BOOJUM!: Watch Out Men, It's Stanislav Lem!

No I Didn't Make His Name Up!
He was a Polish science fiction writer, thank you very much, who is possibly the most successful sci-fi author ever; this is partly because his stuff was published behind the Iron Curtain where your choice of literature was either The Collected Works Of Karl Marx, the Strugatsky Brothers, or Lem.

The almost deserted space-station

You might know of him via the novel "Solaris", which has been filmed twice, and also the seminal sci-fi fillum "Ikarie XB1", or perhaps the unpronouncable* "Przekladaniec". There are also his tales of Pirx the Pilot, and satires like the "Cyberiad".
Lem didn't like American science fiction, believing it to be more interested in $$$ than Art, with the exception of Philip K Dick.
PKD, for his part - don tinfoil hat now - believed Lem to be a committee that created fiction in order to seduce the young and impressionable. I rest my case.

"Hey! It could be true. Pass the bong, please."

Appreciate What May Be Great -
- and which is indisputably late. Conrad being on a late shift, doesn't get in until 7:20, then he has to eat and make lunch for the next day, meaning it's after 8:00 before the blog gets started.
With this in mind, I ensure that I get into work early, and work up some notes beforehand or this wouldn't get posted until nearly midnight.

Blog on the left, Pome on the right

I also had to come up with a Pome for Sue, whose 65th birthday was today. Allow me:

Our Sue has hit a landmark date,

The hard-living, hard-drinking reprobate.

Don’t ask what’s in those fags she smokes –

They’ve been known to flatten bigger blokes.

And to me it’s always been rather a puzzle

At the sheer amount that small Sue can guzzle.

Don’t let your hand stray near her plate,

Since getting impaled by fork can irritate.

Now, Sue is on her pins quite nifty

For someone born in Nineteen Fifty.

This birth-date means she swung like mad,

In the Sixties swinging was quite the fad.

I’ll bet she swung in the Seventies, too –

You can see it in her eyes, can’t you?

Well now, Sue has reached a defining age –

She’s learnt – I hope – that sin has a wage,

In future she’ll be a paragon of good –

So superb “wonderful” will redefine as “Callwood”

I call these "Pomes" as they certainly don't aspire to be poetry**, and are barely above the level of doggerel.

"Handling The Undead" By John Lindqvist
Finished this on the bus into work today, and "finish" is the right term as it doesn't really end, just finishes. I shan't reveal what animates the recently-deceased, just to point out that the phenomenon is limited to Sweden, and then only in Stockholm. Could there be a sequel planned? Probably not.

" - should be done with extreme caution"

As I mentioned last week, the Z-word isn't mentioned until a third of the book has gone, and John works something novel into the mix: telepathy triggered by the presence of the "Reliving". The revenants remain static and neutral until live humans come close, in which case the mental mindset of said humans influences the Reliving.
For your information, "Reliving" in Swedish is "Relevande", unless you were re-living your Reliving experience, in which case it would be "Nyck".

Oh, as I didn't have to rush into work, the Bus Wait Rate concept was again underlined as being an elegant and truthful syllogism: no buses passed on the other side of the road.

The Bus From Hell - And Then Some
"MIRV". Conrad just bets you don't know what that means. No, not American slang.
"Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles", a delightful American euphemism for a missile carrying many warheads, not simply one, and which can target different sites.
Yes, your Education About The Big Bang Bombs continues.

The Cones on the Bus.

As an example, take the British Vanguard class Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines. One of these big metal tubes carries 16 Trident II missiles, and thanks to arms reduction talks they only carry 3 warheads. Potentially, however, they can carry up to 14 warheads each, meaning 224 in total. If they use the W88 warhead then that's over 100 Megatonnes of yield, enough to make those dastardly Bolsheviks give pause. Of course the Russians are our friends now, but we keep our MIRVs. Just in case.
And that's just one submarine.
Where does the bus come in? That's the name given to the carrying platform that separates out after the missile boost phase. This particular bus is not one you ever want to catch, as it it responsible for directing the warheads onto target, one after the other.

The Royal Gun Salute
As you know, Conrad doesn't really care for public celebrities and is pretty ignorant about most of them - there's a singer called Beyonk who's been around for 20 years and Conrad is proud to remain completely clueless about her, as with someone called "Jayes".
So! What possible interest can he have in the above event?

BANG!

I am curious about the artillery piece being fired here. Given that the men firing are wearing what appear to be Hussar uniforms - which means they are cavalry - and are also from the King's Troop - another cavalry term - I suspect these are 13 Pounders ex of the Royal Horse Artillery.
Oh and there was a baby in the background somewhere.

Edna Versus The Evil Blue Cushion
I've posted a few shots before of Edna attempting to rid the world of the evil - excuse me - The Evil Blue Cushion. Last night she really went to town on it: