Seconds Out!

For Lo! We Are Back For Part Two Of Our 'Little Musical Critique'

 - concerning Genesis and the title track of 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', and if Art will put down his bowl of coal - 

     
     Those are shots of the band performing the album live in late '74 and early '75, and illo 1 might be the costume that Peter Gabriel wore that prevented him from being able to sing into the mike, forcing an angry Phil Collins to take over singing duties.

     ANYWAY 'Seconds Out' is a live album release from whenever featuring whatever, as Conrad is not remotely interested in live recordings.  Art!

     As of yesteryon we'd managed to get to the point when the protagonist of the song, Rael, had made an entrance.  Or an emergence, as he's spent the night spraying graffiti on the New York subway system, the cad.

     Ooops.  There may be a problem here.  Art!

<crosses fingers and hopes disguise works>

"And the lamb lies down on Broadway"

     Indeed it does.  We're not told where, and there are 33 miles of Broadway to choose from, so take your best guess.

"The lamb seems right out of place"

     Surely not!  I mean, a random unit of livestock camping out in an urban environment is exactly what you'd expect to see on the streets of the Big Apple, surely?  Or not.  Art!

"Yet the Broadway street scene"

    I've used the illo above for poetic reasons, as the song is set at break of dawn when there are precious few pedestrians about, certainly nothing like as many as shown above.  

"Finds a focus in it's face"

     Art!

     Okay, okay, they have a capitalised 'F' but but but they were also Dutch prog rockers, so that makes it okay.

"Somehow it's lying there"

     'Lying' as in 'Prone' not 'Being deliberately deceitful'.  Just so we're clear.

"Brings a stillness to the air"

     That's Ol' Gabby being all poetic again.  Conrad, flinty-hearted cynic and realist, rather thinks that any stillness in the air is due to the scarcity of traffic, the lack of pedestrians and the anechoic properties of an island being crammed full of skyscrapers.  Also, given that the artwork of Rael shows him bopping about absent a shirt, I suspect that we're talking the balmy climes of summer, when spring or autumnal winds are absent.  Or - I could be overthinking this.  Art!

"Though man-made light"

     <sigh> Ol' Gabby jumping backwards in narration as we are now entering dawn, when man-made light is no longer needed, unless the lyricist wants to make a point.  

"At night is very bright"

     WELL OF COURSE IT IS!  What, you want barely visible illumination that causes eyestrain and the fear of monsters lurking in every shadow?  This is an abstruse narrative, not a horror film.  Art!

"There's no whitewash victim" 

     Says you.  It rather depends on what colour paint Rael has been generously spraying around, doesn't it?  For all we know he's deliberately obscured other subway graffiti artists in order to promote his own artwork, BY USING WHITEWASH.  Or, perhaps, the New York Transit Authority is getting rid of graffiti by, once again, generously coating it with whitewash.  Imagine that, six hours of careful crafting with a spray gun - all gone in thirty seconds*.

"As the neon's dim to the coat of white"

     What?  Neon displays don't become white in daylight, they retain their original colour, just in a far less intense fashion.  Reality trumps poetics.

"Rael imperial aerosol kid"

     Conrad had a look at the various brands of spray paint, none of which have any kind of 'imperial' name or branding.  'Molotow', 'Valspar' and 'Rust-Oleum' to name a few.  One doubts that Rael, Puerto-Rican street punk, is the heir to any empire of any description.

"Wipes his gun, he's forgotten what he did"

     Hmmmm if he has to wipe his spray gun, it's a fair bet he's been using it to spray paint, nicht wahr? so he's not completely clueless about his night-time activities.  Otherwise, what has he been doing, down in the subway for eight hours?  Art!

     Yeah, if you see Jacob Singer down there give him a 'Hello!' from me.  TLLDOB does mention spiral stairways later on in 'The C

     ANYWAY that's the third verse and I'm going to call a halt at this point or the whole Intro would be TLLDOB.  More to come later.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Thankfully I Have Armoured Underpants

Otherwise the Coincidence Hydra would be gnawing on my nethers.  You ought to recall that I have just begun reading the third volume in 'The Expanse' nonology, 'Abbadon's Gate', which I posted about.

