Crackling snaps, Ballot of reading goal, Better bred than TED, &c.

Man and Animal Conflict: A Leopard attacks a forest department employee, after the man threw a stone toward the leopard in an abandoned construction site in Limbu Village in Siliguri in West Bengal, India. (© Salil Bera/National Geographic Photo Contest)

National Geographic Photo Contest 2012, Part 1 and Part 2. If Ian Dury were alive and the editor, there'd be a Part 3. If Quinn Martin were alive there'd be two more Parts plus an Epilogue.

Close Encounter of the Insect Kind: Check out the awesome face on this praying mantis. I can't get over the mouth, it's like something from a science fiction movie. Of all photographic styles macro is definitely my favorite. I am constantly amazed, in every photo that I take, by the intricate level of detail that exists on even the smallest of creatures. It's a stark reminder that a very complex and infinitely beautiful world exists just beyond our human-sized level of perception. Photo taken in Donnybrook, Queensland, Australia. (© Andrew Young/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Failed Escape in the Everglades: I was watching three young alligators when an adult approached. The adult grabbed this one and went underwater... suddenly it came up to flip the juvenile and eat it. Grassy Waters Preserve is part of the original Everglades, and is a natural area that is part of the water supply for the City of West Palm Beach, Florida. (© Steve Scherer/National Geographic Photo Contest)

"Son, how about a snack?" "Oh boy, Pop, for sure!" "No, I meant for me ... Boy, I say Boy - urp!, never mind - could I ever use some ... Gatorade right about now."

Jump: Two squirrels were playing in the warm afternoon in the Penitencia Creek County Park in San Jose, California. (© Chih-Hung Kao/National Geographic Photo Contest)

A Refreshing Sight on a Hot Day: On August 27, 2012, my husband and I were photographing wildlife in the Jasper area, when we decided to go to the Maligne Lake Lodge for a bite to eat. While walking up to the building, Terry exclaimed "is that a Moose swimming in the lake?!" Sure enough, the Moose swam across part of the lake, then proceeded to stand in the water, submerging her head to feed on the vegetation at the bottom. I sat on the shore and snapped several photos, including this one. What an exciting experience that was for us! (© Cathy Parsons/National Geographic Photo Contest)

"Sure beats rolling down a pointy ski slope in a snow boulder and pulling lions' heads out of magicians' top hats."

Immersion: The sheep drowned while trying to cross a small canal in the meadow-swamp "Tøndermasken", in southern Jylland in Denmark. Birds had eaten every part above the surface, and everything under was left totally untouched.(© Johannes Bojesen/National Geographic Photo Contest)

The Great Escape: During a lovely morning in July I was out photographing Great White Sharks in False Bay, South Africa. We had two days when the sea was so still you could barely see a ripple. (© Tonya Herron/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Acrobatic: This small red eye frog playing at the edge of the leaf looks a bit like it's making some acrobatic move. It can blend well with the leaves, disguised from predators. Those big red eyes really caught my attention, drawing me to observe and photograph its moves.(© Shikhei Goh/National Geographic Photo Contest)

A mentally handicapped man of 62, beside his dying 92 year old mother, on the last day of her life.(© Eric Robben/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Gelada Charge: Easily identified by their "bleeding hearts", Gelada baboons are endemic to the Ethiopian highlands and can be found in large troops foraging the grasslands of the Simien Mountains. Here, a group of three young males had infiltrated a group of females and begun grooming them. On detecting this intrusion the alpha male charged the interlopers, reasserting his dominance over them and protecting his harem. (© Thomas Alexander/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Bold Ram: This rocky mountain big horn sheep ram was bold enough to allow me to approach him and snap this shot before he lost interest in me and rejoined his herd. (© Scott Trageser/National Geographic Photo Contest)

I Like My House! This is Gandalf the Great Grey Owl and he gets scared flying out in the open so his owners have built his aviary inside a brick shed. He now loves spending his days watching the world go by out of his window.(© Mark Bridger/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Favorite tracks played lately on BBC 6 Music: Band of Horses: "Feud". Stealing Sheep "Rearrange". Teleman: "Cristina".

