Street performance – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Four more African inflationary tunes

Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Congo are now represented, but so far there’s nothing from Zimbabwe or in French.

Zimbabwean banknotes from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars, issued 2007-8.

A sensational 1810 Parisian fire scene on top of an 1840s Russian barrel organ

But who are the three noseless Austrian ladies?

Robert Hillingford, The Disaster at the Ball Given by the Austrian Embassy in Paris, 1810 (1897).

Tweets for December 2016

The debasement of the European mind

A populist US senator meets an Italian organ-grinder in Rome in 1859.

Doggerel and the death of democracy

Featuring John Taylor, the Water(man) Poet, Cornelius Cardew, Rick Astley, Luther Vandross, Michael Fassbender and someone else as Macbuff and Macdeath, Bugs Bunny & Friends, and finally John Taylor again.

Title page of John Taylor's Swarm of sectaries, and schismatiques.

Tweets for November 2016

A dark and stormy night

A Jerusalem artichoke verse, several Rigbyisms and the Grand Old Duke of Fart.

The English government, with King George behind, farting taxes upon free-born Englishmen (1794).

Yiddish and the Italian Welsh

Daffy-down-dilly has been and fled / Her yellow-green gown all stained in red. Featuring Google Translate’s transliteration service for unfamiliar scripts.

Napoleon meets a Welshman (1810-5). Dad's granny's granny used to recount seeing the Welsh march away to fight at Waterloo.

Tweets for October 2016

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.