Too-Woo Brains

We have no desire

to be put into the driving seat.

There are chairs enough in our libraries –

would that there were more libraries – 

and these are the only seats of learning

that we would wish to know.

This week, David 'Two Brains' Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science and All That, was driven out of Cambridge by poetic execration. Over to 'Hilarius Bookbinder', reporting from the newly ignited Flammae Pulchritudine (The Lyre throws in the owl):

The Minister for Owl-Torture, David Willetts, has, one learns, tonight been compelled to abandon a lecture which he had incautiously been invited to give in Cambridge by that University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Willetts had been scheduled to speak to the pressing topic of 'Owls: Their Nature, Habits, and Destiny, with some remarks on culinary preparation'. Advance leaks of the Minister's speech suggested that he had intended to cover, among others, some of the following points:

     -- Owls, whilst in their own right beautiful and even admirable creatures, might nevertheless in many cases create a perception of falling short of best practice for price-sensitive and workplace-flexible contributors to a fully modern food chain;

      -- Owls must take urgent measures to ensure wider public access to their charming hoots and mouse-hunts, and must above all abandon their completely outdated and inefficient nocturnalism;

      -- Owls would be free to set their own fees for consultations and audiences (except where they would not be free to do so). This would put power in the hands of owl-purchasers, by ensuring that the calls, swoops, plummets and ascents of owls would no longer be freely available to non-paying onlookers;

      -- Owls could (it was insufficiently widely understood) make a tasty and nourishing snack if slow-roasted for six months at a low heat wrapped in white paper;

Carrier pigeons returning from the scene, however, report that, as the Minister began to speak, a discordant -- a human -- voice was heard from somewhere in the barn... [continues]

Read what the owls heard here.

Learn what J.H. Prynne -- wise old owl -- said about it here.

Hoot as you will.