It's Official - Cold Weather Is Here

 Indeed It is!
Time, therefore, to break out the Slow Cooker in the Non-Dangerous Kitchen*.  It's not been used for at least 6 months, ever since warmer weather turned up on the doorstep, and Conrad, to be frank**, is a little out of practice with it.  Viz:

Tater 'Ash

     You need enough liquid to cover the ingredients, although there's a bit much here as you can see.  What I should have done is remove the lid and allow it to reduce.  Better-informed next time, I feel.  Also, since I had chopped the potatoes nice and small, it only needed 3 1/2 hours to cook completely, not the maximum of 6 as stated in the recipe; you'd need to be using potatoes big as footballs for that cooking time.
     "Tater 'Ash", I should explain, is local dialect for "Potato Hash", being onions, potatoes and mince at it's most basic.  Our version includes very thinly sliced carrots, a fistful of petit pois, cornflour and a few dashes of this and that sauce.
     Filling, warming and definitely not for veggies.

Doctor Who: "The Girl Who Died"
This is more like it!  Never mind silly circular stories about Fishing and Underwriters and "Taxiphone***", this is blood and thunder stuff with a serious core wrapped up in a fitment of ham and humour.  With a dash of Worcestershire sauce.
     This time Steven Moffat appeared to be leavened with a bit of someone else, able to make the story coherent, and refer back to things that only True Doctor Who fans will recognise.  I shall point some of these out.
     The yo-yo: the Fourth Doctor was a whiz with this toy, yet the Twelfth is as dextrous as a man with fifteen arms and no fingers.  "It's supposed to do that!" he lies as it unreels and remains static.

I Googled "yo yo" and this came up.

     Then!  Clara proves the truth of Eddie Izzard's skit about Companions.  She gets captured.  Then she gets let go, alongside Shildred (I think, the credits were quick), to announce to the Viking Village that "Odin" is going to come along tomorrow with 10 of his warriors and - 25th Century technology meets 9th Century technology, guess who wins (wasn't there a film with Jim Caviezel about this?).
     The Doctor reluctantly then tries to train the village men to fight.  Since "Odin" vapourised all the real warriors, the menfolk left are terrific at blacksmithing or carving a chair, baking a loaf or herding cows.  Fighting - not a bit.
     Shildred proves to be a bit of a drug on the market.  "By this time tomorrow night we'll all be dead," quoth she.  I bet she doesn't get invited to many parties.
     The Doctor ("He can speak Baby" explains Clara) then discovers that the villagers have barrel upon barrel of eels.

NO!

     Electric eels.  I shall pass over whether this is possible in 9th Century Norway because - well, I like a nice imaginative conceit and this is one.

Wrong kind of electric eels!

     The Doctor utilises these very same eels to both shock and magnetise the Maya warriors when they appear.  Their helmets must be made of iron.  Which comes from iron ore.  Shock and ore^.
     "I'm reversing the polarity of the neutron flow!" exclaimed the Third Doctor in every story, echoed by our Twelfth iteration here, to Conrad's muted snicker.  Well done Steven!

"Odin" and his heavily-armed  mobile metal pillboxes.
All doomed!

     And then Shildred dies, except the Doctor goes and breaks those Laws of Time I was banging on about earlier, allowing her to live. Forever.  We get to see a spectacularly well-realised sequence of time surging ahead in the end scene.  "What are those bands of light?" I pondered, before realising it was the sun, arcing across the sky in fractions of a second.  What will this bring next week?

Hopefully less Shildred.  A less cheerful cove would be hard to find.

     "Time will tell," said the Eighth Doctor.  "It always does."  
     And so did the Twelfth.

Wow, a lot of text.  Pictures!  Bring up more pictures!

Eventually, A Stopped Clock Gets It Right
Before the 24-hour system you could say at least a stopped clock got it right twice a day, though now the odds are it's only once.
     It's a metaphor, meaning that eventually, given long enough, Assertion A will meet Condition B - I'm getting wordy again, aren't I?  Art!

Alright, it's a watch not a clock.
Whose blog is it?

     Whilst I have no intention of purchasing this article, the Feebs have actually got it right, for once.  Shades of stopped clocks.  I decide how I spend my time, within broad definitions of the daily schedule.  For example, I am now going to see if there's any tea left in the pot.  

The Feebs Fail Forthwith
Typically, after managing a relevant Facebook post after dozens of inappropriate ones, they promptly fall over their own feet again:

"Free Solar Panels In Huddersfield!"

     Are there indeed.  
     This is of little use to Conrad, who lives on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PENNINES IN OLDHAM LANCASHIRE.
     Let me underline that again: WRONG COUNTY WRONG TOWN WRONG PERSON
     Thank you.  That is all.

How Utterly Inappropriate!
Conrad does not care to watch much television, certainly not "The Apprentice", yet he caught a clip of it before Doctor Who came on, and felt somewhat startled at the music used.
     For those who want to know, it's called "The Knight's Dance" from "Romeo and Juliet" by that Russian genius Sergei Prokofiev.  A link to Youtube and the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFkZQ84YDlk

     Yes, a theme in one of the most tragic, well-known love stories in the world - excuse me - IN THE ENTIRE WORLD - is being used as the theme for a horrid cut-throat back-stabbing business-boosting programme.
     I shouldn't sound so surprised - it used to be Channel 4's theme music for American Football, which is kind of like Michael Bay filming "Atomic Blasterman" in the Kremlin.

Prentiss.  Close enough

* The Fission-Powered Fast Cooker is in the Extremely Hazardous Kitchen. Fuelled by liquid nitromethane and plutonium, you see.
** Please note no cheap puns here.
*** That's what the legend on the telephone box said.
^ Sorry.