From the Sleep of Reason

Boyo works from home on Fridays in an effort to educate our son Bendigeidfran in his preferred version of the Welsh language, one even meaner of vowel than most.

I ensure that the popular application of "working from home" is not available to Boyo by engaging the parental controls on his laptop and hiding the Calpol.

Boyo instead surpasses himself in both irrelevance and depravity by teaching young 'Fran his bolt-on tongue by simultaneously translating Universal horror films. You've not really experienced the full poignancy of Inspector Krogh's childhood encounter with The Monster in "Son of Frankenstein" until you've heard it in Welsh, apparently.

The inadequate English original is here at 07:06, if you care to compare:

Watching these films anew led me to a useful insight. The appeal of the Universal monsters to infants and adult males alike stems from their childishness. For they are babies:

• Dracula sleeps all day and suckles all night.
• The Frankenstein Monster raises its arms piteously to the unfamiliar light and stumbles about in ill-fitting clothes. This would in addition explain its appeal to the Welsh.
• The Wolfman is permanently teething.

We now see in context the popularity among grown men of the Predator film and its successors, as eloquently set out by The Daily Mash here on the basis of my initial thesis.

The Predator is what every young man aspires to be. His life is one long paint-balling weekend, with the added stimuli of invisibility (permitting the observation of female xenomorphs in the shower), rolling in mud with human skulls, and the binding of all loose ends by an atom bomb.

But now we're onto the secondary-school curriculum.