Website / Frilly Shirt

FrillyShirt is a humour and commentary website with a Victorian Britain theme, dedicated to "historical facetiae and archaic nincompoopery" - in other words, to the sillier side of history. Created by Sir Frederick Chook, colonial fop, FrillyShirt has updated (sporadically) since 2005. As well as pieces of historical fiction or questionable advice columns, the site includes some arts and culture news from around Australia, as well as the occasional political rant or serious academic text. Two College Radio programmes were derived from FrillyShirt in the 2005-2006 period: Sir Frederick Chook's Highly Enjoyable Wireless Entertainment Hours and The Difference Hours.

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FrillyShirt provides examples of:

• The Chosen Zero: Burly-Man, a huge lunatic in a dress who is the inheritor of the ancestral powers of a line of warrior-heroines.
• Con Man: The FrillyShirt Personal Credit Cads. You can apply for one to swindle for you.
• Eagleland: Mixed Flavour. Americans are generally wild, brash, uncultured and materialistic, but rarely actually villainous.
• Fake Band: Most prominently, The Three Swell Chaps, known for their single "Song about our Moustaches."
• Fed to Pigs: Dribble of the Yard investigates a case of this. It turns out to actually have been a case of pigs being fed to people.
• Foreign Queasine: The Charing Cross Hotel Restaurant, which serves an experimental hybrid of French cuisine and heraldry.
• Genteel Interbellum Setting: Used for such stories as Clauses and Consequences with the Reverend Fenchtoast.
• High Class Callgirl: The staff of Madam C's House of Pain - "You'll come for the pain, but you'll stay for the humiliation!"
• Inherently Funny Words: "Charlington."
• Insane Troll Logic: Displayed by Mr Lucius Bumblebeigh, The Socrates of South London.
• Invisibility: The Invisible Man's Dining Room & Cabaret Revue.
• Leave Behind a Pistol: A number of anagram-based alternatives to honourable suicide are proposed.
• Let's Play: A screenshot-and-text Let's Play of Fallen London, starring the city's dullest man.
• Long List: Not infrequent, including Bucking & Cump, Picture Publishers.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Wilbur Partridges, who lives in the coal cellar.
• Metaphorgotten: Hegel's philosophy of history.
• Museum of the Strange and Unusual: The Labyrinth of the Society for Farcical Research.
• Nonsense Classification: The wings of the aforementioned Labyrinth, which divide artefacts from the most to the least specific.
• Occult Detective: Lucifer Marigolds, Esoteric Detective!
• Of Corset Hurts: Opposed by the Radical Dress Society in their pamphlet "Of Corsets Tight: A Cage to Bust."
• Parody Commercial: For such products as Willoughsby's Extra-Rigid Cigarillos, Uncle Chester's Flavourited Hair Paste, and Sir Frederick's own patented Leopard Oil.
• Punny Name: Lady Marjorie Butter-Tapenade. The Electro-Magnates. Winston Lewisham, Gentleman Thief.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: Over the years, the site's content has become less politics and social criticism, more humour and history.
• Smith of the Yard: Superintendent Dribble of the Yard, who investigates cases of literary crime.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Sir Frederick, whose Leopard Oil contains Zest, Hoop-Lah and Argh Crikey!
• Steampunk: Discussed, parodied and reconstructed.
• Wacky Racing: The Annual International Mixed Doubles Quadricycle Race.
• Who's on First?: Who Is On First, A Music-Hall Farce.