Dough!

No, Not A Simpson's Reference
Especially as I loathe that little <insert very rude word here> Bart.  Him and his hideous gamboge complexion, and a face one would never tire of belabouring with a baseball bat.  When I am World Dictator the Simpson's will come to a very abrupt end, with a whole episode devoted to Bart being fed into a wood chipper with very dull blades -
     But I digress*.  No, I refer to biscuit dough.  I managed to miss very little of this week's Bake Off, which featured biscuits.  Biscuits are quick to make, with a couple of privisos - too thin and they'll burn; too thick and they'll be limp.  

Were they in the marquee?  I'm sure someone would have noticed

     Signature:  this was iced shortbread biscuits, and one klutz managed to drop hers all over the floor - probably the ham-fisted Louise.  Michael did very well, and Candice made a rod for her own back by making sandwiches, thus 48 biscuits not a mere 24.  
     Technical:  Viennese Whirls, so not just biscuits, these require buttercream and jam, too.  Against the clock.  With a skeleton menu.  These are some of the reasons your modest artisan is never going near this programme.

Also because of her.  Hovering, always hovering.

     Showstopper: this focussed on gingerbread, which your humble scribe has always seen as more cake than biscuit and rather poor as a construction material.  Yet the bakers had to build a structure a foot in height with at least 8 characters present.
     Oh dear.  There were, predictably, casualties.  Principally Val and Louise, whose structures ended up a rickle of broken biscuit buildings.  Goodbye Louise!  Don't worry, Val will be following you next week.
     Candice got the Star Baker award, with her Pub Of Ginger.  Make the most of it, young gel, you bite off more than you can chew.  Er - so to speak.

Conrad's Sinister Forward Planning
I'm adding this in so I can better lie about things on Facebook and Twitter.  If you're reading this then it ought to make sense.

And if you're not reading it, at least admire the pretty picture

More Cheek
I posted the Pome for Sylwia yesterday, and in an uncommon demonstration of mercy, decided against inflicting that for Charlotte on you on the same day.
     24 hours have now passed, however, so the statute of mercy has run it's course and here's the Pome for Charlotte.  Heh.  Once again I shall excise her surname, as I'm not having pervy old lechers pursuing her across teh interwebz.  That's my job.

Goodbye to dear Charlotte *****s

She of the most shapely carcass!

I shall NOT miss her when she’s gone

(damned efficient office champion)

She knocks it out of the park,

Her and her damned question mark.

We know that she is off to Chester,

To swim in tanks and fish to pester.

She’s dropping us for gills and fins

And scales and horrid piscine things.

Well, Charlotte, if you think it’s fine

To be knee-deep in water, scraping slime

From glass tank walls whilst dodging sharks

Instead of fielding daft telephone remarks

All I can say is we’ve trained you –

Us:  your inimitable collective human zoo.

     There you go.  We even have a photograph of the young lady.  Art?

Once again, to avoid confusion, Charlotte is on the left

     She is qualified in Zoology, which is probably right at the end of the University Graduate Index, unless they offer degrees in Zoroastrianism, and she knows her stuff.  Conrad asked what her position was on Cryptozoology - without giving his own skeptical stance first, of course - and was pleasantly susrprised to find her sniffily dismissive of claims about Goat-suckers, Bigfeet and Nine-Foot Penguins**.

More Of Cake
Today the assembled talents of our floor put out an array of cakes and savouries, in order to raise money for charity - the Red Cross, as chosen by my Enormous Anonymous Employer.  Here's a selection of the goods on sale:

     Er - that's not exactly clear, is it?  Apologies.  From left to right, we have Conrad's Coffee and Chocolate Loaf, Tom's Pinata cake - bulging with a secret stash of Smarties, Stacey's Chocolate Brownies, someone's Not Very Successful Marshmallow, Dom's Spicy Pork and Apple Sausage Roll and Dom's Onion Bhajis.

Ha!  Conrad Points And Laughs Churlishly*
Further to the charity bake above, which raised £82 - eating cake for charity, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it - a bunch of Conrad's compatriots are going to be walking up Mount Snowden tomorrow, which he took great pains to avoid.
     "How churlish!" I hear you chatter.  "Oh.  You already used that word.  How - how - unpleasant."
     Yes, I am consistent, aren't I?  For one, you needed to pay for transport to the venue.  Secondly, it's at the weekend, not during work hours.  Thirdly, it sounds like hard work, always something of a Conrad-repeller.  Art?

