Suffering For My Art

I Know, I Know -
I'm rather stretching the description of "Art" by including a jigsaw puzzle within that purlieu.  In my defence, when completed it does create a great big detailed arty painting of parrots in the jungle.

Er - we'll get there eventually

     There you go, the outermost edge pieces.  Of about 156, I've done exactly 66, so about 40% done.
     Whilst on the subject of statistics, here an aside.  I have gotten 89% of the way through "Martin Chuzzlewit", and things are really hotting up.  There has been a foul and bloody MURDER committed! and a second possible one is currently being investigated, and a touch of romance hangs in the air.  It has taken over 800 pages to reach this point, mind you; one wonders if Chas. Dickens had an editor or if the papers merely printed everything he wrote, kind of like the latter Harry Potter novels and a contemporary South Canadian author whose name escapes me.

The odious Pecksniff at left, and the characteristically grim-faced Martin Chuzzlewitt Senior to the right

     Where were we?  O yes -
     A couple of weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my back, which was annoyingly painful: not bad enough to see a doctor about, yet niggling enough to make one wince when getting out of a chair.
     Now, you know Conrad: an obsessive with no moderating qualities, so I devoted a good two hours to the jigsaw in order to get it to the stage you see above, hunched and twisted over it upon the bed, in a pose that was, frankly, an outrage against nature.
     "Hello!" said my aching back when I straightened up.  "I'm that twingy muscle that you've annoyed and alienated all over again!"
     So I hobbled to my comfy chair and dropped into it.  This did make the floorboards creak, as your humble scribe is by no means a petite individual, but it did make my back feel better.
     Thus we have an explanation of today's title.  BOOJUM! advance!

Ready to tackle the Sinister hordes

Cross About Words
Yes, I am whinging about the MEN's Codeword again.  I did mention yesterday that the swine who compiles it has begun to disregard the unwritten rule: you may not use unusual, exotic or rare words as the Dog Buns thing's hard enough to begin with.  The example I gave was "PYJAMAS", and they also threw in "HYRAX" and "AGAMA".
     What the actual flip?  I had the letters A, E, L, Q and U all sussed out, but didn't commit them to paper because I'd never heard of AGAMA, so they couldn't be right, could they?  

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Agama lizard

     Well, now we know.  I'd heard of the Hyrax before, it's a small mammal that lives in Africa.

Not sure what the plural is

     And what about "SUCKTORIAL", which is a real word even if it doesn't seem like one?  Whereas Wednesday's Codeword featured "RHOMBUS", "BEZIQUE", "SKIBOBS" and <cue drum roll> "LARGHETTO".
     Seriously, what the actual flip!
     Rhombus is a geometrical shape, for an example in the flesh, so to speak, look at Mother.  Art?

Ha!  I manage to work TANK into it.

Bezique, it seems, is a card game. Yawn.  And these below are skibobs, which I'd never heard of before, and which the Ruffians are probably using even now to get around in the wilderness of the Siberian taiga.

CAUTION!  No brakes

     Finally, Larghetto is a technical musical term, meaning that you take the tune slowly.
     There.  That's all of us better-informed than we were yesterday, for which the Codeword compiler gets a grudging thankyou.

     At this point Conrad barges the door open, throws a bucket of syrup over the motley and drops a bag containing angry fire ants to the floor, before retiring hastily and locking said door.*

Life Size fire ant**

Nattering Of Nukes
TANK, atom bombs - all we need now are zombies and the trifecta of Modern Life's Basic Essentials is complete <drifts off into idle fantasy of driving his tank across the scorching radioactive wastelands, gunning down acres of zombies on the way>
     I mentioned in passing an interesting BBC sidebar, which was titled "The weapons making nuclear war more likely", and here is the link:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47117349

     Conrad does not really see anything new here, as the article's author is merely pointing out that dual-capability weapons make the nuclear balance somewhat unsteady.  This has always been the case; the iconic Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, has only ever been used with a high-explosive warhead, but this can be swapped out for a nuclear one.  The M110 self-propelled gun could fire conventional HE shells or a nasty little nuclear round.  Aircraft can carry anything ranging from a dismounted toilet, via iron bombs to stand-off nuclear missiles.

Not Photoshopped

     So as an issue, it's not new.  The article does raise the issue of IRBMs or ICBMs mounting a conventional warhead, instead of the expected nuclear one, or possibly an inert one.  Again, this is not a new issue: you may remember the Norks bluffing about firing a missile into the sea off Guam.  If the South Canadian's radar systems picked up an IRBM launch, terminal trajectory Guam, are they going to wait until it hits to respond?
     Here an aside.  Yes, another one!  The South Canadians have a type of missile submarine nominated "SSGN", which carry 154 cruise missiles.  Yes, you read that correctly, 154.  Which, as mentioned above, can be nuclear-tipped.  If that missile track ending on the sunny shores of Guam is detected, then the SSGN your humble scribe suspects to be lurking in international waters off the Nork coastline, will probably unload all 154 Tomahawks.  This will not do the Nork regime any good.

154 "Hello There!" messages bound for Kim Jong Un

     I was going to bang on about this further, but I'm hungry, Edna needs walkies and we're already over the ton.  We shall come back to this.  O yes indeed!


*  Ha!  Take that, motley, you and your false sense of security!
**  (Not really)***
***  Thankfully