Thirty visitors to the blog yesterday, and 24 today - before I'd posted anything. Hopefully this means 30 people visiting once, rather than the same fan visiting 30 times, although Conrad accepts any visit with pathetic gratitude.
Can't rest on laurels, however - the pub quiz looms and I have a fair bit to commit.
"Trouble With Lichen"
That, sir, is the title of a novel by John Wyndham. I shan't spoil the plot for you by revealing anything more than, yes, there is indeed trouble and it is all to do with lichen.
No! Not evil invasive infectious lichen that turns it's hapless victims into broccolli on legs, nor a mobile carnivorous version that's a lower-profile version of a Triffid.
| Killichen: an artist's impression |
Anyway, moving on, Conrad came across a word he's not familiar with - "ullage". It means the headspace, typically in a wine bottle.
Another thing Conrad found strange were the prices quoted in 1960* currency. He took one example down - one of the central characters purchases a Rolls Royce for £7,000, and this is clearly a tidy sum indeed in 1960. What would a Rolls Royce cost you nowadays? In the region of £285,000, for starters.
There you go, better-educated thanks to BOOJUM!
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| A Seven Thousand Pount Roller |
The Metro. The "Newspaper"
Really, Conrad does not rate this paper. Even if it's free, that's still too much. It's more like a comic with a lot of text -
- You see? You see why the blog avoids current affairs? Because that would mean dealing with entities and institutions and artefacts (and people) that put Conrad's teeth one edge! He has to avoid ranting like a runaway nuclear fusion reactor anyway, so imagine how immenesly long and bitter these posts would be -
Case in point - obviously the journalists have a certain amount of column inches to fill, so one article tries to make a photo of Lindsey Lohan** in a boat a major revelation.
It's Lindsey Lohan*** in a boat.
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| A boat. Mercifully, without Lindsay Lohan**** |
Case the second: a puff piece about somone surnamed "Bundchen" and how much she earns. Conrad not interested, never heard of her, none the poorer for his ignorance of Bundchen, next!
Case the fourth - ah, I can't be bothered. Al Murray, your concept of "not news" is alive and well and made concrete in The Metro.
There was one interesting article, about an elderly man living in Duckenfield, Manchester, who had been collecting shells. Not the kind of shells you find at the seaside, apart perhaps from the Normandy beaches. No, this intrepid chap had amassed a huge haul of unexploded artillery shells.
Some of this iron harvest dates back to World War One.
Is that important? Well - yes, if you like being alive. If any explosive remains in those shells, it will have deteriorated dramatically, which may render it inert, or liable to go off if you sneeze nearby. Especially if any of the components break down into nitro-glycerine, because this is desperately unstable stuff that itself breaks down into other even more unstable stuff.
Here an aside: I'd made note of nitro-glycerine this morning before - hay pesto! coming across it in the afternoon in another novel I am reading, "If The Dead Rise Not", except in there it's in pill form for heart conditions.
The Klemperer Klomp
One of the figures mentioned in that interesting but grisly work of historical analysis "The Third Reich At War" is Victor Klemperer, Jewish academic and man of letters, who managed to survive both the Second World War and the Nazis, which is quite a remarkable feat.
He shares a surname with Werner Klemperer, another Jew who abandoned country and went from Germany in 1935 to America (Conrad googled accidentally for Werner when he meant to look for Victor). He subsequently became an actor, and guess what his most famous was? Playing Colonel Klink, the German camp commandant in the TV series "Hogan's Heroes".
There must be a word for that kind of thing, mustn't there? Conrad will settle for irony. Irony laid on with a trowel, mayhap, but an indication that now the Americans have acquired it, they're going to take over the world^.
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| Ironing. Close enough |
** Sorry, who is she?
*** Remind me - Lindsy who?
**** Nope, gone again. She's who, exactly?
^ it was the only thing stopping them
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