Today Has A Theme - No.

Yes It's Rare, But BOOJUM! Does Occasionally Manage It
     This theme was triggered by a whacking great hoarding that displayed an advert for the film "Noah".

Noah-scape from the Flood, miladdoe!

     Conrad - being inquisitive, cynical and, above, an evil alien spy - wondered about this film.  You know how it goes - Noah, a burned-out ex-secret service agent, gets tasked by his friend into guarding a football player, except the job -
     - whoops, no, that's "The Last Boy Scout", isn't it?
     Okay.  Noah.  He foresees a great flood, probably with a capital "T", builds a giant ship to survive it and takes along two of every kind of animal, flood - sorry, "Flood" - arrives, Noah & mates survive, everyone else drowns, they find dry land, the end.
     There are some serious plot holes here.  I wonder if they'll be addressed?
     1)  A ship so big it can accommodate not just all the animals but their habitat and food would be the size of a supertanker.  To be built out of wood.  How far in advance did Noah begin building?  Two decades?  Three?  How big was his workforce?  How did he pay them?

A 1/10th scale replica

     2)  All the animals in the world.  Let us imagine that this film is set in the Middle East of Biblical times.  Where do they get the pangolin or kiwi from?  Does Noah have an army of fauna collectors worldwide, and why only two of each animal?  What if one dies?  What if they both die?  Would not a larger breeding colony be desirable to avoid an insufficiently large gene pool?  Am I over-analysing this?
     3)  To avoid inbreeding and the consequences amongst humans of an insufficiently diverse gene pool, Noah is going to have to take along a big-ass collection of humans, preferably not ones directly related to each other.  These people have to repopulate the world, remember.  There will have to be hundreds of them.  Yes, I am over-analysing this.  Sorry.
     Then there's the tagline: "The end of the world - is just the beginning!"
     No, I think you'll find the end of the world is, genuinely, the end of the world. If Noah et al survive - then it wasn't the end of the world!

Ha!  Survive that, Noah!

No-Face
     This is a character from the greatest animated film ever made, "Spirited Away".  You can only argue that it is perhaps primus inter pares with "Howl's Moving Castle", otherwise the exit door is over there, chum.

L to R:  Chihiro, No-Face and a - er - hmm, I'm really not sure.

     Chihiro accidentally lets No-Face into the bath-house, where she/he/it eventually gorges themself into a monster of gargantuan dimensions, until Chihoro purges he/it/she with a - 
    - well, that would be a spoiler.  Go see the film*.

Doctor No
     Ah, the one that started it all 52 years ago!  Wonder Wifey will spit venom at this since she founded the James Bond Must DIE! blog a few years back.
     Let us nevertheless look back at 1962 and the very first James Bond film.  I won't bother with a picture of Sean Connery as James, you're all so familiar with that already.  Instead here is Joseph Wiseman as Doctor No:

"No, Mister Bond.  I expect you to dine!"

     You may not know this, but the bad doctor's first name is Julian, his mother was Chinese and his father German.  SInce his father rejected him, Jules (we his friends can call him that) adopted the surname "No".
     Now, don't forget that this film is titled after the bad guy.  Inside every clown a Hamlet, inside every boy scout an evil mastermind**.

No Country For Old Men
     Yes, another film, and another film adapted from a book.  I have read "The Road" and "All The Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy, and bloody hell he is hard work.  In fact I have to confess I gave up on ATPH, despite hearing it being described in glowing terms on "A Good Read" on Radio 4 several years ago.

How old is "Old"?  That's a moveable feast if ever there was one!

     In this case you, dear reader, may benefit from the experience of Conrad and avoid the written works of Mr McCarthy, being sure only to watch the films of his works.

Just To Be Perverse -

Take that, common sense!

Noh Theatre
     This is a traditional Japanese theatre, and when I say "traditional", it has a history that pre-dates Shakespeare.  Formally, it consists of five plays, interspersed with parodies or skits***, and could take all day to perform.  Nowadays in the neon-tinted amphetamine-lifestyle of Japan, the plays are curtailed to only a couple.
     "Cast Rehearsal", "blocking" and "direction" are all completely foreign to Noh.  The cast do not rehearse together.  Players only do a single rehearsal.  The whole ensemble is a transient phenomenon, which is the ethos of the play.
     I was going to break down the Noh play in a bit more detail, but unfortunately for a blog that does not swear, the premier cast members are called a word in Japanese that rhymes with "bright", begins with the letter "s" and refers to excrement.
     Still, here's a picture:

"Knit one, purl one ..."

No Cold Dog
     As the weather at present can be cold and wet and windy and raining and hailing and snowing all at the same time, we have to ensure that Edna is soundly wrapped-up:

So clever she put it on herself.

