The law may be an ass, but Potty, Fartwell and Knob is not a law firm. It is the title of a book by Russell Ash, subtitled “Extraordinary But True Names of British People”. My initial thought: wouldn’t it be good if Mr Ash’s first name was Terry?

The book has tickled the ribs of The Spectator’s Dot Wordsworth, although if your name is Dot, perhaps you shouldn’t throw stones:

The book is nothing but a list of funny names. They are funny because they are true, supported by evidence from baptismal registers, census returns and the like. They become increasingly funnier in bulk.

Here are some from a section on mad names: Elizabeth Barmy, Lettuce Bedlam, Daft Coggins, Alice Crackers, Ada Crazy, Dick Daft, Loonie Fattelay, Edwin Headcase, Mania Hyman, John Idiot, Mad Looney, John Loopy, George Mad, Temperance Madly, Isaac Madman, John Mental, Edith Hard Nutter, Joyce Moody Nutter, Mad Parrott, Mary Ann Stupid, Batty Treasure.

And the greatest of these is Mary Ann Stupid, born Middlesex c1821 (St Dunstan-in-the-West, London, 1841 census). It’s the “Ann” that does it – the “Stupid” has extra force because the name is two-thirds normal. The poker-faced listing of details is one of the charms of the book, for example the explanatory sex designation here:

Silly Staryroom (Female) Born Whissonett, Norfolk, c.1877 (Hindoveston, Norfolk, 1901 census)

“[M]any of the silly names are rude,” writes Dot “only connect” Wordsworth. “Some are so rude that I can scarcely mention them.” Well, it just so happens that I was given this book as a Christmas present last year, so I can mention some of the unmentionables. Full-blown rude has its place, but some of the more obliquely rude names are funnier. Not too oblique, mind:

Everard Cock
Peter Piddle
Emma Royds
Nora Bone
Andrew Le Fuckinjon de Cadet
Page Turner
Charlotte Slob
R. Slicker
Richard Pillock Sutton
Elizabeth Bastard Silly
Inane Barker Smithson
Samuel Sod
Erasmus Bugger
Connie Linger

Some of these are clearly intentional; others may be a slip of the tongue. One of my favourites is the understated Robert Rubbish, baptized St Olave, Southwark, Surrey, 23 August 1702.

From The Times
Security on the River Thames has been stepped up to try to prevent a Mumbai-style terrorist attack on London, Boris Johnson says in an interview with The Times today.
The Mayor of London says that the Royal Navy and the Special Boat Service are guarding the capital against the threat of an assault from the river.
The Times has also been told that measures are already being intensified in readiness for the London Olympics in 2012 and are being studied further as part of the review of strategy that has followed the attacks in India.
In the interview, Mr Johnson says: “There is a great deal of work going on. There certainly are extensive preparations to stop a Mumbai-style operation on the Thames. They have thought all that through. There is substantial organisation to guard against the possibility of some sort of riparian assault. 
Counter-terrorist analysts across government have been ordered to review Britain’s ability to withstand or prevent an organised attack on the scale of that in Mumbai, where gunmen arrived by speedboat from a hijacked fishing trawler.
The review includes a close look at whether the Thames is sufficiently patrolled and whether there is adequate surveillance of the sea approaches around Britain.
Police have conducted operations on waterways surrounding the Olympics site to determine whether there is any opportunity for rapid, water-borne terrorist attacks. Of particular concern is a proposal by Tablighi Jamaat, one of Islam’s most secretive sects, to build Europe’s largest mosque in West Ham, next to the 2012 site.
A leaked FBI memo, obtained by US media in 2005, raised fears that al-Qaeda was using membership of Tablighi Jamaat “as cover . . . to network with other extremists in the US”.
The movement rejects that it has any links to terrorism or terrorists.
The Times has made this point several times in this lst year and it is a very valid one. Even if the proposed Mosque is not built Tablighi Jamaat retain a presence on the site, which is bounded by water on two sides, the railway to the south. Part of the site includes an island in the Channelsea River which is not acessible to the public, and which I hope is under particular survailance.
Lord West of Spithead, the Home Office Security Minister, told MPs on the Commons Defence Committee recently that he was concerned that there was no overall body responsible for monitoring maritime traffic around the country. The Royal Navy is charged with keeping watch on larger vessels but other organisations, such as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, local authorities and the police have varying degrees of responsibility over smaller boats.

