Homerton – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Is the Cibber piper in the V&A a notorious plague-pit drunkard?

Featuring O du lieber Augustin, the Thomases Dekker and Middleton, Daniel Defoe and various disreputable beggars and foreigners.

Cibber's blind(?) piper (dog bottom left) in the V&A.

Organ grinders and monkey and marmot migration

Any proto-ecologists don’t seem to have cared very much.

The recto of the Anglicised business card.

Brenda strikes back

“Don’t waste your time on obscure contemporary composers, John,” she said.

¡A por los títeres!

La feria madrileña imita a Petruskha.

Diseño de Alexandre Benois para Petrushka, 1911.

Barrel organ available for losing bettors on the Iowa caucuses

Exemplary punishments from the 1892 US presidential election.

Tweets for January 2016

Protected: Seniorita’s sauna and massage parlour, Chatsworth Road, Clapton, London (This post started elsewhere as a bit of linguistic jokery about George Formby, Al Jolson and Balkan turbo-folk, but unhappily became a focus for daft, drunk men looking for prostitutes. To read it please enter the German version of the first name of the translator of the Bible into Middle English)

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Hackney Brook restoration scheme

Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.