There's a Little Yellow Idol to the North of Katmandu

[liadnan]

You know, I could have sworn that was a Kipling line. Perhaps it is, but the only answers Google can come up with are the Goons (which I knew, indeed it was hearing the Goons episode that prompted the search) and John Lennon.

It's twenty past midnight on a school night and I'm playing on the interweb and drinking whiskey. I have no real excuse. Well, the whiskey is currently the only anaesthetic that works on my arm and shoulder, which otherwise becomes unbearable in the evening, and I stayed up because Joey was on and I wanted to see what I made of it. Currently, hmmm. It has good gags but I don't yet see the staying power Friends or, more directly comparable, Frasier had from the first moment.

And earlier, a weird and morbid ER episode. (Incidentally, they have done real-time stuff before, haven't they? Or maybe I'm just imagining that.)

Frankly, I'm not well-equipped to watch such things emotionally at the moment. I was at home all weekend seeing my father. The man who taught me to appreciate the Goon Show, and Kipling, amongst half a million other things.

I wrote a long paragraph here and then deleted it. Fuck it. Stick with the words of a man my father knew, in a particularly appropriate poem:

Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land

Comments

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reminding me of The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God (http://ingeb.org/songs/theresae.html), which I last heard when I was 12 or so.

Re-reading it made me realise just how much Robert Service took (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8336/robertservice/shooting.html) the piss (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Bluffs/8336/robertservice/sam.html) out of it. (Service was a poet introduced to me when a friend of my mother's recited "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" to me when I was about 10 and promptly followed it up with "The Cremation of Sam McGee" - a truly great shaggy dog story.

(BTW, it was a popular 1910s song it appears. Beats me too, I thought it was a Kipling clone!)

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

I have wine instead of whiskey, but I'll raise a glass of it to your Dad.

[eccles.livejournal.com]

Brandy!

[liadnan]

V. curious. I was searching on "little yellow idol" which is the Goons line. Milligan must have -consciously or subconsciously- edited it from "one-eyed yellow idol" and Lennon then quoted him (Lennon was a Goons and Marx Brothers fan). I suppose it's actually a marginal improvement in the metre.

It's the kind of metre Kipling regularly used ("There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Katmandu" "Watch the wall my darling while the gentlemen go by" "The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone" "When you've shouted Rule Britannia, when you've sung God Save the Queen/When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth" etc etc), and a Kiplingesque type of subject and setting, and in 1910 he was, I think, very popular. And googling on the proper line reveals we aren't the only people to associate it with Kipling.

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

Lovey, quit trying to cope and pass the work on. Firstly, no one could expect you to continue at a time like this, secondly it's unlikely you'll do the work up to standard anyway when your emotions are so caught up.

I'm really sorry to hear the news.

Yellow Idol

[(Anonymous)]

The Poem is by J. Milton Hayes
The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

Happy Reading