The Day Did Not Begin Well

First, There Was First Bus
Or, rather, there wasn't.  Not only did it turn up ten minutes late, the sloven behind the wheel hadn't progressed beyond learning where third gear was.  That, or he gets a bonus for ensuring people arrive late, as he certainly made no effort to make up lost time.
     How you manage to be that late when there's little traffic, few passengers, no roadworks, no rain and being only a stone's throw from the bus station in Rochdale - all I can say is that it takes rare talent.

First Bus Depot, Rochdale

     I'm posting late, not because First Bus is my role model, but because I've been to see "The Martian" at the Odeon in Manchester.  I'll do a detailed critique at a later date, what I wanted to mention is that the spacecraft used to fly to Mars and back is dubbed the "Hermes" after the Greek god of transport.  Heaven help us if First had been entrusted with planning or conducting a manned mission to Mars.
    'Yes, all eight thousand, five hundred and forty nine astronauts have died since their spaceship crashed on Venus, but - a near miss is as good as the real thing!  All we need is another hundred trillion dollars, the entire engineering capacity of Planet Earth for seventy years and we're good to go!"

First Bus Test Run #187,566,291: FAIL

The Shoes
 - of DOOM!
     Maybe not.  Still, they were on the pavement by the bus stop on Saturday morning, obviously a memento of someone's Friday night celebrations.  Today -

Atop the hedge

     This either goes to show how frightfully honest we are in Royton.  Or that we fear the shoes are cursed*.

Research Into The Eighteenth Century
Ah yes, more background stuff for future Eden Underwood, so to speak, as it will be set in the past.  This is the Age of Reason, also gin.  Men wore stockings rather than hose, ladies did not bother with knickers and there were potatoes.  And gin.  Yes, the Enlightenment, the Seven Years War - known to our South Canadian cousins as the "French and Indian Wars" - and gin agin.  Steam engines, the Grand Tour, the American Revolution, and more gin.

Gin and Rum - two for the price of one!

Fame, Of A Sort
I had an e-mail yesterday stating that Anna Dance had read my fan-fiction "City in the Sky" and she represented an internet group of some sort who were looking for fan fiction to do something with.

I nicked the idea of aerial Armenians from The Who
What can I say, I liked the imagery

     I should probably have paid closer attention, shouldn't I?
     However, as Conrad is by nature suspicious, and cynical, and even on the odd occasion suspiciously cynical, I do wonder what they're after.  I mean, as fan fiction I am toying with the Intellectual Property of other people.  On the Fanfiction website there's no question of profit or payment, people post there because they want the world to read their outpourings of passionate prose, or slash fiction about Kirk and Harry Potter.  Quite what Anna and her ilk seek to do is a moot question, and I wouldn't like to mix it with Stephen Moffat, as he strikes me as a man who'd strike men.
     I'll get back to you on this one.


You What?
As a captive audience member, I have long taken my glasses off, closed my eyes, listened to my i-pod or read a book**, rather than pay attention to the adverts presented before the main feature.  Sometimes I manage all four distractions.
     Today, though, I decided to make notes, as this is blinding material for the blog.  All grist for the mill, as they used to say in the sixteenth century***.  And what does my upper-case scrawl reveal?
     1) "Another bloody annoying car advert.  What car?  No idea, I was writing this at the time.  Nice background song, however."
     2)  "Mashables, a brand of chocolate bar.  Joy never seemed more sinister."
     3)  "Virgin trains.  An advert that protracted itself for so long without getting to the point that Conrad was reduced to hissing "Get on with it!" and hurling popcorn at the screen.  Even though he didn't have any popcorn."

"Get to the points!"^

My Conscience Troubles Me Greatly
I'm lying, it doesn't at all.  No, what I have is a skit running to several hundred words concerning that splendidly evil character Josef Stalin, and his loyal underdog Poskrebyshev, and P. G. Wodehouse.  The implication is that Stalin is a secret devotee of Plum, and much hilarity ensues.  Perhaps.

Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and Bingo Little.  No - hang on a minute -

     It's not that far from reality.  Reinhard Heydrich, surely in the running for Biggest Sh1tb@g Of All Time, used to while away his free time at high Nazi conventions by reading American detective novels.
     Truth can, on occasion, be stranger than fiction.  Unless it's fan-fiction.  That's just strange.

Doctor Strange.
So is his dress sense.

As I said, the day didn't begin well.  But it improved, with an entertaining film at the end and lunch with Anna in the middle.


* Perhaps - perhaps they walked themselves onto the hedge?
** Tricky, given the light levels in a cinema
*** Maybe.  Prove me wrong!
^ Do you see what I - O you do.