The "Baba O'Reilly" Factor

Pete Townshend: By the Book

The musician and author thinks Ozzy Osbourne wrote the best rock memoir. “It made me think I should chuck my memoir manuscript away and throw a party during which I jump out of the window but don’t quite kill myself.”

"And Harry, what are your hobbies outside summarizing?"

"Well, strangling animals, golf and masturbating."

"Well, thank you Harry Bagot."

Harry walks off-stage. Music and applause.

"Well there he goes. Harry Bagot. He must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies, golf's not very popular around here, but never mind, a good try."

The last-place finisher, apparently, in the Summarize Proust Competition:

Length and quality

Rachel Redford 24 November 2012

The Complete Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust, read by Neville Jason

Naxos Audio Books, pp.120 CDs, 150 hours (also available in separate volumes), £380

The final volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, released at the end of last month, is a landmark in audio publishing. The seven volumes — over twice the length… Read more

Jeffrey Goldberg, resident liberal-hawk Jerusophile at the Atlantic, restyles both halves of the term "well-regulated militia" for an age in which American liberals have little choice but to throw in the bullet-surprised white towel on handgun bans.

• 
  

That picture of Costco CEO Craig Jelinek answers a question that's been bothering me for seconds - what if they give an audition for the Orson Welles role in a Touch of Evil remake and neither Art Donovan nor Brian Dennehy show up?

Books of the Year (TLS, London); a few cherries:

JONATHAN CLARK In 1931, two pedestrians were knocked down by motor cars. Either, or both, could

easily have been killed. One, visiting New York, was Winston Churchill; the other, in Munich, was Adolf Hitler.

Ed Smith, a talented cricketer, had his playing career suddenly cut short by random injury; educated as a

historian at Cambridge, he wrote a book about it. Luck: What it means and why it matters (Bloomsbury )

counters the reassuring myth that outcomes - in sport, in science, in finance, in politics - are determined by

talent plus effort. Using sports results as a proxy, Smith even quantifies the contribution of luck to victories

and defeats. So he takes the problem of free will, rationality, virtue, chance, fortune, destiny or fate out of the

hands of statisticians, where it has been hushed up by social science, and brings randomness to bear on

everyday life. Our lives, unfortunately.

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES The Library of America series is the best continuous advertisement

for the surpassing intelligence, creative leadership and elite values of the United States in the age of Tea Party

stupidity. This year LoA published both The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (a bewitching exploration of

gay sensibility), and David Goodis's Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s. Goodis was a working-class Jew from

Philadelphia who spent his life caring for a schizophrenic brother and died after a mugging at the age of forty -

eight. His novels, which were first published as pulp fiction, excel Chandler or Hammett as stifling studies of

psychological crisis and urban alienation. The loneliness, despair and stealthy heroism of his protagonists,

the cruelty they encounter in city landscapes, the impulsive altruism of strangers, are evoked in taut, spare

prose of hammering power. Goodis deserves an international reputation rather than merely a cult following.

SIMON JENKINS My book of the year is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (Allen Lane), the worst title

for a fascinating book. Why do people disagree, indeed people from near identical backgrounds? We think we

reason with each other, when in fact we deploy reason to defend our preconceptions against others, and seek

to persuade them they are wrong. The political mind is made up of a mass of inherited and acquired

prejudices, often embedded deep in our genetic make-up. We are groups, interests, tribes, collectives. Reason

is our sword and shield, not a genuine exchange of argument - or every debate would end in agreement. Haidt

well explains the hysterical polarities of today 's blogosphere.

PETER McDONALD A collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

(Virago), has been the most consequential volume of the year for me. Robinson's fiction is always the richer

for each rereading - a rare enough thing in contemporary literature - but her essays, too, can be read

repeatedly with increasing profit. As a novelist, she knows all about "the integrity and mystery of

other lives"; but here it is as a thinker and moralist that she explores the meanings and responsibilities of such

knowledge. Her book has profound things to say about society, religion, and scientific reality - "this teeming

world, so steeped in sin". When I Was a Child is now inevitably a work of counter-culture: Robinson writes

beautifully from a tradition of acute religious intelligence, a caring Calvinism which applies itself with

tolerance, patience and principle to the many difficulties, obscurities and misapprehensions of modern belief.