     Art!

     Then this cropped up in my Youtube shorts.  I think it's from a series called 'Supernatural', which for reasons known only to the algorithm, keeps cropping up in the Shorts sections.

     Moving swiftly on -

Cue The Queue

Twitter and Telegram have been a-swill with orcs posting videos of them queuing in a line of static cars for hours, shading into days in a few cases.  Most of those who post are females, as their male equivalents are either dead, exiled or on the front lines elsewhere.  Here's a different view.  Art!

Atamanovka

     This is from the Zabaikalsky Krai in Mordorvia and consists of a queue of static vehicles 4.3 kilometres long.  Art!

     A vlog posted by a driver who got 20 litres of petrol after queuing for 28 (!) hours.  The petrol stations are now gouging motorists by hiking prices to multiple times their prior value, whilst allowing relatives of employees to jump the queues.  This has led to fist- and knife-fights between unhappy orcs.

     Not only that, in order to produce fuel quickly, the refining standards have been 'relaxed', which is Ruffian for 'completely abandoned', so fuel with either x15 times or x50 times the permitted level of sulphur is being sold.  These poor-quality fuels will rapidly destroy engines.  Ooops.  Art!

     The 'Authorities' are now putting up portable toilets to accommodate queueing motorists, which is very thoughtful, but how are they going to be collected for emptying?  Catch 22, 23 and 24.

More Ungentle Shoeing

South Canada currently has an inflation problem.  Art!

     So does Mopey Dick The Orange Land Whale, whom looks especially sweaty, orange and bloated in this recent picture.  As others have observed, he claims to be 230 pounds, but Conrad is prettttty sure he's now the 400-lb gorilla in the room.  Not orang-utan in the room, please, as the orang-utan is a sombre, reflective and intelligent creature.  Art!

     View from the side.  He looks as if he's had a 'Brazilian Butt Lift' using a pair of dustbin lids.  

Yet More Ungentle Shoeing

Peter The Average put out a short video clip of him meeting with Gerasimov, 'somewhere near the front lines', which is patently filmed in a studio attached to his bunker.  Art!

Kopek for your thoughts?

     This is the real Putinpot, not one of his looky-likies, and O my! doesn't he look haggard without flattering lighting, makeup and recent botox injections.  What you might call executive stress.  Not to mention looking utterly miserable.  Yeah, the first 227 weeks of a two-week SMO are always the hardest.  Things in Mordorvia are so visibly bad that he's had to acknowledge fuel shortages, then lying about having 1.7 million tons of fuel in reserve, " - as at this time in 2025'.  Which is a whole other story of misery and malice.

This Lands With Me

Your Humble Scribe recently had to complete 5 training modules that have been outstanding since 2024, thanks to availability as people watch the World Cup instead of being struck with a sudden desire to pester Conrad on the phone.  Art!

     They were full of corporate jargon and buzzwords and incredibly tedious to complete, especially as they usually have a plenary quiz or test at the end that you need to pass to successfully finish the module.  Hence Conrad's writing everything down.  The last one, on Safety, was the most interesting and grim as it dealt with several fatalities occurring thanks to now observing safety rules.  Granted, it is vanishingly unlikely that Conrad will need to open and close 1.5 ton steel roller gates, but better safe than dead.

Finally -

I've now annotated 35 minutes of a 45 minute vlog given by Nick Moran - 'Myths of American Armour' which you WILL be getting the benefit of.  Once again, I bet you can hardly wait.  Art!

*  Tee hee!

A Look Back In Angry Orchard

Bear With Me, We Zig-Zag A Bit On This One

What or where is 'Angry Orchard'?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Conrad was looking for an urban location in New York that rhymed with or sounded like 'Anger', all the better to subvert the saying 'Don't look back in anger', hence today's title.  Art!

They make cider

     Actually, the orchard being angry fits right in with what comes later in our Intro.  You'll see.

     ANYWAY casting our minds back to November 18th, what happened on this day?  Well, in 1953 the arch-grump Alan Moore was born, kicking and screaming one imagines.  Yes, that Alan Moore, the creative force behind 'The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen' and 'Watchmen', not to mention 'The Ballad Of Halo Jones' and 'Skizz' in '2000AD'.  Art!

