislation will apply.'



Once again it is time for my daily omphaloskepsis. Tinged with a deepening sadness...