The Halibut Of Doom Is In The Room

Yeah, I Know -
Back to fish in the title.  It's worked in the past, and there are only so many famous science fiction authors you can take the name of, hopefully in virtue of higher traffic and not in vain.  Maybe I could revert to football teams?  Chocolate bars have been pretty much exhausted as a source of punnery.  Bottles of beer remain to be explored in a little more detail.

The USS Halibut
Quite doomy,  all things considered

"Inherent Vice" By Thomas Pynchon
It just occurred to me - you can quote bits of the blog about Tom's work, and sound as if you've really read the novels, which will get you a bit of street cred*.  Here's this phrase used extensively by Larry "Doc" Sportell - "flatlanders".  A descriptive rather than negative word, to be fair.  Not entirely sure what it refers to - the non-hippie, non-surfer, non-music lifestyle folk on the Californian coast?  A particular locale of San Francisco?

Close enough.

     One description stands apt - there are more layers of pop culture in this work than you'd find in an Economy-Size Family Lasagne, plus I had to check if the surf band "Meatball Flag" and their song "Soul Gidget" were real.  Were they heck! Another Pynchon invention**.
     Also it seems to me Tom is something of an Anglophile.  Witness his description of the visiting British band "Spotted Dick" (and a mention of Rick Wright out of Pink Floyd), and the differences between grunting American zombies and the far-better bred British equivalent, that use proper language and have better posture.

Talking Of Posture -
 - and halibut, in this case USS Halibut, let us briefly continue your education about nuclear weapons.  
     Yes, you may object, Valentina, but the damned things exist and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  Aren't you even a little bit curious about them?  Of course you are!
     Now, if I mention "cruise missiles" you would immediately recollect the Tomahawk:

Popping out of it's launcher to make someone regret getting out of bed.

     These things have been used extensively since Gulf War 1, although only with conventional warheads.  You can fire them from ships, drop them from aircraft and even from submarines.
     Which is where the "Regulus" cruise missile comes in.  One of the first extant, it began service in 1958.  It was huge!  The size of a jet aircraft, viz:

Regulus: plus size in missiles

     It was 30 feet long and weighed 5 tons, with a range of 500 miles.  It had to be guided to target by a specially-equipped submarine, and when it arrived it could deliver a bang that might vary from 6 kilotonnes up to a staggering 2 megatonnes.
     Not that launching it was easy.  Two booster rockets had to be fitted to the missile before launch:

As here

     And anyone unpleasantly disposed could see it being launched from a long way off:

Probably making a few eyes smart under that!

     There you go, Regulus.  Which means "minor king" and isn't really appropriate, eh?

TOO GLOOMEH!  Funny animals needed!

No!  something funny, not a psychotic goose!

Aha - a Bush Baby - excellent choice

Ah!  Coincidence!  I Wondered When You Were Going To Appear -
Good lord aloft, here we have Facebook and Sophie complaining about lingerie designed to be hard-wearing:

I've excluded her profile photo as she hasn't agreed to be visible.
"Feel like I'm wearing a bra made out of concrete" is her comment

     Now, one of Sophie's particular obsessions - you can't call "Doctor Who" an obsession, it's the finest documentary series the BBC ever made - is "Pusheen" the cat, viz:

Pusheen.  Not lean

     Directly under her post is one from Wonder Wifey that Darling Daughter has responded to, and what is her icon of choice?

This is all due to Thomas Pynchon, I'm sure of it.

Time to post and dash -


* Maybe.  If street cred recognises Modern American Literature.
** An "Invenchon"?

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