Polenta!

No, Sorry, Not Garibaldi*'s Call To Arms
Polenta, or, as you may know it better, cornmeal, is used in baking.  Usually savoury (e.g. the Polenta Pizza) goods, but thanks to Paul Vickery and his gluten-free cookbook, Conrad has now baked two cakes with it.
     Is this news?  Well, all it needed was about twice the amount of baking powder that wheat flour cakes would require, so Conrad wonders what else might be made with polenta as a substitute.  Ain't going to try it tonight - hey, I have a blog to create! - but come the weekend your humble scribe may have a baking bash.

Vulgar Latin
Not to be confused with "Vulgate", which is a 5th Century approved version of the Bible.  Nor is it swearing in Latin, although Conrad does have a book of Latin-to-English phrases where "Bl@@dy hell!" is transposed as something like "Sanguinum Hades!"
     Where was I?  Oh, yes, Vulgar Latin.  So-called to differentiate it from Classical Latin, the vulgar was a provincial spoken version that doesn't have a written equivalent.  If you like a contemporary comparison, take Her Majesty The Queen and her impeccable cut-glass spoken English, then contrast this with the gutter-drawl of the bagheads found plotting outside Salford Precinct.

Vulgar Latin is dull, baby, dull.  Have an EXPLODING MELON instead

Art Versus Real Life
Last week Conrad was burbling on about the cartoon "Catch the Pigeon", mocking the ridiculous flying machines that Hank invented:

Utterly ridiculous!

Nonsensical!

This is just silly

Then there is real life and the aircraft of WW1:

The Voison 10.  Er - bathtub with wings, anyone?

The Caproni CA4.  Because you can never have too much wing!

The Ilya Muromets.  I have no idea what they're doing standing on the fuselage.
But they are Russian.  A dare, perhaps?

     Okay Hank, I apologise.

More Strained Analogies About Lord Of The Rings And WW1
That loud whining noise is probably JRR spinning in his grave at 150 revs per second ... Anyway, do you recall those giant bat-like creatures that the Nazgul whiz around on like helicopter cavalry?  Of course you do!

Cheaper than Ryanair.  Nazgulines - you know it makes sense!

     You may also recall that they rely on fear to be effective, and when I say "fear" I mean "pant-wettingly terrifying horror", and this fear, akin to taking a library book back a bit late bicycling in Parisian traffic whilst blindfolded and naked, derives from the wrinkly old Nazgul being all Nazgul-ey.  The Big Bats prove to be rather crap at real fighting, especially since a mere girl** chops one of them into dogfood.
     "But!" I hear you expostulate***, "Conrad!  How can this possibly be relevant to World War One as Tolkein experienced it?"
     Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - the Zeppelin!

Zeppelin and pylon snogging, it seems

     Before the war broke out, the cassandra's amongst military commentators bewailed the Zeppelin as a city-smashing superweapon that would overwhelm the Entente in exactly 18 hours, that being the time it took for a Zep to cruise from Bremerhaven to Belfast^, bombing all below into <thinks> a bloody batter^^.
     Real life proved a lot less worrisome.  Zeppelins, you see, were full of hydrogen.  Hydrogen is extremely ready to go BANG at the slightest provocation.  A single tracer bullet could (and did) turn the city-smashing superweapon into charred scrap metal in a couple of minutes.
     There you go.  Big Bat and Zeppelin - both with feet of clay.

The Strain
I am currently about to view Episode 8, and a comment from Claire several years ago came back to me.  She'd seen "30 Days Of Night" and was complaining how gory and scarey and unpleasant it was.
     Er, Claire?  "Horror" film?  There is a clue there.  One suspects she expected some post-modern ironic humour or a bit of heavy-breathing-and-biting, and instead she got BLOODY^^^ SHOCKING HORROR!
     Just so with "The Strain".  I dub these vampires Genderless Ghouls, because they are, and I will say no more.  BOOJUM!, after all, might be read by children.

The cuddly-on-the-inside kind of vampire, I guess

Minor Domestic Matters
Wonder Wifey occasionally looks at your aged and humble (but quite large) scribe with disbelief, firmly believing that I subsist on beer, buns and Moroccan tinned sardines.
     Not true!  Behold Conrad's Blueberry and Strawberry Smoothie:

With milk and yoghurt

     I timed drinking it: gone in 40 seconds.

This will get me into trouble, but - honesty the best policy.

You could hear it's gnashing mandibles
(In-joke)

     This monster was squatting on the wall.  Hitting it with one of my size 10 shoes would have splattered it across the nice white paintwork.  So my cunning plan was to blow it off the wall with a mighty breath, than stamp on it.
     Er - it fell into the hand-towels pictured.  A cursory and extremely rapid look - for as you very well know Conrad is an utter coward - did not reveal it.
     it has surely moved on by now, though.  Right?

* Italian patriot, soldier, politician and author.  Big cheese in Italy. Biscuit in UK.
** Okay, "a girl"
*** No this is not a rude word.  I stretched things enough with "Bl@@dy"
^ These statistics are <ahem> elastic.  That is, completely made up.
^^ The kind of batter you make cakes with, not the batter as in to hit or to play cricket.
^^^ This isn't a swear, it's a description.