MARJORIE PERLOFF Bernard Wasserstein's On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World

War (Profile) is not just another Holocaust book and certainly not just another account of the Nazi

persecution of the Jews. It is Wasserstein's great feat to make clear how - despite the astonishing successes of

European Jews in the 1910s and early 20s - political, social, economic and cultural forces conspired to turn

them into the ultimate pariahs. "The problem was not just Germany. The Nazis were the vanguard of a wider

European phenomenon of stigmatization, expropriation, extrusion, and bloodshed." Indeed, the irony is that

whether the Jews chose assimilation or resisted it turned out to make very little difference. In France, "the

revolutionary tradition of the rights of man, to which most Jews clung as a lifeline, proved gossamer-thin and

snapped in the ultimate crisis". Never polemical, On the Eve is a real eye-opener.

My only caveat is that Wasserstein does not include the UK. It would have been useful to see where British

culture stood vis-à-vis its neighbours.

TOM SHIPPEY Every one knows now about the Norse gods, Thor and Loki and one-eyed Odin, and the

mythology associated with them, Valhalla and Ragnarok and the Midgard Serpent. Most of what we know,

however, derives from only one work, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century Prose Edda. Snorri

also wrote Heimskringla, the long series of kings' sagas which gave us many famous bravura pieces, like the

last stand of King Olaf on his warship The Long Serpent. Snorri was a major politician himself, with the aim -

says Nancy Brown's literary biography of him, Song of the Vikings (Palgrave Macmillan) - of becoming

uncrowned king of Iceland. He nearly made it, but when the killers trapped him in his cellar his last words

were, "Mustn't strike, mustn't strike". No hero, then, but one of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages, whose

personal saga is now rivetingly told.

PETER THONEMANN The outstanding work of ancient history published this year was Peter Brown's

Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton). The book is formally about Christian attitudes to wealth in the

western Roman Empire of the fourth to sixth centuries ad. But that is a bit like describing Moby-Dick as a book

about sailors' attitudes to whales. Brown lays before us a vast panorama of the entire culture and society of

the late Roman west. Through the writings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and others, we follow the growth

of the Church from its origins as a religion of the poor and middling classes through to its final victory as the

universal faith of the Roman world. The earliest Christians' radical critique of wealth (the "root of all evil")

gradually crumbles in the face of the fabulous accumulated riches of the Church triumphant, "wrapped in the

magic of eternity". It is a steep climb, but a breathtaking view.

A. N. WILSON Toweringly the most impressive work of history I have read this year is Anne Applebaum's

Iron Curtain: The crushing of Eastern Europe (Allen Lane). Using interviews, and sources in Polish, Russian,

German and Hungarian, she builds up a forensic picture of how the casual decisions by politicians - Churchill

at Yalta shoving a few matchsticks across a map of Poland and offering it to Stalin - could wreck the lives of

hundreds of thousands of people for generations. The accounts of the suffering in Germany and Poland in

1945-6 are gut-wrenching. The careful Communist takeover of youth groups, political clubs, evening classes,

housing associations in the immediate post-war years develops inexorably and violently into total control

over millions of lives. She chronicles the psychological scars as well as the numberless physical deaths and

the political fall-out continuing to this day .

NYTimes 100 Notable Books of 2012 and 10 Best Books of 2012. Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 2012 . The Observer Books of the Year 2012. The Spectator Books of the Year, Part 1 and Part 2. The Atlantic Books of the Year 2012:

Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United StatesDavid Hackett Fischer
Oxford

This comparison of the United States with New Zealand is a pioneering, illuminating, and at times startling book. A historical examination of the idea of fairness, and of its social and political ramifications, it is a work of great sweep and imagination by one of America's foremost historians.

