Have Some Cadbury, Mr. Ray Bradbury!

You'd Better Not Feign Ignorance About Ray -
 - or there really will be trouble.  For a start, he's had a major television series made of "The Martian Chronicles", although that was 35 years ago.  And there are films, too - "The Illustrated Man" and "Farenheit 451", and "Ray Bradbury Theatre" too.
     He had a very distinct style, one of deceptive simplicity, and he wrote over a considerable period.
     So!  He definitely deserves a chocolate bar.

A scene from "Fahrenheit 451"
A slightly more orderly system of book storage than that of Conrad at the Mansion

Today Wouldn't Be Complete Without - Coincidence!
Whilst zooming off to drop Wonder Wifey at Manchester Airport, a not very common word popped into Conrad's thought processes - "Langoustine".
     What is it, exactly, I wondered?  French, yes.  A variety of - lobster?
     Having to concentrate on the road ahead, inevitably the word vanished, although when I got back home I recalled it and wrote it down in The Book Of All Things - see below for proof.
     Later on I went to the Co-Op to get a few bits and pieces of food, see what was going cheap, and find that they don't stock loose leaf English Breakfast Tea.  I did get haddock fillets and scampi - as I thought - that were going cheap.
       

Spooky proof if you really need it ...

      Look at the Dog Bun label - "British Langoustine"! Not creepy.  Not creepy at all.  No no no no.
      What are the chances of that happening by accident?  Fortunately I've already - WHAT'S THAT NOISE!

 "The Race For Space" - Public Service Broadcasting
Their new album, doncha know.  I'm off to see them next Wednesday, attendance of Darling Daughter permitting (can't leave Edna on her tod), and I brought along the CD to play on my way back from the airport.*
     I learnt something - those "beeps" you hear in NASA recordings are called "Quindar tones", and were included so Houston and the astronauts could use a single radio channel - wait until you hear a "beep", which means the other chap has finished talking, then you can gas away yourself.

Apollo 11 begin their commute.  Workplace is in the background

     The album doesn't have the immediacy of their first, but it does have some pretty good stuff, kicking off with JFK's epochal speech at Rice University - "We choose to go to the Moon and do these other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!"
     And the best track is "Go!" where you hear the various heads of functions responding to the Mission Controller (Gene Kranz) in a chorus "Surgeon?" "Go!" "Flight Op?" "Go!" "E-Com?" Go!" "Guidance?" "Go!" "Retros?" "Go!"
     "CapCom we're go for landing!"
     Top stuff.

Gene in a rare moment of hilarity

 Rob's** Military Book Barn
Woohoo!  I have now definitely passed the total of books I had before the Great Book Cull of Project Apocalypse.  With the one that arrived today, we are up to 606.

No!  Not a crap version of Solitaire.  606 book titles in triple column array.

    Now, that might sound like a lot, but years ago I was boasting about how many hundreds of books I had, and my acquaintance calmly informed me he had several thousand.

 "Inherent Vice" By Thomas Pynchon
Yes, definitely a shorter, easier read than a lot of his other stuff, and Conrad can see that the linear narrative would probably translate well to screen-time, if you can keep track of all the characters involved, as there are many.
     I've narrowed down the timeframe it's set in, because one character talks about re-enlisting for Vietnam, and the Nixon administration pulled out of Vietnam in 1973.  So, pre-1973.  Possibly Googling the names of the cars that Tom mentions would help, but cars are boring and I can't be bothered.

Actually "The Car"'s not boring.

     Tom does mention a Hollywood star, one Burke Stodge***, who got blacklisted for his political views and who had to - I believe the vernacular is "haul bottom" - in his yacht.  Which sounds oddly similar to Sterling Heyden.  I may enlarge on this^.

Well, a short pause will intervene here, got to go feed Edna and Jenny -

Darn.  Can't find me "Gelato" ice-cream maker recipe list, after I put the base into the freezer to chill overnight.  Google here I come ...

"Japanese Knotweed Control"
Sounds like a Seattle grunge band from 1995, doesn't it?
     Wrong. It's a real thing, I was overtaking one of their vans on the M60 and did a comedy double take.

See!  They exist

     Being the inquisitive pedant that I am, of course Conrad looked up Japanese Knotweed and - Oh my!  It's a real pestilential proliferating blight.  It spreads with hideous speed, killing off any other plant in the vicinity, and it's worse than a zombie - cut the top off and it still grows back, thanks to a huge root system.

Almost like a stingless Triffid.

     Getting rid of it is a real task, and at one point earlier this millenia it was a major cause of mortgage applications being refused, surveyors apparently thinking it was a Triffid.
     Japanese Knotweed.  Who knew?

Christine!

Another car you cannot call boring.
Well, you could, but then she'd kill you.

* Never when Wonder Wifey is present.  She hate all Conrad music.
** My sinister pseudonym.  Or is it my real name?  I get confused sometimes.
*** Mercifully, Tom has cut down on the number of silly names his characters possess.
^ Or I may not.  You know me.  Fickle as an English summer.

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