A Lot To Post Tonight

Most Of It Art
     Conrad popped along to his daughter's exhibition at Manchester Met today.  There was only time to look at one floors-worth of displays, which still took about an hour.  As Conrad has observed in the past, there are some displays that are good, some that are odd and some that were obviously put there by the lecturers as a joke.
     Without further ado:

     Darling Daughter's display

Yes, that's my tin of Morrison's sardines.  Sacrificed for art.

     And the theme here is dolls, and escapism, and nicking tins of Dad's lunchtime fish

     And half of the rest of them:

Not sure if the lady was wearing this or wrestling with it

Ten out of ten for an excellent Hunter S. Thompson impersonation 

"Nice" - that hated, hated comment

Built up from little bits of paper

This had to be worn verrrry carefully to preserve the lady's modesty

Making faces.  And the high concept is?

Big, bold, bright.  Also nice recycling of Christmas tinsel

The world's most elaborate scarf

Abstraction explained.  I liked this one!

"Because the liquid is dangerously corrosive, and is corroding a split peach"

The Importance of Storytelling, with illumination provided by Mr Sun

Amusing, aren't they?  Not in the video, matey - they looked rather creepy

This brave and amusing soul is under automatic sentence of death in North Korea

Nope, no idea why the Etch-a-sketch is there, either

This looked really good in the darkened room.  Landscape of textiles lit by lamps

Impressive but it doesn't come over well in a photo

Banging on about Manchester

As a man who cooks, this rather took my fancy

No explanation but Conrad suspects this is "The Jungle Book"

The Conceptual Kitchen

      Right, just off to check on the haggis - which is steaming away merrily.  

Peccadillo

     I had to define this, in light of the entry that follows.  What, you may very well ask, is a "peccadillo"?
     A musical instrument of the woodwind family?
     A small domesticated pig found in the Phillipines?

A peccary playing the piccolo.  Easily confused

     Neither!  Although you were getting warm with the Phillipines guess.  Deriving from the Spanish "Pecado" for "sin", it means a small transgression, a sin so minor as to not really be worth bothering with.  
     Anyway, to move on -

Bibliographilia
      One of the more esoteric* things that Conrad likes to do is check out the Bibliography in the back of military history books he buys.
     This really has an objective value - if a certain volume that I haven't read or bought keeps cropping up across different works by different authors, then it obviously has merit, and this is how I bought Paddy Griffith's seminal "Battle Tactics of the Western Front".
     My perusal is interspersed** with ticks placed against the entries - a single tick if I've read it, a double tick if I've got it.  Now, given that I have quite a few*** military history books, rare is the occasion that I don't have a forest of ticks marching up and down the Bibliography pages.

Ticks are boring.  Here's an Airborne Laser Anti-Missile system instead

     So, if you, gentle reader, happen to acquire a military history book and see the Bibliography pages disfigured with hordes of tick marks - Congratulations!  One of mine managed to escape.

"Dear sir, my brethren and I would like to challenge your assertion about ticks being boring.  We might bore into you, but! we are never dull.

Against The Day
     Now on page 372 and what's this word = "absquatulate"?  Apparently it means "to leave in a hurry".  Thank you, Mr Pynchon, my vocabulary is now enriched.
     I know what you're thinking^, dear audience, why don't I read it on the bus to and from work?  
     Simple.  The book is a hardback the size and weight of a housebrick and it would probably burst the seams of my bag - which now smells sweeter thanks to that carpet freshener.
     Tom - a bit familiar but after 30 years I think we can manage that - Tom also mentions taking a trip on the "El", which Conrad takes to mean "Elevated Railway".



Elevated Railways - The Reason
     Normally railways operate at ground level, don't they?  Why raise one halfway to the heavens?  After all, the supports for a train that weighs several hundred tons must themselves be massive, and bespeak of a civil engineering^^ programme mighty in the undertaking.
     Well, Wikipedia puts the reason simply and effectively.  Elevated railways are used in urban areas where there are lots of roads, thus removing the need for an extensive, intrusive, awkward and inefficient series of level crossings.
     There you go.  Ineluctable logic.

They are, however, terrifyingly vulnerable to attack by giant apes

*  Sorry.  Big word attack
**  Whoops. Pretentious author ahoy.
*** F<cough cough> Hu<cough cough> and fifty five of the rascals
^     DARPA are shortly going to release the raw data on a telepathy test, but, yes, in the meantime, telepathy does not exist
^^  Mister Hand would like to point out that Conrad has recently read a book on civil engineering and is now persuaded that he knows all about it, the foolish man.