Chelsea

Buns
Conrad has only made these once, and no longer has the photograph that he took of them.  Sophie, equally skilled at baking and Conrad's glamourous understudy* at work, remarked that they are easy to make.
     Don't you believe her, gentle reader!  They are a sweet, fruited bun, made with yeast, which is always a bit tricky and requires experience of making yeasted dough.
     Allow me:

I think mine were a little tidier, on balance

     If Conrad remembers correctly, it's an enhanced dough, made with the addition of melted butter, which makes it more difficult to prove.  So he is pretty chuffed with having done it right once, and it may be time to try again with gluten-free flour.
     Oh, what's that?  There's a football team with the name "Chelsea"?  Who knew!

Bizarreness, Thy Name Is FaceBook.
Conrad does wonder how the "Suggested Posts" get generated on Facebook.  Before now we've had pages about "Musical Notation Software" and "Sight-reading Organ Music Myths".  Last night two of the most bizarre yet came up.
     First of all: 

      "NOW YOU CAN COUNT LOGS!" proclaimed the post.
     This fantastic software allows you to count logs, apparently, and from the example above you can tell this app really cuts the mustard, or the tree.  
     Why I would want to count logs is another matter.  I do not own a lumber company.  I do not swing through the forest of British Columbia**. Nor do I morbidly stand by the side of the road, watching log-loaded lorries pass by, in order to count logs.

And here's the second one:

Not just SAWMILLS!  No, these puppies are PORTABLE SAWMILLS!

     For the lumberjack on the go, I suppose, who simply hasn't the time to put his logs on a truck - after carefully counting them first of course - and who really really REALLY needs to saw them up in situ.
     Why an elderly office worker, whose closest to sawmills and timber is the wooden spill he stirs his coffee with, should be judged needful of a portable sawmill - 
     - answers on a postcard to the Mansion, or leave a comment.

"Stalker"
Conrad walked past a poster of this and was rather stunned.  "Stalker"?  Surely not!  Tarkovsky's magnum opus done as a television series?  Perhaps it was actually an adaptation of the source novel, that wonderful novella by the Strugatsky Brothers, "Roadside Picnic***".

No sign of an alien wreckage-strewn landscape

     - except Conrad well remembers that there isn't any female lead character.
     And he did mistake the television series "V" for an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name.
     We shall keep our eyes on this on, dear audience.  O yes.

Hubris and Schadenfreude
Greek and German in a two-for-one.
     "What on earth do you mean, Conrad?" I can hear your excited voices asking.  "Is this some more of that tortured wordplay so beloved of you?"
     Well, no, it is actually a case of don't laugh at others lest Karma comes at you with a bamboo skewer.

It is a flaming red-hot barbed skewer three feet long.

     This morning, just after seeing the poster above^, I saw a young chap clad only in a dressing gown suddenly pop out of a cafe clutching a carton of milk, darting to a doorway alongside the cafe and disappearing back indoors.  This, I may tell you, was when the pavements were being particularly well-watered with wet.  Our barefoot hero must have had cold, wet feet, I chuckled to myself.  But he wasn't going to have dry cornflakes or black tea!

Believe me, Fry, they were wet socks.

     By the time Conrad reached the Electric Goldfish Bowl, he was considerably less merry; his flimsy trainers were completely porous and thus he had wet trainers, wet socks and wet feet.
     Just one of those things that make the day a tad irksome.

Bah! Blog Begets Burnt Brownies!
Conrad made up a batch of gluten-free brownies last night, then left them to bake whilst he went to work on the "Sheffield. Wednesday" blog.  After a few minutes he glanced at his stopwatch and, with muted horror, saw the display "51:43".
     No!  This is not a ratio of fifty-one to forty-three.  The time elapsed - at least ten minutes longer than it should have been.
     Dashing downstairs on his creaky legs, Conrad did indeed smell the smell of burnt cake - and that had to be bad, as Conrad has perhaps 0.015% of a normal person's sense of smell.
     There followed a good few minutes of scraping and trimming.  Conrad took the resulting brownies into work and said folks didn't need to pay for them as they were substandard.

9:35

     After the Empty Stomach brigade from Ops Support turned up, you see the remaining bits; much to Conrad's surprise they were very nice!
     This little lift was enough to counteract the irk of wet feet.

"Adumbrate"
No! Nothing to do with Council Tax or being mute.  No, this is an action you experience here on BOOJUM quite frequently.  It means to outline or sketch out a concept or principle, to delineate rather than detail.  Where does it come from?  Latin.  Latin, I am afraid.  "Ad" meaning "to" and "umbrae" meaning "shadow" - which had become "adumbrate" by the sixteenth century.

It would have been successful - if only they'd followed Conrad's advice about the title - "The Adumbrate"

My Letter Of Complaint
As I mentioned yesterday, I intend to lambast^^ First Bus with a letter of complaint.  However, this isn't just any old letter.  First, there will be no swearing.  Second, there will be a strict limit on the use of UPPERCASE.  Third, it will use several French words.  Fourth, it will be ironic and elliptic.  

Draft on the right hand page

     Conrad is unsure what effect - if any - it will have, but the sense of venomous fun will come through.  I can't use the page above, far too spidery and scrawly, and I'm not going to word-process it as I want the inhuman touch.

* Henry is lucky to have her!  Watch out Henry, lest someone steal her away ...
**  Yes, nicked from Monty Python
*** Available for free on the internet
^ You see? You see how everything refers back to everythine else?  The work I put in!
^^ Explained in an earlier blog.