Tally Ho! Angels Seven And Climbing

To Adopt A Bit Of RAF Banter
I know it's ill-mannered to blow one's trumpet, euphonium and trombone all at once, but Conrad has to gloat a little, since nobody else will do it on his behalf.  I refer, gentle reader, to the number 7,000, which is how many hits the blog has had.

It has seven in the title, close enough

     Notice I did not say "visitors" - there may be a few fanatical followers who visit several times a day, dozens of times a week, hundreds of times a year, and whose devoted attention totally skews the stats.  Probably not, given the laws of probability and good taste, but there is a finite chance of it happening.
     Now, without further adieu*, onto the meat in the sandwich/falafel in the wrap (depending on carnivorousness or not).

"The Liberty Bell"
Ah, me, what it is to have a tune go round in your head all the time, round and round and round until it sends you utterly round the twist!
     Ahem.  Sorry.  The tune I refer to is in the title, a fast military march by that American bandstanding barnstormer John Philip Sousa.  Sousa titled it after the Liberty Bell itself, that icon of Britain's rebellious rascals overseas.
  No!  The Americans, not the Pitcairn Islanders.  It used to be the march of the British Army's Foot Guards, until An Event occurred and they changed marches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rutX0I6NxU

That's The Event unfolding before your ears and eyes, punters.  

Von Richthofen's Flying Circus.  Close enough.

The Cockpit Of Europe
Do you see?  The effort that goes into making bad puns on BOOJUM!?  Aircraft - cockpits - do you - O you do.
     In this sense Conrad refers to France being a constant battlefield, "cockpit" meaning a pit in which fighting cocks wreak sanguine havoc on each other*. Since I am reading about the 1415 AD campaign that led to the battle of Agincourt, and also about the attritional slogging match of 1916 on the Somme, it is interesting to see the same towns named in both books.  Peronne, Bapaume, Amiens, the Ancre river and valleys and ridges - all these are common to both books. They also feature briefly in the Battle of France in 1940.

A hen party

     But not since!  Perhaps Hom. Sap. is capable of learning the lessons of history.  If you don't learn from history you are comdemned to repeat it.
     I say - that's not bad, it would make a good quotation ...** 

"Picayune"
Yes, sorry, another of those words that pop into my head with no reason, this one whilst I was staring blankly at the monitors set  up over my desk.
     What on earth does it mean?
     It's a Spanish word that derives from the French "picaillon" (Hoorah!  Not Latin!), meaning a small coin.  By extension "Picayune" means small or worthless.

Picayune
YET TERRIFYING!

Vital Statistics
Again, this concept popped into Conrad's mind whilst he slogged through e-mails at work, hundreds of e-mails if not thousands, perhaps even ***
     Yes, thank you Mister Hand!  Anyway, Conrad wonders where the concept originated.  You measure a lady there, there and there and that indicates what she looks like, except which way round do they go?  And why?  And who introduced them?  And in the day of the selfie are they really needed any more?
     That - obviously! - led onto a meditation about female size.  This is measured in a peculiar even-only metric from Size 6^ to Size 16^.  Why only even numbers?  Why not a sequential count, because that would be more logical, wouldn't it?  Why aren't there Sizes for men?

No saucy pictures here.  BOOJUM! may rant but it does not reveal.

Bad Neighbours
Conrad saw a bus poster for this film and it set him to wondering.  Will the Mansion ever get neighbours again?
     Conrad sincerely hopes not, as it took considerable effort to generate the infrasonic barrage that drove the last lot away, suffering from subsonic-induced hallucinations - although some of the terrifying creatures they imagined they saw are actually rent-paying tentants at the Mansion.
     Imagine a new set of neighbours.  Conrad wouldn't be able to play "Metal Machine Music" at full volume on a loop, nor listen to his Polish art-horror films with their terrifying soundtracks.  Wonder Wifey would have to moderate her bashing the spoon against the pan as a 180 decibel BANBANGBANG would probably disturb their dinner next door.  The combined howling chorus of dog, Degsy and wife all marooning away would have to stop, as would the shouted insults at politicians on the news channel.

A unique but possibly illegal use of baby-as-punch-protector

* Mister Hand apologises for the long, roundabout getting to the point here.  Bamboo skewer time!
** Mister Hand punctures this pretension by pointing out Satayana got there first.
*** Mister Hand states there were 137, precisely, not these ridiculous totals.  In fact the real total was quite <wince> picayune.
^ Complete guesswork here, I confess.