Northern Lights
At last! A blog about everything
Thursday, September 17, 2026
lumpipatsaat pihassa
k'foops, kafoops, kerfoops
Alright so I am less excited about K'foops now that I dug a little more and found that it's just a minor esoteric variation on Kerfoops (my first thought, you'll remember) and a lot of people have thought about it over time. I found this in the Age few years ago:
Next mention I can find (by the very easy means of searching newspapers.com) is in an Adelaide paper called The Sport, which seems to be mainly about sport but has some humorous items that might never have made any sense and certainly don't now. This is from 21 December 1923 p. 7:
'Those are all words', yes, and one of the words is 'Kerfoops'. By the way, I have to say hats off to whoever drew this banner, I love it:
Anyway back to Kerfoops. Another mock wedding, this time in Wagga (Daily Advertiser 23 September 1926 p. 5)
And on it goes, actually sporadically up to the present day though as mentioned above more recently just as an observation, like my original one, on how it's a name people once used to mean something and now no-one remembers precisely what (perhaps because it never had a precise meaning). I am not going to go into Kuffoops. Sorry I'm not.
ashley paske
So a few years ago I had things to say about Ashley Paske, who was a TV soap actor in the 80s, mainly good things. I think at one point I said I'd gleaned that although (or because?) he no longer acted, he was 'in a good place'. Well I messed up with that because I have recently learned that he died in 2022. Sad.
more k'foops
I mentioned recently I was quite interested in K'foops. Mainly because this was a name my grandmother Mavis who grew up, I suppose, in the 1920s occasionally brought forth as a sort of silly name for a random person. I mentioned that 'Fred Nerk' parallel. I am not sure what it was all about. There are surely similar names but I can't think of any right now. Anyway, I did a quick search on K'foops just to see what else showed up. Nothing too special, I have to say.
Here he is in Smiths Weekly for 5 August 1922 (p. 25).* Here's a use of his name in a mysterious item from the Broken Hill Barrier Miner 25 August 1923 p. 7. What on earth did people do for fun then:Trove says there are 5,614 mentions of 'K'foops' in Australian newspapers, surely most of those are misreadings of old newsprint by OCR (see below) but nevertheless it was obviously something of a phenomenon. The below is from the Mackay Mercury 4 March 1953 p. 2 and the one following from the same paper, 5 October 1953 p. 2.
This is the most recent reference I can find to Mr. K'foops, from the Melbourne Age 4 September 1973 p, 28:
As for the earliest, I don't know, because when you do a search in Trove on 'k'foops' you get suggetions like: 'Ao equal aavin^ wm!,) be 'kvj uhrtndiuioc tho wortia ' Yeura f«; ? ant to 3jie«k of rigm^roUa mch u ... nei|tht---'irh V.* ^ tiutt tb«t thta will you, mh! n-t ^ 1 )?«» ? to o.^rl-».»k th? incideot. in *vw ' ^ ?till'.
I did find this, which is from a speech(?) by Mr. Aikens the member for Mundingburra told the Qld Legislative Assembly on 25 October 1945:
Well it's hard to read that for the K'foopsness and not concentrate on the other elements of the hypothetical but, focus.
Here's my current feel: the name K'foops was if not started by Smith's Weekly around 1922 certainly popularised by it at that time (SW itself began in 1919) and seemed to live on much longer in Queensland than anywhere else, the 1973 existence of Mr. K'foops in Ivanhoe notwithstanding.
More news as it comes to hand.**
*BTW Alek Sass, who drew this cartoon, was dead within six months. I don't think there's a kurse of k'foops though.
** I have more news. It will be with you soon enough. Clue: it has to do with 'Kerfoops'.
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
avulias autonkuljettaja
Please explain to me how the driver of the car is in the driver's seat in the third frame and yet looking out the back window.
Also, I have to say I don't really understand some of the text.
Anteeksi!
creatures - pt 3 or a coda
The place where we parked in Avondale Heights, Annette Court (all the streets round there have 1950s girls names) has a bunch of big guard dogs in the various homes, making a range of unusual noises between them and bouncing off each other. When I went back I saw these guys, very handsome and also quite barky. Beautiful gate too.
lumpipatsaat pihassa
I'm not confident I really understood what the text means here although it's pretty obvious what happened except for the reason wh...
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Just marvellous to see Joan Letch in an episode of D4 from 23 September 1974 called 'Lonely Hearts', as an actual character with, yo...