Good luck, chaps!

     I shall sleep in tomorrow morning thinking of you***.


* I do this a lot, it's why people hate me.
** Nine feet tall, not that they have nine feet.
*** Perhaps.

I Speak Of Cheek (And Greek)

Yup, That's Me
More brass neck than the statue of Talos. I'm so ch- what's that?
     You've no idea what I'm talking about when I mention "Talos"?
     ARE YOU MAD!!!  Surely - and allow me to sit down before asking this question for fear of your answering in the negative - surely you have watched that epic for the ages, "Jason And The Argonauts"?
     If not, go out and buy the DVD and watch it from beginning to end, NOW.
     If yes, then we can proceed.  Hercules, played by Nigel Green, and his mate, whose name I can't remember and who's not important anyway, come across a valley full of metal statues, one of whom is Talos, static atop his pedestal.  Art?

See?  Static

     Observe that door in the pedestal; it leads into a chamber chock full of treasure, which our two heroes decide to help themselves to.
     This is a spectacularly bad idea.  Because that statue is there to guard the treasure, and when the pair emerge with their ill-gotten loot, it comes alive.
     Slowly, creakingly, it's head turns to gaze on the thieves in one of the creepiest scenes in cinematic history.  Art?

Nightmare fuel

     You don't really get a sense of scale from these shots, so allow Art to illustrate -

No!  He's not small and close up -

      Ignoring the fact that he'd probably be made of bronze, not brass, there you have it.
     Sorry, what was I on about?
     Oh, cheek, that's right.  Yes, any old trick to pad out the word count.  For example - 

A Pome For Sylwia
It is sufficient to say that Sylwia is from Poland, and I'm going to excise her surname as it's unwise to give the kind of reader who hangs around here that level of detail.  She finished on Wednesday, so your humble scribe agitated his grey matter and threw together a bit of doggerel, which see:

Today, folks, we look back

At young Ms. Sylwia *********k.

Visitor from the exotic East,

Blonde of tress, the sexy beast!

Undaunted by our English idiom,

Our food and our weather tedium

A mistress of HR procedure

Nothing halts or discommodes her.

Precise in her enunciation

Ambassador for the Polish nation.

Sylwia, sorry I was such a yarker –

“How’s this beer pronounced?” “VARKA!”

“Poles were besieged at Tobruk – “

“Rob my dear, please shut up.”

She may have thought yet never said

For Sylwia is polite and so well-bred.

I’ve not seen her in a social sense

So, hopefully, she won’t take offence

When I say I’d like an answer –

To the query: is she a Pole dancer?

     I'm sure some of you wretches would love a photo of her, well put your tongues back in, I don't have one.  Ha!  That expression on your face!

A Pole prancer?

     Now, I put the work in on that one, even if it was scattered across Wednesday morning and afternoon, so I'm claiming that it's perfectly legitimate to post here.  I have a pome for Charlotte, too, except it would be pushing the limits of literary propriety to inflict two pomes in one blog post.  Perhaps tomorrow*.

A Heart-Wrenching Picture
I apologise to non-UK dwellers, because you don't live in the awesome Pond of Eden.
     Also, you may not be familiar with Bob Mortimer, who started out as a solicitor yet who skipped career tracks to become famous and familiar (here in the Pond anyway) as the foil to Vic Reeves.  Art?

Vic and Bob

     What did I find over on Twitter but some utterly pathetic shots of a hapless and joyless Bob, undergoing purgatory at a train exhibition.  I thought I'd get a screenshot - hello not working, try again - still no screenshot, hmmm, restart the browser - still no screenshot - PUNCH HOLE IN MONITOR AND DANCE ON IT'S MANGLED CORPSE, SHRIEKING IN HATRED.  Nope, still no screenshot.
     So, I got a photo of the Twitter photo.  Art?

Awwwww!

     Hopefully, through the synchrony bars, you can make out Bob's mournful face.
     Given a look like that, how can you resist taking this sad old man home, and putting a smile on his face with tea and biscuits?

The Mojo Returns
We'll see how robust it is tomorrow.  Conrad, you see, has been baking again.  He realised time would be tight on Thursday, as it was late shift night, so the Chocolate and Coffee Loaf was baked last night, being put in the oven just before Bake Off started.  Art?