No Cars Go
     A track by Arcade Fire from their album "Neon Bible" and probably my favourite track.

Conrad will stoop to exploit any creature for his blog!  Also, notice cars not going.

So - Tanks?
     No.

* NOW!
** Especially if there's a secret volcano lair thrown in
***  The Greeks used to do it.  I've seen Diana Dors in one such skit, using a telephone.

       

On The Good Ship Yacki-Hicki-Doo-La

It's a song!

     Admittedly from 1918, so not exactly contemporary.  

     Ah, busted.  Yes I have been referring to DoFaP for inspiration.  Could you tell?

     I can't hang around here discussing the finer points of early 20th century music hall - got to go check on that banana bread that's baking in the oven - 

 - ah, had to tent it with a bit of foil or it would have burnt. Can't have that - Wonder Wifey is camped out in front of the oven with a plate and knife.

Don't worry, it's only red food colouring.  Dr Oetkers - so it's veggie-safe!

"Against The Day"

     As I expected, Mr Pynchon, after detailing the adventures of the "Chums of Chance" for dozens of pages, suddenly switches to the character Lew.  We may return to the Chums later in the novel, or - not.  At 50 pages I've only read 5% of the book, so who knows what the remaining 978 pages will bring?  Probably more coincidences.

My dust-jacket is missing.  Apparently I'm not missing much.

Vituperative

     Yes, yet another attempt by BOOJUM! to educate you, the reading masses, in new and interesting words.

     Now, this is obviously - obviously! - a pottery process, probably created or discovered  in the mid 19th Century and coming out of Stafford, where the pottery industry was a major force at the time.  It would be a combination of glaze and white colouring that not only sealed the chinaware, but also gave artists a tabula rasa* to work upon.

     What's that?

     It' not?

     It merely means to rant a lot?

     Bum!  - see, that's me being vituperative.

NO! It's the wrong #*$¬>#ing photo!  (See - that's me being vituperative)

Well Well Well!  

     Many wells make a river, according to the old Russian proverb.  Moving swiftly from Artesian to Artistic, I picked up another book for only £1 at my chap's bookstall - you know, the one opposite the Co-Op shop and the Arndale entrance.

The title's a bit blunt.  I have an NVQ3, you know.

     This is of interest for Conrad as he has long wanted to create a screenplay for the John Wyndham novel "The Kraken Wakes".  I have read it dozens of times, and even went to the bother of annotating the Penguin version, getting each page refined as a single line of writing.  Not only that, I persuaded Moyra to bring back postcards of Falmouth.  And I dreamt up an opening scene.

     None of this exactly cuts the mustard with film studios, damn their necrotic eyes**!  Given that the book is over 300 pages long, it might take a while to peruse and put lessons to practical use, but Conrad is hopeful.

Sloth, Meet Idle

     As you know, BOOJUM! Mansion is protected by minefields, barbed wire, razor wire, trip wire and the band Wire, whilst for close-in defence we have a pair of cyborg sentry cats that possess laser-eyeballs and a bad attitude.

     Or at least we did until this character arrived:

Edna, sulking because Wonder Wifey is not around

     This is our second line of defence, "defence" being a comparative term.  Edna loves everybody and any intruder who got beyond the first line of defence -

Razor(light) Wire

   -  would be met by a pup with it's tail going at 150 W.P.M.***, bouncing around trying to lick their face, licking any bare flesh within reach and generally making a fuss.  

    After being lulled into a false sense of "Oh how cute" the intruder would then be vapourised by our deadly sentry cats with their lethal laser-eyes -

Ahem!  "BY OUR DEADLY SENTRY CATS - SENTRY CATS - DEADLY - LASERS -"

     Damn.  I think someone turned their Mode switch to "Lazing Around"

Er - deadly sentries having a bit of down time.

     Bum! - see, that's me being vituperative - at least we have Edna.  Edna?  Edna! EDNA!

"I are sulking.  Also skulking.  Humans - Bah!  See - that's Edna being vituperative."

So - Tanks?

     Yes indeed.  As any fule kno, Nazi Germany loved to have short production runs of exotic Panzers that required unique jigs and machinery and tools, creating perhaps as many as 100 of the "Hapfenstengahl Sonderkraftzeug Mark VIII Mobile Mass Dough-Mixing Machine", for example.  Here we see the "Neubaufahrzeug", which was pimped to the world as an example of how awesomely awful the titan terror technology of the Third Reich was.

Arriving in Oslo

     This was a heavy tank (for the time) mounting multiple turrets with a variety of guns and machine guns.  See the photo above?  That's 60% of all these tanks every made in one place.  Being less obtuse, only 5 were built.  They were used exactly one, in the invasion of Norway, and then disappeared from history.

