Yes, I Know, Late Tonight

I Do Have A Good Reason
That being that it's Degsy's birthday today and the old beggar hits this side of 50 for the last time.  So, the family were all off to "Dough", one of Manchester's trendy eateries, hip and pretty cool whilst also not being pretentious or unfriendly.  Also, a Gluten Free menu for those amongst us poisoned by wonderful wheat.

The embarassed chap himself

     I had the "Piccante", which is probably Italian for "hot" because it was gaily decorated with red chile slices, not bits of sun-dried tomato, and those were green chiles, not bits of diced pepper.

Piccante peppers, indeed

     Very savoury and delicious.  I didn't have a pudding, had to leave room for dining on handfuls of Twinkies once we got back home.

Coincidence?  Only You Can Judge!
This is a bit worrying, normally these sinister real-world coincidences only crop up when reading Thomas Pynchon and I've finished all his novels.  First of all, I was reading my posts from this date in 2013 and 2014, and there I was, banging on about "Mars", just a day after I'd been banging on about Mars here in 2015.  Here's the old post:

Mars

     Hilariously ambiguous, eh?  The planet?  The confectioners?  Your mother's house?

     No.  The Mars Volta.  Pretty potty prog metal mathcore musicians.  I took the trouble to check out lyrics on their track "A Zed And Two Naughts", especially the chorus.

     "Saint Christopher, Don't go wandering, There's no-one left to save, Because there's no-one at the wheel, Saint Christopher". 

     Musically, it sounds great but makes absolutely no sense.  I suspect this may be true of other musicians I like who do not sing in English. 

     I have to post this to prove my point, not to merely jack up the word count quickly.  Anyway, walking away from my desk at lunchtime immediately after reading the above, what do I espy?

It's enough to make you sniver ...

     I'm pretttty sure the Universe is trying to tell me something.  Why can't it just e-mail like everyone else?

This Won't Jack Up The Word Count - 
Quite the opposite, but it's not often the dawn looks wonderful enough to inspire me to take a photo of it:

Morning has melded.  Not broken, that's much too harsh.

Terror In The Toilet OR The Monster In The Bathroom
As you surely know by now, Conrad makes no bones about an utter craven custard-coloured chicken-livered coward with a backbone made of stewed spaghetti soaked in slime.
     Not brave.  However, my shrieking girlish fear of spiders has actually diminished to the point that I let this thing live last night -

No wall feature to give scale, so I got the door jamb in

 - instead of pounding it into the wall under my size 11 shoe.
      A bit rash, perhaps, as I heard a faint noise whilst washing my hands and when I turned back the octopus-wearing-a-fur-coat had vanished.  This is a cause for concern as it is easily capable of carrying off small animals and babies.
     I'll get back to you on this ...

"Waspider!"
Following on from the arachnid theme, I vaguely remember that one of the characters from "Spaced" has a fear that wasps and spiders will interbreed and produce this deadly hybrid, and also that there's an airborne epidemic of them in an episode of "Sliders", but can I find a picture of them?

No, but this is close enough

Next!

Fanfiction
This is a website that features - fiction written by fans.  "Fans of what, Conrad, fans of what?" you ask repeatedly*.  Any and every film, television programme and comic book character imaginable.  There are hundreds of different titles, from "ALF" to "Zero X" and all stations in-between.
     The relevance to your humble scribe is that he posted a tranche of stories there himself, years back.  A connected series about the UK branch of UNIT, and several novel-length stories about the Doctor.  I've just had a very kind review published of the story that people seem to like the most, "The Sea of Sand".
     Now, I took my writing very seriously, although hopefully not pompously so.  There was to be NO HINT OF ROMANCE between Doctor and female assistants.  The story had to be serious.  It couldn't feature contemporary villains in the 2005 series.  It had to be long, at least 50,000 words.  No sex, and no swearing.
     TSOS is set in early 1941, during the war in North Africa when it was only between the British and the Italians.  Fourth Doctor and Sarah, and alien intruders from the distant past who are resurrected in the here-and-now...

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2824071/1/The-Sea-of-Sand

The link, gentle reader, should you feel the urge to have a look.
     Oh, a word of warning.  BOOJUM! is light, frothy, irrelevant nonsense.  "The Sea of Sand" isn't.


* And yes, it does jack up the word count a little