     Gluten-free, yet it has risen and remained risen very satisfactorily; one frequently finds that a cake made with gluten-free flour tends to sink when it cools, especially in a wide tin.  Not so this one!
     You can also witness the packs of date and walnut that Wonder Wifey bought as a not at all subtle allusion that she wants a cake made with them.




*  Definitely tomorrow!

Of Napoleon And Nourishment

Not Quite "Cabbages And Kings"
 - which is also from Lewis Carroll, who wrote "The Hunting Of The Snark", from which is derived that most eloquent of words, "Boojum", which is - hopefully! - familiar to anyone reading this.
     I refer, of course, to "1812: Napoleon's Invasion of Russia" by Paul Britten Austin, which I am currently reading, and will be reading for a while hence, as it's about three inches thick.  I have, thankfully, gone past the point where the pages were upside down and back to front, which necessitated tearing half the volume from it's spine and reading it back to front.  Art?

The evidence

     Nappy has just taken the decision to retreat, since he simply cannot bring the Russian army to a decisive battle.  After the battle of Malojaroslavets, where the Italians had their hour of glory, the French army prepares to depart.
     This is not a good idea.  It means travelling over lands that have been ravaged so thoroughly that there is hardly any food or fodder left.
     Why is this?  because the French approach to supply and logistics can be summed up in one word:  loot.  They don't like admitting this, claiming that their soldiers "find" food and, having found it, remove it from the Russians encountered en route.
     This is another reason why retracing their footsteps is a bad, bad idea.  Those Russians encountered en route, are, to put it mildly, extremely angry.  Ruffians tend to be rather vigourous in their pursuit of warfare, all the more so if it's (Holy Mother) Russia where the warfaring is.  The poverty-stricken peasantry are so filled with frothing nitric ire that they buy French prisoners from the regular army, in order to do them to death.  So the French are going to be retreating across lands not only devastated but seething with (seething!) peasants, who have now had time to get armed and organised.
     Plus, winter is about to begin.
     What can possibly go wrong!

Russians:  big lads armed with nasty pointy things

Hello Coincidence Hydra - 
 - and can you kindly remove your serrated fangs from my tender posterior?
     If you read the blog with any frequency then you are surely aware of the unholy number of coincidences that regularly impact upon Conrad, especially so if he's reading Thomas Pynchon.  This one, though, is sufficient to render one seriously worried.  Because -
     - well, how many times has your humble scribe sat down and posted about songs to play at his funeral?  Exactly.  Once.  On Monday.  Here is the link to prove it:

http://comsatangel2002.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/one-bite-at-cherry.html

     So, what does he encounter in the atrium of the Electric Goldfish Bowl this morning?  The top 10 songs played at funerals, and a free pair of earphones.  Plus, fill in this card with your preferred choice and you stand the chance of winning an i-pod mini.  Art?

Wowsers!

     I think it's time to go ponder on this at length.  Clearly the Universe is trying to tell me something, it's just a shame that Ol' Uni's a bit of a stick-in-the-mud and can't use social media.

How To Speak Dog - An Occasional Series
The dog in your life is a lot more accommodating than the cat, and whilst they are quite willing to put their lives on the line defending your Mansion, they expect recompense, either in the form of attention or treats, preferably both.
     Take Edna for example:

     "But I'm so adorably wonderful and hungry can't you share some of your crisps with me, on account of me being so wonderfully adorable?  And hungry?"
     No.

Damn You All To Hell!
Not you, gentle reader, lest you feel alarmed.  No, Conrad is venting his spleen at those people who invent new and pointless things that make our lives more complicated and burdensome, with no advantage - like the mobile phone.  Which, when I become World Dictator, will also go the way of the dodo and the video cassette, and then we'll see what the younger generation are made of, eh?
     None of which has anything to do with dice.  Allow me -

Excuse the photograph

     Normally I'd use a screenshot but the PC was feeling it's age last night and couldn't manage.
     Suddenly wargaming as a hobby becomes much more complicated.  Clubs are going to have to decide if these Lucifer-inspired inventions are allowed or not, and you can guarantee (human nature and wargamers being what they are) that somebody will spend three days clapping in front of 50 of these dice whilst their compatriot takes notes of which numbers turn up.  And if they don't all hit 16% there will be merry hell to pay!