I HAD To Buy A Bottle of Beer

There Was No Choice
You see, I'd been given a new bottle-opener and all we had in the house were cans.
     I'm sure you see the dilemma here - without a bottle to open, my gift meant nothing.  Not to seem churlish, your humble scribe went to the Co-Op and bought a bottle of Old Golden Hen.

Yes, it does look as if it's screaming, doesn't it?

     I shall report back later on how this article performs.

"V"
I am now up to page 410 of Mister Pynchon's opus, and it continues to run strange.  We finally get to meet the mysterious lady "V", who might have been a place rather than a person, in Paris of 1913 - although she isn't identified at first and I was beginning to think "What on earth does this have to do with anything?"
     Typically, old Tom introduces words that are novel to Conrad: "Endogamy" for one.  What does it mean?  "Marrying only within a strictly limited circle".  "Pourboire", a French word that translates literally as "For drinking" and is idiom for a tip, and the word "Mancia" which might be Spanish or Italian and seems to be about tips, too.

                                         Tips

"The History of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division"
We are now up to late 1915 and the division is present at Gallipolli, where there are descriptions of life in the front line, besieged by flies - aerial armadas of flies - fighting the Turk and setting off mines.  These "mines" are not contemporary ones the size of a fag-packet or dinner plate, these are tunnels and galleries dug by hand (as silently as possible) in order to place tons of explosives under enemy lines.  Light blue touchpaper, retire and give an awful lot of people a Bad Hair Day From Hell.

Not quite what I had in mined

     It's not all grim, however, and the author includes several anecdotes that are amusing.  One concerns the working parties who were at the beaches; if one was not too bothered about coal dust, rubbish thrown from ships, and the floating corpses of horses and mules*, a beach working party meant being able to bathe.
     Also, by a mistake in logistics owing to tins being unlabelled, the division ended up with a glut of strawberry jam.  Normally the jam ration was Plum and Apple, unvaryingly, and the troops came to simply detest the stuff.  The French, ANZAC or Indian troops refused to swap anything for tins of Plum and Apple.  There were songs about it.

Ticklers.  Quite.

      Then there were the two sergeants from one of the Lancashire battalions who spied a Scottish soldier standing guard over two jars of rum.  Faking Scottish accents, they persuaded him to let them take the jars to the front line, "for the lads".  Once out of sight temptation proved too much and they decided to sample the contents.
     Which turned out to be creosol.

Good for planks but not to be dranks

Apparently This Is Me

     Because it's wearing a pinny and has white tufts upon it's head, before you ask.  Another present, but with considerably less utility than the bottle-opener.

Damn That Cat Likes It's Box
Cats like hiding in small spaces.  Our silent cyborg sentry really loves this box and has been sitting in it all day long:

     She only emerges when she smells meat being prepared.

Darling Daughter Is At Home This Weekend
No!  Not because she simply wants to gorge herself on free food for several days, but because she loves us and - her boyfriend Tom** is working working working.

Sal switching the sentry from "Standby" to "Laser Battle Attack"

     You see her here in her pyjamas, which she has kept on all day long.  This is simply shocking and Conrad cannot <Mister Hand intervenes to cut off a long Parental Screed>

Making With The Baking
Conrad decided to try and do one notable thing per hour this afternoon, and here we have a collection of notable things:

     Gluten-free Sweet Potato And Bacon Muffins, which are now cooling on a rack and because Darling Daughter is home - hmmm perhaps that crack about free food does have some weight after all - I can ask her to be Chief Guinea-Pig.

Dead Snow 2:  Red Vs Dead
Finished watching this today.  I liked it, and it clearly had a much bigger budget than Dead Snow.  Not only do we have Nazi zombies, we also have Soviet POW zombies, and zombie villagers, too.  Plus a Tiger Tank; although Conrad is pretty sure the turret is too far forward and it's probably a customised T34.  There are Americans, just to round out the national mix, and the end - actually that really would breach BOOJUM!'s criteria about being SFW.

That's Norwegian for "Dead Snow2"

     A word of warning: this film rather reminds me of "Accione Mutante" in that it doesn't possess a PC bone in it's body.  It is extremely gory with an extremely grisly sense of humour so you probably won't want to watch it with Grandma or the mother-in-law present as the Tut Factor is up there in multiples of "Really!"
     There isn't a lot of snow in it, either.  Come to think of it, snow is pretty much dead in the first place, so <Once again Mister Hand saves the day from an endless recursion of drivel from Conrad>***




* These were towed out to sea, but the tide kept bringing them back.
** A splendid young chap, rather quiet for the Mansion and it's exotic residents.
*** You're welcome <wrote Mister Hand>