It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time ...

Or, How To Make Fish Smell Even More!

     Today, dear reader, Conrad experimented with a cheap tin of Prince's Smoked Mussels In Vegetable Oil.

     You can have too much of a good thing.  Conrad scoffed the shellfish before noticing that the smell of fish was extra-specially enhanced by the woodsmoke, which rather hung around the kitchen like an olofactory shroud.  The vegetable oil only went down the drain very reluctantly, too, trying to hang around like an old friend as the tin got rinsed out.  I foresee comments from other kitchen users.

     Which executive at Prince's sat down and thought: tinned mussels. They smell, yes, but - not enough!  How can we pack more piscatorial pong in a tin?

Coming soon - smoked mussels in garlic sauce with extra hard-boiled eggs

The Boonies

     No, not a mis-spelling of "Boo - . No!  

     As part of BOOJUM's charter to educate you, the huddled masses, I  now skip lightly o'er the Atlantic Ocean (something the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge rowers wish they could do!) to introduce you to an American word: Boondocks.  Frequently referred to as "the boonies".

     What are the boondocks?  Firstly, nothing to do with ships or harbours or ports.  It seems to have wormed it's way into American as a corruption of the Tagalog "Bundok", for mountain, after America sort-of conquered the Phillipines back in the Spanish-American War*.  So.  Etymology aside, it means a rural or undeveloped area.

The Goonies.  Close enough

PANIC PANIC GET A MECHANIC!

     As you are most certainly aware, thanks to his incessant bleating on the subject, Conrad is experiencing unusually high volumes of "car" in his commute to his Still Nameless Employer.  Despite being under strict orders not to use the hidden weaponry built into his mobile-murder wagon, the strain is telling.  The only thing between the travelling public and apocalypse on the A56 is the CD player in Conrad's car.

     And it jammed on the journey in!

     Fortunately I had a can of anti-gremlin spray with me, and I doused the CD player liberally before setting off for work.

     This seems to have done the trick - 

See?  That's dead gremlin ectoplasm oozing out of the CD player.

Russia, Again

     This will make sense on Facebook, honestly.

     Okay, Conrad nailed Russia a few posts ago.  All explained, mainly in terms of Siberia and vodka.  I didn't post a picture of Red Square, and also neglected that other mighty Russian institution, seen here:

The Kremlin's Troitsky Cathedral

I would point out to that rather common chap Adolf Hitler that these sub-human Slavs seem to have the decorative arts down pat, especially painting ...

Oh For The Icy Blue Skies Of Theta Triangulum

     Yes, I know I keep changing the planet I come from, but can you blame me?  It is widely accepted in the wider galactic community that humans are - well, not the sort you'd bring home to Mother, actually.  So I definitely don't want to give away the home-world's location.  I mean, you give a human a knife and no, they don't bother sitting down and carving the joint or buttering the toast, no, they go out looking for aliens to -

     Ahem!  Anyway.  Sometimes it gets cold in the Upstairs Lair, cold and damp I should point out unlike the crisp dry 50 below of Theta T.  Conrad then resorts to these

Terrifying but also toasty

So - Tanks?

      Again, yes, a bit obliquely.  Cast your glazzies** over this photo:

The Russian steppe at harvest time, growing tanks it would seem!

This is actually a still from a Russian-East German co-production film series made in the late 1960's, under the umbrella title "Liberation".  That isn't a German Tiger tank centre stage, it's a Russian T55 dressed-up.  If you look at the background tanks, they are actual T55s, without the prop dressing.

     It's an interesting series.  When you see hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers on screen, they were the real thing - CGI was a gleam in the eye of a gleam in the eye at the time.  Some of the stunt work is wincingly dangerous - at one point a Russian tank is driven off a pontoon bridge into the middle of a very wide, very deep river; in another scene Russian and German tank crews fly at each other and biff the living spit out of themselves - whilst within yards of explosions and pyrotechnic effects.  The "Kursk" entry is the best, before the Soviet censors decided that Russian soldiers were Politically Correct, and superhuman to boot.

To Finish With

     You know I like to end with a cute animal picture that completely negates all the sheer horrid of the foregoing, so how's this:

Cries of "Get a room!" will be ignored

There you go.  A hyena, an animal with a reputation lower than a Wonga publicist, being affectionate to it's lunch***.

*  Yes a real war that really happened.  How do you imagine the Yanks got Cuba?

**  Slang from "A Clockwork Orange" - oh the irony!

***  I dunno.  Maybe dinner.