It's Venus De Milo - In A Missile Silo!

Ha!  Fooled You!
Of course it's not Venus De Milo, the world's most famous statue, in a missile silo, and the clue's in the title, because what else do you expect to find in a missile silo other than A MISSILE?

Thus

     If you want I could post something that approximates to the blog title:

Close enough

     Right, enough wibbling Intro, let the yeltom* begin!

"House of Leaves" By Mark Danielewski
Well, I have to say this makes Tom Pynchon seem like a seamless streamlined mainstream narrative.  And, yes, it is already generating coincidences.  Which supervillain** was I banging on about last night?
     The Riddler.
     HoL Page 32, an in-depth look at -
     - no, not the Quaternion-Vectorist debate!
     - Riddles.
     The novel is heavily annotated, we're up to number 53 so far and I'm only 40 pages in.  There are going to be some large numbers in the footer!
     More critically, it's written as a narrative by one person, with extensive notes by a second person, not quite matching each other on the physical page.  I wonder, did Mark write then individually to completion, then edit both together, or did he write both simultaneously?
     I'll get back to you on that.
     Oh - a subject matter close to my plutonium-powered pumping processor***, and most unusually for novel, it has an index.

Enough Of Coincidence, Say Hello To Irony!
Ah yes, if a picture could paint a thousand words I could post one and be done with the blog in ten seconds flat, except I don't think it works that way, quite.  Art!

NO!

      <muffled sounds of someone being beaten with many blunt instruments>

A cat in a dog bed.  That's irony for you

     Don't worry about Art, he's only a concept and you can't really injure them.

In My Spare Time -
I occasionally like to listen to tornado sirens.

     Why not?  After all, I'm not going to hear one in real-life, now am I?  My daughter later in her life, perhaps, given global warming, but not me.

Hay Pesto!
Let me introduce you to some Peach and Apricot ice cream -

     Made last night, and it was tinned not fresh fruit***, and it took a good half hour of churning before it thickened up.  It still hadn't set properly this morning, so it was a bit melty by the time I got to eat it for breakfast.
     Also -

I'm afraid I ate the evidence

     One of the perks of our location is that we get a crack at all the freebies going, and in this instance it was free ice cream.  Win-win!

The Bridge
In the sci-fi novel "They Shall Have Stars" by James Blish, he describes the greatest engineering work ever achieved by human beings - The Bridge, a giant structure built by remote control on the surface of Jupiter to conduct experiments into gravity.

Thus

     "The poor old thing's lost the plot -" I can hear you say.  Let me point out I CAN HEAR WHAT YOU SAY AND I CAN HOLD  GRUDGE FOR A VERY LONG CENTURY!
     Thank you.  No, "The Bridge" instantly came to mind when I saw this photograph:

Wow.  And not in a good way

     Either that, or the Grand Entrance to Hades.

And now, after seeing a bus poster, the shortest film review you will ever read:

Sinister 2
Isn't.

"From The Earth To The Moon"
I've gotten up to the sixth episode here, which is about Apollo 11 and the first Moon landing and I really have to give credit to the programme, it invests the missions with crises, drama and danger.
     One element that comes through is that vomiting in a pressure suit is a killing joke - you'd asphyxiate before anyone could help you.  So, a poorly astronaut is a health hazard waiting to happen.

To those contemplating responding with "Hoax"-
I WILL kill you.

     Then there's the "1202 alarm" and "1201 alarm".  These vocal warnings are on the commentary track of Public  Service Broadcasting's "Go!", but utterly placid and devoid of any emotion.  On FTETTM when they happen the technicians are goggling with apprehension, flipping through wads of notes to define what the alarm is and if it's abort-critical.  It's not, but it's a close thing.
     Very well done drama indeed.  Yes, you know how it ends, but it's the getting there!
     It's also amusing to see Buzz Aldrin as a a ferociously jealous obsessive about Neil Armstrong getting to step onto the moon first ....


Fantastic Four: The Trainwreck Continues
Sorry about my gloating schadenfreude^.
     I did mention yesterday, gloatingly, that this film had dropped from a rating of 4.9 on IMDB to 4.4, then to 4.0.  These ratings are ones that are averaged from people posting their reviews of the film, so you can bet a few film company shills logged-on and posted 9.9.  Balancing that are the caustic critics who rated it at 0.5.
     Anyway, I checked today and it's down again to 3.9.  I can't remember any film on IMDB that's dropped so rapidly.  3.9 is the kind of rating that Asylum films get - but they cost only a couple of million dollars, not $200 million.

The obvious metaphor

     Nor is that all.  We don't have much box office information but it seems to have generated only $25 million, when an opening of $50 million at least was being touted.  Nor is that all!  The rule of thumb is that a film will make back across the whole of the world roughly what it took in America alone, but this one is such a stinker that it might well gross less than the USA total.





*"Motley" backwards. I like to mix it up now and then.
** Barely.
*** Ain't I just a rock 'n' roll rebel?
^ Actually, come to think of it, no I'm not.