The Slate Book Review Top 10 of 2012. Slate staff picks 2012 Books:

How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough
Recommended by Emily Bazelon, senior editorAs an education writer, Paul Tough goes deeper than anyone I know. Some of the ideas he has brought to light—that preschool is a great government investment given the payoff later in life, that building character matters as much for success as academics—are so deeply ingrained in my own thinking that it’s hard to remember I had to learn them somewhere. Reading Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, reminded me just why he’s so good. The book is a synthesis of all the latest research on learning, told in well-packaged chapters like “How to Think” and “How to Fail (and How Not To).” I learned so much reading this book and I came away full of hope about how we can make life better for all kinds of kids.

Escape From Camp 14, by Blaine Harden
Recommended by Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist
In January 2005, a malnourished 23-year-old named Shin Dong-hyuk escaped from the North Korean prison camp where he'd been born.Escape From Camp 14 is his story—a parade of unimaginable cruelties that Shin and the hundreds of thousands of other prisoners held in North Korea's vast gulags face every day. The account, by the formerWashington Post reporter Blaine Harden, is a brutal, terrifying read, with every page offering graphic details of monstrous physical, psychological and emotional torture. It's complicated by Shin's own apparent conflicts about his own behavior in camp. And it is also an unforgettable adventure story, a coming-of-age memoir of the worst childhood imaginable. Read it to feel better about any problem you've ever encountered.

The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson
Recommended by David Plotz, editor
A Grand Guignol of a novel, The Orphan Master’s Son follows an orphaned boy who survives horror after horror after horror, at each stage rising toward the top of North Korea’s hellishly bizarre society. It exaggerates the grim reality of North Korea, but that country is so warped that the depravities Adam Johnson imagines actually seem possible. (Would North Korea’s leader try to recreate a Texas ranch, Potemkin style? He probably would!) Individual scenes—the underground prison mines, the psych-torture dungeons of Pyongyang—have the sickening power of Holocaust memoirs, but the book as a whole has a manic, comic buoyancy. I could have done with 20 percent less magical realism and 20 percent more real realism. Even so, The Orphan Master’s Son the most fun you’ll ever have reading about torture, totalitarianism, and death camps.

The Monsters’ Monster, by Patrick McDonnell
Recommended by Dana Stevens, movie critic
If only there were more new children’s picture books as good as The Monsters’ Monster, written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell, best known as the creator of the syndicated comic strip Mutts. This story of three would-be terrifying monsters who collaborate to create a supermonster takes a charming twist midway through when their Frankenstein-like creation turns out to be a sweet, gentle soul who can’t stop exuberantly thanking his creators for the gift of life and buying them fresh jelly donuts. This goofy kid-pleaser also a works as a thoughtful little allegory about friendship, kindness and gratitude, and it’s a pleasure both to look at and to read aloud.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo
Recommended by Matt Yglesias, Moneybox columnist
It seems dumb to recommend a National Book Award winner, but if there was a better book in 2012 than Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity I missed it. It's the story of a Mumbai slum community and its residents' struggle for survival and even prosperity, and in its way there's no more important question in the world today than the central question of the book: Can Indian democracy deliver rising living standards for the broad mass of its people? But it's a narrative rather than an analytical work, written in out-of-this-world novelistic prose.

Eurydice by Cristina Nehring

In reading "Loving a Child on the Fringe", Cristina Nehring's essay in Slate on the deepened character and capacity for joy she has acquired from life with Eurydice, her leukemia-bearing Down's Syndrome daughter, after Eurydice's father chose to evaporate without trace, 

It is sometimes said ... that autism is mysterious, Down syndrome is not. Autists are prodigies, introverts, misunderstood; people with Down syndrome are just dumb and dull. And yet, Eurydice has always been mysterious to me. To this day she does not speak—or, rather, she does not speak any publicly recognized language. But she has an enormous amount to say, uncanny capacities for observation, and startling social intelligence. In the French-English-German universe she inhabits, she has invented a vernacular all her own in which she makes orations so self-assured, well-inflected, and precisely punctuated by rhetorical gesticulation that strangers often inquire which language it is she’s speaking.

