Pub games an old woman with a clay pipe in her mouth, or subsequently a ball on a stick. The object was for players to throw sticks at the head in order to break the pipe. The game bears some resemblance to a coconut shy, or skittles. Today, the game of Aunt Sally is still played as a pub game in Oxfordshire. The ball is on a short plinth about 4 inches (10 cm) high, and is known as a 'dolly'. The dolly is placed on a dog-legged metal spike and players throw sticks or short battens at the dolly, trying to
In the Mouth of the Whale In the Mouth of the Whale In the Mouth of the Whale is a 2012 science fiction novel by Paul J. McAuley, the third in his "Quiet War" sequence. While "The Quiet War" and "Gardens of the Sun" were set in a mid-term future solar system, "In the Mouth of the Whale" is spatially and temporally much further out, set thousands of years in the future around a Fomalhaut system long since colonised by refugees from the Quiet War. The first settlers, the Quick, have since been superseded by the True who are in turn challenged by the posthuman Ghosts.