     No, I shan't put up an illo of the Cassandra Of Comics, just to spite him.  Ha!

     Interesting enough as this titbit is, it's not what the Intro is about.  

     People who jitterbugged off this mortal coil as of 18th November include the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and the much less deeply missed Jim Jones, him of the Koolaid meme.

     Whilst either of these might be worth following - well, the former, rather than the bottomhole latter - neither are today's Intro core.

     So, what else happened on 18th November 1974?  Art!

      Obviously - of course! - Genesis released 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', their double-album concept platter, with all lyrics by Peter Gabriel, so blame him if you must apportion blame.  This album is either the zenith or nadir of prog rock, depending on how you look at it, and must surely have given a few punk rock incipients food for thought.

     Going off on a tangent for a moment, you ought to remember that, every so often, BOOJUM! does an hilarious HILARIOUS I TELL YOU 'musical critique' where we look at the lyrics to a song and mercilessly deconstruct and analyse them.  'Hips Don't Lie' might fall under this rubric at some point but it would need to be the whole blog as it's tremendously long.  Art!

The very, very confusing inner sleeve notes.

     Ol' Gabby seems to have been determined to be as obtuse and oblique with the lyrics as possible, making it very, very difficult to interpret, which is why people are still arguing about them over fifty years later.  O yes they are!

     ANYWAY I wanted to do a critique on the album's very first song, 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'.  Before we do, a little background.  Art!

     That's Broadway in red; it runs the length of Manhattan Island, a total of 33 miles, so there's plenty of room for the lamb to gambol or lie down in.  Broadway and Manhattan are both in New York, hence the Angry Orchard title.  I told you we'd be zig-zagging.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY to the lyrics -

"And the lamb lies down on Broadway"

     I know what you're thinking here, BUT from the following lyrics we discover that the events here are occurring at the crack of dawn, so there is minimal vehicle traffic and precious few pedestrians.  Lamby is reasonably safe, even if a concerned passer-by might call an Animal Control Centre.  Art!

"Early morning Manhattan"

     Told you.

"Ocean winds blow on the land"

     Technically, no.  On Manhattan Island, the prevailing winds blow from the land to sea, thanks to the surrounding waters and the enormous skyscraper geography of the island.  Mark Gabby down one point. 

"The Movie Palace is now undone"

     I think, from a later line, that this means the cinema - possibly the RKO Palace Theatre 1564 Broadway - has finished it's showing pictures long past midnight.  Art!

                       "The all night watchmen have had their fun"

     I've read responses from people doing overnight security work.  It's the most boring, tedious job imaginable.  No fun involved.  Ol' Gabby has to be propounding a sense of irony here.

"Sleeping cheaply on the midnight show"

     Back to the cinema.  If you're poverty-stricken, buying a cinema ticket for shows that don't finish until the small hours of the morning is a lot cheaper than a hotel, although this is usually safer if done in pairs, as one can keep watch for the wierdoes into Seventies Italian zombie-slasher trilogies.  Art!

"It's the same old ending, got to go"

    Being ambiguous about both the films and our overnight sleepers having to leave when the cinema closes.  So far it's not very mystifying, is it?  Be patient.

"Get out!"

     The heartfelt plea from the cinema staff, who by 02:30 in the morning just want to go home.

"It seems they cannot leave their dream"

     Another reference to those cinemaphiles dozing off in the upper stalls, surviving on a diet of stale popcorn and desiccated hotdogs.  In fact, thinking about this line, the rest of TLLDOB might merely be one of these people recalling their dream for the rest of the album.  Hmmm.  Food for thought.  "They woke up and it was all a dream ..."

"There's something moving in the sidewalk steam"

     Ah, that classic NY screen shot!  Art?

     Whatever might have been moving mysteriously in the miasmic mist of morning is never mentioned again.  Talk about an anti-climax!

     We now move into Verse 2.

"Night-time's flyers feel their pain"

     No idea whom these chronic sufferers are, except they fly by night.  Passengers on a red-eye flight into JFK?

