Cloud cuckoo land

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for the album by Lightning Seeds, see Cloudcuckooland (album).

Cloud Cuckoo Land refers to an (unrealistically) idealistic state where everything is perfect. ("You're living in Cloud-cuckoo-land.") It hints that the person referred to is naïve, unaware of reality or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief. The reference is to the play, The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, in which Peisetairus (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Trusting") and Euelpides (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Hopeful") with the help of Tereus, tired of the Earth and Olympus, decide to erect a perfect city between the clouds, to be named Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (Νεφελοκοκκυγία -- Nephelokokkygia).

[edit] Uses in popular culture

Entered modern lexicon through its use by W. J. Cash in his groundbreaking 1941 acerbic critique of the Southern Cavalier myth, The Mind of the South. Cash consigned the who ever had "laid claim to the title of planter [...] [was] perpetually suspended in the great haze of memory [...] a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land."

It is commonly thought that Margaret Thatcher famously used this phrase in the 1980s. "Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land" However, it was actually a misquotation of her spokesman, Bernard Ingham.^{[citation needed]}

UK pop-rock group The Lightning Seeds named their 1989 debut album Cloudcuckooland.

The band Radiohead used this phrase in their track "Like Spinning Plates" on their 2001 album Amnesiac.

In the Nintendo 64 videogame Banjo Tooie, One of the many worlds is a floating series of islands called Cloud Cuckooland. Unlike the perfect city it was named after, Cloud Cuckooland is full of random, chaotic elements such as a giant castle made of gelatin dessert, eyeball flowers, a giant wedge of cheese and a Terminator-like duplicate of Banjo's friend Mumbo.

Noise rock/grindcore band The Locust use the term in their song, "One Manometer Away from Mutually Assured Relocation" on their 2007 album, New Erections.

Poet Randall Jarrell uses this phrase in the poem "90 North"

Poet Simon Armitage entitled his 1997 collection "Cloudcuckooland".

In the BBC TV series "Life On Mars", the character "DCI Gene Hunt", played by Philip Glenister, says to "DI Sam Tyler", played by John Simm, "You're living in Cloud-cuckoo-land, Sam...".