Search This Blog

Saturday, 26 September 2015

It's Peter Capaldi - Gieing 'Em Laldy!

Quite!  This Will Take Time To Explain
I bet you wish I'd stayed with the Star-Trek-clickbait-Titles, don't you?  Now, of course, I can switch horses in mid-stream and use Doctor Who instead of James Tiberius Kirk*.
     Okay, unless you've been living in a Mars-simulator in the middle of the North Dakotan badlands for the past eleven years, you'll realise that Peter Capaldi is the actor currently  playing Doctor Who.
Image result for peter Capaldi fighting
Like this
     Peter, thanks to a generous producer (Steven Moffat who is Scottish himself), has been allowed to retain his Scottish accent, unlike poor David Tennant.  This is where the dialect comes in.  "Gie", pronounced "Gee", in contemporary Scottish lingo, means "Give".  Thus, "Gieing" means "Giving".  "''Em" is simply "Them", as used for an abbreviation across the Northern Hemisphere.  "Laldy", once again in contemporary Scottish lingo, means "To render a person a severe beating."
     So, our title refers to Peter, as The Doctor, giving someone a severe seeing-to.
Image result for dalek
A dialect.  Close enough.
"The Leopard" By Jo Nesbo
Following right on from dialect, we come back to Jo's dark murder novel and "Nynorsk", in which Oystein (drunken taxi driver) makes quite an issue of.  
     "What are you talking about, Conrad?" I can hear you say.  "Norwegian is Norwegian."
     Ah, but there you are wrong!  I didn't quite realise the current conflict within modern Norway about the languages used there**.  You have "Bokmal", which is - I had to look this up - a Norwegianised version of Danish.  Then you have "Nynorsk", which is a purer form of Norwegian that rejects the Danish roots, not to mention "Hogmal", nothing to do with pigs but everything to do with an artificially refined version of Norwegian, and "Sansmal", which was going to be a merged version of all of the above.
Image result for nynorsk
Norwegian.
0.04% of all Minnesotans speak Norwegian

DANGEROUS Chemicals!
Conrad, as you already know, possesses the maniacal glee of a small child when he comes across exotic chemicals that are really, really, really dangerous.  I have described The Chemical From Hell that is Chlorine Triflouride, which is pretty much the benchmark for Awfulness in the chemical kingdom. Ethylene Oxide came a close second, but tonight we have - Dimethyl Cadmium!
Image result for dimethyl cadmium
I Googled "Dimethyl Cadmium" and this came up.
     Cadmium does not get the publicity of metals such as lead or mercury, yet it is quite as vile, believe me.  Going off the splendid "Things I Won't Work With" website, this stuff is both acutely toxic and chronically toxic - meaning it's poisonous Now, and poisonous From Now Until Then, at appallingly low concentrations in air; it goes for the liver, lungs, kidneys, blood, brain and spinal column, so it is nothing if not hard-working at trying to kill you.  If you survive exposure long enough it's also carcinogenic.  It is reactive, volatile and - another Terrifying Tick Box ticked! - self-igniting.  When reacting with anything, it gives off Cadmium Oxide as smoke, and, yes, Cadmium Oxide is toxic.  It also breaks down into Dimethyl Cadmium Peroxide, which is a friction-sensitive explosive.  Good luck getting rid of that!
     Last thing, apparently it reeks to high heaven.  Getting poisoned by it means you have No Sense Of Smell, which is a bit of a caution to your humble scribe.
Image result for naughty chemical
Chemical Bothers.  Close enough.
Still No Stegosaur!
Whilst journeying into Manchester on the bus, what did Conrad espy but a whacking big dump truck bearing the logo "Hydroblast" upon it.  It had another title, which was new to your humble scribe - "Hydrodemolition".
Image result for hydroblast company

     Of course you know what happened - I looked it up on Google, and found that it's more remediation work than actual demolition.  High-pressure water is used to abrade away the surface of reinforced concrete, until a level of removal is reached that chimes with what needs to be built back from.
Image result for hydrodemolition
Like this
     Thankfully no Liopleurodons in sight!

Which Leads To Small Coincidence Of The Day
Why yes it's so, Janeane Garofalo. Please bear in mind that Conrad had never seen or encountered "Hydroblast" before Friday morning, and that they were present as a vehicle portraying a logo to do with water.
     A good half an hour later your favourite blogger in the OL2 5UT postcode was plodding unenthusiastically down Miller Street, listening to "Wonders of the Deep" by The Chemical Brothers, when what passes him on the right hand lane but -
     Greater Manchester Fire And Rescue's Water Incident Unit.
     Which I'd also been completely ignorant about until that very morning.
     If only Philip K. Dick hadn't been sucked into an alternative universe by the trans-dimensional time police, I could ask him what he thought ...
Image result for coracle
GMFARS Water Unit.
There had been cutbacks ...

* Which translates as "Heel River Church", if you want to know
** It's okay, it's Norway, "conflict" means "a long dialogue between linguistics professors at the University of Oslo"

No comments:

Post a Comment