"Drugstore takes down the chains"

     Quite prosaic - the chains that kept said shop secure overnight, because there's no telling what those triple-feature Fulci fans might do after being released from durance cinephile.

"Metal motion comes in bursts"

     Hmmm Ol' Gabby waxing poetic about morning traffic.

"But the gas station can quench that thirst"

     NOT IN MORDORVIA IT CAN'T!

"Suspension cracked on unmade road"

     You're going to get NY citizens erupting in justified fury that their city's roads and motorways are not being kept up to spec, because what else do they pay their taxes for?

"The trucker's eyes read "Overload""

     THIS is why This Sceptred Ise insisted on the use of tachographs in the cabs of 18-wheelers, to prevent dangerously over-tired drivers nursing 30 tons of cargo and leaden eyelids.  Art!

Tachograph, Seventies iteration

"And out of the subway"

     NOT THE SANDWICH FRANCHISE!  Which did not exist in 1974 <checks> actually it did, having begun in 1965 BUT STILL! No, we are talking the underground railway system that underlies and underpins New York.

"Rael imperial aerosol kid"

     At last!  Our protagonist arrives, for this is the dude we will accompany for the rest of the albums.  'Rael' is indeed an anagram of 'Real', but it's also one for 'Earl', although I don't think the world was quite ready for a protagonist called Earl.  I could be wrong.  Art?

I was wrong

"Exits into daylight, spraygun hid"

     O my, Rael, have you been using industrial paint sprays in confined spaces with no breathing mask?  For hours on end?  Hmmmmm.  No wonder what follows doesn't make sense, if it's the dream of a cinema slacker about a man off his box on paint fumes.  Plus, he's well aware that he's been committing acts of criminal vandalism on the New York transit system or he wouldn't be hiding his spraygun.  Art!

    Does it need batteries or compressed air to work?

     OKAY!  That's the whole of an entire blog consumed by an Intro.  We've got more verses to cover.  I bet you can hardly wait.

More Of Manglement!

We've Been Absent From This Theme For A While

So I'm going to return to it, with apologies for those who were looking forward to more architectural follies at Painhill Park.  Maybe tomorrow.

     This tale has manglement stupidity in spades, plus very dubious hiring practices and rampant stupidity in spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds.

     First, let us introduce the Put-Upon MAnager narrating the tale, PUMA hereafter.  They worked - you may be ahead of me here - as a manager in a very large software firm.  Art!

     The Board of Directors proved to have feet of clay, and brains made of it, too, for they appointed a new Vice President of Development, hereafter VIPRE, whom had little to no understanding of how a software business operated.  Instead, he was brimming with bright ideas - well, actually one idea singular - of how to transform things.

     He introduced The System and yes, that was the official name for it.  He replaced what he called the 'assembly line' or in other words the actual software engineers and developers, with a baroque management monstrosity.  Art!

     In future, the engineers and developers would have nil ability to make decisions.  Instead, there would be a core of 'Decision Facilitators' who would route decisions to the correct department to make a decision.  No word from VIPRE on how this would either increase efficiency or reduce the bottom line, and from Conrad's cynical assessment, things would have gotten much more expensive with all those middle-management salaries to pay.  

     This so far is all window-dressing, for the real issue came when the business had to emergency hire a whole new tranche of managers to enable The System to operate.  Enter Pat, or Persistently Absent Thought.  Art!

     PAT had run a corner store for 27 years and knew nothing about software, IT or management in general, so I can only presume that she was hired thanks to her clothing choices - PUMA puts it as "Her wardrobe did not have a single item that would fall under a conventional definition of business-appropriate attire".  She was also as thick as ready-mixed concrete, and here PUMA introduced the acronym 'ELI5' or 'Explain Like I'm 5', which gifts PAT a year or two.  If anything new came up she would freeze like a deer in the headlights, slack jawed as a zombie, although probably not drooling quite as much.  Art!

Note lack of drool

     Then PAT got the only non-white person on her team fired, due to what she claimed was 'constant staring', which amounted to him emerging from the restrooms at the same time as her.  That was it.  She went a-weeping and a-wailing to HR threatening to sue everyone for everything, and he was walked out of the building by security.  Perhaps, PAT, wear more than a swimsuit and wrap to work?

