It's Tom Hanks - Riding Tanks!

Actually It May Be
Often the clickbaiting blog title bears vanishingly small resemblance to what follows in the Intro, but today - today reality and braggadocio may collide.
     Now, I bet you thought I'd be dragging this picture out of Art's collection of gallery stills:

Trust me, that's Tom

     Not so!  Conrad is more subtle, or more devious, than that.  Take a look at this picture from "Apollo 13":

Major Tom?
Definitely not minor.

     This takes a minute to explain, so hang on.  There's Tom in the Command Capsule of Apollo 13, riding atop the Service Module.  Let me show you a cutaway of the Command Module and Service Module:

Look!  Lots of TANKS!

     I thereby rest my case.

Torquetto Jubbly?
As is a given with any prolonged period spent standing at the bus stop, Conrad begins to muse, and today he mused upon those two words, which popped into his head with no prompting.  Really, out of nowhere.
     By the time the (Late!  Late again! Forever Late!  If >*) the number 24 bus arrived, a dim suspicion that this was a character from the pages of 2000AD had percolated through the neurons.  Furthermore, it was in reference to a story featuring those alien teenaged delinquents "DR and Quinch".

Ernest Errol Quinch (L) and Waldo "Diminished Responsibility" Dobbs (R)

     Googling at work proved me correct.  One of 2000AD's most popular and humourous stories ever, "DR and Quinch Go To Hollywood", which took a sly swipe at the Eighties film industry.  Our anti-heroes (for indeed they are such) trojan-horse themselves into a Hollywood studio with a script purloined off the aforementioned Torquetto, who apparently died in front of them**.  Given an unlimited budget and directorial freedom, they abruptly discover that the script is handwritten by Torquetto.
     And the only person who can read his writing is himself.
     And he's dead.
     That's when the fun begins with "Mind the Oranges Marlon!"

"Frangipani"
Since the 24 was LATE, my mind churned on, looking at other aspects of life on earth, the human condition, the unending struggle between Good and Evil, and how many words in common use are derived from Latin.  Dead language my Hairy Underside!
     The name above is one.  What is it, and why?

Blue broken bread, so to speak

     Well, it translates literally as "Broken bread", and refers to an Italian aristocratic family who helped relieve local famine by distributing same.  In the seventeenth century one of this family invented a perfume based on the Plumier flower.  In turn the Plumeria flower is also commonly known as the Frangipani.
     There you are - BOOJUM! - educating one fact at a time.

"Gravity's Rainbow" By Thomas Pynchon
Now up to Page 710, so I may finish it over the weekend  ("Hooray!" cheer the bored audience) and for that I'll be starting on "House of Leaves" immediately after ("Our lives are eternally blighted" complain the audience).
     As ever, Tom throws words into the mix that I've never heard of.  Take this one: "Phthisic", used in the context of a person coughing.  Looking it up on teh interwebz, it means "tubercular", that is, of the lungs.  Why couldn't he just say that!
     Then there's this one, which crops up a lot: "Preterite".  Which merely refers to events in the past.
     In one of his typical tangents, Tom goes off a bit on the Hotchkiss machine gun.  Art?

Hotchkiss 8mm, with a 20 round strip magazine in place

     As Tom points out, this was used by the French, whose invention it was, and the British and Americans, and he probably refers back to the First Unpleasantness about this.
     Case in point, I've seen one in "Once Upon A Time In Mexico".  We may come back to this.

We Got One Of These Free Today
It's a Kinder Egg with one of the Despicable Me minions on the wrapper.

Dancing fool

I always find it's nicer to have a Kinder Egg than a Mean Egg***.



The Bucolic Shire Of Royton
This is again in the nature of a test.

     Just to let you see the nature of the landscape around the Mansion on a beautiful cool summer morning that actually feels and looks like a beautiful cool summer morning.



* Mister Hand intervenes to prevent a five page rant with no punchline, just hatred.
** Most unusually, the renegade pair had nothing to do with this sudden demise.
*** Sorry