I can put in another word that rhymes with "Greek". Mind you, tonight's Hellenic repertoire is considerably less than yesterdays, being in fact restricted to a foodstuff. Hummus. You remember the bread-batons of last night? Conrad rashly also ventured to make hummus to go with them. Thank you to Ms. Pavlou for providing a recipe. Actually I lied, that surname is Greek, so we have two items from the eastern-most peninsula in the Mediterranean.
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| Hummus. |
This phrase has always stuck in my mind, being from that incomparable science-fiction "Earthman, Come Home", by the unfortunate James Blish. Er - unfortunate in that he's dead. He described a character, running for their life (and that of the flying Okie city of New York*) as breathing "as though through saw-edged rales".
Rales, it turns out, are part of the interior of the human lung, which makes sense in context, as Blish was qualified in biology.
There you have it.
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| Rales. Ha! I bet you expected "Rails", didn't you? |
Aha, this term crops up in one of the Pastel City novels by M. John Harrison, one of our home-grown greats in the science-fiction field. It is a geological feature from it's context, although there is no clear description of "Iron Chine". That useful arbiter of information, Wiki, describes a chine as a narrow, steep-sided river valley usually running through sandstone terrain. They occur frequently on the Isle of Wight, and are also mentioned in
| A Chinese chine |
- where the author, Captain Dunn, mentions the word but doesn't describe it, merely contrasting the Flemish countryside to that of the English south coast as he goes for a jolly behind the lines on leave. He also mentions the Crecy campaign again, and several towns that the English army of 1346** passed through, and you get a sense that the English were rather like a visiting football firm, arriving only occasionally but being exceptionally unpleasant when they did.
O bitter irony, he also mentions the small port of Saint Valery. This is another site of historical interest because here the 51st Highland Division was overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht in in 1940.
For those with better olofactory gifts than Conrad, Dr. Dunn also mentions the first cases of poison gas cases affected by another unlovely German chemical invention, mustard gas, which he describes as smelling like "nasturtiums". As a corrosive it tended to invalid rather than kill. My mother-in-law's father-in-law had been affected by mustard gas when lying injured; being heavier than air it tended to lie on the ground and if one couldn't get one's head above it ...
From the beastliness of man to that of nature. Dunn describes how appallingly bad the weather in August was, creating mud that impacted front-line operations dramatically for the worse.
| Mud and rock. Double whammy. No, hang on - |
I almost forgot. What is this word? It's a French card game for two players, using a double pack of cards. It features melds, brisques and trick-taking, all of which sound unutterably dull to Conrad and, frankly, the game is only here because it rhymes with "Greek".
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| Bez. Eek! |
"Got Ham"
I saw this on a bus poster yesterday, and wondered a little about it. The tagline is "Before there was Bat man, there was Got Ham". Conrad is not well-versed in the affairs of cricket, but he's pretty sure that before you start talking about batting, you sort out who's going to field and where (yes, Silly Mid Off) and the order of batting, and the umpires tie coats around their middles. Where the cured pig meat comes in is anyone's guess, unless they mean the actors, which again is a mystery as who is going to watch bad thespians***?
| Posh Hamm. Close enough. |
For Better Or Worse - Lawyers We Curse
No, this is not Conrad being mulish and dealing with current affairs. Alexandre Dumas^ wrote of lawyers in 1844, that Napoleon should form a corps of them, and send them in where the shot and shell flew thickest. What did I see on a bus poster today? Why, an imprecation "For better. FOR WORSE. See a professional. See a solicitor" there was small print that I couldn't read as the bus drove off, doubtless about how they would suck the blood, marrow and soul out of the opposite party and all for the bargain price of your firstborn child, a wheelbarrow full of banknotes and all your gold. Not silver, as silver is known to repel evil. You will never see a lawyer wearing silver; they say it is, but we know it's really white gold ...
| Sadly this lawyer was too greedy to resist those 30 pieces of silver ... |
* Yes, thanks to the Dillon-Wagoner polarity generator, the "spindizzy", cities can fly.
** The year AD, not just-past-quarter-to-two
*** The Persians. Remember yesterday's blog about the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans? Well there were a lot of Thespians there, too. Alhough maybe they were bad-ass Thespians.
^ Pronounced "Dyoo-mah", not "Dumb-ass". Just so you know.
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