     PUMA was deeply unhappy at this behaviour and outcome, because it tanked his annual bonus STRIKE ONE.  It also meant endless, endless, HR meetings, reviews, e-mails, meetings, more e-mails and a whole additional slathering of un-necessary drama.  STRIKE TWO.  Art!

     The firing of Mr Minority - one wonders at an HR department blindfold enough to fire a minority hire which has verrrry bad optics - meant a significant hole in PUMA's team capabilities, made worse for him as he had to baby PAT for at least an hour per day as she clucked and squawked in utter hopeless helplessness at doing anything.  Art!

"The tyranny of The System"

     Everything was made much, much worse by VIPRE's vapid venture, which PUMA broke down into a workstream: anything needing amending or changing or implementing had to go via Testing, then Integration, then Verification, and finally Deployment, all of which sounds like a pointlessly complicated way of slowing everything down and making it far more expensive.

     All this sent PAT into a loop, where she would run panicked to PUMA and then her manager and be told to resolve things - which she was unable to do.  So she stopped reading her e-mails.  PUMA, after thoroughly documenting, documenting and documenting her behaviour and activity, decided he was done with her, and informed her boss of same.  He got a zinger of a reply: "Don't bother me with this again, and don't ever go over PAT's head ever again."  

     Oooo-err Matron! someone has their gusset in a twist.

     Don't forget that PUMA did all the documenting.  This is how to cover's one's bottom in the corporate world.  Art!

     A dark setting for a grim meeting: The Project had utterly failed and management were looking for heads to chop off.  PUMA was present as were PAT and her Zinger E-Mail Manager, whom looked like the cat that ate the cream, the canary and the dill-infused poached salmon.

     If you recall, Document, Document and Document had been PUMA's default mode, meaning that they had chapter and verse on how they had detailed PAT's inability and outright refusal to do any work.  To wit:  82 critical points of failure and another 166 major issues that had been assigned to PAT with NO ACTION for months, as well as 72 e-mails to her and ZEMM from PUMA about the consequences of ignoring - well, everything. 

     Ooops.  Art!

     PUMA passed round the e-mail ZEMM had sent about not bothering him, to ZEMM's unbridled horror, as it established why PAT was not doing anything: he had been covering for her.

     She was fired.  ZEMM was fired.  VIPRE got demoted a few weeks later and the new VP Of Development instantly ditched The System and reinstituted normal work practices.

     It doesn't quite end there.  PAT was unemployed for 10 months before starting at a new company, which fired her mere days later as A Mysterious Someone had informed the business that she'd been fired already for being a complete dunce, and that she'd been a minor manager, not the high-flyer that had kind of appeared on her Linkedin page.  Gosh I wonder who that could have been?  Art!

Is it a cheetah?  Is it a leopard?  No, it's a -

More Ungentle Shoeing

There has been a concerted effort by Mopey Dick The Orange Land Whale in recent weeks to turn the 250th anniversary of the treacherous South Canadians spurning the mantle of British sovereignity into a big bash celebrating him.  Sorry, that needs to he 'Him' as he always capitalizes himself.  

     Things have not gone well for the 'Fair' that was planned.  Art!

     There are considerably more people on stage than in the - ah - 'audience', whom total 7.  Such miserable attendances have been par for the course so far, which King Piggy will ignore and pretend attendees number in the millions.  Which he will have to take on trust as he can't count past 10 without taking his shoes and socks off.  Art!

     He's going to claim this unlovely picture shows his right eye 'winking' and not being swollen almost shut.  Sweet dreams, Piggy, you may get as many as 14 people tomorrow!

More Blasting From The Pasting

Another still from the 'Cape Canaveral Space Museum' and I can attest  that I know where the picture is located this time.  Art!

     Actually 'educated guess' is closer to the truth.  What the artist has depicted is a missile wing of Minuteman ICBMs, which were first deployed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in late 1962.  What you see here is presumably a breezy, balmy summer's day, as there's no snow or ice and the trees have all their leaves.  Art!

 
     What a real Minuteman ICBM silo looks like from an aerial vantage point.