... Warriors at heart, we cherish what we’ve gone to battle for far more than what’s been handed to us with a lifetime warranty and a lollipop.

... There are reasons to think the future could be harder—not easier—than the present. But while certain experts (repeatedly quoted by Solomon) have suggested that this leads to “chronic sadness” in parents of children with Down syndrome, I find it leads to “chroniccarpe diem”—a chronic desire to seize the day and wring the best possible from every moment—and from myself.

... I also know she’s unlikely to grow up entirely: She’s unlikely to move out at 18 and leave me to my own adventures, so I try to embark on those adventures right now. Toddler in tow, I take every travel assignment I can get from an editor, board every train, scale every limestone fence, and dip my nose longingly into every long-stemmed tulip. It’s probably a good modus operandi for all of us.

... The joy Eurydice takes in each detail of life is the most infectious quality I’ve ever known. When she flings her arms around my neck as she does every day, every night, my most recurrent fear is no longer relapsing cancer, no longer early dementia or heart disease or hearing loss—or even the fact that Eurydice is growing up too slowly. It is a testament to how radically this child has transformed me that my most recurrent fear may be that she’s growing up toofast—that one day she could be too mature to give me those massive, resplendent, full-body hugs.

If the two of us can avert that catastrophe, I tend to think we can avert them all.

I thought at once of the closing paragraphs of Nehring's 2005 review ("Good Vibrations") in The Nation of O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm by Jonathan Margolis

... herein lies the gravest problem with Margolis's erotic agenda: In wanting to keep sex unencumbered by emotion, morality or mysticism so that we can have as much of it as easily as possible, he altogether depletes it. He makes it dull and small--at best an agreeable snack for the sensations and at worst a forgettable hiccup, but never a sublime experience.

And that is tragic. For sex is a powerful force; if harnessed rather than simply sprinkled hither and thither, it can take us places. It can burst through barriers that would otherwise remain unbroken, accomplish in one explosive clap what decades of whittling away at someone else's or our own defenses could not. It can throw us into the core of a Strange Other or into the still center of our own souls. At its best it is two things Margolis disdains: mystical and transgressive. That is why it has so often been shot through with spirituality--by twentieth-century hippies, seventeenth-century poets and contemporary Tantric theorists alike. That is why it has so often been curbed: But to curb, in many such cases, is to strengthen. Much as nudist beaches are not erotic, people sitting around openly masturbating, as Margolis envisions, are not erotic. It is secret love that is the strongest. It is forbidden fruit that is the sweetest. In that sense maybe we can thank Christianity for making sex harder; in so doing it has made it more intense. Women comfortably comparing vibrators over lunch are not for that reason in possession of the most beautiful erotic experiences. Portnoy masturbating around the clock is not the happiest guy on earth--though Margolis's arguments would make us think so.

We have demystified orgasm enough over the decades; perhaps it is time, now, to remystify it. Margolis rightly blames the church for having attempted to make sex a mere tool for procreation: God, he says, gave us a race car; why use it as a tractor? No, God has given us a chariot to the sun, and Margolis, alas, is using it as a Honda Civic. Always reliable, generally available, but just not a lot of magic. Sex is many things to many people and that is as it should be, but the last thing we want is orgasms on tap; an erotic culture of infinite availability and amiable innocuousness is an erotic culture that is bland. There will always be those for whom sex is a snack or a sneeze, but let us leave room for sex as communion, sex as spirit made flesh, sex as a brush with the feathered glory of Leda's swan, a brush with the divine.

and then of the first half of Emerson's poem "Give All to Love", popular as a wedding reading:

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the Muse -
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:
High and more high
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,

Untold intent;
But it is a god,
Knows its own path
And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout.
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward -
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

"The Onion sends up TED talks":

That TED Talks are for winners—or as [Onion Talks head writer Sam] West described them, “C.E.O.’s, on islands or whatever, having a grand old time”—can make the lecturers come across as smug. TED has been accused of being elitist; Heller pointed out that the cost of admission to the Long Beach conference is seventy-five hundred dollars, and tickets are available only by invitation or application. But TED also clearly tries to be inviting, in a manner reflective of what West sees as a problematic tendency in the tech world, that “every new idea is the best one, and because we are profiting off of it, everyone must know—and everything else is backwards and obsolete.” The first installment of Onion Talks, “Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?” highlights the absurdity of blindly chasing innovation; the lecturer explains, “I’m an idea man. I link up with implementers, and then we share the money.”

