"This, of course, is not the first time that someone who discovered folk music (or anything else you can name) just two weeks ago leaps to the podium and condescends to explain it all to those who've been at it all their lives.

Sort of like a freshman back from his first quarter at college. He knows EVERYTHING and is more than eager to explain it all to his father and uncles, all who hold Ph.Ds.

Don Firth"

Presumably, this is where we get the term Sophomore (wise fool)?

It's not just the fact that WAV wishes to condescend to everyone on Mudcat. Note: someone suggested earlier that if he would actually sit back and listen to some of the points made here, he might learn something. But WAV is not here to LEARN. He is here to TEACH. And to pimp his risible "life's work" by providing as many links to it as possible. He has made it very clear that a ten-a-penny humanities degree and a few childhood tennis trophies make him the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and his website - a huge, onanistic homage to himself - serves to prove that he is, in his own mind, a great literary and musical talent. As many people as possible obviously need to be made aware of this...

But there are plenty of attention-seeking nutters on the internet. Myspace is certainly littered with them. Keeps them off the streets, I guess. The thing I really find objectionable is that WAV harnesses his very dubious monocultural politics to English traditional culture. Anyone reading his pronouncements on cultural isolationism, the role of women, homosexuality etc, and then sees that this person espouses English folk music as representative of his world view, is doing the tradition the worst kind of damage.

If it weren't for this, I'd say his self-important, barely literate ramblings were best ignored. I'm half inclined to believe that this is probably the case anyway.