The title of this play annoys the Spectator's theatre critic, Lloyd Evans:

The National’s new play arrives from Broadway under the label ‘August: Osage County’, a name so silly it deserves a prize. Not only does it obscure rather than reveal the play’s contents, it also makes customers anxious about naming the product they’re buying. Tip: ‘Osage’ is pronounced ‘O, Sage!’, it doesn’t rhyme with sausage.

I must confess, I rhymed it with sausage too, until I heard the playwright talk about it on Radio 4. Tracy Letts, surprisingly, is a man, and while he may not have meant to confuse the British with his name and his  play title, the job is done. Americans, presumably know that Osage rhymes with "O, Sage!", or perhaps they rhyme sausage with "O, Sage!" I am confused, too, by that colon after August. Why isn't it a comma? I wouldn't write "December: Highgate Cemetery". August is not mentioned in the play, but the characters keep going on about how hot it is, so I assume what is meant is "Osage County, August", which doesn't sound any worse than the original.

Having started to bury the play, the normally savage Lloyd Evans digs it up and then praises it:

The setting, a dysfunctional family in the Midwest, will set more alarm bells ringing. American theatre treats the Midwest in the way rock stars treat Africa, as a never-ending source of moral superiority. The worst offender is Sam Shepard, and all the portentous themes that make his plays such a painful bore to watch are on show here too: dislocation, bigotry, spiritual emptiness, abandonment. The good news is that the author Tracy Letts (a man) handles his material with a wonderfully light touch and a commendable clarity of purpose. He’s out to please an audience of paying punters not a seminar of sociologists and thesis-doodlers. The play is full of heroically savage wit. ‘Thank God, we can’t predict the future. We’d never get out of bed.’

The opening feels a touch schematic. Violet Weston (Deanna Dunagan) has been diagnosed with mouth cancer and her drunken poet of a husband responds by committing suicide. Cue a clan gathering from all corners of the US to arrange dad’s funeral and settle his affairs. Once the relatives have assembled the play takes on the pleasing untidiness of real life. The unstable, drug-addicted Violet is a role actresses dream of, an acid-tongued emotional dominatrix who flays her daughters with ceaseless maternal cattiness while satisfying herself that she’s merely being helpful and honest. Her eldest girl Barbara (Amy Morton) matches her blow for blow, and after the burial they slug it out for control of the fracturing family. The second act culminates in a funeral supper of eye-watering bitchiness which had me wondering if the playwright could surpass this climax in the final act. He delivered. The closing plot-twists are so tragic and hilarious that Sophocles would gladly have used them

At 210 minutes this blisteringly acute, wonderfully funny and deeply heartfelt comedy requires stamina from its audience, but don’t sit back and wait for a revival. This is the production to see.

I saw the play, which has had universal good reviews, last Saturday. Everything Lloyd Evans says is true, with the glaring omission of one fault: it goes on too long. Three hours with two intervals should have been cut to two hours and one interval. There is at least an hour's worth of padding in there. Yes, in a play about a dysfunctional family you expect somebody to break a plate. But must she break two? And must her daughter join in and break one of her own? The writer indulged himself too much. Perhaps also there were too many characters and the stage and the theatre were too big, diffusing the - surely intended - claustrophobia.

Good, but not that good. Perhaps I should produce an English version called "February: Westward Ho!" That's one-up in the weird punctuation stakes, but other than that, my play would be scaled down, lasting about half an hour and using plastic plates.