* A "blank slate"  ooh look at Conrad mix his metaphors!

** I stole this line from 200 AD's excellent "Bad Company"

***  "W.P.M." - obviously! - Wags Per Minute

You Can't Make A Souffle Rise Twice

So Says the DoPaF*
     I wouldn't know, I've never tried souffle.  Perhaps I should.  It's supposed to be a finicky, nervous kind of baked dish that takes it's disposition from the jellyfish - it quivers and sinks at the least provocation.
     Anyway, the phrase means you can't repeat the unrepeatable.
     We shall see, dear reader, we shall see ...

A fallen toupe.  Close enough

Mr Everett - Meet Mr Everett
     Today, after doing some overtime to obtain more funds with which to buy books to invest in speculative bound publishing works, Conrad trudged across the road to NOMA, where the "City Fictions" festival is taking place.  Walking past the construction site that used to be New Century Annexe, he tootled into Old Bank Building, where he used to work.  This had an exhibition set up as a museum - but a museum set decades into the future, looking back on the technology that had been developed since 2014.

See?  I'm not just making it up!

     A side room held a giant artefact that looked very impressive, whatever it was.  Ah, it's the 5 Dimensional Camera.  The exhibit here looked at the "Many-Worlds Theory" of Hugh Everett, which postulates that for any and every decision a parallel alternative is generated alongside our own alternative, in what is known as "quantum superpositioning".  For example, if you decide tomorrow morning to go for a walk, in a parallel alternative you decide to stay in bed, and in another alternative you turn left at the end of the street, whereas in a different alternative you turn left.  All these alternatives exist simultaneously, and are real, even if we (being only able to move linearly in time) cannot perceive them.
     Is that all clear?  Here's the impressive camera:

Big.  Red.  Shiny (that's as deep as Conrad can get)

     Of course this blog isn't finished, oh no, because what did I find waiting at home?
     Exactly.  My ticket for the "Eels" concert I'm going to in June.

See Eels**.

     Why is this the big stick of coincidence falling on my shoulders again?  Because Hugh Everett is the dad of Mark Everett - Mr E. - the man behind Eels.
     Normally I'd call upon Philip K Dick to explain this away but I've been calling on him rather a lot lately and he can only come out of the box for a certain number of times before he defrosts - at which point he's really dead.
     Instead, have a picture of Charles Fort, a chap who collected strange facts in book form:

Charles Fort (County Cork).  Close enough.

That's Quite Enough Of That!
     The "that" in question being a rather daft advert for KLM featuring a toucan.  A toucan!  As if - I mean, who would advertise their product internationally with a toucan?

Three toucans with two glasses

     Ah.  Yes.  I had to ask, didn't I?
     The question still stands - who on earth would associate a toucan, a bird found only in the tropics,  with a stout brewed in Ireland?

"That Awkward Moment"
     Another artistic inspiration derived from a bus poster.  Thanks, First Bus!
     Allow me to present the cast of "That Awkward Moment".

Seconds later, the teddy ate them

     One review read "The Perfect Date Movie" - now hang on a minute!  These people don't appear to be anything like a date movie ensemble.  They look like four patients who got told three of them have herpes, but not which three.
     "Casual gets complicated" - what does that mean?  Is there a relationship here?  Two relationships?  Three?  Why is the settee blue?  Is she texting? because that can be a major source of conflict in relationships, you know.
     This poster tells me nothing!  Look at "The Need For Speed" - you have stern-looking men, helicopters, guns, fast cars - it's not going to be a film about making quince jam, it's going to be a popcorn guzzling no-brain bang-bang shooty-shooty fillum.  Take "Escape From Planet Earth" - with a title like that you don't need any more!
     2 out of 10.  Must do better.

Primed to explode with action!  No, hang on -

So - Tanks?
      Once again, kind of.  Pete Jones - no, not that Pete Jones! - was at Bovington Tank Museum*** and took a photo of the featured exhibit hall, thus:

I can spot a Duplex-Drive, a Firefly, a Crocodile, a Cromwell,  <Mr Hand moves readers on before sleep arrives>

     Of course the two major bits of kit that are not only not present, but at a guess will never be present are the M1 Abrams and the M2 Bradley.  They are American, you see, and the Americans are less-than-keen to share details of their exotic big clunky metal thingies with the rest of the world.I don't know why they're worried - the security at Bovvie is so tight that it amounts to putting up signs saying "Do Not Touch".

Here's a picture of an Abrams.  Ain't I wicked!

- and here's a Bradley.  Tee hee Conrad - he so bad!

Finally!
     From last week, Conrad showing how utterly inept he is at commanding a small dog.

Who, indeed, is zooming who?

* Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  Standyby muse.
** Nope, no puns using "sea".
*** AKA Tankies Heaven