Irony O Irony!

No!  It's Not What You Do With The Laundry
I refer to the Great British Bake Off - some of which I shall miss because I will be - 
  No!  Not plotting to take over the world*- I shall be baking.  Fortunately, thanks to a bit of forward planning I didn't miss much.  I have baked a batch of banana muffins which now have to cool, and tomorrow I shall be making a caramel custard to go on top, before zooming off to Pub Quiz.  I missed it last week because of rash promises to make cakes and humus and bread sticks.  None of that this week!  Although we did raise £150 for the MacMillan Trust.
     Yes, as Conrad like to say - eating cake for charity - it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it ...

TWTIK
I have now finished reading this remarkable book, so I can tell what you're thinking "Hooray! Conrad can cease to bore about battles of old."
     Not quite, dear heart.  There is, after all, "Duty Done", a scholarly work that analyses the book, the officers, the NCO's, takes a timeline, mentions the honours and medals won, etcetera.  What better way to spend an evening that switching backwards and forwards between the two books!

Pylon-spotting, that's what!

     I have still to read any of Siegfried Sassoon's works about wartime, so your trial by fire isn't over yet.  As the fag-end of comments about TWITK, this leads to -

Wheels Of Steel
No!  Not the 80's rap group that backed Grandmaster Flash.  The 2nd Royal Welch - and we are talking about 96 years ago to the month - captured a German truck that had solid steel "tyres".  This is because Perfidious Albion** had a naval blockade that deprived Germany of rubber, hence the resort to literally wheels of steel and an inability to get rid of embarrassing spelling mistakes.
     Conrad, reading this on the bus, thus naturally wondered what the consequences of such dire straits would be.  The positive is that they would be very hard-wearing and, one suspects, highly puncture-resistant.

Voila! Or, more properly, So!

     The negatives, however, are many.  Weight, for one thing.  Your Opel would be hard to Propel.  If the steel were substandard in any way, you might well get a shearing failure and the wheel cracking apart.  Then try taking it off and putting another 150 kg spare in it's place!  Oh, and the suspension would suffer appallingly, with every bump being faithfully transmitted, causing a much higher chance of suspension damage or failure.  Anyone driving or being carried as a passenger would have a driving experience similiar to that of travelling on the inside of a skip whilst it was towed over rough ground by a Challenger tank driven by a monkey.
     The test of success is that today, we only see steel-wheeled cars in North Korea, where the expression "put the pedal to the metal" means that the driver has to cycle faster.

Formula One at Pyongyang People's Racing Circuit Number One (Dated to circa 2005).

More Of Transport
There is mention in "I, Claudius" of a "catafalque".  What can this be, I wondered.  From the context, a vehicle.  Looking at the term closer, it can be a vehicle, used to display and transport the body of a person particularly well-regarded.
     The word itself comes from the Italian "Catafalco", which itself derives from Vulgar Latin and "Catafalicum" which in turn derives from the Greek "Kato" meaning "down" and the Latin "Fala" which means scaffolding.

Close enough

Good Books Do Furnish A Room
This being so, Conrad is able to do some little decorating with almost no effort.  Why ever so? I hear you ask, gentle reader.  Because Alison at work*** donated another four Robert Rankin books to me.
     Who is Robert Rankin?  He had the sound common sense to have a splendid first name, and then went on to be a humorist, which is not quite the same as a comedy writer, as some spectacularly dark and horrid things happen in his novels.  The way one antagonist is killed by a unicorn still makes one's nethers pucker in sympathy.

"The Strain"
No!  This is not what Conrad suffers at work, or after.  His diet of liquid nitro-methane sees off any kind of strain, sprain, pain or dead cells in brain.
     No, I refer to the television series, brainchild of Guillermo Del Toro.  In more irony he wrote a horror trilogy with Chuck Hogan, after getting his television pitch rejected.  The novels then became sufficiently popular for television to woo him.
     I don't want to create spoilers but this is a series about vampires.
     No!  Not the effeminate glitterghouls of that film series and - are there books as well?  Conrad cares not - their pomaded faces and exquisite bone-structure.
     No.  These vampires are worm-ridden zombies with a Nazi background.  Not so attractive, are they now?

NO!  Get it right!

I guess that answers my age-old question: "Where are all the ugly vampires?"

The Great British Bake Off
Ah, the semi-finals tonight, with Patisserie as the theme.  Only Luis, Nancy, Chetna and RIchard left of the original thirteen.
     First off in the Signature - Baklava.  I love this stuff but I buy it, because it is fiddlerly-beggurly to make from scratch, and I've only ever made it once and not found I miss not making it.  This is how the contestants felt - why make filo pastry when you can buy it?
     The Technical was another horrid challenge, a "Schichertorte", being a cake that you made from successively grilled layers.  Conrad has tried to make torte once or twice and not been very successful.  That's without any judges or roving camera teams or baking against the clock, too.  
     The Showstopper was another unfamiliar dish - Entremets.  Layered sponge and mousse and layers of jelly and chocolate and this and that.  This was about organisation and time-keeping as much as baking.
     Who got sent home?  See under ^

Enter Eminem.  Close enough

* That comes tomorrow ...
**  England.  You and me.
*** A lady who is inordinately chirpy and cheerful.  If you could bottle what makes her endlessly sunny, you'd solve the world's energy crisis overnight.
^ Chetna.