The commonly heard contact call is a shrill, kew-wick but the male has a quavering advertising song hoo … ho, ho, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. William Shakespeare immortalised this owl’s song in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 5, Scene 2) as “Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot”, but this stereotypical call is actually a duet, with the female making the kew-wick sound, and the male responding hooo.

As stated by Chris Bertram. This is a European bird not known to me personally. The North American equivalent is the Barred Owl, Strix varia, which hoots eight times in two groups of four with the stress on the last in each group. No sexual difference in the call that Wiki or I know of. In the Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus, males and females both hoot but you can tell the sexes apart by pitch and rhythm. I have heard pairs calling back and forth in December, which is when they set up housekeeping.

Yes

it’s very civilised and romantic!

No they don’t … at least not singly. Males make one sound and females respond with another (or vice versa).

I pronounce the vowels as best I can in the French fashion because I would feel silly saying “tin, tin.”

Well I liked imagining myself going to a boarding school in the Swiss Alps and talking to fauns, but I don’t think that I could make an academic career by writing how The Chalet Girls School or the Narnia books really clearly have a Tracy W sub-text. Especially since I was born after the works in question were written. There are things in books that clearly were put there by their authors – eg the Christainity subtext in Narnia, and I find analyses of them far more interesting than ones that are based only on the reader’s biases.

Also, I think that whatever drives slash fiction as a particular form of fanfiction is independent to the work itself. Eg there’s slash about the male characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite the obvious existance in that TV show of several sexually-active, strong-minded women. (I am not launching a general criticism of slash fiction here, or slash-fiction about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have no survey data to hand but I suspect it displays the same range of quality as any other type of fiction, I am merely talking about the decision to write slash set in a particular show or book or movie).

But Tintin isn’t for boys. It’s about a boy, and the books are marketed in the US as being “for boys”, but on its native turf Tintin is more “for children, but with jokes in there only the grownups will get.” Part of the goofy appeal is that it’s a young boy’s fantasy, but set in an adult-ish world.

Looking back, Asterix only verged on camp-for-comedy’s sake rather than as any strong intimation of homosexuality (I’m thinking of Roman legionnaires jumping into each other’s arms on being frightened, and so on).

It’s true that Tintin never really fraternised with women all that much, but as has been mentioned, I think that’s more to do with the fact the character is a boy-as-man. He is old enough to travel legitimately, and have adventures, but looks very young, and has a definite (and somewhat inexplicable) naivety. Believable fantasy for young boys.

Our local stores, close enough for kids to walk to, featured Archie comics, Batman and other superheroes, as well as “Classics Illustrated” – The Hunchback of Notre Dame! Moby Dick! The House of Mirth! The Will to Power! for the kids to get some culture.

Pharaoh is earlier. Crab is when Haddock is first introduced.

vrooooooooooooooom.

“precisely! or rather: thompson is waiting to action thomson!”