The witterings, blitherings, and other assorted thinks of Johnnynorms are now continued over on:

Twisty Turny Lanes

Whimsical Tour of the Web #4

Frank Key's Hooting YardErudite and humourous wordmongerer.


Hooting Yard is where to find a certain Mr Frank Key - erudite regaler of fact and fiction, wordmongering humourist, deadpan deliverer of entertaining digression, poetic spinner of poignant yarns.

It is in this instance a blog, but it's also a radio programme in London, podcasted for the rest of the world. Drop in/tune in and enjoy the outpourings of Mr Key's rich imagination, his love of language dredging up arcane verbiage whilst shaping his droll and bizarre world.

Characters such as Dobson the out-of-print pamphleteer, Tiny Enid, and Marigold Chew, abound in stories that have an authoritative feel, like a gigantic footnote which takes over the book. The boundaries of real quotation and Keysian invention aren't wholly distinct in my bamboozled mind. As well as his own writings, the website is a veritable pot-pourri of gubbins, stuff and miscellany. Frank homes in on rarefied and ridiculous snippets of trivia, both topical and ancient, real, surreal and not real, factoids that appeal to the elevated nodes of uber-absurdity. (They home in on him too, certainly in the form of esoteric contributors.)

I feel that I'm beginning to chase my tail in the slippery task of defining something so original, you have to go for a lonesome explore by yourself. The bottom line? The reason for wandering through the witterings? Frank Key is funny, affably disgruntled, very inventive and seems to have the whole world in his head, plus another one of his own making.

http://www.hootingyard.org/

Other Websites in the Whimsical Tour
#1 The Captain Beefheart Radar Station - all about the words, music, paintings & life of Don Van Vliet.
#2 Coconino World - massive French showcase of illustrators and comic artists present and past.

This post was originally published 2008, but I've republished to bump it up to the top.