BOOJUM! Announces A Slight Delay ...

Due To The Great British Bake-Off
     Blame the schedulers at Auntie Beeb, as this used to be broadcast on a Tuesday not a Wednesday.
     Is this relevant?  Well, yes, rather.  You see tomorrow is Thursday - Thursday may be reliably counted on to follow Wednesday - and is thus Pub Quiz night, with a forbiddingly narrow window for baking.  Ergo, Conrad bakes on a Wednesday, but is then obliged to watch the GBBO until 9 o'clock, which means a late start to the blog.
     Enough dithering! Forward!

The Yowie
     Once again Conrad apologises for bringing something strange to the dinner table, and can only say that this item popped into his head yesterday and has been sitting there ever since.
     What is a Yowie?  Not an imprecation as spoken by the denizens of a comic strip, nor a 60's skiffle group member.  No, the Yowie is an Australian cryptid.
     Hmmm.  What's a cryptid, I hear you ask?  A cryptid is a proposed animal that has no scientific underpinning; the most famous two are probably Nessie and Bigfoot.
     Back to Australia!  The Yowie is described as being man-like in appearance and exceedingly hairy, sort of like a hippie who never visited a barber.For all intents and purposes it might as well be just that, as nobody has every produced evidence to support the Yowie as ever existing: no hair or skin or droppings or bodies or bones or hides or homes or - you get the idea.
     So - does the Yowie exist? Probably not.  But it would be amusing if it did ...

Dowie.  Close enough

The Rebec
     Sounds like a 90's acid-house dance group, doesn't it?
     Wrong!  Although in some incredibly etiolated way it might be the precursor of same.
     What is it? O I thought you'd never ask!
     It's a Renaissance stringed instrument, having between 1 to 5 strings, and was played with a bow; you can see it as an ancestor of the violin.  It was replaced by the viol by the end of the Renaissance except in Eastern Europe where it continued to be used.
     This entry is because of Deep Dish and one of their tracks, which Conrad mused at, pondering and thinking: "Is that a rebec?"
     No, it wasn't, but that's a story for another day.  If - only if - you're good.

Jeff Beck - rebec - easily confused

Shakespeare
     You ought to know by now, gentle reader, that Conrad convivially detests The Bard Of Avon - and cannot understand people like his dad who read it for pleasure.  Were it not part of the UK's educational system, Conrad and Bill would have remained a very long way apart.  Still, he did get "MacBeth" dinned into his head for O Level English and can even now recall bits of it: "Is this a dagger I see before me, or is it an image of the heat-oppressed mind?"  (It's a dagger, Macbeth, mate, a dagger, one of those sharp pointy things that you murder people with).

I don't know about you, but this actor seems to be having entirely TOO MUCH fun wielding that dagger.
Don't turn your back on him .....

    There was also an interesting and gory bit that our English teacher skated around, where MacBeth or possibly Banquo are boastingly telling war stories, and retail how they split one unfortunate victim "from the nave to the chaps" and one wonders are they talking about horizontal or vertical slashery, and exactly where -
     - anyway, back from the tangential.  Conrad has this whole post because, pausing at the bus-stop this morning, a line from MacBeth popped into his head*: "You have scotched the snake, not killed it," apropos the murder of Banquo's sons.
     Despite MacBeth being Scottish, and the whole play being set in Scotland, the word "scotched" has nothing to do with our brothers over the border.  No, it is a variant of "scorched", meaning that the snake may be feeling a bit poorly and crisp, but it ain't dead and once it gets better, it's going to go looking for people with matches.
     Also, "butterscotch".

The cook prepares to cast a batch of butterscotch - oh, wait, hang on -

The Louche Pooch
     I'm not entirely sure how "louche" is pronounced, but then you, dear audience, probably don't know either, so we may both imagine that it rhymes with "pooch".
     Is this relevant?  Well, yes.  Conrad rarely watches television, which means he rarely ventures into the now re-painted lounge, so he is rarely** there for Edna to make a fuss over.

Edna Wunderhund, official Quality Checker of renovated sofa cushions.

     Not tonight!  Conrad was a captive audience as Edna did hurdles over him, attempted to lick his face like a hairy globular ice-cream, and finally came to play tug-of-war with a toy monkey.  This was okay the first time, but the second came after Edna had been chewing it for five minutes.
     'Egad!  Dog Buns!  Also Dog Toys!" expostulated*** Conrad, for the monkey was a soggy mass of fabric heavily permeated with dog slobber, meaning if you so much as squeezed, it oozed unmentionable fluids.

Nuoc Mam; fermented fish-head sauce; the only liquid in the world more disgusting than slobbery dog chew toys.

     Having thus unmanned^ you, Conrad is now off to do things like reading, writing and watching a documentary on the Desert War, which would constitute Cruel and Un-natural Punishment to everyone else, but then "everyone else" isn't an alien spy wearing a human skin.

Pip Pip!

* I know, I know, bringing something strange to the dinner, breakfast and mid-afternoon snack table.
** Did I get the sense of "rarely" across enough?
*** "Shouted" for snobs, explains Mister Hand
^ "Unmanned" - as in the Shakespearean sense, not as in the Rosetta space probe sense.