Wicked Wanton Weather

Apologies For Trotting Out An Old British Cliche
     Yesterday the morning dawned with bright blue skies, aircraft contrails and sun sun sun.  Be early afternoon the skies were claggy and forbidding, rain clearly looming.  This morning the skies were forbidding and claggy, rain clearly looming; by late afternoon we had bright blue skies and sun sun sun.
     Nor did Conrad get to dogsit Edna on Sunday - since it was pouring down at seven in the morning the car boot sales were clearly off.
     Tomorrow - well, we might have tornadoes in the morning, and a drought in the afternoon, with a touch of frost overnight.

How Many Bodies?
     They're digging up the car park opposite our offices again.  This time they've exposed considerable sub-surface brick work, then moved the digger off-site whilst a couple of chaps poke around with trowels.

Action archaeology - not very Indiana Jones, is it?

     Conrad suspects this is emergency archaeology in action, given a very slim window by the construction people to poke around in the ruins (he has some slight experience of same at Castlefield).  That, or there's a really big purge in the offing.

"Tommyrot"
     Yesterday we had "bampot", now BOOJUM! traces the origins of this word.
     Actually it might not have much weight in the twenty-first century.  When Conrad mentioned it to Darling Daughter, she claimed never to have heard of it.  What!
     It is a term of dismissal, dating from the late Nineteenth Century, implying that something is stupid or worthless, as in the example:

 "Conrad's claims of intellectual prowess were tommyrot"

      - eh what?  How did that get there?  Mister Hand?  Mister Hand!  Are you playing the saboteur again?

Tommy Rock.  Close enough.

     I was going to try and see where "Balderdash" came from, but there seems to be no theory about it's derivation, and Conrad doesn't like to see an item so open-ended.

Baldur's Bash.  Close enough

That's Quite Enough Of That!
     Why, you might be wondering: what has Conrad found to be annoyed about again?  (After all, it doesn't take much). Well, rest your glazzies on "Earth to Echo":

Cute Alien Tick-boxes: Enormous eyes; no nose; less than eight legs; no laser cannons serving as arms or legs

     It only scores 5.8 at IMDB, which ranks it as "Meh Plus", although it's only been out 2 weeks, so the rating might move up or down.  We shall see.  One IMDB reviewer gave it only 2 stars, said the people in front of them walked out after twenty minutes and said it was boring.
     Conrad would never walk out of a film, since he paid good money to get in there in the first place, and he has a high boredom threshold, usually because there's a party going on his head.
     So.  Be warned.  This is a film about unpleasant adolescents, not cute cuddly aliens, so you might as well go and see "The Inbetweeners 2".

Rosetta Stones
     If you have a long memory, you will recall Conrad banging on about the ESA space-probe Rosetta, which is set to have a close-range gander at the comet 67P.  Surprise surprise, 67P is apparently made up of two comets stuck together:

The cometwins

     How this came to be is unknown, and possibly will remain so until Rosetta's landing unit, Phil, touches down on the comet in November.  And Rosie is only 35,000 kilometres from 67P, practically brushing shoulders in astronomical terms.


Finally
     No cute animals today, sorry, but we do have a cake that deserves a bit of support.  Darling daughter made it and DIDN'T WAIT FOR IT TO COOL! End result - runny icing.

Idiosyncratic.

     I taught her everything she knows.