DO NOT TRY MY PATIENCE!

I've already got an item from 'Factbytes' cued up and ready to roll, although to do them justice they don't seem to be indulging in any historical howlers just yet.  Art!

     For a start, these tanks rolling off the production line are South Canadian Shermans, NOT Teuton tanks.  A minor point yet a telling one, I feel.  

     Secondly, the Teutons were most certainly able to attack again.  Kursk took place in mid-1943, and the Teutons were noted for counter-attacking on a strategic scale in December 1944 in their Ardennes offensive, and again in Hungary in February 1945.

     I'm watching you, 'HistoryAtWar', I'm watching you.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Indiscretion,n: the guilt of a woman."

If I Were To Say 'Follies'

You Would Not Be Forgiven For Assuming I Meant One Of These -

Art!

     'These' being musicals, which as any fule kno are worse than Kryptonite to Conrad, who HATES ALL MUSICALS.  Note also that the promoter knew full well the value of having underclad young ladies on a poster, all the better to lure the audience in, the fearsome exploiters of pre-clickbait bait.

     ANYWAY what we are looking at today are not arrays of young ladies wearing skimpy costumes and prancing about, but architectural matters that earn their title from the Old French 'Folie', meaning 'Madness'.  More specifically, according to my 'Concise Collins English Dictionary', as per architecture 'a building in the form of a castle, temple, etcetera, built to satisfy a fancy or conceit, often of an eccentric kind.'  Also known as 'Having more money than sense'.

     Wentworth Woodhouse Estate has no fewer than three follies upon it, the second of which went up in 1746, in celebration at the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, at the command of the 1st Marquess of Rockingham.  Art!

     Looking a tad rough nowadays.  I guess pro-government anti-Jacobite architecture is a bit niche for renovation funding.

     

     Art!

     What you're looking at here is the base of 'Keppel's Column', with puny human in shot to give a sense of scale.  This is one of the follies present on the Wentworth House Estate, and if Art will do the honours -

115 feet tall

     The folly was erected in 1773, by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, in order to celebrate the acquittal of Admiral Keppel, who had been court-martialled over the Battle of Ushant (where British and French fleets clashed to no end result, the Admiralty not being happy at a mere draw).  Whoopee for the Admiral and the Marquess, a big notice in 'The Times' would have been quicker and cheaper.  Art!

     This is the earliest folly at Wentworth, the relatively modest and understated 'Needle's Eye', put up in 1722 for no other reason than to look pyramidal and  attractive, as pyramids were redolent of the exotic Orient.  Which is fair enough, if you have more money than sense.
     Moving on from Wenty, we move to Stourhead.  Art!

     Glory in the appearance of the 'Temple of Apollo', which one would associate with Hellenic regions, not Stourhead, which kind of lacks the clear blue skies and sun sun sun.  Constructed in 1765 by one Henry Flitcroft for Henry Hoare, the owner.  Flitty also constructed two other 'temples', of Ceres and Hercules, this trio of follies being dedicated to, and as a result of, The Grand Tour.  This was a journey made across the cities of Europe by young gentlemen, to improve and broaden their minds, not a bad thing in my mind, even if does create follies. 
     Before we go any further, an aside.  Hey, I did wait!  Art

     In the eighteenth century, landed gentry, influenced by The Grand Tour, sought to reconfigure their estates by adapting them to embrace natural lines rather than artificial, rigid ones.  Thus they had rolling downs, glades, water features and - drum roll and trumpets - architectural features copying classical remnants and ruins across the Continent.  See above for an illustration of same.  Art!

     Here's a more sweeping vista, dreamed up by the landscaper Capability Brown.  No follies visible.  Sorry.

     ANYWAY AGAIN let us now sojourn to Painhill Park, created over decades by the owner Charles Hamilton, whom was influenced by Continental landscapes, but sought his own interpretation.  PATIENCE! we are coming to the follies.  Art!

     This is the Gothic Temple, a structure actually made of wood that has been plastered over to give the impression of stone, and also added an element of indestructibility, otherwise two hundred and fifty years of erosion and weather would have done it in.  Art!