... As West and I discussed the irksome self-importance of these lectures, he stopped himself, and said, “I’m sounding all grandiose here.” ... In particular, West said, “Some crazy percent of them end with standing ovations, and I think that sort of encapsulates it more than anything else, the self-importance of the talks.” The Onion’s team of five writers, and the actors who pontificate their way through three-minute performances, embody the TED brand of arrogantly benevolent wisdom.

One upcoming Onion Talk opens on a man with black square-rimmed glasses, standing with his hands folded under a screen that shows nothing but a large cartoon duck. He bows his head. “The duck says”—he looks up, for a dramatic pause—”quack.” His eyes widen, as if an angel is offering him a warm plate of cookies. Cut to a member of the audience, who is visibly moved. Throughout, the lecturer maintains an air of contemplative serenity, as though he has discovered untold secrets of the universe. His speech concludes with a call to action: “How do we get our chickens to quack? That is up to you.” Of course, this brings the crowd to its feet, in boisterous applause.
... In an Onion Talk, a lecturer bluntly tells the crowd, “I’m not telling you anything that every goddam asshole don’t already know.” The Onion is doing what TED strives to achieve: stating the obvious in a refreshing way. Only where TED has counterintuitive logic and the “Marcia Trionfale,” the Onion’s got jokes.

“Any self important entity must be taken down by clowns from the peanut gallery, if I can be self-important for a minute.” West told me ...

"A chunky history of peanut butter."

Say it ain't so, Joe, and while allowing 4 to 6 weeks for your cheapjack answer I'll send you 100 Bazooka comics. FORTUNE: Your dog is only trying to give your choking leg the Heimlich maneuver. Chicken make the best livers, pigs the wurst.

Post Mortem: "Bazooka gum overhauls brand and loses comic strips." Gene Weingarten on the "Chewish humor" of the Bazooka artists. The Onion in 2008 broke the haunting backstory behind Mort's nose-high red turtleneck.

Maria Popova grew up around books.

Poporofiled in the NYT: Maria Popova, Bulgarian-Brooklynite curator of the popular web-grab-bag-as-aesthetic-Wonder-Cabinet Brain Pickings. Or me, I like to think, if my own picky brain shaved his legs and then he was a she and said Hey, Babes in WebLands, take a click on the Wilde side. Speaking of Oscar ...

     

The ultimate Oscar Wilde epigram wall chart, for those who need something calming to read at the doctor's when their hearts for hearts' sake are at risk of a sudden surge of mauve-coat hypertension:

Mucho Java: the power of positive drinking as much coffee as you can stand.

Dorothy Day via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Kazin (son of Alfred) on the Catholic bishops' unanimous endorsement for sainthood of Dorothy Day, Christian anarchist founder of the Catholic Worker movement:

Like any good anarchist, Christian or not, Day had no faith whatsoever in the desire or ability of governing authorities to create a moral, egalitarian society. At the recent bishops’ meeting, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago recalled asking her, just after the 1960 election, how she felt about having a Catholic in the White House “who can fight for social justice.” “I believe Mr. Kennedy has chosen very badly,” she snapped. “No serious Catholic would want to be president of the United States.” I doubt we will hear that line repeated from the pulpit once Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, and Andrew Cuomo start running for the White House.

Latest proof that those self-dramatizing Letters to the Editor read as interstitials on Monty Python's Flying Circus 

Dear Sir,

When I was at school, I was beaten regularly every 30 minutes and it never did me any harm — except for psychological maladjustment and blurred vision. 

