Yes, and Twillingsgate is also reputed to be a lovely place to take a few weeks off and revel in the pastoral beauty, quaint shops, and peaceful atmosphere.

Treehouse, I almost fell off my seat when I saw you use the term "ilk" in your post. Ilk, glorious ilk! If you had bothered to read much of the MOABST, you would have discovered that the term "ilk" has been used for a long time now as an in joke amongst a goodly number of us. Whenever we decide to depict the incensed ramblings of a particularly pompous windbag who is railing on about something that has upset him/her, we throw in the term "ilk" as in..."When will this despicable cretin and his ilk learn that their behaviour is not appreciated here, indeed is offensive in the extreme and MUST not be tolerated any longer!!!" And so on, and so on...

It's such an expressive word. The fact that you have innocently used "ilk" in a post in which it was not intended to be humorous indicates that you are from a finer class of individual, the sort who once lifted this forum above the sweaty, vulgar masses and into a more rarified atmosphere where 17 alternative versions of House Carpenter is NOT a subject guaranteed to reduce the listener to a comatose state of boredom! I deeply regret the fact that there are so few left of you and your, dare I say it...ilk...these days. There has been a shocking deterioration in society, and your kind are needed more than ever before to return us to sanity and balance.

The Mother of all BS Threads was started on a whim by Khandu. Why, I don't know. Like I said, it was a whim. I think it was inspired by Saddam Hussein...indirectly. Well, by something he said once. At any rate it was a terrifically funny thread in the first couple of hundred posts, and I feel sorry for you because you didn't get to read it. My heart is rent with sympathy. After a lengthy period of time the MOABST grew bloated and redundant, I am sorry to say. A small group of lost souls (including Amos & Rapaire) became addicted to posting on it for no reason other than that they had already done so a few hundred times! I can understand your annoyance at seeing people thus distracted from the higher purposes of life. But what can one do? People will have their addictions, won't they?

You said: "But I do know a lot of folk musicians and folk music afficionados. They are, by most anyone's standards, a witty, warm, engaging, argumentative, and opinionated group of people, overly drawn to things that are old and antiquated."

That sounds to me like a rather good description of a number of the people whose whimsical posts you are objecting to. In my case, though, I'm more the kind of folkie who is drawn to the folk singers of the 60's to the present...who tend more to write their own songs. That interests me a good deal more than the trad stuff, but I do like trad material and know a fair bit about it. It was the foundation upon which people like Baez and Dylan started out. They just didn't stay there, that's all. Dylan still performs traditional songs in his live concerts, and obviously knows a phenomenal number of them.