     No, you cannot trust your glazzies.  Yes, this is the 'Ruined Abbey', and it looks done in, except that's how it was designed back in 1773.  One imagines the trust keeping the Park in trim has to spend energy, time and money keeping the Abbey looking as decrepit as it's supposed to be and it must jib, rather, that an artificial ruin is being kept ruinous.  One of life's little ironies.  Art!

     Surprise surprise, the lake is another folly, that was created from the most unlovely of precursors - a gravel pit.  The shoreline meanders meaningfully and retaining walls prevent the nearby River Mole from intruding.  There were additional islands present in the Serpentine Lake, added after Hamilton sold the estate, which were subsequently removed.  You can see the Gothic Temple making a subtle appearance at upper port but thanks to Word Count I'm not going to go into any details about the Chinese 5-Arch Bridge.

     And I think that's enough of architectural follies for one Intro, we will definitely be coming back to this at a later date.  I bet you can hardly wait.

SAVE Me

No, nothing about 'Smallville'.  I am referring to Donold Judas Trump's blatant attempt to disbar voters from the 2026 mid-terms, in hopes of keeping the Wizard Lizard Gizzard party from being wiped out in November's mid-terms.  One bizarre reason is that non-resident aliens from abroad are voting for the Ice Cream Bandit party.  Art!

     The chap in glasses here is Ali Velshi, talking head on 'MS Now', the mere name of which is enough to cause MAGAts to spontaneously combust out of sheer rage.  He states an example of how absurd the assertions BOOH has been making are, in that Utah has two million registered voters.  Got that?  There has been exactly ONE non-citizen registration in the state of Utah, with exactly NIL non-citizens voting.  Given that there are 204 millions South Canadians registered to vote, that means at most 102 non-citizens who will possibly vote.  Art!

"I WANT MY PUDDING!"

     Look at BOOH shaking his tiny hands in hate!  You're not going to be SAVEd, matey.  It's like sending out search parties to round up the invisible purple unicorns.

A Literal Blast From The Past

Another image from the 'Cape Canaveral Space Museum' Youtube channel, this one with a tad more info that that last one of the USAF Moon booster.  Art!

     I used my brains and a bit of extrapolation to work out the number here as '6555th', which immediately came up with the Test Group title when Googled. You can date them by the presence of the Shuttle and a Titan III.  They were involved in missile development from 1950 onwards, including such luminary names as the BOMARC and Snark, both of which we've covered here at BOOJUM! as well as heavy-lift launch vehicles - the Titan III as an example - and military shuttle launches.  Long gone now, they got 'deactivated' in 1990.

     

Back To "The Expanse"

I first read these novels as they were published at least 8 years ago and counting, and never bothered to parse exactly what the titles meant, dismissing them as the titular equivalent of a soundbite.

     Except - the titles do have a direct relevance to the story arc and the volume they sit upon.

     CAUTION HERE BE SPOILERS!

     SPOILERS, JIM LAD!

     SPOILERS I TELL 'EE!

     Pausing only to apologise for the outbreak of Pirate <a moment's silence for the ghost of Robert Newton, please> look at the first title - 'Leviathan Wakes'.  There is indeed a metaphorical Leviathan getting loose across the Solar System: the hideously dangerous alien protomolecule.  Art!

Horrors - 15 years old!

     The volume I've just finished is 'Caliban's War' and there's certainly interplanetary war between Earth and Mars, but once again there is a 'Caliban' present, in person.  that being protomolecule-engineered children turned into monsters.  Caliban appears in Shakespeare as the semi-human offspring of a witch and a demon, which realllllly fits well for The Expanse.  Art!

     Volume 3 is 'Abbadon's Gate' and guess what?  The protomolecule artefact girdling Venus takes off and becomes an interstellar gateway to Somewhere Else.  Not sure whom Abbadon is.  <digs a bit> ah, I see - 'The angel of the bottomless pit' or a metaphor for Hades.  It'll all end in tears.

Finally -

Really, one has to wonder what on earth the algorithms are thinking when one gets an item like this in the feed.  Art!

     I suppose it would make a handy beer chiller when I'm back drinking it, but that's two months away <mournful sigh>.