Yours truly, Flight Lt. Ken Frankenstein (Mrs)

were but scarce embellishments upon the real thing, as revealed in Imagine My Surprise... Unpublished letters to The Daily Telegraph, the latest annual compilation from the venerable Tory broadsheet, in which the proper names,  place names and honorifics alike of the assorted mustachioed blue-blazered retired colonels out of Fawlty Towers, dowagers, pensioners, and birdwatchers wondering if they are alone in noticing the world's divers oddities more often than not bear a comic scrutiny as close as their impassioned missives themselves:

[Iain Hollingshead, editor] ... One of my favourites comes from a pensioner in North Yorkshire who started watching the televised Jubilee concert in no mood for “pop” artists and, several bottles of wine later, ended up “dancing the night away in a modernistic style” with his wife ...

Here are some of the best unpublished letters from 2012......

SIR – It is bad enough reading that Colin Firth’s wife has dispensed with her underwear, but to publish the fact that 67 per cent of women over 80 are sexually active and that most achieve orgasm is devastating news.

Are you mad, sir? I am a mere male (not a rampant young stud) of 68 years, still trying to live up to some vague sexual expectations. Not being certain whether or not I have succeeded is bad enough, but the thought of perhaps another two decades of strenuous and possibly gymnastic marital duties is just too much.

My only resort is to prevent my wife from reading The Daily Telegraph.

Geoff Milburn

Glossop, Derbyshire

SIR – Is it not odd, and a trifle spooky, that the two Tory ministers whom Labour have gone after are Fox and Hunt? What can it mean?

Nicholas Guitard

Poundstock, Cornwall

SIR – David Cameron wants to help us old people to downsize. I am already two inches shorter than I used to be, so I don’t need his help.

John de Lange

London N12

SIR – You report that a man has been seen in a yodelling outfit – aka lederhosen – in a nature reserve in Hertfordshire, apparently looking for illicit sex. In August 2010 I walked the entire length of the King Ludwig Way in Bavaria in my lederhosen and no one approached me with the offer of a sexual encounter.

This summer I was planning to go to Italy, but Hertfordshire now looks a more promising destination.

Charles White

Washingborough, Lincolnshire

SIR – I am very concerned when the media describes the forthcoming Olympic Games as a “once in a lifetime event”. I attended the 1948 London Olympics.

Roly Cockman

Horseheath, Cambridgeshire

SIR – Given the overly zealous use of copyright law, will the phrase “Five Gold Rings” have to be omitted from the carol Twelve Days of Christmas?

P.B. 
Harbury, Warwickshire

SIR – Following the first landing on the moon in 1969, I overhead two colleagues discussing the event.

After acknowledging the seminal feat, one concluded her remarks by commenting: “What made it all the more remarkable was that it was only a half moon at the time.”

Josephine Hinson

Gurnard, Isle of Wight

SIR – One is, of course, delighted to hear that the Greek economy is to be saved –once again.

On a recent visit to Crete I asked for the recipe for a Greek salad. There came the not entirely ironic reply: “First, you borrow some feta...”

Christopher Rodda

Boscastle, Cornwall

SIR – Am I alone in thinking that Jeremy Paxman looks like a Proboscis monkey?

Michael Powell

Tealby, Lincolnshire

SIR – My family home, Compton Castle, built in the 14th Century, is open to the public.

For the convenience of the visitors, my father had a sign saying “Lavatory” placed on a door. One day, my mother overheard a young man say to his companion, “What’s a lavatory, dear?” To which she replied, “That’s medieval for toilet.”

His Honour Judge Francis Gilbert, Q.C.

Bovey Tracey, Devon

SIR – My husband’s pithy summary of today’s Daily Telegraph was: “Bosoms; Downton Abbey; and the next thing that’s going to kill me.”

Val Woollven

Horrabridge, Devon

SIR – My wife and I decided to open a bottle of wine every time GB won a gold medal. A mistake.

Tony Hart

Ascot, Berkshire

London 2012 Olympics: Great Britain's 29 gold medals | Mail Online

Aug 12, 2012 – Britain's athletes at the Olympics did not just exceed expectations, they smashed them, winning 65 medals - 29 of them golds.