The building of huge mosques throughout Germany is nothing short of a “a bid for power and influence, a land grab”, according to Ralph Giordano, 85, the German Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, in an interview with The Times that is likely to stir Muslim anger.
The comments from Mr Giordano came as the Muslim community of Cologne – about 120,000 strong – prepared to lay the foundation stone for yet another giant mosque, one of more than a hundred that are being planned or built across the country.
Barely six weeks ago another mosque, capable of accommodating 1,200 worshippers, was opened in Duisburg in the nearby Ruhr region of northwest Germany.
“When I first saw the blueprints for the grand mosque in Cologne, I was shocked,” said Mr Giordano, who is now very active in the campaign against Turkish mosque-building. “It sent a completely wrong signal, it was a bid for power and influence, a land grab, not a place of prayer, so I told the mayor: Stop this mosque now!” That was in a public discussion that was filmed and placed online. The result was, he says, an avalanche of many hundred of supportive letters.
“They all struck the same note: Mr Giordano we are afraid as you are of this creeping Islamification but we can’t say anything in public because we will end up being branded as neo-Nazis.”
The novelist and essayist pauses for effect. “Well, that’s something that cannot be pinned on me!”
Mr Giordano finds himself in the company of far-right activists. “Of course, you have to distance yourself clearly from these people – obviously their racist, neo-Nazis arguments are quite different from mine – but I am not going to be muzzled just because people are fighting on the same issue with false arguments and a false ideology.”

The two are not mutually exclusive. I have written many times that Islam is more concerned with territory than piety. Indeed, for a devout Muslim, a land grab is part of prayer.The Times interviews Ralph Giordano, an 85-year-old German Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, an interview it says may "stir Muslim anger". Is it item 2,434,684,589 on Hugh's list of things that "fuel Muslim extremism"?

“When I first saw the blueprints for the grand mosque in Cologne, I was shocked,” said Mr Giordano, who is now very active in the campaign against Turkish mosque-building. “It sent a completely wrong signal, it was a bid for power and influence, a land grab, not a place of prayer, so I told the mayor: Stop this mosque now!” That was in a public discussion that was filmed and placed online. The result was, he says, an avalanche of many hundred of supportive letters.

“They all struck the same note: Mr Giordano we are afraid as you are of this creeping Islamification but we can’t say anything in public because we will end up being branded as neo-Nazis.”

The novelist and essayist pauses for effect. “Well, that’s something that cannot be pinned on me!”

Mr Giordano finds himself in the company of far-right activists. “Of course, you have to distance yourself clearly from these people – obviously their racist, neo-Nazis arguments are quite different from mine – but I am not going to be muzzled just because people are fighting on the same issue with false arguments and a false ideology.”

Fritz Schramma, the Mayor of Cologne, argues that the mosque will become a tourist attraction and that it will be integrated into the urban culture. “It’s not right that Muslims should have to pray in old factory warehouses,” he said.

There is a hope too that if Muslims are allowed to become part of the urban landscape rather than hidden away there will be less risk of furtive fundamentalism.

Indeed. The fundamentalism will be out in the open as Muslims are emboldened by appeasement.

Update: great minds think alike - Esmerelda has posted the same story. Still, worth reading twice.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=loeEDoWC-qI

Thanks to Alan both for the initial story and the detail and background.
I'll start with the lead story and take the version from Soccer Net.

Nicholas was a 4th century Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. Patron saint of children, students, sailors and archers. Noted for his works of kindness while a bishop, some of which are now legendary and miraculous. Because some of these concerned the welfare of children one strand of the tradition that is our modern Father Christmas has grown up around him.
In parts of Europe and some Christian communities of the Middle East today is the day the children would have received their presents, having first satisfied St Nicholas that they have behaved suitably well during the year to merit Christmas gifts.
In England the tradition in churches and Cathedrals was to elect a Boy Bishop to preside over those activities during the Christmas festival that didn't require a properly ordained priest. The custom was revived in some parishes in the early 20th century, then died out again.